Brothels, Streetwalkers, And Cathouses - Bring The Free Market Back To The World's Oldest Profession

Of course there are hookers in Washington.  Just take the short trip over the Anacostia River to Southeast.

In fact SE 32nd Street and MLK avenue is an open market jamboree where crack, Fentanyl, heroin, guns, and women vie for space.  Cars from Capitol Hill, Prince George's County, and Virginia crowd the avenue.  It's Saturday afternoon, always a brisk time for business. 

Prostitution, along with drugs and firearms, is illegal in DC, but the ghetto has always been given a bye, part of the consideration given to street culture by the municipality and its white liberal supporters.  The black man has suffered the indignity of enslavement, Jim Crow, and segregation for three hundred years, so it is only conscionable and right to let his culture thrive and flourish.

Prostitution of course is not unknown in official Washington.  Madame Duplessis' establishment has served the needs of Senators, Congressmen, and governors for years.  Although there have been the usual and predictable clean sweeps - feminists decried the modern enslavement of women; neo-Puritans with Bibles open to Leviticus 9:22-24 shouted down the perfidy of men; and labor organizers who recognized prostitution as a legitimate enterprise but one in need of institutional protection - the house of Madame Duplessis was always given a pass.

Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York, caught in flagrante delicto in the McKinley Suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, claimed he was too busy to chase women.  He was quickly run out of office, but he insisted he had done nothing wrong. Yes, he had committed an infraction of an outdated blue law, but such establishments such as that of Madame Duplessis who had furnished the goods, did a civic service.  Men who might otherwise be courting other women and abandoning their wives, saved them grief and aggravation. 

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former candidate for the French presidency and a known Lothario was caught with a harem of paid women in a luxurious apartment on the Champs Elysees, he said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  Women all look the same without their clothes’ and with that took the lid off of the little sexual opprobrium left in Paris. 

 

He was right, after all, so why should any man be convicted of such innocent behavior?  Of course the Rue St. Denis in Paris, not far from the Centre Pompidou, was well-known for its streetwalkers who solicited sexual partners in front of cafes, boulangeries, boucheries, and charcuteries.  

These were the classic Paris icons, Irma La Douce, all tarted up in short skirts, high heels, and face paint unbothered by the police or municipal authorities because sex was a national treasure, a tourist attraction, and an international export. 

Prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and it is easy to see why.  Women have long been aware of the economic value of their sex and have been more than willing to trade it for favors, bonbons, and minks.  Men have always been indiscriminate in their sexual desire, any port in a storm, so on an evening off and after a few cafe-Cognacs why not drop by St Denis?

Shakespeare made bawds, pimps, and whores a feature in his Henry IV plays - Falstaff was a regular, a man of hearty appetites, fitting for the likes of Mistress Quickly and her Boar's Head tavern women.  

Pericles' daughter Marina gets sold into prostitution but thanks to her innocence, purity, and godliness she never has to consent and in fact converts johns to righteousness. 

The American West was not without its saloons and whore houses, and it was part of trail riding to come in from herding cattle and go upstairs with a young tart.  The women did not feel oppressed or put upon by randy, abusive men. Tricking was just a profession, a lucrative one, and a way out of the cow towns of the prairie.

So where does this current distaste for prostitution come from?  Certainly a by-product of progressive duplicity - championing the strength and enterprise of women on the one hand, and desperately trying to protect them from men on the other.  Prostitutes are nothing but men's playthings, examples of their innate, persistent devaluation of women, feminists say.  Nothing could be more demeaning, dishonoring, and wrong than a woman being forced to open her sex to all comers for money. 

In a supposedly laissez-faire market economy it is surprising that prostitution has come under such harsh and punitive light.  Why shouldn't sex be viewed as an economic commodity like any other product.  After all, prostitution aside, who ever said that sexual favors were not part of any contract negotiation? Even in the best of marriages, some sexual trading is par for the course. 

 

When rumors circulated in Chillicothe, home to the Victorian era suffragettes and the Women's Temperance Society of America, that the conservative government now in power in Washington was considering decriminalizing prostitution, the citizens were nonplussed.  'A travesty, an unconscionable civil injustice, a welcome mat for the abuse of women'' said Margaret Owens, a longtime, militant 'Christian feminist' who had championed the purity of women rather than their equality; and in so saying became the ally of more secular women's groups who found prostitution an insult to womanhood on psycho-social and political grounds. 

Yet the men of Chillicothe were quite pleased by the possibility.  Of course at first recondite about their expectations, they gradually became more outspoken.  'What harm does it do?' they said.  Sex with a hooker presented no threat to marriage, nor suggested any umbrage or marital dissatisfaction.  Men are simply built differently than women, and sex can be compartmentalized - hookers on one side, loving wives on the other.  In this male universe the twain never have to meet. 

Liberalizing - decriminalizing - prostitution makes eminent sense.  It will return a naturally occurring free market activity to laissez-faire economics, grant men the right to express their inbred sexual needs, and reduce the rates of divorce, separation, and abandonment. 

Opening the doors to brothels would not harm women in any way.  Women would work there by choice, not obligation.  Wives would be assured of otherwise unfaithful husbands, men would be happy, tax revenues would help fill municipal coffers, and Chillicothe society would be back to 'human normal' as one alderman put it. 

Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor caught buck naked in a Mayflower suite, now vindicated, was quoted as saying, 'Bravo.  It's about time'; and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French Lothario, who had run into the scandal mill of New York politics, accused of rape by an overly ambitious District Attorney but then acquitted, noted that America was finally becoming more French. 

'I've got too much on my plate', said Donald Trump when the prostitution initiative was brought to his attention; but privately he thought it was a good idea.  Of course he as a young man never ever had to resort to commercial sex, women were always at his beck and call, but for his less fortunate constituents, why not?