Prostitution is illegal. It is a sex act between two consenting adults for which one of them is paid a sum of money by the other.
Why is it illegal? Because our society decided long ago that there was a moral– and physical– harm caused by the activity. As opposed to, say, polluting drinking water, spewing carbon emissions into the air, or being Mitch McConnell.
The truth is, there was never a great reason to make prostitution illegal, at least, not insofar as it is an act between two consenting adults in which money changes hands. Who is unwillingly harmed? If you argue that society is, that it is debased by the existence of this transaction, that families are undermined and morality declines, you are making a religious argument. It shouldn’t stand up in court. We know that. Yet almost no politician in North America has the guts to say the obvious: prostitution will always be with us and we should legalize it and develop the infrastructure needed to keep sex-workers safe from violence and abuse and exploitation, and their customers safe from disease.
There has been progress. We seem to be leaning more towards treating the prostitutes as social cases rather than criminals, but we still arrest them, like Sisi, and haul them off into court and force them into the dark shadows of dangerous streets and alley-ways, and tiny apartments that charge excessive rents managed by people with no legal or discernible relationship to the real owners.
We took two steps forward with the more recent tendency to not publicly identify johns so we could enjoy destroying their family lives and careers. But the feminist and #metoo movements are threatening to go backwards on this issue and some police forces make noises about going after the customers rather than the girls. But then they go after the girls anyway.
In the meantime, young women like Sisi are abused and ruthlessly exploited at least partly because they forced to keep their positions secret from the very people who could protect them.
[whohit]Why we go on Failing[/whohit]