I’ve been out of the country for the last few weeks. I’d prefer not to go a whole month without posting, or I’ll be constantly annoyed by the missing month in the archives. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and wash my hands for exactly six minutes and forty seconds.
Right then. All done. Now – having said that I’m a feminist, how fast do you think I could lose the sympathy of every single feminist in the world? Here it is in two words – ‘Legalise prostitution’*. Now, before you hunt me down with torches and pitchforks, let’s be clear here. The idea of prostitution disgusts me, I’d have trouble actually bringing myself to associate with anyone who’d actually avail themselves of the services of a prostitute, even if it were legalised. Indeed, if they were legal, I’d be prepared to spend considerable effort putting them all out of business. But this isn’t about the morality of prostitution. It’s about the morality of using the law to stop it, which is subtly different. Besides, if we were going to outlaw things just because they disgusted me, we’d have to outlaw sex**.
So what’s wrong with outlawing prostitution? After all, If we’re all agreed that it’s morally repugnant***, why not just stop people doing it? A couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s the classic drug argument that it’s quite a bit easier to regulate things when they’re legal. Legal regulation of criminal activity tends to be somewhat futile. For the record, there are a few reasons I take a different attitude to this argument here than I do when it’s used in the case of drugs, but I’m not going into that here. The point is that prostitution is currently a popular reason for human trafficking. You could probably reduce that quite a lot if legal prostitution existed.
Then there’s the question of exactly why women**** would go into prostitution. You won’t get any argument from me that almost anyone becomes a prostitute for any reason other than because they’ve not really got much other choice (or because they’ve been tricked into it). Which gets into the question of what exactly ‘freely given consent’ means. There are rather a lot of opinions on that, from ‘anyone who says yes gives irrevocable consent, in some cases, even if you lied to persuade them to do so’ to ‘It’s impossible for women to give consent because of the influence of the patriarchy.’††. There’s a fairly good argument to be made that if someone has a choice between death by starvation and prostitution, they’re being raped when they decide on the latter (even if it’s a little difficult to determine who exactly the rapist is). The thing is, I’ve always been rather an advocate of the lesser of two evils. If someone’s going to starve to death if they don’t go into prostitution, then if you take away the option of prostitution, they’re going to starve to death. Personally, I’d take the prostitution, and even if you’d prefer the alternative, you can still take it†††. And if they’re not going to starve to death, then they have the option. The thing is that I’d question anyone ever considering, it’s still an extra bit of freedom that harms noone except the person doing it. I’d say that anything that increases freedom without hurting anything is a good thing. Maybe noone would avail themselves of this freedom – I rather hope they wouldn’t. But on the other hand, there are seven billion people in the world at the time of writing. One or two might surprise you. But the point isn’t whether anyone actually does it. The point is that you shouldn’t stop them if they want to, that freedom shouldn’t be restricted without good reason.
Which leaves me in the rather odd position of opposing prostitution, but defending people’s right to do it. I disagree with what you do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it.
Now you can hunt me down with torches and pichforks.
*I would also have accepted ‘Women suck’, but it’d be a little tricky to actually justify that one.
**And, for that matter, coleslaw.
***You don’t count Hubert.
****And as a side note, I find it fascinating that prostitution is just about the only job you can still basically think of as ‘women’s work’ without objections. I’ve yet to decide whether this is because of the fact that the people who normally object to that kind of thing are too busy objecting to prostitution to object to the stereotypes associated with it, or whether it’s just the whole ‘men are sex addicts’ stereotype†.
†Which also fascinates me, but I won’t go into that now, except to mention that the ancient Greeks thought the exact opposite.
††And in the interests of fairness, I must point out that both these position are pretty extreme. Most people are going to be rather a lot further towards the middle, no matter what my RS textbook says about the second one being ‘the feminist position’.
†††And yes, I’m aware that this is pretty much like saying that I’d rather have my fingernails ripped out with rusty pliers than have needles driven through my eyes††††.
††††Both of which will probably happen to me if I keep publishing things like this.
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