Sweden bans the purchase, but not the sale of sex because all sex work is exploitative https://archive.is/CsMX4
- Making only one side of a transaction illegal is absurd.
- Because the customer assumes more risk, they are often more antagonistic. Sex workers have to more explicitly offer to protect their customers from legal repercussions to maintain their business, rather than the the mutualism of same risk (with legal or illegal for all).
- Legal work is always the least exploitative; that's why big agriculture wants migrant workers etc.
Kinda standard practice in europe. Ex. Drug laws are also often written like this. Basically to make sure to hurt those most who profit most, ex. it doesnt make much sense to bill a junkie every other day.
Unless someone is proposing government run sex work, it's not a fair comparison.
B) Drug dealing and sex work are also quite different in that the former in it's modern day incarnation can be highly anonymous with dead drops and whatnot, but that isn't possible for most sex work.
C) Finally, maybe the above does make drug dealing a nastier business, but few people are worried about the well being of drug dealers that aren't also for legalization.
Even thats a thing. Sex workers for mentally challanged people, is a state organized programm, which is paid by health insurance.
There's no great difference between giving a person a massage and a hand-job. Nor between an attractive person modelling for a clothing shoot, vs modelling nude to sell sexy photos. Sex hotlines are not exploitative if advice hotlines are not - it's simply a person using their skills to provide a service.
The history of vice criminalization is also informative.
- Prohibition was anti-irish, and anti-immigrant in general. KKK resurgence in the 1920s involved in part them being anti-alcohol vigilantes too.
- Original criminalization of cannabis after in the 1930s to not abolish the prohibition bureaucracy saw Mexicans as expendable scapegoats. This is why there is little use of "marijuana" in English before this time.
- Current drug war initiated in conjunction with the "southern strategy".
Now I think a lot of the bad morality is genuinely held, just as there were probably non-nativist teetotalers a century ago. But the clear negative structural consequence of anti-sex-work is to continue to try to keep the public sphere and less shitty parts of the formal economy male-dominated.
Is that true? From my understanding, Prohibition on a national scale was championed by women's movements and temperance activists (Susan B Anthony was a leader of both) as states across the entire country were enacting these laws on there own. If the KKK was involved, that wouldn't explain why Massachusetts and Maine were among the first to initiate such laws.
Certainly the KKK couldn't have been the earliest to push prohibition. It's important to remember that the 1880s and 1920s KKK were almost separate organizations: the original largely disbanded because "mission accomplished", with the end of reconstruction and imposition of Jim Crow. The 1920s iteration was a much more national organization kicked off by "The Birth of a Nation". This was also the peak of Social Darwinism, and racism being not only acceptable but fashionable among northern intellectuals.
So the new KKK couldn't help but be late to the temperance party, but it fit in with the overall milieu. A gentile KKK fashionable to northern and southern elites is rather separate from the low-class Appalachian moonshiners and bootleggers whose descendants we stereotype as the most angrily racist today.
Basic epidemiology.
Telling the state in no way keeps you from giving it to others. The existing legal requirement to disclose STIs to partners is targeted at that. In terms of actual epidemiology, the government just needs to know O() how many new cases have been found in a population, not specifically who has been diagnosed with what.