Prohibition of Sex Work Is a Pipe Dream

Just like alcohol, marijuana, and (in the United States) guns, you can't stop something that a critical mass of people want to do

Julie Bindel is a long-time UK-based feminist who has been out in the trenches fighting for women for decades. I have a lot of respect for her. And she uses her Substack to blog her longstanding campaign to eliminate prostitution (here is the latest installment). I recommend it if you want to see what the arguments are.

I also think Bindel’s cause is doomed to fail, for the exact same reason that Prohibition failed in the United States.

I’m pretty sex positive, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I have libertarian views about sex involving consenting adults in all of its permutations. But this is not a Substack post about sex positivity. Rather, I’m willing to assume arguendo for the purpose of this discussion that Bindel is absolutely right, and sex work is inherently exploitative and bad for women and it would benefit humanity if the scourge was wiped from the face of the Earth. Nonetheless, I am going to argue that even if you believe this, even if you are somehow even more anti-sex work that Julie Bindel is, you shouldn’t try. You are bound to fail and make the problem worse. That is the lesson of Prohibition.

So let’s talk about Prohibition. It’s forgotten, but it was very much a feminist enterprise. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was one of the first explicit women’s movements in the United States, and the arguments that they made against alcohol consumption were explicitly feminist. They talked a lot about domestic violence, and how men would come home drunk from the saloon and beat and even force themselves on their wives. They talked about child abuse. Abandonment of women and the family. Inability to support one’s children. Divorce and sometimes even death.

The language was 19th Century language (a favorite slogan was “home protection”), but when you adjust for the differences in language, the WCTU made explicitly feminist arguments against the sale and use of alcoholic beverages. And the temperance and suffragist movements were closely aligned, with many figures prominent in the campaign to give women the vote also strong supporters of temperance. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed a temperance society in upstate New York.

To be clear, temperance and Prohibition were not solely feminist projects. Indeed, ironically given the configuration of later feminist debates, the feminists aligned with the Protestant religious right in the Prohibition movement, with the latter focusing on what it saw as the biblical prohibitions on excessive drinking. (In contrast, Catholic communities, often made up of European immigrants, saw little wrong with alcohol consumption and opposed Prohibition.)

Now why am I spending so much time in an essay about sex work talking about Prohibition? Because of my next sentence, which is not what is usually said about Prohibition. Insofar as their critique of alcohol consumption was concerned, the Prohibitionists were right. Alcohol is indeed one of the most dangerous substances regularly consumed by human beings. It is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths per year, and indeed probably more now than even was the case before Prohibition, because at that time few people owned cars and drunk driving was less of a problem. (Over 10,000 people die every year in drunk driving accidents.) About half of all accidental shootings (over 30,000 a year) are alcohol related. Alcohol plays a key role in domestic violence and a massive role in three different ways in sexual assault— drunk men are more likely to commit rape, drunk women are more likely to be raped, and drunk friends and witnesses are less likely to report, stop, or give competent testimony relating to rapes. Over 40,000 people a year die of alcohol related liver disease. (Yes, you read that right.) Alcohol also gets people fired from their jobs and breaks up marriages, relationships, and families.

And further, Prohibitionists were right about another thing— Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption. Our data collection wasn’t as good back then, but all the indicators are that alcohol related deaths declined significantly during Prohibition.

So what was there not to like? Well, quite simply, Prohibition was unenforceable. While some people certainly did obey the law (just as more people have tried marijuana since it became at least quasi-legal in many states), large numbers of people did not, and that created an entire black market and massive criminal enterprises to supply the demand. Further, alcohol became openly available in major cities, and there simply were not enough enforcement agents to possibly shut these facilities down. (New York had no more than a few hundred Prohibition agents and 25,000 or more speakeasies selling alcohol.) Law enforcement also went on the take because there was so much revenue generated from the sale of alcohol. Civil liberties were violated as desperate police agencies looked to technology and invasion of privacy though such things as wiretapping to make up for the disadvantages they faced in enforcing the law. Wealthy people found ways as they always do to escape the law; what law enforcement did exist came down unequally on poor, rural, and immigrant communities. And most famously, American cities, most notably Chicago, became battlegrounds as organized crime families and syndicates fought each other on the streets with machine guns for control of the lucrative businesses.

The key point is— something can both be a theoretically correct wonkish policy (in the sense of saving lives and improving well being) and yet also be completely unworkable (because large numbers of the public want to engage in the activity and will thwart any effort to prevent them from doing so). And when that happens, you empower the criminal sector to use violence to take over what could be a lawful (and lawfully taxed) business, and end up with a loss of freedom on many levels, as citizens suffer at the hands of police and private violence, as well as losing the freedom to make their own life choices even if someone else thinks they are wrong and bad for them.

Prohibition lasted just over a decade and was repealed by a constitutional amendment at the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

We tend to think like Prohibition as if it is some curious episode in history where America did this really weird thing that it should have known could not fly, and then the lesson was learned and we stopped it. But actually, we never actually learned the lesson of Prohibition. Because almost everyone who doesn’t like something that large numbers of people like to do still wants to prohibit it. That is always the dream.

For years, for instance, states insisted on banning gay sex. This, of course, didn’t stop gays from having sex with each other. What it did do was massively infringe on people’s civil liberties, as people lost jobs, were improperly surveilled upon, and had to live in fear because other people disapproved of who they slept with. It took a Supreme Court decision (Lawrence v. Texas) to end this, which is actually shameful; legislatures should not have needed the Supreme Court to strike down these laws to repeal them.

The War on Drugs is an obvious successor to Prohibition. Especially, I would make clear, the war on marijuana. Some other drugs are less widely used— I don’t actually think the war on heroin, for instance, is effective, but it doesn’t feature the totalizing defiance that marijuana Prohibition did before the recent trend of partially legalized medical and in some cases recreational weed. Again, civil liberties were violated in drug raids, wealthy people always got their pot and rarely got arrested while Black and Hispanic and poor people did, and organized crime got rich off the trade.

We’ve not really tried to ban guns in this country (and we probably can’t due to the Second Amendment), but the leading gun control groups would love us to try. And I’m here to tell you, it wouldn’t work. Gun owners love their guns and aren’t giving them up. There is already something of a black market for guns through the gun show loophole, and that would be magnified and become a mass criminal enterprise if purchasing a handgun were made illegal in this country.

But I think sex work is the best example of all, aside from alcohol, of how Prohibition doesn’t work. Because this is something that has always been illegal in America, outside of a few rural counties in Nevada, and has always been a specific focus of law enforcement. There are probably hundreds of vice squads (however they might be labeled) in police and sheriff’s departments throughout the United States. And the federal government invests in the criminalization of sex work as well (they call this “human trafficking” but, to be clear, much of what they are doing is the same thing that local law enforcement is doing: arresting sex workers, their pimps and madames, and their clients). This all doesn’t come cheap— the federal government spends about $100 million a year combating sex work, and though the numbers for localities are not easy to come by, it has to total in the billions nationwide.

So what does all that money buy us? Well, let’s take an easy example, one that implicates both the federal and local law enforcement expenditures, and indeed an example that is often cited as a prime form of “human trafficking” as well as sex work: the Asian massage parlor. As a random example, I searched “Asian massage parlor San Francisco” on google, and you can click on this and see what comes up. There are, as is no surprise, a ton of Asian massage places in San Francisco. And before you tell me “how do you know they aren’t all legit?”, well, the market for Asian massages with sexual services is so open and obvious that it is advertised on the Internet. Here’s a link to one such online forum— it is far from the only one where customers discuss everything down to which girls at which parlors do which things and for how much money. Or you can look at “bedpage”, a site that popped up when “backpage”, another site that was doing the same thing, had been seized by the federal government. Backpage, in turn, became popular after Craigslist, which had been allowing advertisements for Asian massage places, decided to crack down on illegal activity. Here’s bedpage’s San Francisco page. Pretty obvious what is going on there. You can also check out rubmaps, Humaniplex, and a hundred other sites I can’t even name but which are often just a google search away. You can also find groups on various social media apps devoted to the hobby, and on porn aggregator sites, you can even find numerous hidden camera videos of sexual encounters in Asian massage outlets. (I am not going to link to those, which strike me as a massive and despicable invasion of the sex workers’ privacy.)

My point is, here’s something we know the federal government spends $100 million a year to try and stop, and which local governments spend massive amounts of money fighting as well. And we know there are periodic busts of these places (famously, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was apprehended in a bust of the Orchids of Asia spa in Florida), just as periodically a speakeasy got raided in Prohibition. These places not only continue to operate in America’s cities (and to be clear, it’s not just San Francisco; go ahead and do google searches of Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta, Tampa, New York, Washington, D.C., etc.— they are all over). They do it openly and obviously and nobody makes any attempt to hide what is going on. Indeed, you probably know exactly what an Asian massage parlor that offers sexual services looks like from the outside. You’ve seen them, and you know what they are, even if you never set foot inside. This is exactly like Prohibition. It all occurs out in the open, in plain sight.

And let’s not put a fine point on it— a lot of Asian women working as sex workers in Asian massage parlors are trafficked. In other words, while we could make arguments about high end sex workers who make free choices and are paid well for their services, the Asian massage parlor market is not that. These are immigrant women, sometimes brought over and housed in appalling circumstances, servicing numerous clients a day in horrendous conditions for very little money. The type of sex work where the arguments for shutting it down are strongest. And in theory, one that should be easier to police because it involves people crossing borders and flying or shipping into ports, rather than just some local woman selling a sex act. Yet we can’t. We spend a lot of money, and we can’t shut it down.

Or take strip clubs. Again, that same site that I cited to for Asian massage parlors also contains extensive information about what services are for sale in the VIP rooms of strip clubs. You can read about the particularly notorious Tampa strip club scene here. Or read about the City of Industry, a suburb of Los Angeles with famously raunchy strip clubs, here. Again, nothing is really on the down low here. It’s all out in the open. You think law enforcement can’t read these websites? Nobody’s hiding anything, and yet we can’t shut it down. Strip clubs do get raided, but the work goes on, the hope still lives, and the wet dreams shall never die.

Again, the openness of everything is the true point here. You can’t argue that if we just tried harder and threw more money and agents at it, we would stop this. This isn’t a situation like even drug trafficking or the numbers racket where you need massive investigatory manpower to find out where the illegal activity is happening and who is involved. It’s like Prohibition where the police knew where many of the speakeasies were. It’s just impossible to shut them all down.

Beyond that, other forms of sex work also occur right out in the open. Here’s a google search for Las Vegas escorts. As you might imagine, they are not hard to find. (In case you don’t know, sex work is illegal in Las Vegas; it is only legal in very rural counties in Nevada, at facilities that are usually far away from even the nearest small town.) Back when the Yellow Pages was a thing, the Las Vegas Yellow Pages were the thickest in the country despite Vegas being only the 29th largest metropolitan area; the reason, of course, is that all the escort services advertised openly (and often with display advertisements) in the phone book. You can also find “escort guides” on the streets of Las Vegas as well.

And while Las Vegas is the most ridiculous example, escort services are widely and openly available in every major metropolitan area in the United States. You can look through this google search for New York escorts, for instance. Again, nobody’s hiding anything, even though there are occasional high profile busts of escort services (such as the one that ensnared former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer). It’s all out in the open, because it’s literally impossible to stop.

Street prostitution is also common in major cities. I can’t do this via google, but I can certainly tell you that I recently dodged a traffic jam on the 110 freeway by veering off onto Figueroa Street and driving through South Central LA. This is a known “track” for sex workers, and they were everywhere, some of them approaching cars that pulled over on the side of the road to negotiate transactions. This sort of thing exists all over the country as well, and once again it is out in the open.

And of course there are also other forms of sex work. Seeking Arrangements is a high profile, very successful website where young women sell sex in the form of “sugar daddy” relationships with wealthier men. And besides the Asian Massage Parlor artifice, immigrant communities often develop unique forms of sex work that flourish where they form cohesive neighborhoods, whether it is the KTV “room salons” in Koreatown in Los Angeles or the Vietnamese “coffee shops” that proliferate in Orange County.

And the bottom line is: just like with Prohibition and just like with the War on Marijuana, any person who seeks to purchase sex can do so, easily. We prohibit this stuff, we spend money investigating it, we throw vice cops and FBI agents at it, and in the end, anyone who wants to purchase sex can still do it. It’s all a failure.

And worse, all the things that were so bad about Prohibition are playing out here. Ever wonder who is making money bringing those Asian “masseuses” over to the United States to work as sex workers in Asian massage parlors? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not a legitimate travel agency or temp agency. It’s almost certainly organized crime networks. And how much money do pimps in their various forms, strip club managers, massage parlor managers, etc., pocket for work done by sex workers in this system? I couldn’t begin to count it.

Plus, vice squads massively infringe civil liberties. The Robert Kraft case is a good example of this, where law enforcement secretly recorded hundreds of private sex acts in the Orchids of Asia massage parlor over the course of weeks. (This helped get the cases thrown out after Kraft, to his great credit and unlike most clients apprehended in such investigations, decided to fight the charges.)

So why is it that we can’t find a more effective way to stop sex work? Well, I think it’s obvious, but it probably needs to be said. Just like a lot of people really want to drink, or really want to smoke pot, a lot of men, especially younger men with high sex drives, really enjoy sex and either do not have sexual partners or want more variety than they are getting at home. I think it’s important to make that second point, by the way. Sex work advocates sometimes portray male customers as sexually deprived and therefore sympathetic, but plenty of married men and men in relationships who are getting sex at home patronize sex workers as well. You can make what moral judgments you want about all these men (that’s a separate discussion), but the point is, the demand is massive and there really isn’t anything that the government is going to do to stop the very large number of men who really want to pay for sex (for whatever reason) from paying for sex. This is what they want to do, and when a critical mass people want to do something, Prohibition just doesn’t work.

So in the end, I really think we need to just give up, just like we did with alcohol, and look to other models as to how to mitigate the harms done by sex work. The reality is that the worst forms of sex work are tremendously oppressive to women (a fact that even relentlessly sex positive people like me would acknowledge) and we need to think about whether it would be better to have legal, regulated, and taxed forms of sex work rather than illegal, unregulated, often coercive, and often pimped forms of it. But that conversation— which I think needs to happen— never will as long as the Prohibitionists continue to dream of a world that can never actually be achieved.