Since our good blogmaster has expressed an interest in using sex to sell blog hits, it’s time for a post that I promised a month ago, and haven’t gotten around to yet. Last month, I asked you all what you thought the difference was between “fuck me or you’re fired” and prostitution, and also said
I have some thoughts of my own (which relate to three different possible rationales for legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution, and the implications of each rationale)
So, here are those three different arguments for legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution, and what difference each implies between prostitution and “fuck me or you’re fired” style sexual harrassment.
First argument for legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution: Harm reduction. Karen Street set forth this rationale in the comments to my post last month:
The only reason I’ve heard for legalizing prostitution that makes sense to me is an improved ability to regulate it, require regular health tests, etc. I don’t know the legal status of Thai sex workers, but Thailand effected a huge decrease in the rate of AIDS spread after experienced sex workers taught classes on how to insist that customers uses a condom.
The harm reduction argument for legalization can include AIDS prevention, better recourse for prostitutes who are victims of crime, etc.
What this implies about the difference between prostitution laws and laws against “fuck me or you’re fired” is that laws against “fuck me or you’re fired” empower the person so harrassed to stop the harrassment, while anti-prostitution laws make it less possible for a prostitute who is being victimized to take action, since she herself risks jail if it comes out that she’s a prostitute.
Second argument for legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution: It’s possible for prostitution to be an acceptable transaction between free agents. What this implies about the difference between prostitution and “fuck me or you’re fired” is set forth by Wired Sisters in the comments to my earlier post.
Assuming prostitution to be a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller, “fuck me or you’re fired” would be the equivalent of “give me your used car or you’re fired.” Theft of services, maybe? Or extortion?
Where I see the distinction as getting more blurry is when we come to the third argument about legalization of prostitution. It’s actually a counter argument to an anti-prostitution argument. The steps go something like this:
A) Someone makes a version of the second argument I’ve listed for legalizing prostitution, perhaps a strong one, in which prostitution should be not just legal, but destigmatized, because it’s just fine for people to choose to make whatever sexual exchanges they darn well please.
B) Someone counters that argument with an argument that prostitutes, in general, are deeply unhappy with their work, and economically coerced into it, when they aren’t outright trafficked or otherwise forced into it by their pimps. This is what I think of as the desperate Fantine argument against prostitution. Fantine, if you remember the story from Les Miserables, became a prostitute because she essentially had to, after all respectable businesses refused to hire her once it was revealed that she had a child out of wedlock, and she needed to do something to get medicine for that sick child. She didn’t choose prostitution from an array of possible employment options; she chose it as the only possible way to keep the wolf from the door. The anti-prostitution argument I have in mind holds that prostitution is, in general, so unpleasant a fate that practically no one will choose it other than under duress.
C) Someone counters argument B with a cheerful “Hey, we’re all exploited at work, and we all have to do something or other that we don’t like to make a living.” It’s at this point that the distinction between “fuck me or you’re fired” and prostitution gets blurred. The reason that “fuck me or you’re fired” is legally actionable, while many other things that bosses can require of you, that you might not like, aren’t, is that, first, “fuck me or you’re fired” is something that some managers will in fact do, if not prevented, and, second, most of us dislike being coerced into sex far more strongly than we like being made to do other things that we may not have expected as part of our job (such as, say, finding that a job involves more bureaucracy and less creativity than you anticipated from the job description). Obviously, there are other things that we’d similarly hate: “be artificially inseminated with my sperm and carry my baby or you’re fired” or “give me your kidney or you’re fired” wouldn’t be an improvement over “fuck me or you’re fired.” But, if unwilling sex isn’t the single worst thing in the world, it’s considerably worse than unwilling most other things. So argument C, the one that says that unhappy and unwilling prostitution (the kind, after all, that got described in argument B) is just like any other kind of work, seems to me to leave no basis for laws against “fuck me or you’re fired.” The prostitute in argument B, after all, has been posited as no freer than the woman submitting to sexual harrassment. Why, then, would someone make argument C? Here, again, I see three possibilities.
1) The person making argument C really is that absolute about allowing anything whatsoever in an employment contract. There’s nothing wrong with prostitution, and neither is there anything wrong with “fuck me or you’re fired”. If you don’t like it, just get another job.
Some people may fit in this category, but most people making argument C do seem to believe “fuck me or you’re fired” should be out. They probably go with one of the other two possibilities.
2) I get the sense that some people feel that the only way to destigmatize sex is to get rid of the notion that sex is special. Sex is just another thing like just about anything else; thus, people can be free to do it any way you please. The problem is, sex is special. Whatever the other ways in which sex may or may not be special, it’s special in that it’s especially intrusive if you don’t want it. So “sex isn’t all that special” arguments don’t work all that well if they’re countering an argument in which the woman has been described as unwilling.
3) Finally, the people making argument C may not be thinking of desperate Fantine, but of something far milder. Many years ago, Dorothy Sayers countered a particular argument against women working outside the home with:
As human beings! I am always entertained – and also irritated – by the newsmongers who inform us, with a bright air of discovery, that they have questioned a number of female workers and been told by one and all that they are “sick of the office and would love to get out of it.” In the name of God, what human being is not, from time to time, heartily sick of the office and would not love to get out of it? The time of female office-workers is daily wasted in sympathising with disgruntled male colleagues who yearn to get out of the office. No human being likes work – not day in and day out. Work is notoriously a curse – and if women liked everlasting work they would not be human beings at all. Being human beings, they like work just as much and just as little as anybody else. They dislike perpetual washing and cooking just as much as perpetual typing and standing behind shop counters. Some of them prefer typing to scrubbing – but that does not mean that they are not, as human beings, entitled to damn and blast the typewriter when they feel that way. The number of men who daily damn and blast typewriters is incalculable; but that does not mean that they would be happier doing a little plain sewing. Nor would the women.
Perhaps they are picturing, not desperate Fantine, but a woman who willingly becomes a prostitute, in the sense in which many of us willingly choose our work: she prefers it to her available job alternatives. Nevertheless, like many other people, she doesn’t like her job day in and day out. She’s entitled to choose it, and entitled to damn and blast it from time to time, like anyone else. (I doubt Dorothy Sayers would have made this argument, since she’d be coming from a religious perspective that would make prostitution unacceptable, but then, the people making argument C probably have different sexual ethics from what Sayers’ would likely have been.)
But if that’s the argument they’re making, then they really need to be explicit about making the second argument about legalizing prostitution: that this is a job that some people are actually willing to do, an exchange that can actually be acceptable. Most of us are not desperate Fantine in our work, most of us did pick our job among other choices (whether abundant or slim) and so an “everyone is economically coerced to do her job” argument doesn’t seem to me to fly against a “prostitution is a job no one takes except out of economic duress and desperation” argument. At least not if you agree that “fuck me or you’re fired” is out.
The difference between “fuck me or you’re fired” and prostitution is, of course, that you didn’t get to agree to “fuck me or you’re fired” up front. But the reason that makes a difference is that, when you’re looking for word, you have more choice of what jobs to apply for, while once you have a job, if “fuck me or you’re fired” were a permitted transaction, you could have a metaphorical gun to your head. Leave the job, and you can’t pay your mortgage. Even if you’re prudent, and have a few months saved, it may well not be as many as you’d need to find another job. You can’t get unemployment, because (in the world where “fuck me or you’re fired” is acceptable), you chose to leave, or were fired for cause. Your employer supplied health insurance is gone, and you can’t pay medical bills for your sick child. If, on the other hand, you already don’t have a job, you have already made whatever accomodation you had to (perhaps you didn’t take out that mortgage, and are still living with your parents), and you’re as free to apply for a non-prostitute job as a prostitute one.
In other words, the whole reason the degree to which the transaction is clear up front would matter is that it’s a difference in freedom. If, for whatever reason, you have a set of women who are obliged to be prostitutes (perhaps, like Fantine, they can’t get other work once they’ve been shown to have had sex outside the norms, or perhaps you have an economic system in which some are born to prostitution because of what their parents did), then prostitution is no freer than “fuck me or you’re fired,” and therefore wrong for the same reasons. (If it’s free on both sides, then you can still give other reasons why it’s bad and wrong, but not ones that would resemble the reason that “fuck me or you’re fired” is wrong, and therefore reasons that may not oblige the same legal response.)
In other words, it seems to me that the argument for legalizing prostitution has to be either harm mitigation (which can apply however happy or unhappy the prostitute) or one that assumes that both buyer and seller are actually willing. An argument that accepts the “desperate Fantine” argument against prostitution and then suggests that there’s really nothing particularly wrong with being desperate Fantine makes no sense to me.
My good Lynn,
As both female and homosexual executives of both sexes become more and more common it is reasonable to believe the “fuck-me-or-you’re-fired” problem will gain a concomitantly broader saliency.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I think prostitution should be legal because a woman has a right to do what she wants with her body, just like the pro-
abortionistslifers say.Oops. just like the pro-
abortionistschoicers say.Freudian slip maybe.
It’s definitely time to legalize polygamy. I can’t understand why all the hate filled bigots oppose it.
We could have the right president to lead the charge on this burning issue.
Steve
I hope so. I really hope so.
In the abstract, I have nothing against polygamy. It was practiced by some of the original heroes of my religious tradition. BUT that tradition itself now rejects polygamy (although the rabbinic decree outlawing polygamy is about to run out, or has already done so, depending on who you read–and nobody seems to be looking to renew it OR to come out saying it’s obsolete!) Anyway, the downsides of polygamy (jealousy, family conflict, underage marriages, and welfare fraud) could reasonably be dealt with without criminalizing polygamy per se. Requiring ALL applicants for a marriage license to disclose ALL their prior or current relationships would be a terrific idea anyway. Requiring references from current or prior spouses would be even better.
WiredSisters says, “Requiring ALL applicants for a marriage license to disclose ALL their prior or current relationships would be a terrific idea anyway”
I agree as long as the requiring agent is those persons engaging in the contract. The government’s position in contracts should be acting as the arbitrator when the parties decide to dissolve the contract. If 20 or more persons wish to form a group in which all parties share child rearing, child breeding, income generation, and the other activities we consider to be part of family life, that is their business. I realize many raise the questions of welfare fraud, jealousy, and conflict but fail to see why those would be any more likely in a group than in a couple. Age of consent remains a legal definition and a society can define it legitimately and enforce that definition.
Lynn, If we were to remove prostitution and drug use/sale from criminal prosecution, unemployment would take another jump given the number of guards, parole officers, and enforcement personnel that would no longer be needed. Plus, what the hell would we do with the empty prison beds? After all, part of “punishment” involves being overcrowded doesn’t it?
Or totally isolated. How Aristotelian!
ED’s absolutely right about that!
We’ve long had an economy at least partly based on grinding up/processing the disaffected and non-connected. Armies of lawyers, judges, court officers, parole officers, corrections dept workers, other legal staff, not to mention emergency rooms staffs, the thousands of other emergency responders (Fire, EMTs), etc. ALL make their livings off the misery of such dysfunctional people and the chaos and mayhem they inflict upon society.
As one old “dinosaur” (a fireman who came on during the mid-1960s) said to me when I first got on this job in early 1986, “I thank god everyday for senseless violence, mayhem and arson, because without’em we’d all be out of work!”
I thought about that for awhile and I pondered the fact that this guy was by all accounts a real law and order, traditional values kind of guy, saying this, but it was undeniably true.
Clarence Darrow once said “Government is the tool by which the strong/rich despoil the weak/poor,” I have a feeling he was lamenting that, but after having earned my living for nearly three decades off that, I’d exclaim that SAME phrase only as a positive!
Kind of like, “Government is the tool by which the strong despoil the weak. . .and create tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs for other better connected and less disaffected citizens!”
See? It all comes down to perspective.
This a subject that’s very close to me, because it’s one of the issues over which Pete R’s incessant moralizing very nearly getting us into some serious problems.
Pete saw pimps pretty much as modern-day slave traders who either intimidated or hooked young girls on drugs and basically forced them into a life of veritable sexual bondage.
When we were collecting cars for Sonny from deadbeats, Pete sought of made a crusade out of “freeing prostitutes from their enslavers.”
I had no such compunctions and, in fact, had never frequented such women and had no desire to know any “up close and personal,” so to speak. In fact, when Pete approached me about this, I told him flat out, “I don’t pay for sex.”
To that, he laughed out loud and said, “Ya dope! You ain’t paying for the sex, you’re paying off the liability. If they come down pregnant, it’s on them….if they come down with a disease, it’s on them. You’re paying for a “no strings” arrangement. It’s a pretty sweet deal.”
I’d never really considered prostitution that way and to be honest, it didn’t make it any more appealing, seeing it as guys getting over easy, as opposed to shelling out for sex didn’t make it any better for me.
At any rate, I was not nearly as into any of this “hooker-liberation” as Pete was because, quite frankly (1) I never knew any prostitutes personally and therefore really didn’t care much about their plights and (2) with my own “moral flexibility” it was difficult to decide that such actions (either the pimp’s OR the prostitute’s) was at all “wrong.”
I certainly DID NOT subscribe to the “damsels in distress” view that Pete did, in fact, the one thing that I was fairly certain about is that the pimp/prostitute arrangement was a LOT more complex than the Pete’s of the world made it out to be. It seemed to ME, that in that dangerous line of work the women required a certain amount of protection (backup), which the pimps provided, for a fee. . .perhaps (to some extent) a rather exorbitant fee, but a fee none-the-less. Those hookers were free to find a better deal and better protection to boot.
I am STILL amazed that Pete, a guy who could so clearly see the advantageous essence of the prostitute/john relationship, couldn’t seem to see the actual mercantile pimp/prostitute exchange that I did, but I guess we all have our “blind spots.”
There’s no need to regale others with any of the sordid details of Pete’s “liberation exercises,” nor my hand in them to “protect my primary asset” (Pete was the muscle in our tandem and I couldn’t risk losing that over such a senseless exercise), suffice to say, it did eventually get awfully hot and it did ultimately alter both our lives very directly for at least the next 5 years or so.
AT any rate, given the insight Pete offered about the “prostitute/john exchange,” there is a VERY clear distinction, in my mind, between prostitution – a mutually consensual commercial exchange between a willing seller and buyer and the clearly illicit sexual coercion of “f*ck me or you’re fired.”
Now, even given my own intransigent moral flexibility, I can easily see one of those exchanges being mutually consensual and thus (in my mind) quite licit, with the other being coercive, non-consensual and thus completely illicit. Which is to say that while I accept your coercive premise “in the office,” I DO NOT when it comes to prostitution, at least absent some direct and legitimate “proof” of coercion.
To my way of thinking, that is, “at least under my own personal moral code,” coercion, blackmail, anything like that can be punishable by death. You can’t have that sought of thing hanging over your head and I believe you have a right to liberate yourself from such a threat.
To this very day, IF I found myself on a jury where a couple of “happy funsters” had, say, taken a bat to such a coercive boss and were on trial for murder. . .well, I would feel compelled to hold to my own moral code, which means that under such conditions, I’d be personally required to engage in a bit of “jury nullification,” meaning “Them boys ain’t gonna get convicted this day.”
I think it goes to one of my OWN basic legal/moral belief that a person in the commission of a crime has no legal standing and thus no “legal, even basic civil rights” that must be considered at least NOT AT THAT time.
In other words, a store owner shoots a fleeing looter in the back, IF the state were to bring criminal charges against that store owner, in my view (and I AM adamant about this) I COULD NOT (in good conscience) convict that store owner, because MY OWN interpretation of our hallowed Constitution is that that fleeing looter, like that coercive boss, has no civil or legal rights that can be acknowledged at that time because legally, while in the commission of that crime, such people simply do not exist. They are, in my view “legally invisible” at that moment.
I’d bet that if they could bring old Tommy Jefferson and Benji Franklin back from their graves, I’d be able to convince those guys (who I see as eminently open-minded) of the absolute efficacy of my legal/moral views. It’s too bad they didn’t have me around back then. . .I seriously think I could’ve helped them all out a bit.
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“The anti-prostitution argument I have in mind holds that prostitution is, in general, so unpleasant a fate that practically no one will choose it other than under duress.” (LG-S)
I don’t really agree. I think some (perhaps many) women make an intuitive inventory and freely engage in what they perceive will be an “easier way to make more money” then they otherwise could, given their limited skill-sets. That’s is not really being “coerced,” it’s simply a lack of options, like a guy taking a coal miners job because no other better/safer way to make as much money exists for him.
As an example, I am virtually positive that this woman (Frankie Santiago) very willingly became a “live in fetish slave” to wealthy investment banker Edward Sonderling (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/he_whipped_she_snapped_blR21M2u5VkeGZKXfPbLxH). . .It seems she was as “into” that scene as much as he and got a lot out of it. Her anger seemed to come ONLY as a result of being replaced!
HOWEVER, I blame the media’s obsession with prurient items that seems to seek to make it impossible for some former “sex workers” to ever “go straight.” Melissa Petro a former stripper and escort service worker who was fired from her Department of Ed job teaching Grammar School, is now being derided (by a female writer, no less) for getting a gig teaching writing at the Gotham Writing Workshops.
She was “outed” last year because she ran a blog devoted to helping other sex workers get out of that “business.”
What I don’t get is that the SAME Department of Education (in NYC) has had NAMBLA members on its payroll and kept them in “rubber rooms” where they were paid “NOT to teach,” so they could “pension out,” but a woman who had no complaints about her behavior with students and ran a blog seeking to help other sex workers become “former sex workers,” gets canned. (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/hooked_on_teaching_jiNLca3nGXIeLEvyBeTkcM)
For me, the issue of alleged coercion is very much like the issue of alleged rape, PROOF must ALWAYS be required.
The Duke Hoax and numerous similar incidents over recent years clearly proves that many women DO lie about such things AND, rape, like ANY assault must clearly have a substantial burden of proof. With the advent of DNA evidence & the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, it’s become harder and harder (rightfully so) to convict anyone of anything based merely on eye-witness testimony. In my view, it should be IMPOSSIBLE to ever convict on eye-witness and victim’s statements alone.
Same with coercion – there are almost always notes etc., in which the person makes their intentions clear. A mere charge cannot be enough to convict. I’d hold myself to the SAME standard. IF someone were trying to coerce of blackmail me, it would be incumbent upon myself to collect evidence and compile proof. How else could I hope to have that blackmailer punished. Short of getting proof, it’s incumbent upon the victim to eradicate that threat by other means (like inviting the guy somewhere and having an associate abduct him from the spot and maybe bury him alive (not for long, hopefully ) somewhere. You definitely have a right to “deal with” such threats.
Likewise, if a prostitute can prove or give evidence for coercion, etc., she’s got the ability to have that pimp charged and convicted. . .I’d call that “kidnapping” and go with the life sentence that often comes with that.
In short, I DON’T believe legitimizing/decriminalizing prostitution would legitimize the more coercive exchanges, in FACT, perhaps, in exchange for that legalization of prostitution, laws against such coercion could be made even more strict.