Prostitution - Term Paper Example

?572640 Prostitution Prostitution, the oldest profession in the world, always generates a variety of opinions. Some believe that it should be illegaleverywhere, no exceptions. This line argues not only that selling sex is immoral, but that making the profession illegal will protect people from diseases, drug use, and sex trafficking. Others, taking a more liberal view, believe prostitution should be legalized and heavily regulated so that those who participate in it know that they can only do so with narrow parameters and any straying from the acceptable line will be severely punished. This point-of-view points out the financial benefits of taxing the profession. A third perspective, though, argues that prostitution is merely a choice and that any regulation should be minimal like any other business regulations. People who subscribe to this argument feel that people who choose to sell their bodies should have the same freedom to regulate their business choices like anyone else does. In some cultures of the world, prostitution is still treated as a legitimate business. The author of websites such as Liberated Christians.com and Sexwork.com, known only as “Dave in Phoenix” says, ”Prostitution is LEGAL (with some restrictions that aren't that bad) in Canada, most all of Europe including England, France, Wales, Denmark, etc., most of South America including most of Mexico (often in special zones), Brazil, Israel (Tel Aviv known as the brothel capital of the world), Australia, and many other countries. It is either legal or very tolerated in most all of Asia and even Iran has ‘temporary wives’ which can be for only a few hours! New Zealand passed in 2003 one of the most comprehensive decriminalization acts which even made street hookers legal” (Dave, 2009). At one time in the United States, the profession was considered a legitimate, albeit ill-chosen profession. People who chose to be prostitutes were considered of loose morality, but it was not illegal and even those who thought it was evil and morally degrading had to concede that prostitutes provided a useful service. Many prostitutes chose their profession because they had no other options. Prostitutions were sometimes the only women in a newly settled mining town. Some ended up marrying one of their clients and settling down to a “respectable” life. In the nineteenth century, the view on prostitution shifted. Instead of being considered at worst a necessary evil and a best a legitimate business for unskilled, unmarried women, it became a criminal act to sell one’s body and/or a sex act for money. As medical science progressed after the Civil War, doctors discovered that one way that disease, especially venereal disease, was spread was through sexual contact. Doctors urged the formal legalization and regulation of prostitution so that men, who the doctors argued “needed” sexual release, would not catch something from “unclean harlots.” Those who opposed any sort of activity that they considered evil such as drinking, gambling, dancing, and, of course, selling one’s body for money, wanted prostitution criminalized. They joined with clergy from across a wide swath of denominations and urged social reform. Shoshanna Erlich explains, “The newly created New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice, a loosely connected group of clergy and social reformers joined together to challenge the pro-regulation forces. Seeking to dislodge the doctors’ hegemonic authority over the transgresive (sic) body of the prostitute, these social purity reformers, as they came to be known, engaged in a searing critique of the ‘radical physiological error’ of male desire, which they dismissed as a socially constructed myth that served to excuse licentious male behavior” (Ehrlich, 2011). The social reformation groups framed prostitution as wickedness and exploitation of women which would take men straight down a moral road to hell. Thus, the prevailing view of prostitution was constructed in the United States. Prostitution did not end just because moral reformers had criminalized it though. Now “the oldest profession” just had to take place more clandestinely. One state where it was allowed openly though is Nevada. Famous for its “legalization” of prostitution, Nevada is home to the world-famous Mustang Ranch. Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been brothels and prostitution in Nevada. If they were not legal, they were at least tolerated. Some in the Reno and Las Vegas areas were shut down during World War II because the military thought that they led to the distraction, if not the moral degradation, of the troops. Fearing the same fate, in 1971 the owner of the Mustang Ranch managed to convince Nevada officials that regulating his brothel would make sounder business sense than shutting it down completely. Since then, there has been legal prostitution in some counties in Nevada, but only in regulated brothels such as Mustang Ranch. More rural counties with smaller populations are allowed to have brothels in Nevada, and, of course, the owners of the brothels as well as their employees must pay all applicable taxes on their income. Virtually all of the brothel owners insist that their prostitutes undergo regular disease screening, be drug free, and practice safe sex. What is not legal in Nevada, nor anywhere else in the United States, is pandering. Pandering takes place when physical force or psychological pressure is used to compel a person to prostitute him/herself. In Nevada, the pandering of an adult is a class C felony, and the pandering of a child is a class B felony. Both are punishable by no less than two and upwards of twenty years in the state prison (Nevada Legislature, 2011). One of the strongest arguments against prostitution is that many prostitutes are forced to sell their bodies and do not do it by choice. They rely on their “pimp” for food and shelter, or they are physically coerced. This practice of forced prostitution is often called sexual slavery and it is of great concern all over the world. Such atrocities should be punished severely. However, prostitution that is not forced, that is the profession of choice for many people, and has existed for thousands of years as a victimless crime, is another story. Many believe that prostitution should be at least decriminalized if not completely legalized. That way, the argument goes, prostitution can be regulated and the spread of disease checked. In these economic times, it is also fair to point out it could be taxed and become a healthy source of revenue just like all of the other illegal “sins” that should be left to the choice of the partaker and not to the moral legislating of those who wish to control the lives of others. Some critics, like David Bennett, say that postmodern society has already broken the taboos of prostitution and that society is ready to legitimize the profession. “Postmodern ‘prostitute-chic’, alias ‘stripper chic’, ‘porno-chic’, the ‘hooker look’, and ‘raunch culture’, along with the mass suburban market for prostitute memoirs and such hands-on manuals as How to Make Love like a Porn Star, represent a very different kind of cultural or semiotic rehabilitation of the prostitute . . . . ‘Sex-work’ became a (contested) rallying-cry for women (and their male clients) wanting to ‘respectabilise’ (sic) prostitution as a selling of time and skills on a par with any other form of commoditised (sic) labour: a legitimate exploitation of labour-power and talent in a service sector of the capitalist economy” (Bennett, 2010, pp. 113-114). Starring in pornographic movies, nude dancing, and stripping are all legitimate, even lucrative, professions that frequently lead to a sex act, yet they are all legal. Just the one that actually advertises the sex act is illegal. In recent years, many stories of young women “stripping their way through college” have gotten media attention. These women are admired for their hard work and their willingness to do what it takes to get that degree. The stories one does not hear are those of women who prostitute themselves to get through college, to pay their rent, or to feed their children. The media generated stereotype of the prostitute is the drug-addicted “slut” who will do anything for enough money or drugs to feed her habit. However, if it were not illegal, many “clean” women, who now must work two or more jobs to put food on the table for their children, or who are on welfare, might consider the profession. One has to think that these women would practice safe sex so they would not contract a disease let alone spread it to their clients, which is one of the reasons those against legalizing prostitution cite for keeping it illegal. Those detractors say that prostitution is not a victimless crime because many, maybe most, johns are married or in a relationship with a partner. When they have sex with a prostitute, they open themselves and their partners up to the possibility of spreading a sexually transmitted disease. This is true because prostitution is illegal. If it were legal, the profession could be regulated. Women who bought a small business license as a prostitute would be required to have periodic tests for disease and to display their certificate of a clean bill of health. Also, they would be subject to health inspections, much like food establishments are currently, to insure their use of condoms and other safe sex practices. With the widespread knowledge about the dangers of unprotected sex and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, most men who are willing to pay for sex would opt for the regulated prostitute over the street walker. That element would soon go away because the demand for risky sex would dry up. Of course, the demand for sex will never end, not even in economically difficult times. That is how prostitution has become the oldest profession. Those who oppose the legalization of prostitution say that eliminating the demand does not work. They cite the Netherlands where prostitution was legalized in 2000. Ethan Kapstein points out though that the reason for legalizing prostitution in The Netherlands was to prevent slave trafficking, not for disease prevention. “The Dutch government has explicitly stated that its legalization of sex work was meant to facilitate ‘action against sexual violence and abuse and human trafficking.’ The idea was that once brothels were permitted and regulated, the police would be better able ‘to pick up signs of human trafficking’ and prevent it. But the Dutch strategy has not achieved much. Sex slaves have continued to enter the black market, providing their services at lower prices than those charged by prostitutes in the officially sanctioned red-light district” (Kapstein, 2006). Yet, as Kapstein emphasizes, it is not a problem of the prostitutes or the legitimate johns, but of the police, whose current methods of preventing human trafficking are not effective. Clearly, the police need to adapt and come up with better methods to combat the slave trade because prostitution is not going to go away just because the Dutch government decides that the legalization of it did not work to stop human trafficking. Kapstein also cites Sweden where instead of legalizing prostitution, the government toughened its laws against it. The result is that there are fewer prostitutes on the street, but probably not fewer prostitutes. They are now just more difficult to find and regulate. Johns in Sweden most likely have to take their chances with prostitutes who may have diseases or who may have been kidnapped and forced to sell their bodies. Some who oppose prostitution believe that whether or not a woman is forced to sell her body against her will or if she makes a conscious choice to do so, that prostitution needlessly exploits women. In other words, even if a woman chooses to be a prostitute she does not really want to be. Society, through its gender-based economic inequality, forces women to sell their bodies to feed their children or have a roof over their heads. Rebecca Hayes-Smith and Zahra Shekarkhar explain that those who support this opinion, oddly enough, also support decriminalization. However, they support criminalizing the purchasing of sex by johns, and the exploitation of women by pimps, not the selling of sex by prostitutes (Hayes-Smith & Shekarkhar, 2010, p. 44). Many cities have made soliciting prostitution a criminal offense, but they have kept prostitution illegal also. Probably the argument that prostitution is immoral is the hardest one to address when advocating for the decriminalization of the profession. Those who believe that society has some sort of obligation to legislate morality are difficult to sway. Teela Sanders, a British writer for Capital and Class, says, “Sex work is not considered a service industry, because the idea of sexual services is viewed through a different lens due to the inherent Christian, middle-class morals attached to the act of sex, as something that is only rightly expressed in heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive relationships” (Sanders, 2005, p. 11). These same sorts of morals dominant American culture too: because a wealthy “moral majority” purport to believe that prostitution is wrong, and only financially support candidates who will further these restrictive views, laws prohibiting lifestyle choices such as prostitution, marijuana use, and gay marriage are constantly maintained in the courts. However, most people, if they answered honestly when polled, would say that they do not care if such “vices” are legal. Either they do not affect the majority of people, or people want to participate in them without the fear of being criminally stigmatized. It is interesting also to note that those who protest against “sex work” the most usually end up in some sort of sex scandal with a prostitute or mistress. The moral thing to do would be to legalize prostitution with heavy regulations, taxation, and legitimacy. People would not have to sneak around and it may help to end the sex trafficking trade. At least, there would be a legal alternative for those who wish to participate in prostitution either on the selling or buying end of the business. Those who wish to purchase sex for whatever purpose could do so without fear of losing their jobs or reputations. If they are in a committed relationship, the regulation against diseases should protect their significant other. People who want to stand back in their ivory towers and judge those who partake in the world’s oldest profession need to remember that Jesus’ most loyal follower, Mary Magdalene, was a prostitute and Jesus loved her anyway. Perhaps those who announce their attachment to Jesus the loudest need to close their mouths and follow His example. References Bennett, D. (2010). Libidinal economy, prostitution and consumer culture. Textual Practice , 24 (1), 93-121. Dave, I. P. (2009, February 9). Decriminalize Prostitution Now Coalition. Retrieved September 29, 2011, from Sexwork.com: http://www.sexwork.com/coalition/whatcountrieslegal.html# Ehrlich, J. S. (2011). The Victim of Lust or a Noxious Site f Contamination? The Nineteenth Century Battle over the Legalization of Prostitution. Evil Women and the Feminine (pp. 1-6). Warsaw, Poland: Women’s Studies Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Hayes-Smith, R., & Shekarkhar, Z. (2010). Why is prostitution criminalized? An alternative viewpoint on the construction of sex work. Contemporary Justice Review , 13 (1), 43-55. Kapstein, E. B. (2006). The New Global Slave Trade. Foreign Affairs , 85 (6). Nevada Legislature. (2011). Prostitution Laws of Nevada. Retrieved September 29, 2011, from Nevada Legislature: http://www.leg.state.nv.us/ Sanders, T. (2005). Blinded by morality? Prostitution policy in the UK. Capital & Class , 29 (86), 9-15. Read More