Prostitution and the Case for Decriminalization

Prostitution and the Case for Decriminalization

Leftists generally respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect toward prostitute organizations or their political activists and intellectuals. For the most part, such groups and individuals are ignored. Again, why?

Responses to prostitution from the left have been radically contradictory. Marxist thinkers, for example, are committed to study social phenomena in terms of systems of production and their related labor forms. But they rarely treat prostitution as a kind of work; instead they treat it as a side effect of the moral decay, corruption, or cultural collapse that occurs under particular social conditions. Why? Leftists generally respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect toward prostitute organizations or their political activists and intellectuals. For the most part, such groups and individuals are ignored. Again, why?

Many on the left want to believe that prostitution would not exist or would not be common or tolerated in a world free of economic, gender, and sexual exploitation. The problem of prostitution would solve itself once other problems are solved. Yet speculative judgments like this one are abstract and academic. Prostitution isn’t any single thing—a unitary social phenomenon with a particular origin—and so it doesn’t make sense to argue about whether it would or wouldn’t be present in this or that type of society. Working from crosscultural and historical studies, I have examined institutionalized and commodified exchanges of sexual services between women providers and their male customers in many different social contexts.’ I conclude that there are (or have been) places and times where exchanges of sexual services between women and men are (or were) relatively free of gender and class domination. How then should leftists respond to the varieties of prostitution in the contemporary United States, where the labor practices involved are shaped by pernicious class and gender asymmetries?

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