Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Following up on my previous post, which also quoted this post by Cara of Feministe. She also said of New York prosecutors decision not to charge former Governor Elliot Spitzer.

There’s nothing to be surprised about here, and not just because Eliot Spitzer used to be governor.  It’s because, as this NYT article notes, clients are rarely prosecuted:

Patricia A. Pileggi, who once prosecuted public corruption cases in Brooklyn, agreed with Mr. Garcia that the federal government does not, as a general rule, prosecute johns in prostitution cases. She said that she once represented a madam in a criminal case and recalled that the clients in the matter were never charged, despite there being evidence to do so.

“What I’m seeing,” Ms. Pileggi said, referring to Mr. Garcia’s decision, “is completely consistent with how they’ve handled other matters.”

And that’s precisely the problem.

As you may know, I support decriminalization of prostitution.  But if we’re going to prosecute those involved with it — which I unfortunately think we will for some time — there is absolutely no non-misogynistic excuse to not charge the clients.  Not prosecuting the clients indicates that selling sex is morally repugnant, but buying it is not.  It indicates that there is something repulsive and wrong about women having sex with many men for a fee, but not about men paying many women fees for that sex.  It says that there is something that needs to be condemned and punished about female sexuality, and in fact female survival, but male sexuality and exploitation ought to just be shrugged off as “boys will be boys.“  And it sure as hell doesn’t do a damn bit of good to help those women who we pretend to be so concerned about.

Read the quote in context here.

In my previous post I proposed that while not all customers may be stigma-avoiding, those customers who are embarrassed or ashamed of their involvement benefit disproportionately and therefore may be more invested in keeping prostitution illegal than those of us who have never been customers at all. (In a footnote I also speculated, darkly, that such reluctance might explain why so many customers seem otherwise inexplicably sanguine about paying pimps and traffickers for sex with the involuntarily conscripted.)

Anyway, like Cara I too favor decriminalization. And consequently I believe that if prosecutors are going to enforce the law against prostitutes they should bloody well enforce it against their customers as well. Or maybe another way of saying that would be until prosecutors stop enforcing laws against prostitution they should start enforcing laws against customers.

It’s not just a matter of fairness, or avoidance of hypocrisy, it’s also a matter of strategy and tactics. Governor Spitzer and Senator Vitter both knew they risked at best embarrassment. (Even Spitzer, had he not made such a big splash about prosecuting sex workers, might have been able to bluff his way through without resigning.) Consequently, despite potentially having considerable say in the matter, they had virtually no incentive to help decriminalize the activities they benefitted from. Perhaps they, and the tens or hundreds of thousands of other public figures who may also quietly be customers, would take a clearer perspective on the business if they had as much “skin” in the game as the men and women they buy sex from.