The Oldest Profession

I'm for the decriminalization of prostitution. My reasons could be described as feminist motivations:

Criminalizing sex work increases rates of prostitution and facilitates human trafficking by making it harder to leave.

Please be advised I've seen decriminalization and legalization used in a confusing fashion repeatedly in online discussions.

Please see Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French for more information on what I mean by decriminalization. She had previously worked in politics in some fashion before choosing to become a prostitute in her late twenties. 

She was college educated and childless and made better than minimum wage at work she hated. She was in an accident and made a conscious decision to get a life and stop working for the weekend and that led to her just trying stuff as opportunity knocked and that led to her choosing to be a working girl.

In my teens and twenties, I read a lot of books and articles and watched assorted movies with sexual themes, some assigned to me as part of therapy because I was molested as a child and trying to sort my problems.

I was interested in hard data that met a high bar for credibility. I looked for things that were research based or involved interviews with people with firsthand experience.

I read at least two biographies of prostitutes and I read Mayflower Madame, which is a biography of a woman who ran a prostitution ring. I also read a book where researchers interviewed prostitutes and covertly watched them work with their permission to get a better understanding.

From the Wikipedia article on Yellow Journalism:

Journalism historian Frank Luther Mott used five characteristics to identify yellow journalism:

1. Scare headlines in huge print, often sensationalizing minor news

2. Lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings

3. Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts

4. Emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with superficial articles and comics

5. Dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.

Another common feature was emphasizing sensationalized crime reporting to boost sales and excite public opinion.

In 2023, Harper's magazine published a piece titled Do Cartels Exist? I wrote my critique of why it's a bad title.

Organized crime by its very nature is a secretive world. People who speak of things like drug cartels as if the world at large has a clear idea of how drug dealers are organized and how they operate are spouting nonsense on the face of it.

If we really had an organizational chart of who runs what territory, I'm pretty sure it would be past tense -- who ran which territories -- and everyone would be in jail. If the world at large had that information and could say with confidence it was true, those people would immediately go to jail.

My reading of data based sexual subjects was not comprehensive. It wasn't intended to be. My goal was sorting my problems and I chose material I felt served that goal.

I opted to not read a biography of a prostitute whose pimp was her own father in an incestuous relationship with her. The jacket described him as a charismatic and likable fellow and her as having mixed feelings about him.

Sorry, that's a NO from me. Children's lives depend on the good graces of their abusive parents and they have limited life experience and they basically are guaranteed to have so-called Stockholm Syndrome.

So please don't read this as suggesting I think all prostitutes are having a nice time. I'm not.

But mainstream magazines trend towards articles that pretty universally paint extremely ugly pictures of the lives of prostitutes and how extremely abusive their pimps are. And that doesn't actually jibe with my more university study style of reading materials on the lives of prostitutes.

I'm a former homemaker and the general hysteria and ugly moralizing surrounding women taking money for sex is part of a larger pattern of treating women like they should only have sex for love and be caring souls out of the goodness of their hearts and not expect to be paid for their caring acts.

A lot of my best strengths are in areas where people expect me to do it because I care and then no one feels obligated to care about me in return. 

I'm absolutely certain this ABUSIVE bullshit is directly causative of my intractable poverty and also directly related to the larger societal nonsense where we trash talk and criminalize sex work and then NONSTOP brainwash all of society into believing women should marry for love, not money, give up careers for the good of the family etc.

And then we act all shocked when older women almost universally wind up living in poverty no matter how perfectly they played good girls by the rules their entire lives.

Footnote 

Previously on this site and it links out to related pieces by me: Working Girls and Women's Rights.