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[maenads_dance]

I live in Rhode Island, the only state in the USA in which indoor prostitution is currently decriminalized. However, this may be about to change: a bill has been written and has already passed the state senate and house judiciary committees which would make indoor prostitution illegal and punishable for both clients and prostitutes by prison

Comments

[cruelbitch]

Hi. I live in Rhode Island, and I'm also a sex worker. Have been for several years.

You posit a worthwhile dilemma to consider regarding East Asian sex trafficking (the precise customers of mine, in fact, were also avid consumers of the massage parlors). There's an equally large problem regarding trafficking of South American (more specifically Brazilian) women worth mentioning here. A program I'm involved with is heavily invested in devising strategies to avoid their prosecution and possible deportation, while still managing to accomplish their removal from exploitation. It is, as you've acknowledged, a dishearteningly tangled issue.

ProCon.org is a comprehensive source of unbiased cross-cultural research on the subject, where it analyzes radically different approaches undertaken. I'm partial to Sweden's successful approach (which often leads to Libertarians wanting to wring my neck) in minimizing coercion and violence, while also providing ample social services to the workers -- trafficking has been reduced to roughly 200 victims within the last few years, as compared to roughly 17,000 trafficked victims in neighboring Finland. I've surmised that methods involving criminalizing the demand side are usually controversial within the Right To Sex crowd, but as an exasperated sex-worker, I haven't discovered any feasibly functioning alternatives within present societal parameters.

I think you raise an interesting point regarding the socially-crafted semantic line between "selling the services" and "selling the body" within both advertising and stigmatizing contexts. Of course, subsequent legalization to eradicate this line has minimal positive effects in terms of reducing crime or dehumanization, which countries like Germany will demonstrate. The heavily entrenched aversion to prostitution cannot be minimized independently of other social forces, as most feminist gradualists are quick to underscore. A proposition to legalize opens the door for "then what?" And as Australia, Denmark, and the Netherlands have demonstrated, it cannot stop at legalization (or even begin).

I think an approach, at least within present patriarchal context, needs to be aggregated in it's considerations. The overwhelming correlations between sex-work and poverty (in conjunction with race and gender) demands some collective urgency. Of course, when your interventions are supply-side only, you do crazy shit to the price without reducing the quantity much (see also: War on Drugs). There's more, but I've bombarded you enough.