Miami cops arrested Carlos Rodriguez for soliciting prostitution on November 9th. Under the heading of unique physical features, the arrest report notes, “Half a Head”. What would we do without our Blue Knights saving society from those who want to get laid?
While I write endlessly about the persecution of women who sell sex, it’s much more rare that I comment on the other victims of society’s war on sex, the customer.
It’s no secret that anti-prostitution crusaders advocate the state injecting itself into and regulating our most intimate and private relationships. While they rant about how all prostitution is coercion, they don’t give it a second thought when they use the threat of jail to force everyone to follow their narrow intolerant moral code. They summarily decree that the moment money is involved, women are being coerced or exploited. To them the only acceptable terms for a sexual relationship are mutual attraction.
They dismiss the idea that that puts millions of people, of which Mr Rodriguez is only one, at something of a disadvantage. Laws against prostitution sadistically deny one of humanity’s most pleasurable and intimate interactions to a class of people who are only likely to experience it through the services of a prostitute. That would include many handicapped people, those who have been maimed by war or accidents, those with serious birth defects, the home bound, the bed-ridden, and the just plain ugly (such as myself).
To spell it out, laws against prostitution specifically single out disadvantaged people for persecution. As long as man has walked the earth society has been defining the powerless as throwaways, unworthy of the rights and privileges that the rest of us take for granted. Every generation of Americans self-righteously proclaims their abhorrence of witch hunts, moral crusades, and lynchings of past generations, even as they enthusiastically engage in the current ones. Like the very people who perpetrated that history of marginalizing those they didn’t like, they don’t recognize what they’re doing. It’s never called persecution by those who doing it.
As one commenter so eloquently wrote a while back, no “normal” person needs to buy sex. The implication is that sex is a privilege reserved only for so-called normal people. If you’ve ever been in a discussion about the demand side of prostitution, some moron will invariably make the remark, “I’ve never had to pay for it”. The implication is that, “I’m among the class of people that women will have sex with without having to pay for it”. The pure naivety of such an assertion is stunning. I don’t know too many people who would dispute that wealth (coupled with generosity) usually plays a part in the dynamic between men and women, regardless of whether an explicit transaction occurs.
The war on prostitution is not just a crusade against a woman’s right to own and control her own body. It’s also a systematic program of persecution aimed at a minority of the population that no one gives a shit about. It’s the tyranny of the majority in action. And there is nothing moral, benevolent, or heroic about it.
