Maybe, but I didn’t say it was justifiable. I said it was a factor in why people can think that that people have the right to do what they want with their own bodies and at the same time believe prostitution should be illegal.
But you said that charging for it is what makes the difference, and I’m saying that porn stars charge money for sex without any problem.
(Not trying to be antagonistic - genuinely trying to understand your viewpoint- it’s just hard to get nuances across in text :))
Porn stars are paid by the producer of the porn, not the person they’re having sex with.
I would assume that they argue they’re not paying people to have sex, but to act. They pretend really really well your Honor, but that’s the magic of Hollywood ! 
But I seem to remember Cecil writing a column about just that - how Cali came to be the porn capital of the USA *because *someone tried this prostitution angle in court and got tossed out due to the way prostitution is defined in the Cali law code.
Since then, no other state has tried it again for fear of a similar result.
See Cecil’s column for why porn actors/directors have few problems. But in terms of people’s thinking, I suspect many of those who think prostitution should be illegal also believe porn should be illegal.
Charging doesn’t only make a difference in prostitution by the way- I can legally donate a kidney to my sister, and I can donate my kidney to someone else in a daisy chain that eventually leads to someone else donating a kidney to my sister , but I can’t legally sell my kidney nor can my sister legally buy one.
This is a good point actually - so the thinking is that behaviours which are could cause you harm are illegall to profit by (if that makes sense :)) I’m not sure I agree that prostitution is necessarily harmful but I think the parallel is a fair one in that paying for something can change the nature of an action.
Well if you had several men contributing varying amounts of cash toward making the rent with whom you have similar relationships, is that any different, from the viewpoint of the law or morality?
The thing is, in a pure, legal, constitutional aspect, in a world where abortion is legal, prostitution should be legal as well. If you want to accept the notion of the body as property, then one should be able to dispense with it as one sees fit. The notion that a woman can have sex with a stranger for free, but it becomes a crime when money changes hands is a bit silly.
That said, no court is ever going to actually say that. Judges, at the end of the day, are politicians and live in a political reality where Vitter can scream morality by day and visit brothels at night.
Morally, to me it’s all the same, whether someone is offering every man stopped at a red light a $5 blowjob, someone is charging $300/hour for “companionship”, someone agrees to have sex in exchange solely for financial support or someone gets married just to be taken care of.
No law prohibits the last example, a few might prohibit the third and although the second is usually illegal it is rarely prosecuted. The laws really only affect the prostitutes who solicit customers in public places- and that is the type of prostitution that is both most likely to be exploitative and to impose social costs on others. I suppose there might be some way to eliminate the activities that impose the social costs while leaving the prostitution itself legal. I don’t however, see that helping the prostitutes any. Nobody’s offering $5 blowjobs at the stoplight or soliciting customers in a casino if they could get $300/hr through an escort service.
Actually, there are a certain proportion of sex workers who choose to remain on the street even when they could (legally and/or practically) work for an escort or other indoor service. The reasons they give include being their own boss, thus being able to keep all the money they make, set their own hours and feel they have a greater degree of control over whether or not to accept the transaction, and the camaraderie that exists among street workers. They’re only a small proportion, granted, but then street workers as a whole are only a small proportion of sex workers.
I thought this article might be pertinent. It discuses actual hard numbers regarding human trafficking and child prostitution in the United States. Big surprise, the estimated high number of trafficked girls is completely baseless, and would appear to exaggerate the actual numbers by hundreds of thousands.
Just like I thought. Less than a thousand verifiable cases of child prostition nationwide. And hundreds of millions of federal government dollars for those that crank up the numbers, plus the people who are cranking up the numbers are the Usual Suspects in the old sexual repression game – think Catholics, Mormons and evangelicals. Almost as bogus as the turn of the century white slavery scandal. Well, maybe more bogus when you think of the money angle. Sickening, really.
Here in Ireland, the leading “rescue” organisation for trafficking victims is run by the very same religious orders who ran the Magdalene Laundries in which young women were imprisoned and forced to work as virtual slaves for the Church. Those orders have received €87 million from the state in the past five years alone and that’s not even counting the money the rescue organisation gets.
It’s the direct descendant of the white slavery scandal, though it has branched out a bit. In a lot of ways it’s also comparable to the “Satanic child abuse in nurseries” panic of the 1980s, though more profitable for its promoters.