What's a Former Sex Worker to do?

 

 

Ashley Alexander Dupre.

The question of whether or not prostitution should just be legalized turns on whether you believe the oldest profession is an inevitable part of human society, and whether you think the benefits of regulation (bringing the workers into a controlled environment and taking arrest off the table so they might be more likely to approach the authorities with problems) outweigh any moral problems you see inherent in legalizing sex for money. As Emily Bazelon points out, the data is mixed on how much things improve for prostitutes when its legalized.

Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist who has investigated black markets like the drug trade, takes a different approach and argues, essentially, that making prostitution illegal creates a two-tier system in which the poorest women who work as prostitutes are disproportionately punished, while higher-level prostitutes have job flexibility, good pay, and relatively little harassment from police.

In some ways, Venkatesh is painting these women as feminists. They hit a glass ceiling in the corporate world and rejected it. This is another argument that follows prostitution (as well as pornography) wherever we find it: Are the women being exploited, as is commonly assumed, or are they smart, independent women doing the exploiting by tricking money out of willing male hands for something as simple as an hour’s conversation?

It’s not too different from Karen Abbott’s argument in Sin in the Second City about a famed house of ill fame in Chicago called the Everleigh Club. Though prostitutes still had their problems Abbot says that the two sisters who founded the club were feminists in their day, in way. They operated at a time when vice was still illegal but somewhat tolerated, if it stayed in certain areas. The players in the Levee, the Chicago vice district, wielded a certain level of power. The Everleigh sisters eschewed marriage for a life in which they could actually earn a great deal of money. At a time when women were expected to have domestic duties fairly exclusively, these women bribed officials and politicians, thus having a bigger say in politics, and in their lives, that they couldn’t otherwise have had at a time when women couldn’t vote.

But that’s where it gets tricky. Are women who become sex workers exercising any real choice here, or are they victims of hegemony as well as misogyny? (That’s the key to exploitation, making the exploited feel that they’re exercising their best option.) Even high-end prostitution has some serious problems; Venkatesh points out that they’re working in a cash-based, under-the-table job that leaves them little room for an exit strategy. They can’t invest, and they certainly can’t put it on their resumes.

Incidentally, the law under which Eliot Spitzer might be tried, the Mann Act, is a relic of the days of the Everleigh Club. At the time, anti-vice crusaders and religious leaders were preaching about the horrors of the “White Slave” trade. They believed, based on some dubious cases, that innocent white women were being snatched up all over the countryside and forced into sex slavery in the big cities. Around the globe today, it’s certainly true that some are forced into prostitution, especially children, and I’m sure it happened then. But probably not to the extent that they believed and that got the Mann Act passed, which prohibits transporting across state lines “a woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

The first person prosecuted under the law was legendary boxer Jack Johnson, who happened to have been a client of the Everleigh Club. (Abbott says one of Everleigh’s former prostitutes ran away with him.) Johnson, of course, committed no crime related to prostitution. He was a black man known for dating white women. The Root argues that continuing to give the Mann Act legitimacy is worse than letting Spitzer walk free.

So what do you think? Should prostitution be legal, and are prostitutes always the victims?

(Either way, I think it’s pretty clear that Ashley Alexandra Dupre should get the most of her 15 minutes while she can. I heard her single on the radio last night, and she’s not the world’s worst singer. But she is doomed to obscurity again soon, if not already. Sign it, Dupre. Whatever they have in front of you, sign it now, get your millions, and move somewhere tropical where you never have to work again.)

Monica Potts is a reporter in Stamford, CT.

  • Even if prostitution was made legal, I think an elected official in the state of New York would still have an awfully hard time justifying his/her actions

  • R.

    it sucks that the moralist argument against takes an all or nothing approach with this and completely disregards the well-being of the prostitute as a person. Legalizing it might not make it all fine and dandy but it will surely help reduce the risks involved with such activities and maybe get the police force (read: tax payer $$$) to focus on other, more pressing matters. Besides, for anyone taking moral offense to paying for sex, legal or not, justifying their actions would be hard enough (as rashad said above).

  • I think the answer is that high end prostitutes can be taking advantage of a system and a kind of “power” that they have, *and* be essentially victims of the system within which they’re working.

    Obviously prosecuting women for prostituting themselves is insane and cruel. OTOH, legalizing the prostituting of women is pretty fucking sick, and from what I’ve read, legal prostitution is still a pretty shitty “job.” I think the answer is decriminalizing selling sex, while continuing (starting) to prosecute the buying of it.

  • Legalization plus unionization is an option I’m surprised you didn’t mention.

  • quadmoniker

    The ability to organize would be one of many rights sex workers could exercise if it were legal, so yes, it would be one of the benefits.