Title: Why is prostitution illegal? - The Straight Dope
Headings: Why is prostitution illegal?
Why is prostitution illegal?
Content: They just don’t want it in their back yards. From time to time a few people make noises about changing U.S. prostitution laws. The best known is Margo St. James, whose hookers’-rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), surfaced in 1973. She complained that prostitution laws gave the cops an excuse to harass women — prosecution of their male customers was far less frequent. St. James and her camp attracted their share of feminist allies, who felt that a woman’s right to control her body included the right to rent it out. This line of thinking has succeeded to the point where much sociological and AIDS literature has replaced the pejorative prostitute with the more PC sex worker. Other feminists, it should be said, consider prostitution a form of “female sexual slavery,” to cite the title of one well-known book. One way or another women are coerced into prostitution, the argument goes — sometimes physically, often psychologically, and if nothing else out of economic necessity. But that seems to victimize prostitutes more than the reality warrants. Suffice it to say studies of prostitution have generally found that women who become prostitutes do so voluntarily, often to support a drug habit.