Tuesday’s federal raid on the New York offices of Rentboy.com, a site that facilitated hookups within the LGBT community (legal!) but which also didn’t do all it could to discourage the appearance of its use as an escort site (which it totally was), reinforces the fact that, in 49 out of 50 states (and then only in a few counties of the lone exception, Nevada), prostitution is illegal. But, oh man, it shouldn’t be.
This, combined with last week’s hack of adultery website Ashley Madison, revealing not only thousands of real and phony email addresses and real and phony members (including conservative overbreeding wingnut Josh Duggar but also, quite likely, thousands of people who used the site for relationship-approved consensual poly-bonding), suggests we still have so far to go in our basic understanding of sex as a need.
We need sex and sexual expression as instinctively as we need to close our eyes when a snowball is hurled at us (today in Porn Valley it is 102 degrees), to laugh when we’re happy, to eat when we are hungry, and to crap if we ended up eating at Taco Bell. The fact that an escort site was busted and an extramarital hookup site was hacked for the purpose of shaming its members, that prostitution is legal in some places (Pahrump) but not in others (Las Fucking Vegas) is mystifying.
And let’s not get started that the thing that separates porn performers from prostitutes is the fact that both parties are being paid and that a camera is on. Or that a good-hearted bachelor party stripper, who feels personally responsible for relieving me of bodily fluids, is not a prostitute.
Does it ever make your head hurt explaining America’s myriad double standards about sex to foreigners, aliens, and offspring?
I think of prostitution the way I think of the Second Amendment — so often deliberately misunderstood. I would happily be the Sex Work Czar of a country that recognized that, not only is there nothing wrong with that profession, but also that it is necessary. Give me an elite corps of well-regulated prostitutes in every city over 100,000 and we won’t need a well-regulated militia.
I imagine the power of this editorial will have America’s problems with sex sorted out within the next two weeks. Thank you for following my lead in creating a worthwhile national discussion. In the meantime, thrill to Gamelink’s selection of more than 500 movies that mention the word “hooker.”
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