The World's Oldest Whatever

As usual for public discussions of supposed vice in the United States, the Eliot Spitzer joint has become fodder for mere legalism. Should or should not prostitution be "legalized"? It is a valid question, but a foolishly narrow one. It will briefly incite competing arguments about relative harms, both psychic and physical, and then nothing will happen and everyone will go home. Of course prostitution should be legal. If I may sell the labor of my body, which I'm pretty sure is the basis of a slaveless economy, then I should be able to sell the labor of my body. The objections on the basis of coercion, human trafficking, abuse of women, and the like aren’t objections to prostitution at all, but objections to sometimes-attendant abuses that ought to be addressed on their own, just as violence arising from, say, the drug trade ought to be addressed on its own. We don’t outlaw schools and post offices (but maybe we should!) because they seem to be magnets for a certain kind of violence.

Really, though, all of this is tangential at best to the more interesting questions of our conception of and relationship to human sexuality. The more fruitful question than, “Should prostitution be legal in society?” is: “What is the reason for the persistence of prostitution throughout virtually all societies in all of human history?”