Cash/Consent: The war on sex work
nplusonemag.com
nplusonemag.com
For example, it would be illegal for me to run a website which let sex workers anonymously check a particular client’s phone number to see if someone had previously reported them as violent. FOSTA/SESTA would expose me to both criminal and civil liability, even if it wasn’t intentionally made with sex workers in mind, if I didn’t act to stomp out any sex workers from using the service.
Even "progressive" companies like Cloudflare kicked us off with ZERO warning after Switter (a social platform for sex workers) was covered in the press (https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla...), but neo-Nazi platforms were were given detailed blog posts on why they were kicked off (https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ & https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/), and only after massive pressure from the community after people DIED. But a website where the goal is to increase safety for sex workers? Gone without warning.
It's bullshit like this that further strengthens our resolve to ensure that we (Assembly Four) continue to exist so we can continue to use our privilege to assist one of the most stigmatised groups in the world.
For more background on FOSTA/SESTA, why we started Assembly Four and Switter, see my article on Medium: https://medium.com/assembly-four/my-six-week-rollercoaster-r...
"Elliot Rodger's Retribution" was posted on YouTube. How is this situation distinct from the Isla Vista one? E.g., why should YouTube not be blockaded, other than for reasons of corruption and nepotism?
But, recalling what the bad-driving site was an analogy for, it doesn't seem like it would be appropriate for sex workers sharing reports of bad clients.
As it is, libel laws give you protection if you can prove the claims are false, and you can get civil damages if you show harm. What would you say should be legislated beyond that?
It's not an easy decision, but I lean towards "should be illegal if done anonymously and without proof".
Would it be a civil thing where you could sue me for some amount, or would you make it a criminal infraction?
I'm pretty sure that "no anonymous slander" reduces the amount rapidly, so you end up with a bunch of legitimate accusations that people are willing to stand for because they can provide evidence. The whole "I don't like his hair, so I'm going to make up stories about him" stuff goes away.
I always had a business idea that is very similar to this. It would be a good use for decentralized "blockchain based" (aka no mediator). It would be like LinkedIn, but instead of thumbs ups and high fives saying what an awesome boss you are and how your Excel skills are second to none, it would be the truth about working for/with certain individuals/companies.
You could even have a spinoff that talks about romantic partners. Who is a known cheater, abuser, etc.
Decentralized judicial system
It attempts to place prior restraint on speech.
Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply should not be legislating in search of outcomes.
In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence, etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position.
It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.
In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.
I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_ choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz. housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2) does society provide these basic needs to all its members.
From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through college. But not everyone is middle class.
What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of an individuals creativity.
A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.
This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.
A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.
Suppose you wander into the desert and get lost. Suppose you're on the verge of dying from thirst when another person shows up. He says "I'll take you back to civilization, but only if you agree to be my slave forever".
You're not any worse off than if the slaver didn't exist, because you can always choose to reject the slaver's offer. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Yet I think that most people would consider that a very unconvincing argument for permitting slavery: that a would-be slaver would simply not show up if slavery were illegal.
Arguing in favor of free will, you could say that all other things being the same, a world where you get lost in the desert and the slaver shows up is no worse than one where you get lost in the desert and nobody shows up.
Arguments in favor of control thus rely on all else not being the same, that making something illegal changes the wider society, not just any single individual's ability to do that thing.
The article is pretty nuanced.
"So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates."
The whole economic system we're in is coercive to many.
It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma? What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker? What about your wife or your mother?
Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.
The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.
In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of value.
It's an entirely different perspective.
While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring on an any different set of self worth problems.
> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange, especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman "decides" to let you have sex with her.
As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my rent".
I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.
Why is that particular act singled out? Humans need to do lots of things both to ensure individual survival and the survival of the species. Why is "the human reproductive act" morally different from, say, paying someone money to cook food for you? Why is genuinely immoral work (such as advertising) given a free pass?
Now, we could help children by helping people and providing social services -- but it's easier to just make prostitution illegal.
Uh, that's totally deniable.
Ten years ago, Germany legalized prostitution in an attempt to reduce crime and improve sex workers rights, standing, etc. Curiously at the same time, Sweden made prostitution illegal (incl. soliciting), for the exact same reasons.
Ten years later, the outcome is pretty clear. Germany is seeing exploitation and trafficking on a much larger scale, mostly because the criminals can more easily hide behind a screen of legality. Sweden sees less trafficking and exploitation.
I have no idea what Germany did, but if all they did was one day say "hey, it's legal to be a sex worker now, go nuts!" ... then the outcome they got is not surprising at all. Even if they did more than that, it's a complex issue, and you need a comprehensive legal framework in place in order to ensure that exploited sex workers have a path to justice.
If the response from exploiters is "well, sex work is legal", and the law buys that and looks the other way, then the law was not made particularly well.
Doesn't that put a negative stigma around sex work? It makes it sound like sex workers should/would only get into sex work if they had no other options available.
They had other options. They chose sex work knowing the risks, knowing they could quit if they wanted to, and knowing their alternatives.
I'm aware that not every sex worker enters sex work that way, but it's equally wrong to say that all sex workers do sex work because they have no other options.
What are you advocating here? There are many transactions in which modern states interfere that are between consenting adults. In countries with minimal wage you could consent to being paid below it, but it would remain illegal. You can consent to being scammed in a transaction, but it remains illegal. Etc. These interference are meant to protect citizens. Just because the transaction would involve a sexual exchange doesn’t mean it’s any different.
A lot of the dangers to sex workers is because of these protections forcing them to go underground and work with shady exploitative dealers and trafficking.
This is the older viewpoint. The newer one is that no one would consensually agree to sex work unless they were coerced. I am not in a position to opine on that viewpoint, but if it's true, then every sex worker is being exploited regardless of any laws or regulations.
"No one would consensually agree to [insert other menial job here] unless they were coerced."
I can't speak for everyone or everywhere, but we definitely have documentries in the UK where women claim to do sex work because it afford them a specific lifestyle and they'd rather be there than a supermarket.
In fact, I've met such woman and the suger baby approach is fairly popular with students nowadays. They're not doing it for basic food and warth, they're doing it for chanel and gucci.
I'm not sure that moralising their ability to consent away from them is the right thing to do, but it's also probably true that cost of living rises and advertising budgets have contributed to this.
Making children work in a factory, forcing slaves to work under threat of violence, or even paying consenting adults to work grueling hours in dangerous jobs without medical recourse is bad. Paying employees to do something that's menial or boring is not.
The standards of what is acceptable or not certainly change over time, but conflating coercion and acceptable remuneration is a silly equivocation.
Edited to add that this is discussed explicitly in the article, as it mentions for instance the migrant sex worker collective Red Canary Song.
Also 'trafficking' is a term that needs a precise definition as it means different things to different people.
That is hardly an improvement.
Obviously if you raise the minimum wage high enough then it's going to hurt employment. But it seems like it has to be quite high before it hurts employment much, and in particular it seems that "everyone who would otherwise have been paid less than the minimum wage just loses their job" is a really inaccurate model.
Because that is fundamentally the purpose of government. Roughly, to intrude in the decisions of individuals in order to generate a safer and more prosperous life for everyone in general. A civilization is more than a collection of individuals.
Consent can be coerced, scammed, misinterpreted, hard to prove afterwards, etc. And individual actions have consequences beyond the individual because of human traits like envy and greed. So, government attempts (should attempt) to take all these factors and many more into consideration while creating regulation and enforcement structures that work around those problems.
Seatbelts, speed limits, health regulations, heck even labour laws are about utilitarian outcomes - generally keeping people from dying prematurely or going to the hospital.
The state generally interferes with transaction that are harmful between the two parties. You can't write whatever you want in a contract, even if it only pertains to first parties.
As for alcohol prohibition: That's not a principle stance regarding the freedom to take harmful substance. It is an exception to the prohibition of access to harmful substances. We still want something that's bad for us, so alcohol is the exception for historical reasons, but for (probably misguided) utilitarian reasons, we don't allow all sorts of drugs.
Our reasons for prohibition of certain drugs over others are far from utilitarian. If anything, they're anti-utilitarian. Compare the motivations for the 18th and for the 21st amendment.
"(We still want something that's bad for us, so alcohol is the exception for historical reasons), but (for probably misguided utilitarian reasons, we don't allow all sorts of drugs)."
or
"We still want something that's bad for us, so (alcohol is the exception for historical reasons, but for probably misguided utilitarian reasons). We don't allow all sorts of drugs."
The former suggests we prohibit drugs for utilitarian reasons, misguided but utilitarian nonetheless, the latter seems odd by itself?
That is a bit glib, but so is your bald assertion that states ought to be concerned only with principle. It is neither part of our legal tradition nor even a plausible interpretation of the foundational ideas of most currently constituted governments.
I see where you are coming from, but I don't know that, as humans currently understand things, your argument really has traction on reality.
Because most real world value systems amount, in practice, to rule-bounded utilitarianism, rather than purely non-utilitarian deontology.
> Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives.
Utilitarian objectives are a set of principles, and while they are usually qualified rather than pure, they are very widespread set of principles and virtually every advocacy campaign appeals to them for that reason.
You are simply wrong if you think most public support for or opposition to legislation, in general or in the US specifically, is based on moral principles that are completely divorced from perception of utilitarian consequences.
Is that true? There are still many dry counties in the US, and full scale prohibition was an utter and total desaster. Seems more that people learned that alcohol prohibition doesn't work which lead to its abolishment, not a principled position.
You don't have to be that conservative to find it at least a little uncomfortable or grimy. I'm not saying that should be the basis of law, but you must understand there's generally stigma associated.
You have to look at who does it serve to establish this moral standard, and it serves a patriarchal society that overemphasizes the value of purity in women.
Somehow if the issue focused on gigolos I doubt it would have as much moral opposition.
I guess, legalized prostitution would bring enough money to be respected. (Like dentists, digging rotten teeth)
To clarify, I personally favor the Swedish model, which outlaws pimping, brothels, and buying sex but does not make it illegal to be a prostitute.
> Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who considers the purchase of sex an act of violence against women... holds a very different opinion on who the victims of prostitution are: "The acceptance of prostitution makes all women potential prostitutes in the public view since there are only two requirements for a woman to work in a brothel: one is that circumstance has placed her so […] and the other is that she has a vagina, and all women are born meeting at least one of these requirements."
I can't help but be reminded of how people cast Jewish pro-human-rights criticism of the Israeli government as "self-hating Jews..."
Ah, there it is.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/norway_report_-_sex_workers...
> Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a “preventative policing” approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences as “stress methods” to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how police sources “in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market”. One example of this approach is “Operation Homeless”: an initiative that saw increased enforcement of the law on “promotion” of sex work – which makes it an offence to “let premises ... for prostitution”. “Operation Homeless” ran for four years between 2007 and 2011 and initiated the systematic and rapid eviction of many sex workers from their places of work and/or homes.
> They don't have
The ones where I live aren't like that.
This sort of stereotyping is problematic, because you can’t fix problems if you can’t differentiate between dysfunctional and functional. You can’t make changes if you alienate the good with the bad. And you can’t make things better if you’re making global changes without understanding local context.
I can only hope this action os ilegal in someway
There's a tiny but really interesting museum in Amsterdam set up by a former sex worker that explains exactly this. The safety regulations they're looking for really aren't all that different from how cities regulate taxis.
Like driving a taxi, sex work can be a dangerous job because they're alone with a client, often at night, and with a fair bit of cash on them. A lot of time the clients are drunk, which makes them more likely to be violent. And, because many of the workers are immigrants, there's a risk they're being exploited by someone taking a significant portion of their earnings.
Allowing credit card transactions, issuing taxi medallions, requiring worker background checks, and, most importantly, having police who actually investigate crimes reported by workers, has gone a long way to make driving a cab a much safer occupation than it was two decades ago.
I'm not sure about credit cards in de Wallen but they have a medallion-like system with the booth rentals.
It’s not something we care about in 2019 but medallion owners are required to provide a radio to drivers. That’s really important from a safety perspective before we all had cellphones. Without the medallion system a radio in a taxi would have been a safety luxury that most drivers couldn’t afford.
Medallion owners are also required to install the machines to accept credit cards. That helps the drivers not carry too much cash and again is a bigger investment than what a typical driver would be able to make on their own. Knocking down this barrier to entry is basically the only way Uber was able to exist. How many people would sign up to pick up strangers from the internet while carrying hundreds of dollars of cash? Not many, unless they really needed the money. But sex workers have to do that all the time because banking regulations make it almost impossible for them to even get a bank account let alone process a transaction for sex work.
There are also maximum lease rates that medallion holders are allowed to rent the taxis out to drivers. That goes a long way towards stopping the financial exploitation of a taxi driver who might be struggling to get out of a difficult financial situation or sending money back home to their family in another country. It’s also enforceable. So if a medallion owner is taking too much of a driver’s money the driver has recourse. When a pimp is stealing money from a sex worker they don’t have any recourse to stop it.
Another way that people in difficult financial situations are often exploited is through insane work schedules. It’s hard to say no to an extra shift when you need the cash. Medallions come with a limit on the number of hours in a row one driver can operate the vehicle.
Medallions also set prices, so the odds of getting into a dispute over the cost are pretty low. There’s no “he said she said” about the price after the fact. And if a customer doesn’t pay its easy for the driver to tell the police exactly what they’re owed.
And (at least until Uber came along) the cost of a medallion was so high that it wasn’t worth the risk of having it suspended or revoked.
When I talked to a taxi driver in Canada about his situation for example, he told me he has to pay $3000 at the start of the month, like house lease, and therefore he is $3k in hole. It basically forces him to work non stop doesn't let him do things like take one week off, because he couldn't rent the car for 3 weeks for example. It's one month or not effectively. At least with something like uber he said, he had flexibility, and I get the impression he would of made a similar amount anyway.
Also similarly, a lot of drivers prefer cash and pretend their card machine is broken. The laws say one thing, the reality is often another.
Enforce Zelle/Square/CashApp/WePay only rules :)
Ex: " I went to endless meetings on refugee shelter and nobody ever invited a single refugee. I only ever saw one refugee at a meeting about refugee shelter, it was a doctor from Canada who had grown up in a refugee camp in Africa. She had become quite a senior doctor and when she came in it was like an axe murder. She was unbelievably angry, and she literally just called out every single thing the speaker said that wasn’t true."
"the boss lady from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) come around to inspect the shelters refuse to set foot inside of it. She was fucking furious that one had been built there. The fear that they had was the the Hexayurts were too cheap and they lasted too long. They were afraid that what was going to happen was that every place that they built them the locals were going to look at them and say That’s actually pretty good, and start building them themselves. And I’m just like, Does that not solve the fucking problem? Is that not what we want—local resilience? The more you find out about how these systems run the worse the expectation gets. It’s very messy. "
Their policy is both simple and logical once you know it: The main challenge with refugee camps is not an engineering issue; the challenge is getting nearby countries to agree to host camps. Countries will agree much more easily to host a temporary camp - which means it has to visibly be a temporary camp.
It turns out, once you know about this constraint (and the obvious facts about cost, logistics, and that camps have large amounts of manual labour available) it's extremely difficult to improve on 10,000 year old canvas tent technology.
My own theory is that people that genuine want to protect workers for exploitation usually end up working on general labor rights.
If you want the government to protect sex workers you, almost by definition, need to make sex work legal. In reality, you might not need to go that far. The effectivness immigration policy of sancuary cities and safe harbor laws for reporting drug overdoses show that it is possibly to provide services (including law enforcement) to criminals; but building and maintaing the nessesary trust with the community is very difficult.
The decriminalization actually helped weed out most of the small "street pimps" and violent or non-paying Johns/Janes are now a lot more regularly reported and prosecuted, especially since prostitutes can now actually go to the police without fear of being charged for prostitution.
Legal prostitution also means brothels are now registered as legal businesses a lot more often, which in turn means they have to follow health and safety regulations and are subject to inspections. Before, the state only ever could raid a brothel (illegal by definition) and shut it down, at which point it often popped up again in some new place. This also means brothel operators can invest in their properties, thereby usually improving the physical working conditions as well.
But admittedly it hardly put a dent into the larger criminal enterprises which have an entire "supply chain" incl human trafficking and (illegal) brothels with sex slaves. Those criminal organizations just continued as usual, maybe even profiting from generally increased demand in prostitution now that it is legal, keeping their enslaved people in check with fear and outright violence, but are helped by trafficked sex workers nowadays originating from non-EU states which means those people would have to worry about deportation (aside from violent retribution by the criminal enterprises) if they went to the police.
Now that the state has freed up some resources it previously spent on prosecuting sex workers and their customers, I'd like to see those resources go towards fighting those larger criminal enterprises, but that didn't really happen yet as far as I can tell. There have been some high profile busts, but not more than it used to be.
Like protection from unwanted and unsolicited sexual attention in the work space?
It's something that's pretty common in labour protections - but also highlights how prostitution is different from other forms of "wage slavery".
> "how to avoid the director when he’s trying to get you to blow him between takes and your jaw needs a rest"
It quite clear that the author consider the sex in the shooting and the unwanted sexual attention by the director to be two very different things. One of the two they agreed to before hand and is getting paid to do, the other is unwanted.
It seems identical to the problem that has been on the news regarding directors in the movie industry in general.
So, both are examples of an unpleasantly sexualized work place with an unequal power balance?
I don't know exactly how employment law applies to the armed services, but I expect the upshot is something like this: the army has an obligation to do things in a way that e.g. doesn't make accidents needlessly likely, but if you are a soldier fighting a war then you might get shot and that's just part of what they pay you for.
Employment laws may or may not already be drafted in a way that makes them suitable for applying to sex workers, but in principle the situation seems to me very similar to the one I just described. If you are (say) a pornographic actor or a prostitute, then you are going to be having some sex that you wouldn't otherwise have chosen to have, and that's just part of what they pay you for; but your employers are still obliged to protect you from (for instance) being sexually harrassed by your boss.
So, sure, it's a special case and the laws might need to be written carefully to deal with it, but that's not unprecedented. (In particular, if your intended subtext was something like "... so sex work should be illegal because it's fundamentally abusive" then I think you need to explain why we don't have to outlaw the military, police, and other groups that are necessarily exposed to substantial physical danger in the course of their work.)
Now for fire and police work - I would argue the difference is one of necessity - even the most fundamental libertarians would probably agree that sex work is a luxury good or service - not something fundamental for survival or law and order; it is closer to working at a restaurant: providing a convenient, but ultimately redundant service (people can and do buy food and prepare it at home).
We don't expect restaurant workers to risk their life; while we accept that firefighters sometimes do (although, they try very hard not to).
As for the more fundamental aspect; should we allow prostitution - or; is there a difference between other uncomfortable jobs and the sex industry - I suppose I land on the side that the idea that prostitution is OK derives from the fact that we live in a society that's not equal.
It may be puritan of me to say that I'd never (unless circumstances changed significantly for worse, I suppose) consider making a living sucking cocks - and I don't think it's a reasonable expectation. But if we do say that prostitution is just work - I don't see why we'd pay social security to people who refuse sex work?
I just think there's a fundamental difference between say, cleaning floors and having sex for money.
If we look at the top 10 most dangerous jobs we also see a fairly common pattern where safety is a balance between costs and efficiency. Most of those jobs could be made relative safe, but then the cost would go up. While we don't expect restaurant workers to risk their life, we do expect that the roofer to not spend more money on safety that is strictly necessary, making roofers one of the most dangerous jobs.
That said, fishing can never be entirely safe - a storm is a storm, and the ocean is cold and deep (off the Norwegian coast, for example).
Still,while I wildly disagree on the premise that fishing and prostitution could be compared (that is, mostly on an emotional level) - I think I'll have to concede that in some ways it might make for a an interesting comparison point.
I'd guess coal mining could fit too.
But in the context of a sound and well regulated job market, I don't think fishing in general is a luxury goods provider. Neither is mining (in general).
Any regulation that tries to go the route and forbid jobs based on health risk would need to make a larger portion of the worked force in order to also cover legal prostitution.
We could also take a stand against wage slavery. The article articulate quite well how much of her life was punctuated on the need to raise money for rent and food. Countries like Norway and Sweden have social safety nets in place to prevent that, but even here people will accept risky jobs that they do not want to do in order to escape bare minimum living standard.
No. Unwanted implies against her will. She agreed to have sex in exchange for money, and knew before that the job she was applying to was to perform sex for money.
She might not really enjoy the sex she is paid to perform, but that's not different to somebody who cleans toilets in exchange for money might not enjoy cleaning toilets.
Would you consider cleaning toilets and prostitution for supporting yourself as "no different"?
If entered voluntarily, I do not see a moral difference.
I do however recognize that there still is a societal stigmatization when it comes to sex work (there is also stigmatization when it comes to "menial" jobs such as cleaning toilets, but less so). This stigmatization to me doesn't appear to have a rational footing, but either comes from "traditional" and/or "religious" values (same as opposition to homosexuality), or from confusing voluntary sex work with involuntary sex work (as I often see in self-proclaimed "feminist" perspectives).
All in all, a lot of societies seem to be in a state of cognitive dissonance, where voluntarily selling your body for sexual gratification of others is illegal... unless you make a movie out of it, or do not actually perform outright sexual intercourse (strippers, dominatrixes).
But that wasn't really what I asked. I asked if you consider prostituting yourself to be equivalent to taking a cleaning job?
If I was in a situation where I could either prostitute myself (legally, in a safe-enough environment like a legal club with a bouncer) or clean toilets (legally, in a safe-enough enviroment), I'd probably end up with prostitution.
Then again, I live in a country where the welfare system is good enough that I always have a third option...
PS: Let me explain this a little further. I know only one prostitute loosely (old friend; I did not ever use her services; or the services of any prostitute for that matter) and while I am sure she did not tell me all the shit she encounters in her current job, she actually worked as a "cleaning lady" in a hospital before becoming a prostitute full time. She says she will never go back to being a cleaner. She'd like to get a better accepted job with better job security that she can still work when she gets older, so when we last spoke she was looking into taking classes to become an accountant, but for now she says she is happy with the life prostitution affords her relatively easily. "It's better than begging the state for money, and I can still afford nice things and go on vacations"
I actually know a lot more such "cleaning ladies" from the same hospital (who probably still work there). Every cleaner ranted about how the job ruins their backs, their joints, etc, and that old age will not be fun for them and that they saw a ton of co-workers retire early because their bodies gave out and they ended up on welfare because their early-retirement money was not sufficient.
This line of reasoning makes very little sense to me. Let's just consider another profession. It's pretty undeniable the demand for skilled software engineers currently outstrips the supply. Especially for certain in-demand specialists.
Yet we don't see machine learning PhDs being kidnapped and enslaved to work in a dank basement tuning Netflix's recommendation algorithm for hours on end with Reed Hastings and his goons threatening to kill their families. The simpler solution is for Netflix to just pay enough money to attract qualified people for the job.
Every single other market in the world has a simple mechanism to deal with the scenario where demand outstrips supply. And that is simply to let prices rises to the point where the two reach equilibrium.
There's absolutely zero reason why the market for prostitution should be any different. To the extent that it isn't it's only because law enforcement either is incapable of or refuses to investigate the complaints of crimes committed against sex workers.
The simple supply/demand argument you see in economics class works in very few cases that feature in internet debates. It works well on eBay when you're selling a used iPhone, but not on labor, healthcare, or housing as those markets are all heavily regulated in comparison.
A charitable read of that paper, particularly p. 25, would suggest that trafficking dropped from 19,740 cases to 12,350 cases when prostitution was liberalised.
I've done enough statistics to say that I don't think the paper conclusively shows evidence of a problem; particularly given how hard it must be to gather data on illegal things. Need more rigour to be used for this sort of discussion although it does show that there is a risk to be considered.
But this argument is the strongest I've seen for the opposing view. It basically says that legalization/decriminalization does make things better for existing sex workers, but since it increases trafficking, the whole thing is net negative, since a lot of people are now made to suffer to supply this new market.
The best defense I have against that is that then you haven't enforced the legal landscape properly. It should be possible for local police to protect legal sex workers and treat them with dignity and respect, and crack down hard on trafficking. But I also realize how naive that makes me sound.
And it's just not true: https://sarahditum.com/2014/02/24/who-do-you-listen-to/
The article also provided examples of people helping people get out of sex work, and actually being good at it.
And the article also talks about the very thing you're protesting, there are two big narratives in the debate: "The happy hooker is a myth!" and "Sex workers who speak out are empowered feminist icons!"
Both those narratives are extremes, and the article points out that reality is a lot more bland and boring and grey than that. The author talks about instances where a porn shoot was a great experience, but that mostly it was a boring shit job.
Of course there are sex workers who hate their job and want to get out, but can't for numerous reasons, and need help getting out.
Of course there are sex workers who hate their job, but would rather keep it, than take another shit job.
Of course there are sex workers who occasionally hate their job, and occasionally love their job.
Of course there are sex workers who like their job and would never want any other job.
Of course there are sex workers who do it to finance a drug addiction.
Of course there are sex workers who do it to finance their university education.
Of course there are sex workers who have been abused and traumatized and hurt and beaten and killed in their work.
Of course there are sex workers who have never experienced abuse in their work.
And when I say "listen to actual sex workers", this is what I mean you have to listen to. All the good, and all the bad. All the different experiences that different people have. You can't just listen to all the bad, and immediately want to crack down and forbid it and try to stamp it out "for their own good", and assume it will magically disappear. You can't just listen to all the good, and immediately want to decriminalize it and assume it will all work out magically in the end either.
This is what was I was responding to. The article I linked talks more on this sentiment, which generally ends up doing the same as Amazon warehouse workers chiming in on Twitter about how much they love their jobs: defending exploitation by appealing to the convenient ideologies of individuals.
And this is what I responded to.
Also a) implying that prostitution is exploitation per se and b) implying every sex worker who said something positive about their work is a somehow rewarded astroturf shill is at the very least problematic.
There are happy sex workers, there are unhappy sex workers (who still do it with the same level of voluntary participation as a "data entry specialist" in some cubicle or a worker gutting fish in a factory do their jobs; to make ends meet) and there are exploited/coerced/forced sex workers.
The latter is a problem and a big one, and there were and are many proposed solutions to tackle it, and nobody found a really well working one yet, but putting those victims in a spot where they themselves are criminals is something that I would think cannot be helpful.
She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better.
She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal.
Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
But when I've searched, different sources use decriminalization to mean what you and she called legalization, iirc. So I have really been given a lot of nonsense over the years by people seemingly affronted by a woman and former homemaker who is for decriminalization as the term was used by Dolores French. If they understand the term differently from how I use it, they pounce on this as evidence that I'm an idiot rather than acknowledging that it gets used differently in different sources and it was simply a misunderstanding.
Yes, I think this is about the gut reaction many people have that sex work is flat out immoral and should not be done. Period.
"Identity politics" -- ie details about who I happen to be -- seems to just make it a real hot button for a lot of people that I am willing to go on public record as being for the decriminalization of sex work. As a former homemaker, devoted military wife and full-time mom of special needs kids, I'm supposed to be some symbol of conservative goodness or something, it seems.
I've gotten more careful about how I talk about it. But my views remain the same.
Also, it was mentioned in the article, but the porn industry's STD situation should be harold by free market conservatives as a triumph of self regulation.
(the US is kind of an outlier in legalization of prostitution anyway)
So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women.
But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished.
So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias.
In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point.
In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
An awful lot of feminist stuff seems to grow out of the poison seed of an idea that the cure for the way the world hates on women is to replace policies that hate on women with policies that actively and intentionally hate on men.
It is a fundamentally broken mental model that I cannot support. It is a variation of what so many activists do where they decry the injustice of the current system and how it mandates that Group A is allowed to shit on Group B, but their proposed solution is "As a member of Group B, I want a mandate that Group B gets to shit on Group A instead."
If all you are doing is rearranging the pieces on the gameboard without fundamentally changing the rules, you are merely reassigning which parties get unjust treatment. You aren't actually creating a more just world.
Given that this often boils down to saying to privileged people in power "I would like to stop being the world's toilet and I would like you to virtuously volunteer to take my place as a toilet," it's really not surprising that so much activism gets aggressive pushback from those currently in power.
The path forward is to find a rule set which states "Shitting on people is bad and forbidden. We don't care who they are, don't shit on them. Please and thank you (and backed up with a big stick if polite requests don't work on you)."
A source on the eventual impact on trafficking would also be of interest. (I am Swedish and this, if true, I'd news to me).
The same is true for people who have medical needs in excess of that covered by UBI, but no (or insufficient) health insurance.
IOW, you're absolutely better off with UBI and massive debt than you are with no UBI and no debt.
This does not mean workers do not get exploited, or that people won't take jobs they don't want to do in order to escape bare minimum of living.
As a minor, I did all sorts of work over the Internet, and got paid fraudulently over Paypal. Boy am I glad child labour experts didn't get in on that shit. Moralists never really care to help.
I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences.
To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives.
You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.
Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
> “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.”
This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say.
Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people.
You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism.
You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level.
> All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me.
You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice.
You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.)
What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong.
Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
Why? We're not and should not be robots.
What has that got to do with anything I said?
Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic.
It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
https://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion-and-human-valu...
> Ultimately, humanity is one and this small planet is our only home, If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to experience a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another.
> I believe that at every level of society - familial, tribal, national and international - the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities.
I don’t want to hurt people, so I would happily not endorse or engage with your type of social policy, and will advocate everyone else to do the same.
Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
In the case of sex workers, getting people to agree that they don't deserve violence from clients or police is the difficult bit, and only once we can get people to agree that can we make progress on how to achieve it.
> “to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white.“
these two items from your comment seem to contradict each other.
To be clear, there is nothing at all wrong with her choosing to do this or with anyone choosing to publish it.
The part I feel is wrong is the attention paid to it and the endorsement that it is valuable. These come at a great expense because they invite people to decide that the emotional mental portrait it paints in their mind is a reasonable basis to form opinions for the general kinds of policies or actions they would support.
> Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data.
The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you:
> To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy
What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data.
A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much.
What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it.
Edit:
> I disagree very strongly about all this
You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
This doesn’t make sense. All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language, statements of feeling and perception.
If you think this article offers a clear explanation of facts, then either you didn’t really read it, you read it but are just taking the piss / trolling, or your understanding of what counts as presenting facts is so wildly different from the ubiquitous notion of it that we scarcely could communicate about it given your extreme and unusual set of standards.
> “You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly.“
This sounds like you’re looking for some kind of rhetorical flair to justify what actually is a poor and uncharitable attitude to try to just gainsay me. Seems most likely not worth it to engage further if you won’t be reasonable.
So you agree there are facts in the article?
> This doesn’t make sense.
Yes, there are facts in the article. They are presented in unison with emotional retellings of difficult circumstances from the author’s subjective perceptions.
Because of this, it’s not easy to extract meaning about the facts that is not biased by the emotional presentation.
Yet when dealing with an issue of this importance, where there is great potential to do harm to a large cohort of people if we design ineffective or incorrect policies, it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value.
That makes it so much worse when a subjective narrative story creates a mixed picture of what the facts mean.
You imagine you speak in pure axiomatic terms, and that I am incapable of reason. It's not the case. You make baseless assertions, one after the other. Consider this:
> it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value.
Maybe pick this apart. Why is it paramount? I agree that it is important, but you offer no reasoning for your opinion - built not on facts, but your moral standing.
And how does one 'understand quantitatively'?
These are rhetorical questions for you to answer. I think you're right that our views of the world are at odds with one another.
I believe that appeals to emotion are unavoidable, and part and parcel of unpacking the social compact, and coming to consensus on what is morally important - and that consensus will endlessly shift. Whereas you have some notion of moral realism, where moral facts emerge - 'ought' becomes 'is' - and are quantifiable. You'd probably be a fan of Sam Harris' Moral Landscape. But even Sam admits their can be equal peaks and valleys, and here we enter the world of subjectivity.
I suggest you dig deeper into the rabbit hole of philosophy and get out of the scientism local maxima you've caught yourself in.
Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.
Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases.
But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent.
It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.”
This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing.
This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.
There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation?
I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally?
I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases?
All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
“We should ban sex work, because that’s best for women”
This always felt like an oxymoron to me.
A bunch of people in this thread are saying there's nothing wrong with sex work, but if I offered £30 for them to give me a blowjob not one of them would take the money.
There's a weird disconnect here: people think women selling sex enjoy it, and they don't recognise that the vast majority of women are only selling sex because they have no other option.
I'd also not want my wife and daughter to work in many professions that are known to be harsh, exploitative physical work in abusive conditions that's likely to bring in long term health conditions for measly pay. There are so many jobs that objectively suck, and being able to refuse money because the job is really bad is a privilege that most people don't have. So that criteria also isn't really sufficient to distinguish sex work from many other options that are and will continue to be legal.
Compare this to $75 day pass to massive grounds that would put anything on Game of Thrones to shame. $150-$200 per hour to do anything private and sexual. A budget Norwegian Air flight, accomodations and 10 hours of your wildest sexual fantasies and you'll still have spent less than any of the bullshit you'll encounter in North America.
I personally see that model over there and it seems pretty awesome, but people are always looking for something wrong to rationalize their opinion on all sex work, but most of whats wrong applies to any job in these regulated environments. People talk to sex workers, and assume they are all being coerced to say something positive.
It's the same with porn by the way. You don't know if the women you're watching are on drugs, being threatened by men, or just needs the money to survive. So what what are you watching? "Sex" or rape?
And there is never, ever, ever a UBI or "retraining"/"back to the workforce" program paired with this to get them out of SW.
The Nordic model is at best ineffective virtue signalling and at worst actively increasing the danger SWers are exposed to.
The second line is also confusing... I wrote there should be UBI/exit programs because there aren't.
It's the work of a coalition of the religious right and rad fem TERF left, so hardly surprising.
It does also seem to infantilise women who are capable of making a choice. I've only heard arguments that prohibition is 'for their own good' or necessary to correct male behavior.
Many women in illegal and coercive prostitution face the reality that their families will be injured or killed if they escape or go to the police. They will also likely be deported even if they aren't arrested for prostitution. I would rather reduce the client base for illegal prostitution by allowing legal prostitution, which removes it from the nexus of drugs of dependence, corrupt policing and criminal violence.
The assassination industry is also underground... what does that mean for murder laws?
As to why the stigma has increased, it is a documented fact that it did, established by the evaluation that was done some ten years after the law was introduced. Swedish political climate regarding the question being what it is, the investigator saw the worse conditions for sex workers as something that was a positive outcome.
You may wish to look at the work of organisations like the Nelson Trust who provide a package of support to women.
The reason most men don't want to make sex-work legal, deep down, maybe so deep they don't realize it, is because sex holds such symbolic importance in our society.
The fear is that legalizing sex work would have the side effect of morally legitimizing sex work (i.e. making it less shameful), which in turn would push us a bit more toward a world where we might see the people hiring numerous sex workers as a status symbol rather than a shameful secret.
Imbalance in wealth is a loaded topic. But imbalance in sexual satisfaction is a much heavier one, particularly for those at extremes.
That said, I don't have an overall opinion on the issue, this is just to try to elevate the debate.
Honestly, quite fascinating.
Syphilis, for example, was a real debilitating problem 70+ years ago. Today, its something everyone actively avoids, and also quickly treats.
So this particular public health issue isn't perpetuated by rampant diseased sex workers.
Regulated sex workers are cleaner than the general population due to frequent testing.
There is room for many state-level prohibitions to be challenged now, due to the rationale that passed their old laws. Sure there are people that will cite the law as preventing and criminalizing human trafficking, but go back to the public policy discussions regarding the drafted laws and you will often see public health issues that are no longer relevant today. The judicial branch can easily then strike them down. Forcing the legislatures hand.