Prostitution and Promiscuity

Kerry Howley, criticizing feminists who oppose legalizing prostitution:

… Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

If you find all of these cultural pathologies unfortunate, what is the public policy you should prefer? It seems to me that it is not the policy that deems it a crime against the American people to open your legs. Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs. Even decriminalization, which treats Johns as outlaws and sex workers as victims, assumes that all sex workers are damaged, that no woman would ever love sex enough to make a career out of it. And why not? Well, because every woman knows that she is her sexual purity rating. No sane woman would ever choose to mess that up.

In sum: If we are ever going to introduce a conceptual distinction between the moral character of individual women and the integrity of their hymens, it seems extremely important not to criminalize aberrant sexual behaviors.

Hmm. The suggestion that there exists no middle ground between the virgin/whore dynamic on the one hand and a wholesale acceptance of every single kind of sexual practice on the other strikes me as moderately fanciful. The notion that the "women need be preserved in glass so as not to 'ruin' themselves" tradition is in any way dominant in American life today strikes me as fantastic in the extreme. But then again, I'm speaking as someone who thinks that there might be a few reasons besides an irrational attachment to the patriarchy to think that a little “shaming” here and there isn’t the worst response to sexual promiscuity - male and female alike. So I'm not really the target audience for this kind of argument.

I do wish, though, that we heard this sort of line from sexual liberationists more often. A debate in which Kerry Howley's side is committed to the position that true sexual liberation requires removing any distinction between having sex for love or pleasure and having sex for money is a debate that social conservatives can win. I think.

Comments

Mr. Douthat,

Of course you can win that debate. You can win it because anyone who argues that there shouldnt be any moral (or legal) difference between prostitution and sex for love or affection, is dumber than a post.

The debate that I _don't_ think you can win, at least in the minds of most people who aren't already given to social conservatism, is whether the scope of permissible sexual relations should be limited to acts within marriage that are open to procreation. I don't think you are going to win that debate.

I would agree that _promiscuity_ in either men or women ought to be frowned upon and disapproved of. Anyone who views sex as the way to make a career is, in fact, a self-damaging victim that the state should take on the duty of saving from themselves.

Posted by Hector | March 13, 2008 10:52 AM

Ummm..."the state should take on the duty of saving from themselves." Wow, I hope that's an attempt at sarcasm, 'cause if it isn't, we'd all better watch out.

I think Ross has a valid point about there being a difference between sex for love/pleasure and sex for money, the real question is, or ought to be, why should the state impose criminal sanctions on those who engage in the latter?

As Mark Kleiman constantly points out, criminal penalties are expensive for all involved parties, and there are much cheaper ways to achieve the desired result (in this case, sex workers not being exploited, which necessarily implies a minimization of the number of people doing sex work), while minimizing the social costs of both the very existence of sex workers and the harmful effects of arresting and prosecuting them and their clients.

And I don't think that's an argument social conservatives can win. At least not while so many of them are still out getting hookers on the DL.

Posted by DSG | March 13, 2008 11:02 AM

A debate in which Kerry Howley's side is committed to the position that true sexual liberation requires removing any distinction between having sex for love or pleasure and having sex for money is a debate that social conservatives can win. I think.

Of course you can win that debate. But that's because you're debating a straw man. At no point does Kerry (I think, although I have no desire to put words in her mouth) say there's no difference between the two. She merely says - and I agree - that setting up a legal distinction between the two and using the coercive power of the state to punish people who violate the distinction is necessarily going to involve a lot of men exercising dominion over a lot of women. That's unacceptable.

Kerry does have a more "liberated" idea of human sexuality than you do, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. I'm just saying I don't think she's teetering over the edge of advocating wholesale depravity, even if she thinks your plan to punish people who choose depravity is basically authoritarian.

Posted by Ryan | March 13, 2008 11:35 AM

C'mon, Ross, Kerry Howley just wants everyone to make money and be happy and have lots of sex!! Isn't libertarianism great, guys?!

Posted by Derrick | March 13, 2008 11:58 AM

Part of the problem, Ross, at least from the libertarian/libertine position, is the relative absence of people like yourself who argue from good faith that "there might be a few reasons besides an irrational attachment to the patriarchy to think that a little 'shaming' here and there isn’t the worst response to sexual promiscuity - male and female alike." The fact is that, rather overwhelmingly, the shaming/restrictionist position regarding human sexuality is dominated by people who have an explicit, or transparent implicit, yearning for the return/perpetuation of the patriarchy.

Which isn't to say that I (or most people similarly situated politically and culturally) agree with even your position. Rather, one reason why it's so hard to even have a discussion of such issues on the merits is that your position is tainted, fairly or unfairly, with embarrassing patriarchal nonsense.

Which reminds me, actually, of the dynamic you identify elsewhere sis a vis the immigration debate.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 12:33 PM

Kerry Howley and other liberals (whether right liberals like Howley or left liberals) are in radical denial about human nature. (As an aside, I tend to think right liberals/libertarians are even worse than left liberals for this.) Sex differences have their basis in biology, and most men will value relative sexual purity in their long term partners no matter what people shriek at them. Howley and Co. need to take a dip in the waters of Roissyland:
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/double-standards/
I may not always like what Roissy describes, but more often than not it is the hard truth. As his byline says, this is "where pretty lies die."

Posted by Thursday | March 13, 2008 12:47 PM

your position is tainted, fairly or unfairly, with embarrassing patriarchal nonsense

But it's hard to see good faith from the other side, when most on it would admit that rather than throwing out, say, patronizing or "you are property" attitudes for women, they are explicitly in opposition to (basically) the entirety of Christian sexual morality. Those of us who are orthodox Christians (or orthodox Jewish or Islamic, given that there is some considerable overlap here) note that your programme is, from our point of view, aimed at overturning the standards of decency that make human sexual and affectionate life bearable and humane. The masses are behaviorally somewhere in-between the points, and in their desires somewhere in between. The extremes, at least on these points, arguably have nothing to talk about other than at the barrel of someone's "gun".

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | March 13, 2008 12:53 PM

Thursday,

There is a huge slice of the population, defined more by professional/educational status than anything else, where sexual purity (at least prior to the establishment of a long term partnership) has become an almost complete non-factor. Setting aside the question of whether this is a good thing, it certainly suggests that it is possible for society to move in this direction (given especially that the cultural milieu where this has occurred consists of people who have joined the milieu for reasons unrelated to prior views regarding sexual purity. (For further support, look at some parts of Europe, France of course being the exemplar, which have gone even further in this direction. Again, set aside the question of the desirability of such a shift - it is, contra your post, possible empirically, for sexual purity in women to lose much os it's salience as a desirable characteristic).

The fact that the views regarding sexual purity which you describe persist in many people is exactly zero evidence that they are inherent either biologically or culturally.

Now, that being said, it does seem likely (though even there, i wouldn't want to venture predictions too far into the future) that sexual exclusivity in a long term relationship will, indeed, continue to be highly valued, perhaps for biological reasons, perhaps for cultural reasons. But a large swath of our population has (again, irrespective of the merits) gotten comfortable with the notion that young people of both sexes should be free to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences with a wide range of partners before pair bonding, and put that aside when they establish a long term relationship.

Of course, some people believe that such a switch from a fairly libertine sexual attitude to a monogamous one upon marriage, or the equivalent, is difficult or impossible. But empirically many, many couples seem to manage it. And if some don't - well, adultery wasn't exactly unknown even when there was more of a consensus regarding the value of female sexual purity.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 1:07 PM

Marquis,

A fair minded statement of the issue from your perspective. I would respond at length, if I didn't need to get back to work. I am instead responding only to salute you for your last sentence. You do sir, indeed, win the thread.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 1:13 PM

Larry M:
Read David Buss' Evolution of Desire. Men, in all societies, even places like Sweden, have a strong preference for relatively chaste women (not to be confused with virginity per se). With good reason. The number of sex partners a woman has before marriage is the best proxy for whether she will cheat on you after marriage. You would be a fool to ignore it.

What masks this is the behavior and attitudes of the people at the top, the people who get on television. A great example of this is Nicholas Sarkozy and his new wife. Very pretty women like Ms. Bruni can get away with being promiscuous, because they will still attract men anyway. And a lot of Alpha males don't much care if their wife cheats on them, because they are mercilessly screwing around with young women anyway. Nicholas Sarkozy is a cuckold, but who cares when your consolation prize is a model.

Posted by Thursday | March 13, 2008 1:28 PM

You had better believe I am in opposition to the entirety of Christian sexual morality. But the point is this: I'm not making you give it up. You can choose to be how you want while I choose to be how I want. You're the one forcing me to accept a set of laws I consider fundamentally unjust.

Posted by Ryan | March 13, 2008 1:29 PM

Okay, I should be back at work, but let me generate one tentative substantive rejoinder to the Marquis' comment.

With the caveat that i don't think that the opinion I'm about to express has anywhere near universal agreement acceptance among my side of the debate, I'd suggest that one could argue that the reason many (perhaps not most?) of the people on "my side" of the debate are "are explicitly in opposition to (basically) the entirety of Christian sexual morality" is that they/we believe that "Christian sexual morality" is inherently bound up in patriarchal nonsense.

Of course, such beliefs don't make a dialog between the extremes any easier.

Obviously a significant complication in this debate is that some of the people who would agree with me on that point oppose sexual libertinism for a set of very different reasons. c.f. MacKinnon, Dworkin.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 1:32 PM

I should have said that men, in all societies, even places like Sweden, have a strong preference for relatively chaste women as marriage partners.

When it comes to casual partners they don't much care.

Posted by Thursday | March 13, 2008 1:46 PM

Thursday,

Here I am, still surfing, when I should be working. Oy. I'll at least keep my response brief.

Your argument merely suggests that there are some limits - that an extreme, anything goes kind of libertinism, which few people, myself included, would espouse anyway - might (and I emphasize might - it is terribly difficult to tease out persistent cultural attitudes from biologically based attitudes) be inconsistent with "human nature." It doesn't suggest for a moment that we won't eventually reach an equilibrium which is closer to, say, Sweden, than to the United States circa 1950.

As for your opinion regarding likelihood of cheating, I'd be interested in seeing the studies. I'd suspect that it would be really difficult in this case to seperate out other causal factors and prove causation as opposed to correlation. Certainly at some level one would think that a causal link would exist, for both men AND women, but I'm not sure what bearing that has on the real contours of the debate.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 1:55 PM

Ryan (writes)

"But the point is this: I'm not making you give it up. You can choose to be how you want while I choose to be how I want. You're the one forcing me to accept a set of laws I consider fundamentally unjust."

Only in the sense that #1. All law is force & #2. Your idea of injustice is grounded.

There is no libertarian answer to these multiple issues. Mere minutes after the Lawrence decision decriminalized sodomy the Massachusetts courts issued a decision forcing people to subsidize, promote & teach homosexuality as morally equivalent to man/woman marriage.

That’s as good an example of The Marquis of Carabas “barrel of a gun” observation as your going to get.

LarryM (writes)
"The fact is that, rather overwhelmingly, the shaming/restrictionist position regarding human sexuality is dominated by people who have an explicit, or transparent implicit, yearning for the return/perpetuation of the patriarchy."

Well, I suppose that’s me. However, for all its stridency and longevity (still?) in our universities – I rarely if ever encounter women (or men) who even use terms like feminism & patriarchy. I have never been presented with an definition of it that is narrow enough to be meaningful yet broad enough to accomplish its sweeping claims. I often find it to be a mere rebellion against the limitations of human nature.

Posted by Fitz | March 13, 2008 2:09 PM

You're the one forcing me to accept a set of laws I consider fundamentally unjust.

Er, and so are you, with respect to me. I assume (perhaps I'm wrong) that you're "pro-choice." I am assuming you would agree that a society where, say, black people could be killed at will would have fundamentally unjust laws -- not because it has some flawed positive law, but because it lacks a law that is required by morality. That is how the POSITIVE BAN on even states or localities banning abortion looks to me.

Moreover, once we grant this principle (which only very extreme libertarians, of the sort you might wish to talk to only at a distance, and with a weapon handy) that lack of certain positive laws is sometimes a grave failure of justice, prostitution is something that conceivably lies in this category. Now, I don't think prostitution is as important to outlaw as abortion -- there are prudential arguments in favor of allowing it (Augustine and co., as Hector notes). I think those arguments are WRONG, though.

Moreover, as discussed here and many other places before, the libertine position doesn't just carve out space for you to do what you wish: it aggressively pushed for a public square that is as squalid, as pornographic, and as malevolent as can be. It blares evil at the top of its lungs from every loudspeaker, and acts offended if anyone suggests perhaps taking out our shotguns and blowing the PA system away. It plants a huge billboard with sodomy and torture in the backyard, and then looks askance if anyone suggests that common bloody courtesy would cover the billboard, or only face it towards those who like such things. It suggests "if you want to live YOUR kind of life, you can't even retreat to a small town, because we want NO PLACE to POSSIBLY have laws that make any kind of community have ANY kind of standards with respect to our most important value, which is sexual license."

At some point, as I noted above, some of start thinking about getting our guns and cleaning up the town. Modern life being modern life, we can't do it, but we're angry, and some of us are just as educated and well off as you are, too boot.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | March 13, 2008 2:13 PM

Marquis, you would only be partially correct about my abortion position. While I am pro-life, it is my experience that the vast majority of people who call themselves "pro-life" are - as in all of these cases - far more interested in telling women what they're allowed to do than in actually protecting anything worth protecting. Hence abortion bans without exceptions for the mother's health. Hence the requirement for things like abstinence-only education and the public shaming attached to women who get pregnant while young and "choose life" as I (and others, perhaps you) would have them do. If you want a culture of life - and I do - there comes a time when it's important to stop writing laws that prohibit people from enjoying their lives.

I am not in the business of preaching "evil" through a megaphone, but when one side insists on resting its boot on my neck, a megaphone can be found quickly.

Posted by Ryan | March 13, 2008 2:25 PM

In other words, in "your" (for some of you) world makes "my" kind of life very hard to live; mine would probably do the same for you. I don't see what principle (that I accept) would suggest to me that _I_ should yield the floor.

I'm not adamantly opposed to "freedom" or as hostile to "leave me alone" ideas as it might seem on here. For instance, the persecution and legal consequences once visited on homosexuality were harsh and uncharitable, in many many cases. I would not in fact toss poor Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol. Nor would I haul the man caught with a dirty book in his house into court, or prosecute adultery laws except when the violations were flagrant. Laws against fornication in are quixotic, and somewhat deluded about man (and woman's) love of the sweet flesh.

But -- giving a little seems to end in giving everything, or at least way too much. Once an attempt is made to carve more space for private vices, those vices and their practicioners take up arms and are emboldened to claim not just to be left alone, but to speak their peace loudly, to sell their wares openly in the marketplace, and to angle for favorable treatment of their "views" in the educational system. Nobody is capable of leaving anyone alone, so why not see how much ground you can take? It won't be much, but if you don't fight you will simply lose lose lose lose lose, because just as the Puritan suffered thinking someone, somewhere might be having fun, "libertarians" suffer thinking that somewhere, somehow, there might be a town that shuts down an unwelcome topless bar or a public school that doesn't give out enough condoms.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | March 13, 2008 2:30 PM

Hehe, still (intermittently) avoiding work. But the need to get back to it will at least keep this brief, and, unfortunately, conclusory.

As for Marquis, I actually am more understanding of his position than many of my fellow travelers. I suppose that, defined that way, if someone has to lose out in this particular debate, I'd rather it be The Marquis rather than myself. Because his ideal society looks just as bad to me (from my position) as the status quo does to him (from his position).

Now obviously I'd like to live in a world where people of good faith acted with respect to people who have a different conception of sexual morality than they do, and create spaces for each. But, in practice, given the realities of modern mass culture (some of which, believe it or not, I also find problematic, for somewhat analogous reasons), I think the debate is rather moot. I tend to think that legal prohibitions, their desirability apart, tend to amount at best to finger in the dike measures, no pun intended.

None of which is going to be of much comfort to The Marquis, and in fact is all the more reason why these types of dialogs aren't likely to change minds or resolve anything.

I have less sympathy for Fitz' position. I think there is a real tendency to conveniently define "my favored social structure" as "human nature" when it is anything but. In that regard, I think that patriarchal social structures have even less claim to any basis in "human nature" than do claims about sexual mores.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 2:33 PM

Well, to be fair, your way wouldn't make my life THAT hard. I'm not a prostitute and I'm not really in the business of paying prostitutes for sex. While I reject Christian morality as a basis for law, my morality is pretty deeply Christian. I'm a (mostly) heterosexual (serial) monogamist. And a white male. You don't endanger my way of life in the least, but that's sort of the point of the whole argument.

As for folks angling for favorable treatment of their "views" in schools, I think the most conservative Christians have been pretty successful in this regard for a long time. Seems to me, in fact, that the ones most vocally forcing their malevolence and wares into the marketplace are the folks whose moral rules you're defending. Why not shut the abstinents and prudes out too? I happen to find them far more destructive to human decency than the dominatrices.

Posted by Ryan | March 13, 2008 2:38 PM

That last post was cross posted with Marquis' 2:30 post, but dovetails, I think, in an interesting way. Here's the thing, Marquis - as I said, I do have some sympathy with your position. The problem, though, is really mass culture, and a few laws here or there aren't going to change it. From your perspective, I don't have an answer. As I said, I also find aspects of current mass culture problematic - some of which you would agree with. A culture where people can calmly discuss the pros and cons of various types of torture, and where violence is glorified in certain contexts, is one that I am deeply uncomfortable with. But I'm not sure what can be done about that; I think that legal prohibitions don't tend to be very effective in that regard, even apart from their negative consequences.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 2:42 PM

I'll also note that if there were legal / cultural / technological space for heavy restrictions on modern mass media, then I would be fairly friendly to what Ross is talking about elsewhere, a subsidiarity-based world, where Vegas can be Vegas and Mayberry can be Mayberry. But that's not how things are, and it's not what most libertarian-liberals are pushing for, either.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | March 13, 2008 2:48 PM

If the libertarians who are NOT libertines had any liking for shame and disapproval even where law is useless or harmful, this discussion would be different, and more friendly. But for the most part, that's not the case, or it's very mere lip service.

This is why, though very far from a leftist, I have some sympathy with aspects of Hector's thinking in a way -- modern mass capitalism may have to die some kind of death to get any kind of grip on mass culture. Particularly, advertising.

But yes, changing the culture is hard, however you want to do it.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | March 13, 2008 2:55 PM

The problem here is that, while I am all for shaming people for the set of things I think are both wrong and legal/properly-legal, I don't see all that many things on both lists. Do I consider overusing cocaine bad? Yeah. Do I consider using it in small amounts bad? No, not really. If people can control alcohol or nicotine addictions in a reasonable way, then cocaine isn't something I think is all that different. Similarly, I don't find "slutty" behavior all that troubling.

What I do dislike is people who are jerks. I'm all for publicly shaming racists, homophobes, and moralists (whose speech I don't think should be outlawed), but most of the things I'm asked to shame are things I don't consider particularly wrong.

Posted by Ryan | March 13, 2008 3:09 PM

and it's not what most libertarian-liberals are pushing for, either.

I don't know that I'd put it just that way. I think that most liberals, and many libertarians, don't even think about these issues on that level. When they do, they probably (like myself) have at least some (maybe even a lot) of sympathy to your position. That doesn't necessarily mean they have constructive suggestions of how to get there. In that regard, though, I think the problem is as much, or more, a kind of corporatism which exists as much or more on the right side of the political spectrum as it does on the left.

Which of course you are well aware of, and hence the second paragraph of your 2:55 post.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 3:10 PM

by "your position" in my last post, I meant, if it wasn't obvious, "subsidiarity-based world, where Vegas can be Vegas and Mayberry can be Mayberry." Though perhaps more properly I should have characterized it as Ross' position.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 3:16 PM

There are two views in conflict. The traditional view is the chief purpose of sex is procreation. The libertarian view is the chief purpose of sex is pleasure and recreation.

Posted by Mark | March 13, 2008 4:07 PM

"I'm all for publicly shaming racists, homophobes, and moralists"

Will people start thinking clearly on issues?
Taking a stand against racism and for homosexuality is moralism.

Posted by Mark | March 13, 2008 4:10 PM

Well, I think there's at least three views in conflict....my view would be that the purpose of sex is love and affection.

LarryM,

As for sexual 'purity' in a partner, depends on what you mean. I wouldn't necessarily want to marry a virgin, but definitely I would prefer not to marry someone promiscuous or who's had a lot of _casual_ sex, and I wouldn't want to get involved with someone that I had no interest in marrying.

I would imagine that my views are pretty typical. It's true that _virginity_ is probably no longer particularly valued by most people (although it's still probably a positive attribute) but I don't think most people would _prefer_ a partner who's been highly promiscuous.

Posted by Hector | March 13, 2008 4:22 PM

Hector,

I think that your views are typical. I'm not sure to what extent that such views are inherent, i.e., biological, and to what extent they are cultural. But even assuming arguendo that such views are in some sense inherent, my point is that one can certainly defend a relatively broad minded point of view vis a vis human sexuality without running into "human nature."

At the risk of generalizing from my own experience, by the time I was in my late 30s, still unmarried (am happliy married now at, yikes, almost 48), I would say that the "typical" person, male or female, in my social circle probably had in the neighborhood of 15-20 lifetime sexual partners, a few casual, mostly either sequentially monogamous or at least more than just one night stands. And no men in that milieu were the least concerned or put off about that kind of history in a potential mate. Even a "phase" in one's younger days of more casual sex was not considered problematic in a potential mate. (I dated one young lady who, because of such a "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" phase had a lifetime total of about 45; we didn't get married, but her past was definitely not an issue).

Now, I'd agree that a person of the opposite gender (or the same gender, if that's your thing) who is actively engaged in a lifestyle of casual one night stands probably wouldn't strike one as the best possible potential mate. But that's just common sense, and isn't really inconsistent with a fairly libertine POV.

Posted by LarryM | March 13, 2008 4:43 PM