Opinion: Unhappy hookers
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I’ve had a hard time getting into the D.C. Madam story because a) it’s not news to me that the sex life of our nation’s capital is at the same time painfully inhibited and polymorphously perverse and b) yawn, is there anything more pathetic than the idea that they’re still arresting prostitutes in the United States of America? Over at Reason, Cathy Young puts it into more succinct words than I (who flush like a slackjawed yokel with a protruding adam’s apple when the conversation turns to sex) could have managed myself:
Prostitution is currently legal in virtually all developed nations, though often surrounded by restrictions and regulations. It is illegal everywhere in the United States except Nevada and, by a legal quirk, in Rhode Island if all transactions are conducted in a private residence. Yet prostitution is perhaps the ultimate victimless crime: a consensual transaction in which both parties are supposedly committing a crime, and the person most likely to be charged—the one selling sex—is also the one most likely to be viewed as the victim. (A bizarre inversion of this situation occurs in Sweden, where, as a result of feminist pressure to treat prostitutes as victims, it is now a crime to pay for sex but not to offer it for sale.)
Young, who has always revered the true icons of women’s empowerment, draws a nice distinction between the platitudes that frequently mark pro-prostitution panegyrics and the commonsense view that grownups have the right to engage in consensual activities with other grownups:
Unlike some defenders of prostitution such as ‘Mayflower Madam’ Sydney Biddle Barrows, I do not believe that selling sex should ever be seen as an empowering or liberating way of life, or an affirmation of female sexuality. (If anything, it perpetuates the notion that sex is something women do for male enjoyment.) I do not believe, as sex-positive feminist Susie Bright has written, that ‘sex-work professionals are [among] the future’s largest contingents of the new het-sex liberation front.’ Nor do I think that disapproval of sex for profit invariably stems from a residual notion that sex is bad, or that ‘sex work’ should be destigmatized as just another career. But there is a vast difference between social stigma and criminal prosecution, between personal moral judgment and the nanny state.