The social evil Book

First I should say why I pulled this book down off the shelf. A few weeks ago Amnesty International adopted a resolution stating that prostitution should be fully decriminalized all over the world, in terms both of buying and selling. Swedish members of AI starting resigning en masse in protest, asking that AI look over what's known as the "Nordic model" (originating in Sweden) and which has been adopted in Iceland and Norway as well. Here, prostitution is regarded as an aspect of male violence; "it criminalizes the purchase of sex and makes it punishable with prison sentences. The idea is that rather than going after the supply, it can cut out the demand, and in doing so support the weak over the powerful." Thus, "the burden of law enforcement falls on customers [mostly men], not prostitutes [mostly women]."

With this book I was hoping to get a little overview and some historical background of prostitution to better decide for myself which side of the argument I was on (yes, there are other sides, but none of them are on MY list).

I found the best part of the book (a full third) to be the introductions (1976 and 1973) and the preface (1971) for that way I could see some perspective and history. The interviews themselves were somewhat disappointing in that I had thought that four prostitutes would be sharing their stories and I was hoping for a mix of reasons, experiences, and outcomes. Only two of the interviews were with prostitutes, however. The other two interviews were with the author and her assistant, neither of whom have ever been in sex work. I wasn’t particularly interested in their views of what they thought sex work would be like, although in other areas they spoke well.

So while it was a “quartet of female voices”, it was not a quartet of prostitutes’ voices.

Quotes that caught my eye:

But the real goal of American prostitutes is decriminalization. Not legalization, decriminalization--because legalization gives the state the right, even the prerogative, to own and sell women and to collect revenue for such transactions, where as decriminalization simply removes prostitution from the criminal code and pass it back into the sphere of private life where it belongs. (10-11)

Even without entrapment, Dr. Jennifer James of the University of Washington estimates, it costs the state $1560.00 to arrest one street walker. This many tax dollars, amounting to millions throughout the nation, thousands of hours of police work, court time—all to what end? “To secure the insulation of innocent men from obscene invitation by females,”…. We all [know] the irony of that—because every female is continually and under the most public and humiliating circumstances subjected to the obscene invitations of males. There is no law against it, or no law applied or enforced. (12-13)

Decriminalization would in no way increase the incidence or availability of female prostitution, but it would frustrate the exploitation of prostitutes by the two classes of men who are their chief predators: pimps and police. The latter function in the same manner as pimps, since the fat earnings of members of the vice squad are acquired through methods of coercive protection. One defines a pimp as a male who lives on the earnings of a prostitute. Since the prostitute is a lucrative source of police graft, forced to endure either extortion or arrest, government has a vested interest in prostitution’s illegality, rivaled only by those states that in ‘regulating’ (e.g., institutionalizing) prostitution, make it a state monopoly. Oddly enough, the other chief opponent of the decriminalization of prostitution is not organized religion, but powerful hotel interests, who see the prostitute’s patronage as insufficiently lucrative to outweigh her possible threat to the public image of the more expensive hotels affluent enough to dispense with her custom. (85-86)

It is not sex the prostitute is really made to sell: it is degradation. And the buyer, the john, is not buying sexuality, but power, power over another human being, the dizzy ambition of being lord of another’s will for a stated period of time—the euphoric ability to direct and command an activity presumably least subject to coercion and unquestionably most subject to shame and taboo. (93-94)

At present prostitutes are subject to arrest at any moment, stigmatized in any area of employment by a record and fingerprints, and offered no protection against the assaults of pimps or police. (107)
Prostitution has flourished always and made fortunes, counting on and aided by the state. Considering the weight of this tradition, one gets a notion of how heavy a job actual social revolution is: bigotry, habit, moneyed interest, physical force, even indifference are so solid. (108)

The fact that sex is directly linked to money only through prostitution represents the devious way in which society deals with its truths. (132)

The actual situation in the city is that prostitution is accepted by everyone—police, judges, clerks, and lawyers. Arrest and prosecution are purely gestures that have to be made to keep up the façade of public morality. The method of dealing with it is simply a form of harassment, not a form of prevention, abolition, or punishment. There is no conviction at any level that prostitution is a crime on anyone’s part, only a total and satisfied acceptance of the double standard, excusing the male, accusing the female. There is also a curious fascination with the prostitutes, ‘the girls’, a geniality toward them, friendliness even, in the sense of familiarity. (134)

Everyone accepts the fact that each woman who comes in will be in again and again, will go through the same routine, maybe stay in the pens overnight, but she knows all the cops and they know her, they accept her and they fuck her and she pays them and gets off: that’s how the relationship is defined, clear and simple. (135)
Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest. And they never even take down the man’s name. It’s not his crime, but the woman’s.*
*The recent New York statute, which declares the male client (the ‘john’) guilty too, in an act of female prostitution, is simply not enforced and may therefore be disregarded in such discussions. [Bear in mind this was written in the 1970s.]

[Here the arrogance of the author’s assistant really pisses me off] Because all I see are the wrecks of what society has done to these particular individuals. I could rap to them about women’s lib stuff for hours. And they are so out of touch with themselves, they cannot hear. Even if you assume that there’s a sense of rage which develops, you can scarcely continue with that assumption when you see their terrible passivity, their remoteness from any consciousness of their condition. (138)