A silly yet understandable mistake on my part, as the National Day of Johns was a celebration of the arrests of hundreds of men in a series of sex stings in 15 states. I suppose you could say I am the consummate john. And neither should any of these other unmarried johns who have been arrested. If these men are anything like me, they might simply feel more comfortable with prostitutes. I never pick them up to be abusive. I always feel extraordinarily loving and close to them. When I first began soliciting sex for money, it never occurred to me that some of them are possibly forced into prostitution or have abusive pimps.
A big part of my addiction is the ritualistic aspect, and for some reason I only liked to pick up prostitutes who talked to me through the passenger window. As we were speaking, a van full of girls stopped, and a guy I assume was her pimp bounced her across the hood of my car and threw her in the van.
Law-enforcement stings designed to shame men who pay for sex are nothing more than the state blowing its own morality horn. And not from a case-study point of view but from the honest point of view of someone who has spent the equivalent of a Harvard Law School education on purchasing sex. By keeping prostitution illegal because we find it morally objectionable, we allow or, more accurately, you allow sex workers to constantly be put into dangerous situations.
Studies have shown that rapes and STDs dropped drastically from to in Rhode Island after the state accidentally legalized it. The American Journal of Epidemiology showed that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 50 times that for those in the next most dangerous job for a woman, working in a liquor store. The illegal aspect of prostitution has never deterred me, nor would legalizing it cause me to engage in it more. The decision people make to have sex for a living would undoubtedly confuse and repulse a large part of the population.
But in a free society, people must be allowed to make choices for themselves that are incomprehensible to others. By keeping prostitution illegal and demonizing all of its parties, we you are empowering pimps and human traffickers and anyone else who wants to victimize sex workers because they feel helpless under the law. Contact us at editors time. Opinion politics In Defense of Johns.
