Bob Herbert has an interesting column in the Times about the problems with legalized prostitution. He writes:
A lot of people more thoughtful than Oscar Goodman believe that prostitution should be legalized as a way of protecting and empowering the women who go into the sex trade. I’ve lost patience with those arguments, however well meaning. Real-world prostitution, in whatever guise, bears no resemblance at all to the empowerment fantasies of prostitution proponents. I have never seen such vulnerable, powerless women as those in the sex trade, legal or illegal.
I’m one of those people who makes the legalization argument, minus the whole “empowering” thing. I don’t think that sex work or stripping is empowering for women, but I realize that making money can be. I also don’t think that most Americans find their jobs particularly “empowering.” I’ve had jobs that I liked well enough, but I didn’t often feel empowered by them. Doesn’t make ’em bad or even morally neutral, but for me, empowerment arguments are neither here nor there, and I find them silly when they’re trotted out on either end (i.e., “Stripping is empowering!” or “But stripping is not empowering!”). This isn’t a choice between empowering or not. Empowerment or lack thereof isn’t a sufficient argument for or against legalized prostitution.
Herbert’s major point is that prostituted women are powerless, vulnerable and exploited, even in places where prostitution is legal and/or regulated. He’s right. It’s interesting to see the narratives surrounding sex work. When people write about sex workers, the story is that sex workers are exploited, abused, poor, and selling sex out of sheer desperation. When sex workers write about themselves, it tends to be the more privileged women who are able to get their voices out there — women who are better-educated, who aren’t forced into prostitution, who are call-girls instead of street prostitutes, who are white, etc (this shouldn’t surprise us, since people who get book deals in the first place tend to come from more privileged places, and have the privilege of accessing the publishing industry in the first place). That obviously isn’t a bright-line rule, but it seems to be the trend. I’m glad that the voices of actual sex workers are finally getting out there, and that they’re challenging what other people have been writing about them for so long. Some sex workers enjoy their work. Some may not love it, but see it like any other job — only one where they get paid better than they would doing most kinds of low-skilled labor. Some did it as a temporary thing to get by. Some don’t hang much of anything on it. Those experiences are all valid. Sex workers deserve decent working conditions just like any other employee, and they deserve to enjoy their jobs or bitch about them or not care either way, just like anyone who works in an office or at a check-out counter or at a restaurant.
This issue is interesting to me particularly because I’m currently living in a city where sex work is legal and regulated. I’ve been to the Reeperbahn (the red-light district), and while it’s not nearly as seedy as, say, Amsterdam’s, it’s also not exactly paradise. As a port city, Hamburg has a long, long history of sex work — one of the main streets through the city center is called the “street of the virgins” because it was the one place where, back in the day, society women could walk unaccompanied without having their reputations sullied. The virgin-whore dichotomy that attaches itself to prostitution is troubling; it’s certainly not a feminist goal to return to the days of good women and those women. But how do we address the very real problems of prostitution and sex work without insulting or condescending to sex workers? How do we deal with the really horrific, deep problems in the sex industry while still representing the diversity of experiences within that industry?
Herbert’s column is a laundry list of atrocities. He writes:
At Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas, the women have to respond like Pavlov’s dog to a bell that might ring at any hour of the day or night. It could be 4 a.m., and the woman might be sleeping. Or she might not be feeling well. Too bad.
When that electronic bell rings, she has five minutes to get to the assembly area, a large room where she will line up with the other women, virtually naked, and submit to a humiliating inspection by any prospective customer who happens to drop by.
“It’s not fun,” one of the women whispered to me during a tour of the brothel.
…
That a city, a state or any other governmental entity in the U.S. could legally sanction the sexual degradation of women and girls under any circumstances, much less those who are so extremely vulnerable, is an atrocity. And if you don’t think legalized prostitution is about degradation, consider the “date room” at Sheri’s. That’s a small room where a quiet dinner for two can be served. Beneath the tiny table is a couple of towels and a cushion for the woman to kneel on.
That is some ugly, demeaning, degrading stuff. This article, also about legal prostitution in Nevada, gives even more examples:
The women are expected to live in the brothels and to work 12- to 14-hour shifts. Mary, a prostitute in a legal brothel for three years, outlines the restrictions. “You are not allowed to have your own car,” she notes. “It’s like [the pimp’s] own little police state.” When a customer arrives, a bell rings, and the women immediately have to present themselves in a line-up, so he can choose who to buy.
Sheriffs in some counties of Nevada also enforce practices that are illegal. In one city, for example, prostitutes are not allowed to leave the brothel after 5pm, are not permitted in bars, and, if entering a restaurant, must use a back door and be accompanied by a man.
Obviously legalized prostitution isn’t exactly the safe haven for women that some claim it could be. There is, no doubt, lots of unbelievably horrible stuff happening in legal brothels. I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that the majority of prostitutes world-wide would prefer to be doing something else. And, to be quite honest, I do think there’s something inherently troubling and thoroughly fucked up about selling sex, and with having one half of the human race always in the position of buyer. At the same time, we sell personal services all the time — house-keeping, massage and care-giving are the three that come most immediately to mind. And of course, these professions are also disproportionately female. But something about sex work is… different. I’m not quite able to articulate what that difference is. Perhaps it’s the pleasure in degradation that men seem to get out of visiting prostitutes, or even talking about prostitution. The sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, and the conflation of sexual pleasure with sexual violence, the inability to look at sex workers as actual human beings. The fact that we have all of these existing cultural hang-ups about sex, and when you put a price on it — on someone — it comes with a whole net of misogyny and male entitlement. I don’t know what, exactly, feels different about sex work from other personal service professions, but I think it’s situated somewhere in what I just wrote. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be more articulate.
Then there’s the argument that prostitution simply formalizes what’s usually an informal agreement — the exchange of money and goods for sex. Traditional marriage, after all, was basically an economic agreement where a woman quite literally sold herself and gave up her status as an individual to be part of her husband, who essentially paid her to have sex with him, clean up, and make babies (to be crass about it). But being married conferred a social status up on the woman that made it ok to be paid for sex and other services. Prostitutes, on the other hand, are low class. The girls you fuck, not the ones you marry.
And so discussing this is complicated, because there has to be a balance between shining light on the ugliness that often comes with sex work, and at the same time not further marginalizing or demonizing or othering sex workers.
Trafficking of women and girls to work in the sex trade is a huge problem. Continued abuse of regularly abused women who enter the sex trade voluntarily is a huge problem. Herbert writes:
The first thing to understand about prostitution, including legal prostitution, is that the element of coercion is almost always present. Despite the fiction that they are “independent contractors,” most so-called legal prostitutes have pimps — the state-sanctioned pimps who run the brothels and, in many cases, a second pimp who controls all other aspects of their lives (and takes the bulk of their legal earnings).
They are hardly empowered. Years of studies have shown that most prostitutes are pushed into the trade in their early teens by grown men. A large percentage are victims of incest or other forms of childhood sexual abuse. Most are dirt poor. Many are drug-addicted. And most are plagued by devastatingly low levels of self esteem.
And then there are the armies of women and girls who are trafficked into the sex trade by organized criminals, both inside and outside of the U.S.
I hear him. But at the same time, there are women who enter sex work uncoerced. And even that aside — will illegalizing prostitution solve any of these problems?
As sympathetic as I am to articles like these, at the end of the day I’m not seeing any solutions coming out of the anti-legalization side. The oldest profession isn’t going to go away any time soon, and while increased gender equality and greater access to education can help women and girls to have more opportunities, until we see a serious shift in how men view women, there will continue to be a huge demand for sex work. Someone will step in to fill that demand. If there aren’t enough people stepping in, someone will be forced in.
No one should have to work in conditions like those described by the above-linked articles. So how about regulating it a little tighter? How about establishing outreach programs for sex workers who want out, drug and alcohol treatment programs for sex workers who are addicts, and better and more affordable physical and psychological health care for everyone? How about putting some of the onus on men who frequent prostitutes — requiring them to register with the government and prove that they have a clean bill of health? Require condom use, no excuses. Have reasonable working hours. Regularly interview sex workers to keep a check on possible abuses. Hold brothels to higher building standards. Demand that sex workers who work out of brothels be provided the basic tools of their trade, like bedsheets and condoms. Or how about asking actual sex workers what would make their lives better? It wouldn’t solve all of those problems, but it could help.
Prostitution continues whether sex work is legal or not. Except when it’s illegal, sex workers suffer even more because they have no recourse if they’re abused, raped, robbed, or otherwise victimized. It’s even easier for pimps to exploit them. Legalization clearly doesn’t solve these problems, but it may be the lesser of two evils. And done in conjunction with social programs that aspire to get some women help if they need it seems like a better idea than just pretending prostitution doesn’t exist, or praying for the day when it goes away.
There’s a big difference between the abused 16-year-old runaway who winds up living in a Nevada brothel and having her life controlled by a pimp, and the college-educated 30-something who sells sex to supplement (or provider) her income, and who is able to select her clients and say “no” when she wants. Yet when we’re sculpting social policy, we need to make sure that these women, and all the other women in between, and all the women who have it even worse, are protected. We also need to make sure that they’re treated like human beings who have a diversity of experiences and needs.
In case it’s not clear by now, sex work is a really troubling issue for me, and I’m still sorting out where I stand on it. But eventually, I always come down on the decriminalization side. It’s the specifics of how we manage decriminalization that throw me. And it’s the fact that this is one of those issues where there is simply no great solution.
I’m really curious to hear all your thoughts on this.