Prostitution Law Reform?
Nick (Nick Levinson)
about related laws? What should the law look like?
Slavery accurately describes much prostitution, perhaps most of it, but
it seems some amount of it can be walked away from. To describe all sex
for pay as slavery requires applying dynamics with men that also exist
in sex without pay, perhaps most sex without pay. That's probably
correct to do but I think most womyn in sex without pay (dating,
marriage, etc.) would deny being enslaved, and would want to keep a
right to date and marry and be sexual with men without pay. Given that
case, allowing sex with pay should be just as permissible. But that
doesn't solve slavery seen as sex, as to which law enforcement is
almost nonexistent.
My view includes questions.
Being paid for most work is socially accepted as the cornerstone of our
economy; being paid for sexual services should be socially accepted,
too, not condemned as civil or criminal offenses. I'd penalize men, but
if it's okay for womyn to be paid for sexual services then it's okay
for johns to pay them for the same without thereby violating the law,
and therefore providing or soliciting sexual services in exchange for
pay would have to be allowed by law.
That leaves more problems with prostitution.
Violence, confinement, abuse, refusal to use a condom when required by
the womon, and other illegal behaviors by johns are separately illegal
under other laws (at least in the U.S.), although those laws are hardly
enforced, partly because of social attitudes toward prostituted womyn
and partly because the womyn can't complain to law enforcers about
those behaviors without essentially revealing their own illegality from
prostitution. Legalizing prostitution would ease prosecution and suit
for these violations.
Health is perilous. Prostitution exposes womyn, because strangers are
more reckless and womyn rarely can enforce medical examinations. When I
went to summer camp as a child, my family was required to send ahead a
certificate from a doctor answering some health questions. We went to
the doctor's office, which meant testing was possible. The same could
be required of a john, per standards set by each womon. The john who
doesn't want to doesn't have to have sex.
Prostitution of womyn reinforces the norm that womyn are good for sex
and not much else, i.e., reinforces the social expectation that womyn
should stay in the traditional roles assigned to womyn. Law, however,
is abysmally bad at changing attitudes toward prostituted womyn.
Criminalizing womyn for prostitution because womyn should be in
professions and nontraditional occupations is a contradiction, using an
antifeminist means to achieve a feminist goal. Decriminalizing womyn
for prostitution requires decriminalizing men for being customers,
therefore requires decriminalizing men for reinforcing their belief
that womyn are good mainly for sex. Thus, other sanctions are needed to
persuade men to welcome womyn into professions and occupations equally
with men even at the cost of losing their sexual services.
Pimping is of two minds. Many of us who legally work for pay do so
through the good offices of agents (e.g., employment agencies,
theatrical agents, attorneys, and friends), which is normally quite
legal, as is paying them. Therefore, prostituted womyn should be able
to do so as well, which means that agentry known as pimping, and
pimping for pay, would have to be legal. Pimps' violence is separately
illegal. Pimps' confiscation of prostituted womyn's earnings as
underpayment of earnings or through deceit or robbery is separately
illegal (perhaps the turning over of earnings to pimps is occasionally
voluntary within the framework of having little other choice, but it
should be illegal when it would be illegal in normally legal
relationships between other professionals and their agents). Pimps'
reinforcement of the attitude that womyn are good mainly for sex has to
be condemned in order to change the attitude, but making agentry
illegal doesn't accomplish that purpose. And just as having agents is
helpful to many people's careers, womyn in prostitution should be able
to choose whether to have agents and whom, which means that pimping as
agentry would be alive and well when the pimps as agents provide useful
services to the womyn.
Pimping right now includes acclimatization to customers' range of
wants, which is why pimps rape, abuse, isolate, and drug womyn they're
prostituting. The johns sometimes kill the womyn with impunity, which
might be less fun for the men if the womyn could defeat them with
finality, and so pimps break womyn's will to resist so the men, as long
as they pay, can have a steady supply of womyn to rape and kill. Pimps
are aided by womyn's abusive families; recruiting womyn into
prostitution is easier if the recruits have already been abused for
years.
But most of what pimps and abusive families do is illegal under laws
that would remain in effect if prostitution and representing womyn in
prostitution were legal.
Yet I have huge doubts:
Grrls would be devastated even more. Legalization for adults would
increase the market, increasing the numbers of johns once it's no
longer illegal, and thence increasing the number of womyn recruited
into prostitution (the same way that increasing the market for baseball
increases the number of players recruited into baseball). The most
critical qualities demanded of womyn for sex are femaleness and youth,
especially youth about as young as the law allows. The line is crossed
often. Desire would cross even more frequently but for fear of law and
family. Legalization of adult prostitution would add to the enormous
masses of grrls who are incestuously raped and nonincestuously raped at
almost all ages, because the approval of the one would be taken as
semi-approval of the other. Men who now have sex with small grrls would
hardly switch to sex with adults once prostitution were legal, since if
today's law is holding them back from adult sex for pay then the even
more stringently enforced law against child abuse should hold them
back, but it doesn't seem to be. The likelihood is that legalization
would increase the market for all prostitution and with it the
substantial niche market for child prostitution. Doesn't that risk
alone warrant keeping the laws in place?
Would the laws be enforced? Wouldn't men still dominate in terrible
ways? Would a womon be able to enforce the limits she specifies? If
not, and if she called in the police or the courts, would they pay any
attention at all? I suspect the legalization would be seen as all the
boon "those" womyn need, so that complaining about being beaten would
be treated like complaining about not getting a chocolate chip cookie.
Police response to battered wives who are not prostituted ranges from
good to bad; I'd guess bad more often than good. The Supreme Court last
June exempted police from responsibility when daddy-poo killed a few
daughters he didn't want anymore. His wife had invoked her order of
protection, and yet the police put her off. Police more or less
represent the political leadership of their communities. Womyn don't
have much influence there. They don't get much law enforcement in their
favor except when it suits men, which means prostituted womyn won't get
much law enforcement at all.
Will repeal lead to jury nullification of violence prosecutions in
prostitution contexts, because the violence will still be illegal but
the juries will be swayed more by prostitution having become legal and
so refuse to convict for the violence, as they refuse now to convict
for nonstranger rape? Will they nullify prosecutions because, by being
in prostitution, the females must have "asked for it"?
Would the lack of enforcement be during a transition only? What social
pressures, political pressures, would be needed to speed the
transition? Given that, historically, social and political pressures
have been most effective when instigated by the self-interested aided
by allies (productive allies often having complementary
self-interests), are womyn who are now in prostitution able to amass
and exert that pressure? Given that difficult movements usually take
time to build (including learning curves and overcoming resistances),
is a short transition unreasonable to expect? Given the harm that'll
accumulate during a transition as men don't believe laws will suddenly
be enforced, is a long transition unreasonable to ask womyn to tolerate
if the alternative is keeping laws as they are? Are womyn better off
with prostitution being a felony, perhaps because it keeps some womyn
out? Does that matter much to men, since a supply is assured, law or
no?
Is law enforcement in favor of prostituted womyn a higher priority so
that crimes against the females can be broken and then so that
decriminalization could be politically feasible? Other movements have
gained legal rights by building a step at a time. Is that what's needed
here as a strategy?
Will legalization mostly spread men's domination of females? and make
life yet more horrifying than it is?
What would you do?
-- Nick
E-mail:
Nick_Levinson
Domain:
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Dan Holzman
Nick (Nick Levinson) <do_not_e-m...@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com> wrote:
>
>Grrls would be devastated even more. Legalization for adults would
>increase the market, increasing the numbers of johns once it's no
>longer illegal, and thence increasing the number of womyn recruited
>into prostitution (the same way that increasing the market for baseball
>increases the number of players recruited into baseball). The most
>critical qualities demanded of womyn for sex are femaleness and youth,
>especially youth about as young as the law allows. The line is crossed
>often. Desire would cross even more frequently but for fear of law and
>family. Legalization of adult prostitution would add to the enormous
>masses of grrls who are incestuously raped and nonincestuously raped at
>almost all ages, because the approval of the one would be taken as
>semi-approval of the other. Men who now have sex with small grrls would
>hardly switch to sex with adults once prostitution were legal, since if
>today's law is holding them back from adult sex for pay then the even
>more stringently enforced law against child abuse should hold them
>back, but it doesn't seem to be. The likelihood is that legalization
>would increase the market for all prostitution and with it the
>substantial niche market for child prostitution. Doesn't that risk
>alone warrant keeping the laws in place?
As the situation exists today, someone wanting to have sex with an
underage girl need only find wherever it is the streetwalkers hang
out and wait until one comes along -- that's how many runaways wind
up. Since current law makes them criminals, they are highly limited
in the tools at their disposal to get out once they're in. Preserving
current policy as a tool to prevent child prostitution makes no sense,
because current policy has utterly failed to achieve that goal.
Decriminalizing prostitutes while keeping forcible and statutory
rape laws in place restores those options to those girls. Since
seeking underage prostitutes would remain just as illegal as seeking
underage sex partners, demand for underage prostitutes shouldn't
change based on decriminalization of adult johns who seek adult
prostitutes.
>Would the laws be enforced? Wouldn't men still dominate in terrible
>ways? Would a womon be able to enforce the limits she specifies? If
>not, and if she called in the police or the courts, would they pay any
>attention at all? I suspect the legalization would be seen as all the
>boon "those" womyn need, so that complaining about being beaten would
>be treated like complaining about not getting a chocolate chip cookie.
I direct your attention once again to the history of police treatment
of rape charges. It looks very different now than it did 40 or even
30 years ago. It changed because feminists demanded that police
change how they treat women. That change has not extended to
prostitutes because governments were able to say, "but those women are
criminals." By decriminalizing prostitutes, the men you are concerned
about here will lose cover for that treatment.
I also direct your attention to the labor movement. Management
treated labor very differently before unionization than it does today.
The primary bar to unionizing prostitutes to demand better working
conditions is criminal status.
>Will repeal lead to jury nullification of violence prosecutions in
>prostitution contexts, because the violence will still be illegal but
>the juries will be swayed more by prostitution having become legal and
>so refuse to convict for the violence, as they refuse now to convict
>for nonstranger rape? Will they nullify prosecutions because, by being
>in prostitution, the females must have "asked for it"?
Since juries do often convict for nonstranger rape, I'm not sure this
is a very strong argument. Even if some juries would nullify, that
isn't a reason to keep prostitution illegal -- today that violence
simply doesn't reach juries in the first place because prostitutes
can't go to the police.
>Would the lack of enforcement be during a transition only? What social
>pressures, political pressures, would be needed to speed the
>transition? Given that, historically, social and political pressures
>have been most effective when instigated by the self-interested aided
>by allies (productive allies often having complementary
>self-interests), are womyn who are now in prostitution able to amass
>and exert that pressure?
The structures are already in place. Check out COYOTE, Sex Worker's
Education Network, Sex Worker's Art Show, etc. The primary bar to sex
workers being able to exert that pressure is criminal status.
>Are womyn better off
>with prostitution being a felony, perhaps because it keeps some womyn
>out? Does that matter much to men, since a supply is assured, law or
>no?
A woman convicted of a felony because she is a prostitute is certainly
not better off.
Paul Ciszek
Nick (Nick Levinson) <do_not_e-m...@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com> wrote:
>
>
>Grrls would be devastated even more. Legalization for adults would
>increase the market, increasing the numbers of johns once it's no
>longer illegal, and thence increasing the number of womyn recruited
>into prostitution (the same way that increasing the market for baseball
>increases the number of players recruited into baseball). The most
>critical qualities demanded of womyn for sex are femaleness and youth,
>especially youth about as young as the law allows. The line is crossed
>often. Desire would cross even more frequently but for fear of law and
>family. Legalization of adult prostitution would add to the enormous
>masses of grrls who are incestuously raped and nonincestuously raped at
>almost all ages, because the approval of the one would be taken as
>semi-approval of the other. Men who now have sex with small grrls would
>hardly switch to sex with adults once prostitution were legal, since if
>today's law is holding them back from adult sex for pay then the even
>more stringently enforced law against child abuse should hold them
>back, but it doesn't seem to be. The likelihood is that legalization
>would increase the market for all prostitution and with it the
>substantial niche market for child prostitution. Doesn't that risk
>alone warrant keeping the laws in place?
Why not investigate some of the developed nations where prostitution
is now legal, such as Germany and the Netherlands, and see if it is
having this effect? Surely that would be more fruitful than speculating
in the absence of facts.
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Nick (Nick Levinson)
dramatically over the past five years: from 4,000 to 15,000 according
to figures published by the Amsterdam-based ChildRight organization.
Dutch police says the numbers are much lower, but acknowledges there is
a big problem."
That's from
http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/currentaffairs/region/netherlands/netherlands011218.html,
accessed Sep. 17, 2005.
"Prostitution is on the increase in Germany, according to criminal
psychologist Adolf Gallwitz. Some 18 percent of German men regularly
pay for sex, he said. And child prostitution is also on the rise.
"'We have men who have a fixation on children and also exploit them.
They come from the social mainstream and are totally inconspicuous,'
Gallwitz told Deutsche Welle. 'But we also have men who turn this into
a real family event and bring their wives along.'"
That's from http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1016270,00.html,
accessed Sep. 17, 2005.
Those were found by Googling.
Can you cite any scholarship, e.g., journal articles, that shows that,
on the contrary, grrls would be safe, at least to the degree they are
now? So far, a light search is not looking good for grrls in Germany or
Holland, but if you have better citations, please let us know.
And if you know anyone here who was speculating in the absence of
facts, do tell us who that was. We know a great deal about men's
behavior. Sexual relationships, however quick, are quite optional and
not a man's right. That's a fact many men would rather forget.
-- Nick