The Times, to its credit, published a good piece in Sunday’s paper about the self-employed higher end of sex work – sex workers who tend to have more control over their work lives. The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls by Cara Buckley and Andrew Jacobs is well worth the read.
Interesting, though, that a search of the Times for “call girls” yields only two items this year – and the most recent pieces before that in 2004. There seems to be a similar gap in coverage including the word “prostitution” between 2004 and 2008 – only a few, including the 2004 Staten-Island based case in which then Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer was quoted as follows:
”This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who oversees the task force, said in a statement. ”It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable.”
“18 Arrested in Lucrative Prostitution Ring Out of Staten Island,” April 8, 2004.
And, in the recent flurry of articles – two articles which maintain the position that, any evidence to the contrary notwithstanding,
Nicholas Kristof – while dodging the question of whether sex workers should be prosecuted, claiming complexity, reminds us that most sex workers are unhappy even if they don’t know it in The Pimps’ Slaves. How anyone is helped by being arrested, and locked in a cage – well, it seems an odd way to “help.”
In The Myth of the Victimless Crime, Melissa Farley and Victor Malarek make the same point. However, using “victimless” – i.e. without any harm at all -is a stanard we don’t use when we’re trying to evaluate matters on their merits. Do we talk about “injury-free” automobiles? Do we demand that all economic activity generate zero harm? Far from it. The question with prostitution – as well as illicit drug use – is to identify the harm – and try to reduce it: hence the formulation Harm Reduction.
We’re reminded of Emma Goldman’s observation that “We are all prostitutes.” If we think of prostitutes as us – rather than as the other, we might approach this more humanely.
