Nussbaum on Prostitution
Political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a great opinion piece on legalizing prostitution that’s making the rounds:
What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable. [...]
What should trouble us are things like this: The working conditions for most women in sex work are extremely unhealthy. They are exploited by pimps, and they enjoy little control over which clients they will accept. Police harass them and extort sexual favors from them. Some of these bad features (unhealthiness, little control) sex work shares with other job options for low-income women, such as factory work of many kinds. Other bad features (police extortion) are the natural result of illegality itself.
In general we should be worried about poverty and lack of education. We should be worried that women have too few decent employment options and too little health and safety regulation in those that they do have. And we should be worried if men force women to do things sexually that they do not want to do. All these things are worth worrying about, and it is these things that sensible nations do worry about. But the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted, vile things who must be punished.
I think Nussbaum offers a strong argument for legalizing prostitution, but I do wish (and I don’t remember if she deals with this in her book Sex and Social Justice) Nussbaum would tackle the argument that prostitution – unlike working a low-wage factory job – is so inherently degrading as to make it categorically unsuitable for legalization. Other than that though, I’m pretty much on board with Nussbaum’s take (as is usually the case, actually).
(h/t to Will Wilkinson)
