Letting the hookers go about their business and arresting some fraction of their customers but not a large enough fraction to keep the customers from showing up at all (wouldn't want to deplete the metaphorical fishery) sounds an awful lot like a speed trap.
I wish I could not be cynical but there's just too much evil in law enforcement and the social services that deal with vices for me not to take this as a face value good thing. I'm sure they're happy to not be arresting hookers who've done nothing wrong. Beat cops don't like arresting people who've done nothing wrong. But I'd be lying if I didn't think there wasn't someone somewhere in the bureaucracy twirling their mustache while congratulating themselves on finding a way to both increase in revenue policing and satisfy the politically involved people who want progressive policy points.
Don't get me wrong, not arresting hookers is a good thing. But all my experience with the parts of government that deal with this sort of thing tells me this happened because the stars happened to align, not because someone with decision making power had an epiphany and decided that hookers shouldn't be arrested.
In this case there is dueling advocacy for the so called "swedish model" and full decrim, and by all accounts the lame duck DA is just trying to look good with the boring middle ground before his terms up.
Most other things, drug investigations, assault, etc are not earners.
The state doesn't make money on criminal law. It just doesn't.
It makes even less sense to keep them in the shadows, afraid to work with cops, given they are such a vulnerable population.
No, you're either attempting a low-effort troll or you have a profound misunderstanding of history. Men have almost always been classified with elite status compared to women in most societies. The entirety of Western civilization is founded under religions that teach a Male God created Man (male, not collective humanity) in His image and that women were created to serve men and obey them, and that the weakness of women is the source of all of the world's evils, and the cultures and legal systems which emerged have often reflected and enforced that patriarchal bias.
For most of history, women were basically the property of their fathers, then traded for dowry to become the property of their husbands. They couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they could be stoned to death for disobeying their husbands.
For most of history, both men and women in any society couldn't do any of the things you just described. The majority of people in any society, of both genders, have belonged to the lower classes. This is still true today, but you have far more rights as a lower class person today than you would have 200 years ago. You're viewing history solely from the perspective of the upper classes (which includes the middle class).