(Update) Spitzer’s Hypocrisy Aside, and Contra Some Feminists, Sex Work Should Be Legal
(posted by Mona)
To the discontent of some of his regular readers, Glenn Greenwald deviates from his usual analyses of FISA issues, neocons, the pathologies in the media & etc., and posts about the sheer inanity of the public’s giving a tinker’s damn who Eliot Spitzer has sex with per se – but he carves out the exception for harping on the hypocrisy factor, and withholds personal sympathy for Spitzer who has prosecuted “prostitution rings” — and with those caveats in place, he asks in his title: Who cares if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes? Then inquires:Are there really people left who think that doing so should be a crime, that adults who hire other consenting adults for sex should be convicted and go to prison?
Well Great Aunt Louise, yes there are! And they include many of Greenwald’s horrified lefty readers. A lot of feminist bitching about exploiting women, and on and on in a thread that is nearing 700 comments. To be sure, many of Greenwald’s regulars completely agree with him, and make the obvious and sensible arguments from their left-of-center (as well as libertarian) perch. As for me, one of my (cleaned up) comments went thus, in part:
Women have moral agency, and if they choose to sell sex as a service with the owner of the business getting the larger share of the fee — that financial arrangement is not unusual in any number of businesses.
If Eliot Spitzer wanted some sort of unsafe sex the sex worker did not wish to perform (and this may not be true), she should have either said “no,” or quit the agency she worked for. High-end sex agencies don’t send apes after her to beat her up. If they did, women who can command those prices would not work for that agency.
The one sex-for-hire agency I was well-familiar with (a gay one and the owner my now-deceased friend), allowed the young men to say “no” to whatever, and they simply were not assigned to clients who insisted on that whatever. The “boys” made loads of money, and so did my friend. (And my friend was rigorous in his demand for proof that would-be workers had reached the age of majority.)
But then, this was NYC, where law enforcement typically looks the other way vis-a-vis the “escort agencies.” Everyone felt safe: clients were vetted, and customers were happy. Few in that metropolitan area give a sh*t about what everyone knows goes on every day. (And I knew, but will NEVER reveal, some of his customer list — some names would shock.)
Oh, but gee, there were no females in the equation to be “exploited.” Some here want to ignore the whole male sex-worker industry, since it undercuts their “it heinously exploits women in the most sexist way!” hysteria. pfffft
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Update: In comments, Kevin Carson surmises:Greenwald might also be surprised to learn that there are still people around who think someone should be thrown in jail for ingesting herbs of one kind or another into his body, or for buying and selling those herbs to other adults.
Not likely. See him revisiting the issue of consensual, adult acts today, (brief ad click-through) and the huge, continuing dust-up with the nanny-state-feminists and some other liberals in his comments. In his post today, under the caption Things I Learned Over the Last 48 Hours, he writes:
*It’s possible to eliminate recreational activities that people have engaged in privately for thousands of years simply by making it illegal and then imprisoning the people who do it. Thus, we criminalize prostitution and drugs to ensure that nobody does those things.
* People who work at an unpleasant job in order to support themselves, rather than because they enjoy it, are the functional equivalent of brutalized, exploited slaves and therefore should be barred by others from choosing that job — when the job in question is prostitution, but not when it’s factory work or fast food cashier or large corporate law firm associate or massage therapist or porn actor.
* Sometimes, adults make choices for their own lives that other adults perceive to be bad choices. When that happens, the adults who know better have the right to step in, pass laws to restrict the bad choices, and even make the bad choices criminal — all for the good of the adults who don’t know what’s good for them.
* People who respect the judgments which adult women make about their own lives and believe in their right to choose for themselves how they live are sexist and even misogynistic. People who believe that adult women don’t really know what’s good for them and need to have choices made for them by others are the people who respect women.
Greenwald has a strong libertarian streak.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Greenwald might also be surprised to learn that there are still people around who think someone should be thrown in jail for ingesting herbs of one kind or another into his body, or for buying and selling those herbs to other adults.
I confess to a little Schadenfreude, because Spitzer persecuted the objects of his Wall Street investigations for visiting sex workers–totally unrelated to the alleged securities crimes they were under investigation for.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Greenwald might also be surprised to learn that there are still people around who think someone should be thrown in jail for ingesting herbs of one kind or another into his body, or for buying and selling those herbs to other adults.
I doubt that. He’s very libertarian in any number of ways, and has written vehemently against the “war on drugs,” as well as the prescription drug system. He wanted to know why a lawyer (properly) cannot coerce his/her clients to follow the lawyer’s advice, but a patient is not permitted to tell a physician “I’ve heard everything you say as to why I should not take [prescription med X], and I still choose to take it.” And then be free to go buy that drug. (With the exception of antibiotics, where overuse/unnecessary-taking-of threatens all.)