Prostitution is one of the world’s oldest professions, up there with cobblers and people who complain about things on the Internet. Yet it’s illegal, and come Christmas, most sex workers don’t even get a bonus, unless the chance of catching gonorrhea counts. That’s one of the reasons why Belle Knox wrote an article for Rolling Stone explaining why prostitution should be legalized.
Save for a few counties in Nevada, prostitution is criminalized in every state and locality across the country. As a result, sex workers are pushed onto the street, leaving too many at the whims of pimps and dangerous johns without access to police protection and labor representation. If only the practice was brought indoors, sex workers could have more freedom to perform on their own terms in a safe, legal environment like I do.
This is not just theory, but hard fact. Barbara G. Brents of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, studied the Silver State’s legal brothels for more than 15 years and found that “employees report that they feel safe, are free to come and go and are bound only by their contract.” In fact, 84 percent of the brothel workers her team surveyed said their job “felt safe,” and no evidence of trafficking could be found. (Via)
So long as they don’t work for SAMCRO, they’re fine.
Legal prostitution wouldn’t simply result in greater safety, but improved health as well. While it’s not well-known, Rhode Island unintentionally legalized prostitution in 1980 as the result of a legal loophole. Between the time a criminal case brought the loophole to public attention in 2003 and when it was recriminalized in 2009, gonorrhea infection among women plummeted by 39 percent, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Similarly, reports of rape declined by 31 per cent. (Via)
You can read the rest of what Knox had to say here, but don’t bother directing your attention to the RS comments section, unless you consider this to be enlightening: “People? ha ha ah ha ha….no one ever has and no one ever will ‘respect’ prostitutes.” That’s dangerous thinking, though not as risky as working for, to quote Knox, “pimps and…johns” without legal protection. It’s a tricky, sticky issue, not that it’ll matter in 20 years when everyone has their own sex robot and prostitution will go the way of landline phones, which, ironically, sex robots use as dildos.
It’s the 69 of life.