When feminists and liberal men disagree

[afleitch]

While I don't agree with it, there's a strong consequentialist argument to be made for just blanket decriminalizing prostitution (including pimping, buying the services of a prostitute, et cetera) until such time as the economic conditions that lead most of the women involved into it can be addressed. I don't agree with it both because it's consequentialist and because 'such time' could be anywhere from five years from now to never depending on the country and on what counts as addressing the conditions, but I have heard actual ex-prostitutes, who have no love lost for the practice or for the various types of seedy men involved, advocate this.

What I don't like at all is the 'muh legalize, regulate, and tax' model, which both drives prostitutes to turn more tricks than they otherwise would because their income is being taxed and gives the government a perverse incentive to keep prostitution around.

It's also worth recognizing that laws against prostitution aren't really all that traditional in either etiology or intent. They were for the most part enacted after proto-feminist, or very very early first-wave, campaigns in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Which, yes, had a lot to do with common female sexual anxieties, but considering the vectors for how things like STDs are spread I don't think we should write that off as intrinsically unreasonable or compare it to men's anxieties about 'cucking'.

There are no distinct economic conditions that result in male or female prostitution, call girls, gigolos etc. It's naive to think it's just sexual entrapment foistred on the poor and vulnerable. Professional women will do it to pay for college. Men to boost income. Indeed 'high class' prostitution is in many ways self regulated and 'safer' for those who pursue it. Where regulation is non existent, those with money and position are often protected. Those at the bottom however have to obtain that protection from others, leading to sexual exploitation.

[afleitch]

I'll admit that the last few sentences of your post make good points but the first, at least when you get outside (relatively) cossetted First-World-problems territory into the parts of the world where most people and thus most prostitutes actually live and work, strikes me as simply ludicrous.

I don't want to have language about this further right now.

My job from 2007 to this July, which I suppose I can now talk about, was dealing at a government level with victims of crime including reading full statements, police reports and social service reports from victims of childhood sexual abuse and adult victims of sexual abuse. I have probably looked at a tens of thousands of cases in that time.

Sexual abuse of prostitutes is under reported for two significant reasons, with the prime reason being that fact that it is usually a statutory offence. Secondly, there is a strong link between people who have been victims of abuse prior to or outside of solicited sex, of which 'payment' numbs that particular pain to the point it ceases to 'feel' like abuse. That's what I mean by there not being a distinct set of economic conditions (i.e 'being poor') to prostitution. Furthermore those who solicit, their clients and even wider society and law have created an artificial differentiation between 'low class' prostitution and 'high class' soliciting. From experience, those who suffer abuse within that model (as there is 'choice' and 'self regulation') tend to be more willing to reporting the abuse and having a proper response by the authorities.

Continued criminalisation of prostitution perpetuates this division. Indeed, why would a high class call girl want to be equal in law with decriminalisation in place rather than remain 'classier' with continued criminalisation that is less intrusive for them than those on the street? And that's where, with everything, power and protection is an issue much more than money.