Illegal sex
Posted by Lance on 09 May 2007 at 6:03 am | Tagged as: Around the Web
Cathy Young asks why prostitution is illegal. Captain Ed frames the question quite fairly and then answers here. I am with Cathy, but Captain Ed makes a good argument as to the merits of keeping it illegal.
4 Responses to “Illegal sex”
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I think one of the problems with Captain Ed’s argument against legalizing prostitution is that it is essentially a Marxist argument: reducing people to commodities is like slavery, therefore all wage labor is slave labor (afterall, access to one’s vagina is a service that can be sold hourly just like access to one’s knowledge of PHP).
On a less theoretical tack, he seems to be saying that meaningless sex is a bad thing. Which is fine - I happen to think so as well - but meaningless, cheap sex is not illegal. It is not against the law for me to lie to someone to get him in bed, so long as that guy consents. It only becomes illegal if I ask him for money first.
But what of sugar-daddy arrangements, in which a young man or woman has sex with a rich older man or woman because they enjoy the perks of being “with” a rich person? Such a relationship is just as double-exploitative as Captain Ed rightly sees as destructive, yet it is illegal (perhaps because there is no “official” price negotiated beforehand for sexual favors).
Or how about a more common scenario, in which one party to an expensive dinner date feels somehow obligated by the other picking up the tab to perform some sort of sexual favor. It is uncomfortable, and to many repulsive, but not illegal.
It seems only when exchanging money for sex is at its most honest and open (and, incidentally, taxable and regulate-able) that people seem to throw their arms up in outrage. I don’t get it.
Those are exactly the arguments I have with his thesis.
I think Ed is less concerned with the enforcement of the law than the symbolic nature of it. I think he feels, in the classic Hayekian-conservative argument, that the sanctioning of it will have broad social implications which are difficult to predict and possibly quite destructive to even informal social structures. It isn’t a bad argument, and argues for social change being incremental, but I think ultimately it fails in this case.
Bingo.
As the Madam says, “Such a Business. You got it. You sell it. You still got it.”