Coyote Blog

Prostitution is a person selling sexual services of their own free will.  Trafficking is a form of kidnapping and slavery, when someone is forced to provide sexual services by someone with power over them.

All or even most prostitution is not trafficking, but many in the media and political sphere use these two a synonyms.  I have seen it all week surround the Robert Kraft bust for seeking a private happy ending even before his team played in the Superbowl.   I see this as a victory of traditionally anti-prostitution folks on the Right who have found a way to take advantage of a division on the Left, and specifically a division within feminism, to rebrand prostitution and bring some folks on the Left over to their side.

I am not an expert on feminist politics, but what I do know is the prostitution has created a divide among feminists.  You remember the old abortion chant that feminists wanted the government to keep its laws off their body?  That what a woman did with her body was an eminently private affair and should not be subject to government regulations?  Well, feminists who followed up on this thought in a consistent manner generally supported legalization of prostitution.  Bans on prostitution were seen by these folks as just another example of the male-dominated system limiting women's choices and ability to make money the way they choose.

On the other side more modern feminists see everything through the prism of male power over women.  This is the "all sex is rape" group and for them prostitution has nothing to do with women's free will and everything to do with yet another channel through which men objectify and dehumanize women.  From here it's only a small step to thinking that all prostitution is slavery.  And thus by attempting to rebrand prostitution as trafficking, the Right found new allies on the Left in their campaign against sex work.

Those who read me a lot know I come down on the side of women being able to exercise choice, and I think the only real dehumanizing going on is the denial by modern feminists of any agency among most women.

But real abusive trafficking certainly exists.  How much of prostitution fits this category is impossible to really know as a layman because the media and activists do so much to blur the line in their reporting.  But I will say this:  To the extent trafficking exists, it is not enabled by society somehow being soft on prostitution, in fact it is enabled by the opposite.  By making prostitution illegal, we give unscrupulous people leverage to abuse those in sex work.  Women being abused by men at, say, Wal-Mart have many legal outlets to air their grievances and seek change or compensation -- no one talks about trafficking in Wal-Mart greeters.  But abused sex workers cannot go to the legal system for redress of abuse because they themselves are treated as criminals in the system.  Contributing to this is our restrictionism on immigration.  This is why many real trafficking cases revolve around the abuse of immigrant women, because abusers know these victims have not one but two impediments to seeking legal help.

For a short time 5-10 years ago I thought we might be near a breakthrough in softening the penalties on women voluntarily seeking to make a living through sex work.  Now, my optimism has dimmed.  The success the Right has had in enlisting parts of the Left in rebranding all prostitution as slavery has polluted discourse on this issue and means a lot of women will still be left outside the law.

When Mathew Vassar built the original main building at Vassar college, he made the hallways of this college for women extra wide.  While there is an apocryphal story that he did this so he could later convert the college to a brewery if the whole educating women thing did not work out, the actual explanation is a window on Victorian-era thinking about women.

People of the time were convinced that women were subject to hysteria, and that one way to potentially defuse such hysteria was through exercise.  The extra-wide hallways were so women in their hoop skirts could walk back and forth in bad weather.  (Interestingly, Vassar and other women's colleges also played a role in the early history of baseball, fielding teams for a number of years until men decided that the unseemlyness of women playing sports trumped the fight against hysteria).

Whenever this story is told, we laugh today at Victorians' condescending, even misogynist views of women as subject to hysteria or fainting or the vapors when encountering the slightest bit of stress.

Which is why I never would have believed that it would be 21st century feminists dredging up these old attitudes with fears of "triggering."  Women are once again being treated as if they will get the vapors if difficult topics are discussed in class.  I suppose we are now supposed to leave these to men in the smoking room after dinner?

In the future, historians will draw a line somewhere in the last decade to mark the point where feminism switched from empowering women to treating them like children.

Disclosure:  My wife attended Vassar College and is still convinced the brewery explanation is the correct one.

Massachusetts liberals up the penalties for women (and men) using their bodies in ways the government does not like.   Proving once again that the women's groups' motto, "keep your laws off my body," was in fact a fake libertarianism, aimed at exactly one thing -- abortion -- and nothing else.  Those on the Left who mouthed this slogan seem to be A-OK with regulating consensual sex, salt and soda pop consumption, access to medical procedures, health care choices, etc.

Also, this seems to be yet another law that purports to promote women's rights by treating them like they are ignorant rubes unable to make the smallest decisions for themselves.  The implicit assumption in the law is that all prostitutes are in the profession solely due to male compulsion.  This is consistent with a certain philosophy among feminists that all behaviors of women with which they don't agree are not due to a normal excercise of free will by people who simply have different preferences, but are due to some sort of enslavement by the patrimony.

But one high-priced online hooker said she’s no victim — and she doesn’t know any women who are.

“If you are an escort, you go into it of your own free will,” she said. “Absolutely no one is forced into doing this. You don’t have to be affiliated with any agency. I’m not forced to do anything I don’t want.”

What’s more, the new law’s focus on johns, she said, will hurt her lucrative-though-lawless trade.

“If that’s the law that’s been written, then yes, it’s going to impact business,” she said when read the new penalties.

There is no doubt that some women get into situations where they are abused or forced into work or have a large portion of their earnings taken.  But this tends to be a result of the profession being underground, giving women no legal recourse when they are abused and defrauded.  If one really is worried about women's working conditions, the best thing to do is legalize prostitution, instantly giving them access to the legal system to redress wrongs.