Do We Legalize Prostitution?

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Prostitution needs to be partially decriminalized, he says. The women and men involved in prostitution themselves ought to be decriminalized on the principle that nobody ought to be criminalized for their own exploitation. But all of the other third party exploiters, the pimps, the traffickers, the men who buy access to people, they are allowed to becriminalized and harshly,. All of them. He was enormously disappointed here in Ireland when we got to the end of a very long campaign to find that, although we got what we wanted on paper, we got the criminalization of the purchase of sexual access.

Shermer and Moran discuss: her dysfunctional family background • her boyfriend who pimped her • the women who sell sex and the men who buy it • why other prostitutes have attacked her • agency and volition in prostitution: women and men • why “prostituted” as something done to women (instead of choosing it)? • what she thought about when having prostituted sex • drugs, depression, and suicide as responses to prostitution • the myths of prostitution • feminism and prostitution • how she got out of prostitution • the harm in consenting adult women selling their bodies for sex • what should be done about prostitution, if anything?

Rachel Moran is the Director of International Policy and Advocacy for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE, a leading non-partisan organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography). Her work has been endorsed by Jane Fonda, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan and many others. Her bestselling memoir, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, is regarded by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon as “the best work by anyone on prostitution ever” and has been published in more than a dozen countries and numerous languages including German, Italian, Korean, French, and Spanish.