Mark Draughn blogs and tweets as Windypundit, and has been reading this blog for at least five years (and maybe more). He’s a staunch ally and has written some good pro-sex work articles on his own blog in the past, so naturally I had to ask him to do one for me sooner or later.
Anyone who follows sex work issues has probably seen reports claiming that prostitution hurts the economy. Sometimes the accuracy of these claims depends on subtle issues of data and methodology, but often you can deconstruct these reports by watching out for a few basic economic issues. (A disclaimer: I’m not a trained economist. I like to think that I’m an amateur economist the same way some people are amateur astronomers — I lack the breadth and depth of the professionals, but I pay attention to what they’re doing, and I try not to say anything that will make people stupider.) The big problem with this narrative is that anti-prostitution crusaders use it to buttress the argument that prostitution is a bad thing that must be stopped, yet when you look at how they’re calculating the costs of prostitution, it turns out they’re implicitly assuming that prostitution is a bad thing that must be stopped.
Thus the first thing to note when you see one of these reports is that they almost never mention the economic benefits of prostitution. Anti-prostitution crusaders would no doubt object to the very idea that there are benefits of prostitution, but if you begin your analysis by assuming away all benefits of prostitution, then of course your analysis will show that prostitution hurts the economy. Sneaking your preferred answer into the calculation is no way to reach an honest conclusion. Economically speaking, we know the sex trade has benefits for the participants because they keep doing it. One of the foundational assumptions of economics is that people are smart enough to make choices that will improve their lives. Obviously that isn’t literally true in all cases — people make mistakes — but it’s close enough, because people making choices about their own lives (a) can understand their situation better than anyone else, and (b) have the most to lose from deciding unwisely. Most people don’t make perfect decisions, but it’s hard to see how distant cops, politicians, and do-gooders could make better decisions for thousands of people they barely know.
Actually, these reports sometimes do mention the benefits of prostitution without realizing it, usually when emphasizing the size of the “prostitution problem”. Prostitution is a service produced by sex workers and consumed by clients. We know prostitution provides benefits for clients because they are willing to pay money for it, and we know the value of those benefits must be at least as large as the payment, otherwise clients would not agree to the price. Therefore, when a “cost of prostitution” story says men are spending billions of dollars on sex workers, we can safely assume that sex workers must be producing billions of dollars of valuable sexual services for the economy. (That kind of thinking may sound strange if you’re not used to it, but it’s the same reasoning economists use for every consumer product in the economy. If people willingly buy it, it must be worth at least what they’re paying.) The benefits don’t all go to the clients, however, because as long as sex workers are free to refuse services, they can bargain for a share of the benefits in the form of payment. Since sex workers are assumed to be smart enough to make choices that improve their lives, we know they wouldn’t participate in commercial sex unless they received benefits that exceeded their costs.
The assumption that participants receive a net benefit allows us to take a shortcut when calculating the costs of prostitution to the economy: We can omit the benefits that participants receive from prostitution as long as we balance the account by omitting the costs as well. Or to put it the other way around, if a report fails to include the benefits of sex work to participants, then it should not include any of the costs to participants either. If you find such unbalanced costs in a report, you can ignore them. This leaves one major set of costs remaining: The costs of prostitution that are borne by non-participants. These are almost always some kind of government expense, for which the burden ultimately falls on taxpayers. For example, if sex workers are more likely to receive financial assistance from government anti-poverty programs, then the additional costs of those programs fall on taxpayers, and they are genuine costs of prostitution. Even for these legitimate costs, however, there are a few things to watch out for:
- Only excess costs count. If the average sex worker costs some program $5000, we can’t count it as a cost of prostitution without first subtracting the baseline per-person cost of non-sex-workers. If that’s $3000, then the excess cost of prostitution is only $2000 per sex worker.
- Co-factors matter. If women tend to have higher average medical costs than men, then sex workers will have higher average medical costs than the general population simply because sex workers are more likely to be women. You have to subtract out the excess cost of being women to get the true excess cost of being sex workers.
- Causality matters. If a study discovers that sex workers have disproportionately poor health, leading to higher medical costs, that doesn’t tell us if they have health problems because they are sex workers, or if they are sex workers because they have health problems. If the latter, then their medical costs are not attributable to sex work.
Much of this can be sorted out with statistics and good data, but not everybody does the hard work. For all these costs, my guess is that sex workers already pay more than enough taxes to cover the costs they impose on society, and they’d pay even more if sex work was decriminalized. I doubt that sex workers are nearly as much of a burden on society as, say, ethanol producers, auto manufacturers, or Amtrak.
That brings me to the last category of government expenses, for which sex workers shouldn’t owe a frickin’ dime. I’m talking about the cost of fighting prostitution, which can includes things like the costs of arresting and jailing sex workers as well as the cost of taking care of a sex worker’s children while she’s locked up. If we were talking about crimes such as murder, the costs of catching criminals and isolating them from society would be part of the cost of their crimes, as would the cost of caring for their families while they are in prison. With sex work, however, those costs only materialize if we actually decide to fight prostitution by treating it as a crime, but making that decision is the whole reason we are talking about the economic costs in the first place. It doesn’t make sense to argue that we should fight prostitution because of costs that only arise because we are fighting prostitution. Furthermore, although I said earlier that we can ignore costs of prostitution borne by sex workers, that doesn’t apply to the heavy non-financial costs paid by sex workers who are imprisoned or who lose their children after being arrested. Nor does it apply to the violent costs borne by sex workers who are attacked or killed in situations which would be avoidable if they could operate in the open and depend on the police for protection. Not only should these costs not be held against sex workers, but they are the basis of a strong argument that decriminalizing prostitution would reduce economic costs.
Finally, many readers of this blog are sex workers or are otherwise familiar with the sex trade. This means you are in a good position to answer a very important question about any “cost of prostitution” analysis: Do the descriptions of sex work match what you see? Much of the commercial sex industry operates in hiding, which leads to bad information about what really happens when people trade sex for money. Analyses that depend on false assumptions — that most prostitutes start as children or that street prostitution is the most common form — are likely to reach poor conclusions. In particular, many of my points — the benefits of prostitution, the reasons to ignore costs borne by sex workers, the argument that law enforcement costs favor decriminalization — depend on the crucial assumption that sex workers have agency to chose the sex trade. At a time when we are becoming more accepting of people’s choices in recreational drugs and (non-paying) sex partners, it would be a shame if we allowed sensationalized claims of sex trafficking to undermine the agency of sex workers and cast doubts on the benefits of sex work.
No I dont think that matches what I saw. For myself I definitely think I what I benefited the economy while escorting.
I paid my bills- rent, car insurance, and utilities. I paid cash for all medical and dental expenses. I paid over 3K in cash to the community college. You have hotels, take out food, extra shopping, all the extra drug store stuff we buy, gas, taxi or driver money etc… Some people probably get professional pictures, our agency did that for us. Most ladies keep their nails done. People who work from themselves pay to promote. People that tour have the flights. I knew a lot of escorts that had kids, so all the stuff they bought for them. The high end women buy designer bags and clothes.
The flip side, I saw stuff that probably burdened the economy. Escorts buying pills and illegal gambling were two big wastes of money I saw. I knew one lady who, if she made $500 at night, she had $0 by morning. Some had no concept of saving at all, even if they weren’t doing any drugs or gambling. They couldn’t seem to save money from even one day to another.
There’s a big difference between benefiting an individual & benefiting the economy. Spending money on gambling & drugs still benefits the economy, even if it hurts the individual doing the spending.
I am sure antis will hate this for another reason – it discusses prostitution in economic terms, like it was a job that interacted with the economy, i. e. sex “work” which is not their preferred terminology. What you have described is women making good or bad economic decisions with their income rather than the mantra of all sex work is exploitation
That’s sort of what I’m going for when I write stuff like this. So much of what goes on in sex work (except the sex and legality) is considered perfectly normal in any other line of work — management, advertising, supplies, reviews, transportation, business travel, security — it’s all normal stuff easily explained as ordinary business practices.
My thinking was about people who blow all their money then lose their car or get evicted. I was thinking that is a burden. But the amount has to be practically nothing and probably comparable to other jobs where people rely on commission rather than a salary.
If you lose your house and apartment because you can’t manage your money, not much changes in the national accounts. The car and the apartment still exist, they just belong to someone else. So this doesn’t really hurt “the economy” no matter how painful it is to the people it happens to. More to the point of criminalization, your loss wouldn’t hurt anyone else.
One of the principles of liberty is that a person’s own good is what he says it is. (David Friedman labels this “consumer sovereignty.”) Therefore there is no difference.
Mr.Galt, that is not liberty, that is license, based on selfishness, which as Thomas Jefferson pointed out in his letter to Thomas Law in 1814, cannot be the basis for a system of morality.
One economic benefit routinely ignored is that many hotels, bars, restaurants and game rooms flourish thanks to sex work.
I can’t get excited about either side of this debate. Unless a person or business introduces a wealth-creating innovation into the economy, an achievement that is far less common than the prevailing business ideology assumes, nobody’s economic activities (or lack thereof) benefit or cost the economy as a whole.
Take the case of a barber. If he chooses not to work one day, he makes no money and buys fewer things that day. However, he’s not hurting the economy, since his customers will have the money that they would have paid him for a haircut that day to spend either at another barbershop or on something else. Neither is he helping the economy if he chooses to work the next day, since all that then happens is he earns the money for himself that his customers would have spent elsewhere had he not worked. Whether or not the barber works, the same amount of money remains in the economy, just is distributed differently.
Same with prostitutes.
A classic economic argument against prostitution is that it amounts to clients (usually men) spending money on sex that they should be spending on supporting their wives and kids. No doubt this is sometimes true, and I despise the guys behind on their child support who throw money at hookers. This is wrong.
However, selfishly irresponsible spending is hardly unique to prostitution. Guys in arrears on child support also throw money over bars, drive more expensive cars than they need, and even go to more expensive barbers than are necessary for decent haircuts (while their wives, ahem, are sometimes known to blow a lot more money at hairdressers). Paying a prostitute is hardly a uniquely frivolous expenditure, and even to call it frivolous is quite the subjective judgment. (I have noticed e.g. that women have no problem paying for massages, just I guess draw the line if a guy also gets his dick massaged.)
So this economic argument against prostitution is borderline nonsense.
A second and frankly more persuasive economic argument against prostitution is that it generates negative externalities, or costs to the public at large, that it doesn’t pay for.
Unfortunately, most of the alleged negative externalities are consequences not of prostitution but of the battle against it. Most of the social costs of prostitution are after all attributable to law enforcement combating it. Make prostitution legal, and these costs disappear. Other supposed costs, such as ruining marriages when the client’s wife divorces him and having to support her as a single mother with public funds, are highly debatable. It’s entirely possible that prostitution actually preserves more marriages than it destroys.
Even so, there are negative externalities. Say one or more providers rent an apartment from which they conduct business. Like any other business, and perhaps more so than some, they run risks of fire and robbery and so on. They therefore need to be able to call 911 for fire and police protection at roughly the same rate as other businesses, yet unlike the other businesses they aren’t paying the higher business taxes to cover these costs. The public therefore has to subsidize them.
It gets worse. A few prostitutes, either working where prostitution is legal or just with attitudes, may well report their earnings to the state and federal governments and pay taxes on them like everyone else, but something tells me that most don’t pay taxes on their earnings. Insofar as they don’t, they are freeloading off the other taxpayers who do.
However, once again, these negative externalities are largely a consequence of prostitution being illegal. True, where it is legal prostitutes probably do still often cheat the tax collectors, but then again so also do handymen, musicians, and others in largely cash businesses. Still, two wrongs don’t make a right.
My own view is that the single problem prostitution poses to an economy is tax evasion. Where I live, prostitution is legal, yet sure enough there is a group of aging whores complaining that they are entitled to pensions just like everyone else. The fact they overlook is that they would receive pensions if they had registered as self-employed workers and paid their self-employment taxes all along. Duh, they didn’t do this. Instead they spent their entire careers cheating on their taxes only to now want the benefits that taxpayers receive.
And of course it’s worse than this. They also used public services from schools for their kids to roads and so forth without paying their fair share of taxes for them.
Sorry, taxpayers should not have to subsidize whores.
But correct this tax evasion problem while legalizing prostitution and the economics of the industry work out about the way they do for barbers–no net gain, no net loss, just people choosing (if sometimes foolishly) how they want to earn and spend money.
In the US, most won’t pay income tax. That is true. But I think we make up for it in sales tax. Where I am sales tax is %7.5. And hotels have twice the tax and other fees that the government gets. So we pay taxes on all the electronics, clothes, food, etc… If an escort is a single mom with two kids, see wouldn’t likely pay income tax anyway. And if she wasn’t a escort she would likely make less and get more government help. When I decided to go back to school I missed the FASA deadline but I went anyway and paid myself. I would never demand soical sercurity for the time I didn’t pay into it, that’s nuts. Those ladies should have saved on invested themselves.
I’m not real sure how to think about the tax issue. I think technically it might not harm the economy, since taxing people is not in itself a productive activity. But it does effectively steal from others, since they will have to either pay higher taxes or live with reduced government services. And I guess that will probably have secondary effects due to things like reduced investment. Personally, though, I can’t get real upset about sex workers who don’t pay taxes because their work has been criminalized.
I wouldn’t blame the whores if they don’t pay federal taxes. Blame the utterly skewed up tax system of the USA. As it is, the number of individuals and married couples paying no federal income tax is 45.3 percent and 77.5 million households are not paying federal income taxes…better to reform the government than the whores.
I don’t buy the argument that paying sales offsets not paying other taxes, since people who pay the other taxes pay the sales tax too. Also, the big tax not paid in the US is self-employment tax, close to 16%. Those who don’t pay this but should be are sloughing off the Medicare tax burden onto others. Similarly, since SS retirement benefits are distributed on a sliding scale such that benefits are highest proportionately to those who paid in the least, those skipping out on paying self-employment taxes are often freeloading on others.
As for income taxes, I don’t think we want to get into the how-much-hookers-earn discussion. In my observation, the average is a lot lower than many (especially clients) assume, and insofar as this is true, many wouldn’t pay income taxes. Similarly, for self-employment as well as income taxes, most prostitutes could probably take a lot of deductions. I doubt that on the average the tax evasion amounts to a whole lot. However, it obviously amounts to something, since if hookers didn’t have taxable earnings subject to at least self-employment tax, not many would be in the business. Plus, there are some high-earning prostitutes, and more who have high earnings in some years but not others.
I do find the argument that prostitutes may make up their unpaid taxes by paying high hotel taxes compelling. These taxes are often disproportionately high,so maybe there is some offset from them. I’d like to see the accounting.
I have just noticed and done some rough calculations that tell me even where prostitution is legal it can be an industry subsidized by taxpayers who don’t participate (and often oppose it). I don’t think this is fair to them.
Also, I’ve noticed that in some places prostitution functions as a kind of support industry for other businesses. This is especially true in tourist destinations. Take away the prostitutes, and many a ritzy resort would fail. Thus, indirectly subsidies to the sex industry become subsidies to the tourist industry. My impression is that the tourist industry often wants the sex industry even as it wants to keep it in the non-taxed underground economy.
The weird thing is that tax evasion tends to arise from a mindset similar to that of those who oppose prostitution. According to this mindset, prostitution isn’t really a business or a serious economic activity. In fact, if anyone suggests that prostitutes pay self-employment taxes, as I have, the resonse is usually laughter. But this response just reflects the wink-and-giggle attitude that many have toward prostitution to begin with. It’s just not taken seriously, even though I suspect that many in the tourism industry recognize that it’s their bread and butter.
But if anyone were to take it seriously where it’s legal, I would look into the hotel taxes as part of assessing tax fairness. This is a good point.
A couple of thoughts: Sex workers may not pay enough income taxes, because they run a cash business, but that advantage doesn’t apply to any other kinds of taxes, including sales and hotel taxes as mentioned. They also can’t evade a lot of indirect taxes, like real estate, fuel, and utility taxes. In places that depend on a VAT instead of income taxes, I’d think sex workers would pay as much tax as anyone.
Also, sex workers would have a harder time hiding their income once they discovered the convenience, and attractiveness to customers, of accepting checks and credit cards.
If the antis really wanted to do something to reduce prostitution, lets reduce poverty, and make sure everyone has health care housing and access to an education that will provide them with a job that will pay a living wage to them, without burdening them with crushing debt. Yes I know socialism, But in a modern post-industrial world, socialism has its place for those times we stumble, fall, and need help getting up. I know you’ll disagree Maggie, but when the primary cause of bankruptcy is medical bills (82%) that is the way I feel.
Where I live, prostitution is legal. The question whether it has any negative economic impact does not even come up. Every few years, the question whether the prostitutes get exploited comes up, but usually some newspapers go out and interview some women working on the street and universally return with the result that, well, work is not always pleasant but things are not really different from other jobs.They also find that most prostitutes from abroad like the clientèle here as they are typically respectful and polite.
In short, there are always elements in society everywhere that want to make prostitution a problem, but with it being legal and accepted that is not a view that matches the observable facts.
If it weren’t for the fact that we can’t even do it with an inanimate object like marijuana, the argument of ‘decriminalize it so sex workers can pay taxes’ sounds like the only thing that might get through to some prohibitionists. What’s worse, someone who’s a sex worker or someone who’s a sex worker who’s also “freeloading” off the taxpayers?
Of course, then we get into the whole can of worms which is whether the practice of taxation should exist in the first place…
On the subject of tax evasion, many small workers do it, like construction workers, auto mechanics, the old lady giving piano lesson, and just about any small job that can be paid cash. Most legal workers pay some taxes, but there is a lot of transactions under the table everywhere. Once again there is no real economic difference between sex work and other jobs once the burden of criminalization is removed.
In a criminalized country, sex workers are more unlikely to contribute income and sale taxes, but they often have more troubles to access public services, so on average I think they are losing more than they are freeloading.
I’m not sure how effective the economic argument can be to sway the public towards decriminalization. People are perfectly ok wasting billions on ineffective policies if they think they are justified in some way. In my opinion, the harms of criminalization and the inherently harmless nature of sex work are more convincing considerations.
Not entirely sure what “The Economy” is, and whether or not “hurting” it is a bad thing.
Heh. For purposes of this discussion, “The Economy” refers to the whole arrangement by which we produce, distribute, and consume goods and services that we use to improve the quality of our lives. Hurting the quality of our lives is a bad thing.
The problem is that ”quality of life” is highly subjective. For some people preventing social inequalities is the prime consideration. For other people it means having only neighbors of the right background. For many people upholding certain artificial moral standards is necessary for their quality of life. It’s impossible to decide whether something is beneficial unless we all agree on the desired outcome.
Quality of life is very subjective, but economists have a few tricks for getting around that. For one thing, they assume that when facing a trade-off of some kind, people will make the choice that improves their own personal subjective quality of life. If you and I go to the grocery store, and you buy fish while I buy steak, economists will assume that both of us made decisions that make us happier. You and I don’t have to agree on what is good, we just have to be free to make our own choices.
Of course, the more choices we make, and the better the things we choose, the happier we probably are. In fact, the ability to choose more and better things is pretty much the definition of being rich. And in a market economy like ours, we measure our wealth in the one thing that we can use in a trade-off for anything else: Money. Economics is a very materialistic discipline. It’s good to be rich.
(Economists do realize there’s more to life than material consumption, but some of those things are hard to measure or understand, so they tend to stick to what they think they know. Mostly.)
Hmm.
The problem is in people thinking “the economy” is about money. It isn’t – money just goes around and around. The total amount of money is whatever the banks generate. The Economy is *human effort*.
When people say X affects the economy, what they are saying is that as a result of X, net human effort is going into things that do not improve our lives. Fair enough. A cop chasing down a lawbreaker is a man not engaged in – say – carpentry. (of course, this is a result of criminalisation, etc – we all know this stuff.)
Once you analyse in this fashion, however, it becomes clear that prostitution is in and of itself a plus to “the economy”. Its a service people want. How do we know this? Because people are willing to pay for it. Any analysis in money terms of how prostitution is “bad for the economy” must count the service itself as an economic positive.
I doubt the anti sex-work crowd are honest enough to do this.
Thank you Mark for a great article. I liked the bit about people deciding their own price of participation freely, and when that happens both people benefit. Sex workers may even think about the physical and psychological costs but still participate at a price they put which is above that. I thought you were going to mention ‘consumer surplus’ for a moment!
One point to add: I suspect a couple of posters are in the UK where working alone is legal but sharing premises is usually not. If this were decriminalised, it would free up some London apartments for other business or residential use. So decriminalisation would lead to an increase in ‘utility’.
Interesting point about London apartments. I suspect that legalization would change the market a lot. My guess is that independent escorts would go away in favor of some kind of agency system, simply because most industries embrace specialization to some degree. I imagine some of these would be full-blown branded agencies promising high quality or low prices, whereas others would be unobtrusive support (advertising, screening, calendaring, dispatch, accounting, etc) for escorts who prefer more independence. (Hmm…rather than speculating, I should find out what actually happened in New Zealand…)
Anyway, thanks for the kind words. I don’t think I ever used “consumer surplus,” but “rational utility maximizers” was in the draft for a little while before I came to my senses.
Setting aside the issues of whether prostitution helps or harms the economy as a whole (most seem to agree that it’s a wash) and taxation (there seems some disagreement here) I would like to address another issue: Which groups benefit economically from discouraging prostitution, often by making it illegal?
Everyone knows that law enforcement and various anti-prostitution nonprofits are economic beneficiaries of crusades against prostitution. Hey, law enforcement budgets inflate fast while donations to the nonprofits fighting prostitution increase too. (Anyone wondering where their tax dollars are being wasted needs to look no further. In fact, since charitable donations are tax deductible, we’re also all indirectly subsidizing the nonprofits.)
Less well recognized are the benefits that accrue to adjacent industries, such as tourism. Insofar as public policy restricts prostitution where prospective clients live, some travel to destinations where prostitutes are more widely available. This increases their business at the cost of business where prostitution is more restricted.
Rarely mentioned is that prostitutes themselves benefit and their clients lose from from prohibitions against the activity. When an activity carries risks of the sort that prostitutes often face in areas where it is illegal–risks that include prison, fines, tarnished public reputations, and even rape by law enforcement–basic economics tells us that the prices will rise to compensate for these risks. Whether or not prices rise above a level that compensates for the risks and prostitutes are on the average overpaid, I can’t say, but the lucky and/or careful ones do earn more as a result of anti-prostitution public policy, while clients always pay more than they would in an undistorted free market.
However, there is a third important group that benefits from public policies that discourage prostitution: The wives and girlfriends who don’t directly sell sex. This follows from basic economics too.
In every service industry, the more service providers who enter the business, the lower the price becomes for those services. Since lower prices stimulate competition, the more service providers in an industry, the more varied and innovative become the services (and the more choices available to the consumer). It’s all just supply and demand.
Well, when faced with competition from other service providers, which threatens to lower the fees they can charge while forcing them to scramble more for business, what do service providers do? Invariably they try to restrict entry into their profession, usually by enlisting the aid of the state, as a way to minimize their competition and maintain higher fees.
Barbers do this by championing laws requiring barbers to be licensed, as also do physicians, real estate agents, social workers, and so on.
And in every case their public arguments for restricting competition is always that it assure customers that a service provider meets a certain standard of competence and isn’t a hack or a quack. That is, they publicly justify their protectionist initiatives in terms of protecting the public from inferior services.
Let’s assume that sex is a service, wherever it is obtained. Wives and girlfriends provide this service to men, and while they rarely directly charge a fee for each sexual service they provide, they indirectly expect compensation. Often the compensation they expect is financial. The husband is expected to continuing earning enough to contribute his over 50% share to the costs of running the household, the boyfriend to pick up the check at the restaurant and to buy flowers on Valentine’s Day. But most of the expected compensation isn’t monetary. Husbands are expected to fix things around the house on weekends, to change the oil in his wife’s car, to be nice when his mother-in-law visits. Boyfriends are expected to be witty and caring, feign interest in soap opera sagas involving his girlfriend’s sister, and spend three hours having a romantic dinner without even knowing whether or not he’ll get laid when he’d really prefer a fuck followed by pizza delivery.
Enter prostitutes. With them, a guy can just get his fuck and pizza delivery, doesn’t have his weekends scheduled with chores he doesn’t want to do, and doesn’t have to deal with a mother-in-law. Sure, he pays an up front fee for a prostitute, but a lot of clients will tell you that fees are less expensive for them than even the financial costs of a wife or a girlfriend.
(Aside: In my case this has proved true. In every instance prostitutes have been cheaper for me than wives and girlfriends. Just a fact.)
It follows that wives and girlfriends have a strong vested interest in discouraging prostitution, even to the point of making it illegal, simply because that enables them to keep their “fees” for sex higher and the quality of their services lower than would be the case if their men had the option of paying prostitutes.
It’s therefore no surprise that anti-prostitution campaigns have historically been spearheaded by women. This is the group that has the most to lose from legal and available prostitution.
But what of their argument that banning prostitution provides the public (in this case heterosexual men) with protection from the inferior services that prostitutes offer compared to wives and girlfriends?
As most of us know, this argument isn’t always true. No doubt a good wife or girlfriend does provide a superior service than a prostitute, but frankly many wives and girlfriends provide services far inferior to many prostitutes.
So the anti-prostitution crusaders launch horror campaigns to warn of the inferior quality of prostitutes. We are all numbingly familiar with these. The image presented is of a drug-addicted, HIV positive, psychologically troubled whore held as a sex slave by a dastardly pimp-kidnapper. Against this image, who wouldn’t prefer the wholesome girl next door, even if she does cost us more money and effort?
But the image isn’t true. And, like most advertising, it is intentionally false because the false image serves the self-interest of the wives and girlfriends who create the ads.
True is that, at least in my experience, “paying for it” often involves women I genuinely like while hardly precluding warmth, caring, and friendship. Neither does it preclude involvements beyond sex. Nope, I haven’t yet changed the oil in a prostitute’s car, but I have taken a prostitute’s mother to lunch on Mother’s Day. The difference is that with a prostitute these extras are genuinely voluntary (and the prostitutes genuinely thank me). Wives and girlfriends expect it, and don’t even say thanks.
So I can’t say that there is a quality difference, on the average, and insofar as there is, I tend to find prostitutes of superior quality to wives and girlfriends, and not even only with regard to the sex. The overall relationships seem healthier, more direct, less cluttered with baggage.
Meanwhile, as I keep saying, I live where prostitution is legal, and although I can’t prove it, my impression is that this improves the quality of wives and grirlfriends too. They seem nicer, and more open to providing sex. Basic economics would tell us that they have to be better since they have fierce competition from legal prostitutes.
But practical economics would tell is that wives and girlfriends would likely be at the forefront of anti-prostitution crusades for the same reason. They don’t want the competition.
I’m not a market fundamentalist by any means, but it only seems sensible to allow the market to decide these issues. Let guys patronize prostitutes and let gals work as prostitutes if they want to, then let guys who prefer wives or girlfriends go that route while the gals who prefer to be wives or girlfriends can choose that. My prediction is that many would choose the pair bonding over “paying for it,” but that the pair bonding would be of superior quality.
But I doubt that the wives and girlfriends want this open market, since a protectionist market allows them to sell lower quality services at higher prices.