December 9, 2008
Crime and Punishment Department
More On Prostitution
(I started to write this last month, when it would have been more timely, but it kept getting put off by other stuff.)
In response to the 3rd part of my rebuttle to Farley and Ramos's article urging the prosecution of prostitution patrons, someone signing herself (I'm guessing) "olympe" writes:
Libertarianism is an ideology devised by and for white, heterosexual, middle-class (or higher) males (and I'm guessing you're one of them too, Mr Draughn) to justify their reluctance to get off their asses and help those, who are underprivileged, under the guise of 'freedom of choice'. A lot of that reluctance probably stems from the fact that had they actually 'did' something to make the world a better place for others, they might lose their own priviliges. Who would want that, right?
One of the problems of being a libertarian is that people don't take me seriously. "Freedom of choice" is not a guise, it's a guiding principle. That said, I think I understand where olympe is coming from. It bothers me that libertarianism doesn't attract more minorities and women, and I've encountered a few self-described libertarians who do seem to see it as a way to slap around the urban poor.
However, much of libertarianism is about the government, and what the government does to people. Except for high taxation, which by definition is only done to people with money, the government mostly does bad things to poor people and minorities---exactly the kind of people olympe is calling underprivileged.
It's not heterosexual, middle-class males like me who get arrested for loitering while sitting on the front stoop of their own homes. If I want to run a business, I can afford all the licenses and permits I need, unlike a poor black woman who braids hair for other black women, or an auto mechanic who works out of a vacant lot, or a single mom who brings in extra cash by cooking twenty hot lunches a day for workers at a nearby warehouse.
Libertarians don't care that many of those women who 'choose' to become prostitutes have been taking part in 'sex games' involving adults as early as at the age of 8 or 12 (at least in my country, where I've thoroughly researched this issue), thus growing up with a conviction that such activities are 'normal'. Libertarians don't want to stop and ask themselves - are these girls making a truly 'free' choice?
I do care that many of these women were abused as children. I think the people who did that to them should be punished. What I don't understand is why a guy who offers them money for sex ten years later should be imprisoned for the crimes of their original abuser.
As for the final question, "are these girls making a truly 'free' choice?", I have little patience for that sort of sophistry---the word "truly" has the potential to smuggle too many assumptions into the question.
As for the idea that adult victims of child abuse are too stupid to know what they want, and therefore must be forced to do what's best for them, there's a long history of that kind of thought, and it rarely ends well. In another time, it was the creed of the American slaveowner, who argued that the simple Negroes were unable to manage their own affairs.
Consider that with only a few changes, everything olympe says about prostitutes has also been said about gay men. It goes like this:
Many homosexual men had their first homosexual experience at a relatively early age, often with an older or more experienced homosexual partner. Repeated encounters of this sort lead them to believe these aberrant behaviors are normal, and they continue to behave as if allowing predatory homosexuals to use them was a "choice." Only if we arrest and prosecute predatory homosexuals will we put a stop to the homosexual agenda, allowing younger, less hardened gays to recover and have normal, healthy, heterosexual relationships.
That kind of thinking is evil, and people get hurt.
I realize that some of these women just don't see any way out. Years ago, some bastard locked them in a cage and fed them through a hole, and even though they're free now, they keep finding their way back into new cages. To my libertarian sensibilities, that's okay as long as the guys who own the cages never lock the women in. As long as the women are free to leave, they should be free to stay.
And if kind-hearted people want to offer these women exit services to get out of the cage---out of the life of prostitution---I'm all for it. It's always a good thing to offer people more choices.
But Farley or Ramos don't just want to offer the women a way out, they want to punish the men who own the cages, even though these cages are unlocked, and even if the women walked into them on their own. Farley and Ramos don't believe the women are in there willingly, and they want to drag the women out of the cage and destroy it so they can never return, not even if they want to.
Of course, I should add that despite our differences, Farley and Ramos and I all have better ideas than the typical law enforcement approach, which is to arrest the women for being in the cages.
What disgusts me the most about libertarians, though is the fact that the whole world is just a 'market' to them.
The whole world is a market, whether you want it to be or not. It's not always a free market---that takes work---but the forces of the market, supply and demand, are always present and working their power over us. People will always respond to incentives.
For God's sake, prostitution is sex and money. I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, sex and money are really popular. They always have been, and always will be.
Everything has a dollar value slapped on it. They don't seem to perceive the difference between slapping a price tag on a loaf of bread and slapping a price tag on a human being.
I'm not arguing that we should slap a price on a woman like we slap a price on a loaf of bread. I'm arguing that we should give women the same respect we give bakers, and let them be the ones to set the price.
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