The Case For Legalized Prostitution

The Case For Legalized Prostitution
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
- Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)


What we consider a sin forms from our morality. Religion has, for many centuries, dictated morality. Religion tells us that prostitution is wrong and we made laws to support the claim.
Prostitution fundamentally is sex (coitus) between two consenting adults. Sex is the means by which each of us reading this came into existence. True, the rules differ in some societies that demand marriage or other relationships for sex and procreation, but sex between two consenting adults is still the foundation.
In the situation of prostitution, money or some other form of compensation is exchanged. That makes it illegal. Why is it illegal? Because prostitution is immoral. Why is prostitution immoral? Because...well...everyone says it's immoral. And why is that?
That last question brings us to a murky part of our past that most of us in the modern world would rather not think about. But you and I must because that's why you are reading, so stay with me.
In prehistoric times, our ancestors lived in families that were part of groups known as bands. These bands might have been from 15 to 30 people. Some bands might have been nothing more than large families, in many cases with the most fit males fathering children with as many females as could produce children.
Sometimes bands grouped together to form alliances known as tribes. By themselves, band life was rough, subsistent, based on hunting and gathering. Bands carved their own territories for hunting and gathering, but sometimes boundaries were crossed as food was scarce. Stealing food from another band's territory brought risks. Sometimes a band would overcome that risk by attacking the band that occupied an adjacent territory, killing the adult males, taking the females into their own band and assimilating them into the new and larger band. We must assume that the males of the victorious band did not ask permission to impregnate the captured females. That would be typical of our species and its cousin species.
For obvious reasons, a band wanted to expand as quickly as it could so that it could defend itself from attack or attack other bands as this became necessary. The morality of which males had sex with which females is unknown to us, but we may be certain that it varied from one band to another.
When bands formed into tribes, codes of behaviour were necessary. One important one was that a woman must not have sex with a man who was not part of her own tribe. That would maintain tribal integrity. Genetic diversity resulted from males and females breeding with members of other bands within the same tribe. If a woman got pregnant by a man from another tribe, that would mean the woman would produce a child who would be the product of an enemy tribe. She and the child might have been killed.
If a man conceived a child with a woman from another tribe, this might be frowned upon, but not punished. After all, the child (if it was allowed to live) might enhance the numbers of the father's tribe, not the mother's tribe. Ownership of women and children rested with males in the case of most tribes. That is, if the father could steal the child back after birth. But the woman's tribe (if it didn't kill the child) might want to adopt the child, raise it and enhance its own population, which might work against the welfare of the father's tribe.
In matters of tribal population numbers, size mattered. So developed the rule against a man having sex with a non-approved woman. That rule has remained with us to the present day, though its form has changed.
Prostitution, illegal in most countries (but not all), exists because of unfulfilled human needs. Often the woman needs money and the men need a way to satisfy their hormone-driven compulsion for gratification with a member of the opposite sex (let's stay with the male-female pairing for this discussion). "The oldest profession" has existed as long as our species has been around. Because of unfulfilled human needs our societies have refused to address.
Instead they pass laws which have always been flouted and ignored and always will. The needs of nature almost always take precedence over the laws of a culture or society in matters of behaviour, but not in matters of law or morality.
Illegal sex (prostitution) opens a large opportunity for organized crime participation. Organized crime gangs exist to fulfill human needs that societies would like to pretend do not exist. Of course they don't pay taxes. They take risks, but the benefits are tax-free. We law abiding citizens foot the bill for taxes, including for police, courts, legal staff and jail administrators so prostitutes may be "brought to justice." Judging by history, members of organized crime gangs risk more from fellow gang members, from other gangs and from poor nutrition habits than from prosecution under the law.
Prostitutes risk beatings, disease, drug use to get them past the worst parts of their job and time in jail. Because the law does not recognize their job as real, nor does it happily defend prostitutes against the dangers they face. In name the law offers protection to everyone, in practice not so much to prostitutes. The law also does not collect taxes from prostitutes, pimps and organized crime gangs.
Here we, as societies, face situations where human needs for sex with willing partners are ignored, we pretend they don't exist (even though we know they do) and our cost for health care is much greater than it should be because some people we would rather pretend don't exist require more health care than most of us do.
A couple of years ago a study in the USA (respondents were assurred anonymity) showed that 85 percent of married men had sex outside of their marriage at some point. With women, the number was 65 percent. Marriage failure sits around 54 percent. One of the most common causes for failure of marriages is that one partner had an affair outside of the marriage. Those affairs almost inevitably involve sex, the fulfillment of a need for sexual gratification the one partner could not get from the other.
Moreover, humans are not monogamous, as religions (the descendants of tribal morality administrators) would have us believe. Rare indeed is a bisexual species that remains strictly monogamous after pairing (science has trouble identifying a handful). We are naturally programmed to spread our genes as widely as possible. That means males and females together, as often as possible. As our species has males always ready and females fertile and able to reproduce many more times each year than most mammalian species, sex and the desire for it are part of who we are. Hormones rule, no matter what our religions and our laws say.
But sex must not, by law in most societies, be with another consenting adult if money is involved. Let's remember that our species has existed for about 150,000 years, while money or its equivalent has been around for only a few thousand years.
Something is wrong and few countries are doing anything about it. Because of religious dogma, we stick with tribal morality so old that it predates history. But without justifiable rationale in modern society, except that "everybody says so."
Let's remember where we see tribal morality in action today. In Afghanistan, where the Pashtuns (many of whom are Taliban) have been at war among themselves for over 3300 years, since four of the ancient Twelve Tribes of Israel left the Holy Land when they broke up and took up residence in a mountainous land no other tribes wanted. Similar tribal customs are practised in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, where people associate more with their tribe than they do with the nation where they were born.
We can see tribes in action in many parts of Africa, especially where there is violence. Libya is essentially a war between tribes. Same in the Congo (DRC), Nigeria and most of the Arab states experiencing disruption at this time. What is now known as the genocide of Rwanda was a war between the Hutu and the Tutsi tribes. Tribal law is harsh, protectionist and its punishments severe. Some of our modern laws in "free" democratic countries are legacies of tribal laws.
Which brings us back to severe punishments for two people engaged in consenting sex where money is exchanged. I do not claim to be an expert, but I have studied the subject enough to know that some men visit prostitutes because they want more sex than they are having with their wives and they want to save their marriage, not destroy it, by visiting a prostitute (in private). Male prostitutes with female clients exist in every major city, but with lower numbers.
We are, in fact, paying more in taxes and our governments are effectively supporting organized crime activity by not setting up prostitution under controlled legal environments. Note that I have said nothing about girls who run away from home and turn to prostitution as the only way they can find to support themselves, or about the sex slave trade that exists because it can easily be hidden, or about single mothers who support their children by prostitution because they can't make ends meet otherwise. Or about mass murderers of prostitutes who manage to kill dozens of them before they are caught. These problems wouldn't have a place to be if prostitution were legalized and controlled by supervised government facilities.
Prostitution exists as a social problem because we persist in supporting ancient tribal rules instead of making our societies into ones that can function safely and more inexpensively in the 21st century. We no longer live in tribes. Our laws and our moralities have not caught up.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to prepare their children for their whole life ahead, not just with what they will learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com When all the criticism of prostitution is distilled down to its core, the result comes out as "prostitution is a sin because it has always been considered a sin." A tautology, "proved" by constant repetition but no evidence.

What Women Don't Know About Men

The most important issue where women overestimate men is in believing that men know what they're doing. We don't. Most of us know how to do a few things very well. Some not even that, though they think they do. We convince ourselves that it's enough, that we have value because of these few bits of knowledge or skill. We may be totally ignorant about most of what's around us, but we cling to those few things we know as if they have eternal worth.

Men learn very young (usually in early adolescence) to not ask questions. ("Never let them see you sweat." "Act confident at all times." "Make them think you know what you're doing all the time, even if you don't have a clue.") As most men don't have time to read--they're too busy furthering their careers--and they don't dare ask questions, most men live in a self imposed state of blissful ignorance for much of their lives. Only one man in 20 reads more than three books a year; most read none that are not related to their work.

When it comes to what men know about women, most men would have trouble writing more than two paragraphs. The rare man could fill a whole page. He's probably gay, or a psychologist. The psychologist is probably wrong.

Women seem to believe that all men think about is sex. This is patently false. We also think about sports. And occasionally about work, at least until a female walks past.

The one and often only purpose of males in animal species that reproduce sexually is to reproduce, to pass along their genes to as many offspring as possible. Nature programmed men to assess the potential as sperm donor recipients of every female with curves greater than a lead pencil. No exceptions, including no exclusions for odd numbers of appendages, size of tits, length (or indeed existence) of hair, height, weight, skin colour or brightness of the eyes. Although these may be factors that come into play in the actual assessment.

Humans offspring require about two decades (these days, even more) to become self sufficient. This means that fathers must provide both protection and provision (financial) services for much longer than they do in most species. Human fathers have turned the job of protecting their young over to police and teachers, whom they can now blame for neglect rather than themselves. Most don't teach their kids how to protect themselves. Few teach them how to earn a living or to live a balanced life.

Judging by the number of books and courses available to prospective, impending and new fathers, society places little value on fatherhood. Most men become fathers knowing virtually nothing about what a child needs from a father. What they know about fatherhood is what they learned by example from their own fathers, which is usually faulty and shockingly incomplete (to be kind).

If the primary purpose of men is to have sex (by far the preferred method for reproduction), you might suppose that men have highly developed skills and knowledge about how to get a woman into bed. This stuff would have passed from father to son, brother to brother, friend to friend, for generations immemorial. No.

Most men have little more knowledge about seducing women than their prehistoric ancestors did. The ones who lived in caves and trees. A few men know a great deal about seducing women. Unfortunately, these are not the kind of men that most women want to father their children. The women who marry men who know a great deal about sex and seducing women regret it later. They practise too much away from home.

Men often ask the question "What do women want?" If they ask this of themselves when they are alone, the question remains unanswered until they fall asleep. If the question is asked among a group of men, the silence is so thick you could almost taste it, for an unusually long period of time. Then someone suggests getting another beer and the conversation moves on to something to do with sports.

Many men have lots of opinions about sports, at least about their favourites. However, they usually know little more about the subjects than they do about battles of the gladiators. An encyclopedic memory for facts works for broadcast commentators, but it's not appreciated among a group of men. Men can discuss a sport for hours precisely because not a single one of them knows enough to be the ultimate authority.

Men are, after all, physical beings. Like our ancestors who hunted while their females stayed at home gathering berries and inventing agriculture, most men like something heavy and physical in nature to do, even if they have to sit in front of the TV for hours watching it. Some even participate. For a few, mowing the lawn serves the need for physical activity without the conflict involved with most sports.

Conflict in sports always involves touching each other, even in non-contact sports such as basketball. Men will never admit to liking to touch other men or to be touched by other men. It's all done in a macho, team spirit, inspirational kind of way. Loving touch, we believe, is only for gays. We don't know why we believe that. Somebody told us. Often.

Consequently, men know almost nothing about their own personal need for touch from others. When it comes to lovingly touching their mate or the female objective of their current quest, most men are more ill at ease than they were on their first day of kindergarten. They don't really know what to do, unless they have watched videos. Men who have watched videos about enhancing their sexual lives are few, which means that those who can satisfy their women in this way are scarce. We believe there is something perverted about watching videos about people having sex. Unless it's porn.

Many men have seen porn movies. However, when they try to reproduce what they saw in the movies, they find their mates less interested in groping, thrashing and moaning than the porn queens. Which results in their believing that their partners simply don't know how to do it. Their women are sexually inadequate, they believe, though they consider themselves quite knowledgeable, having learned from the professionals.

Their partners seldom want to "do it" as often as the porn queens, so they feel they must look for extra sexual gratification elsewhere. This is usually not received by their committed female partners with grace and gentility. The women usually want more too, but more of what their men are reluctant to give, including loving touch, extended foreplay and some sweet talk. For most men, sweet talk involves praise for specific flavours of ice cream.

In conclusion, lady readers, you may incorrectly assume that your men want the same things as you do. They could, eventually, but only if you teach them. Couch what you say in words that suggest that what will satisfy you most is what you want them to learn. Men want to please women, if only to make their mates more interested in more sex more often.

And men, if you read this far without getting angry or falling asleep, get over it. If you disagree with most of this, you're not "average." For average, you have to lower the bar quite a bit. But, chances are, you're aroused again.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book that will teach you nothing about sex, but lots about how to be a good and effective parent after your days of sexual excesses are over.
Learn more at http://billallin.com