More on buying and selling sex

Another quote from that Newsweek article:

“Ninety-nine percent of the research in this field has been done on prostitutes, and 1 percent has been done on johns,” says Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education, a nonprofit organization that is a project of San Francisco Women’s Centers.

I suspect there is some hyperbole there but the underlying factual claim—that we have more data on prostitutes than we have on their customers—is probably true.

But is it an equal comparison?

There is probably also much more data available on drug dealers than their customers and more on people who receive and sell stolen goods than those who buy them. Rightly or wrongly, we usually treat the person who traffics in goods or services as a we regard as immoral as a more serious offender than the person who buys them. (There are exceptions. I would bet there is more research on people who buy both legal and illegal porn than there is on the people who sell it.)

But that got me thinking that it would be both more interesting and more useful to compare the men here with a different group. What about women who, without actually crossing whatever line makes someone an actual prostitute, sell sex in some form or another?

The Serpentine One and I were walking past a restaurant in the Byward Market the other day and saw a waitress with a decolletage that was breathtaking. That display of hers no doubt translates into a significant number of tips. Farley and her team found that a surprising number of men buy sex in various forms and, once again allowing for hyperbole, I'm sure there is some truth to that. But how many women are selling it in various forms? That is how many if we take "selling it" in as broad a sense as Farley has taken for "buying it"?

I should come out of the closet on this and admit that I think it is very good thing that there are laws against prostitution. I think it would be a very bad thing for women if there weren't such laws. I appreciate that things are often very bad for some women under the current approach but I think it would get worse for a lot more women if prostitution was legalized.

A big part of the reason for this is because there is so much non-prostitutional sex trade. Not everyone does but an awful lot of people do and it is a very useful thing to have a line in the sand law that everyone can see.