America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth
2014-02-15 · Guest: Maggie McNeill (Former sex worker and blogger) · 82:30
Criminalization and morality of sex work
Bob Zadek and former sex worker and madam Maggie McNeill discuss the legal and moral complexities surrounding the criminalization of prostitution in America. They explore the libertarian argument for sex work as a voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange and contrast it with historical perspectives, modern feminist debates, and the class-based hypocrisy of “sugar daddy” websites versus street-level work.
Topics: Prostitution, Sex Work, Libertarianism, Criminal Justice Reform, Feminism, Moral Panic, Voluntary Exchange, Victimless Crimes
Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Maggie McNeill (Guest), Caller (Audrey)
Introduction: The Rules of Dating [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, every Sunday at noon on Talk 910, San Francisco’s talk station. I am your eponymous host, Bob Zadek. Thank you so much for sharing an hour and a half with me this Sunday afternoon. We are the only live libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and the only live libertarian talk radio show all weekend. Thanks so much for tuning in and getting your dose of libertarian thought. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation.
A while ago, when I was dating, I was introduced to a woman through electronic dating. We met, and on the first date, we went to a restaurant and we sat down to have dinner. This woman said to me, “Before we get started, before we see if we like each other, I need you to understand one thing. I’m old fashioned,” she explained. “The man always pays. Whether we’re having dinner or the movies,” she says, “that’s the way I was brought up. The man always pays.” And that was fine with me, and off we went and we dated.
The question which we will discuss on today’s show—the question: was that one-sentence statement of the rules by this woman whom I started dating, was that prostitution? If not, what is prostitution? And what is, and why should prostitution, whatever it means, be a crime? Should it be a crime?
And just to get us off on the right foot, America has invented the internet, the iPhone, the computer, and the criminalization of sex work and prostitution. In the history of civilization, prostitution and sex work in general was never or rarely a crime. It was accepted, and it became a crime only somewhat recently, in the grand scheme of things, in America. How did that happen? What is there about America that makes us want to criminalize a voluntary exchange, mutually beneficial, between two consenting adults?
This is hard stuff. When I sought the answer to this, I immediately thought I would invite today’s guest, Maggie McNeill, to join us. Maggie McNeill has a BA in English and a Master’s in Library Science from Louisiana State. She worked as a librarian, and then, as she puts it, economic necessity spurred her to take up sex work. And for about nine years, she worked as a stripper, then a call girl, and a madam. Eventually she married, retired, and is now living in the United States, not engaged in that activity anymore. Maggie, thanks so much for joining me this afternoon.
Maggie McNeill: Hi Bob. Great to be here.
The Honest Courtesan [04:21]
Bob Zadek: Maggie, thanks so much for joining me on the show. Now, you write a blog, The Honest Courtesan. What prompted you to write the blog, and what is the issue that you try to invite those who subscribe to your blog to appreciate and understand?
Maggie McNeill: Well, I had always wanted, ever since I was an active sex worker, I had always thought that it was important and necessary to kind of get the idea across to more people, to get them to understand that it isn’t like people think it is. There’s this huge myth, this huge mythology that’s been built up around prostitution all over the world, but particularly in this country. That we’re bad people, we’re villains, we’re criminals, or more recently, that we’re victims, that there are terrible men making us do terrible things, and that we’re fallen, that we’re low, that we’re dirty, blah, blah, blah.
And I needed to be able to address that. I wanted to be able to speak to people and say, “No, really, this is a job. It’s a job like any other job, and we’re just like other people.” The only thing—if I had to pick one thing and say that all sex workers have in common, the only thing I can think of that’s common with all of us is that we’re all at least comfortable enough to be able to take money for sex. And that’s it. I mean, that’s the only thing that I can’t think of anything else that we would have in common.
The Libertarian Perspective on Voluntary Exchange [06:10]
Bob Zadek: And the point is, we start, and every once in a while we’ll come back to the libertarian perspective—we start with the concept that money for sex, or vice versa, is a voluntary exchange which is mutually beneficial between consenting adults. Each one of those concepts is important. It’s voluntary, mutually beneficial, and agreed to exchange without coercion. And if we start with that, it is so neutral that we have to scratch our heads and say, why is it, why is that mutual exchange singularly special? And what in God’s name makes that the subject of—makes that act criminal when almost any other voluntary exchange which is mutually beneficial among consenting adults is permitted? And you can’t, no matter how hard you try, with any degree of intellectual honesty, you cannot identify anything that is distinguishing about that activity.
Maggie McNeill: No, that’s true. And I think it’s rooted—and this is something I talked about in a recent essay I did for Cato Unbound—the only thing that really makes it different is that for most of human history, of course, there was a strong chance of it resulting in conception. And in the days before birth control and days before easily available abortion, that was true. I mean, that did indeed make sex different. But I think it’s really interesting that at the same time as modern birth control methods were becoming available, and the same time that modern abortion methods were becoming available at the beginning of the 20th century, at the same time as basically the one thing that made sex work different from other kinds of work, at the same time as that was being removed, was the same time as we were beginning to pretend it was even more different. Do you see what I’m saying?
Bob Zadek: Sure. It’s a strange juxtaposition of events. This is Bob Zadek. I just want to remind the audience, because I suspect a lot of people out there have quite strong views, so I’ll be reminding the audience how to join the conversation more often than usual, just because the topic is to me so gosh-darn interesting. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Maggie McNeill. We are discussing the legalization of prostitution. How in the world did we get to a place in America where prostitution and other forms of sex work as well are criminal? It makes no sense.
Maggie is a former stripper, call girl, and madam—in short, a sex worker, which is sort of a more neutral way to describe it, and it captures lots of different activities. And you know, Maggie, the strange thing is about sex work and prostitution is that if you—as I have in preparation for this show—if you read criminal statutes, it simplistically is exchanging sex for money or money’s worth. And if you start with that definition, almost any exchange of sex is—look, people, nobody would engage in sex unless they were getting something in exchange, whether it’s psychic or physical pleasure or something else.
A date—many women when they go out on dates, they have an expectation of having the guy pay. It may be old fashioned, but many women entertain, as they are entitled to, that assumption. And by the application of the statute, if a woman says, “I will not date you unless you pick up the tab,” then that woman is engaged in prostitution. Now, she would be aghast at being accused of that and quite insulted. And even we get to: why is it an insult to tell somebody you are engaging in sex for money? It’s not insulting to call somebody a professional masseuse. That’s not an insult, but that’s engaging of physical touching, and it may be sexual—the recipient may have a sexual feeling incidentally, or maybe not incidentally. But calling somebody a masseuse is not an insult. How did we get to a point that calling someone who exchanges sex for money—that’s an insult? It’s just a profession. It’s an exchange.
Puritans vs. Classical Liberals [11:41]
Maggie McNeill: Well, obviously I agree. But what I think is happening, especially in this country, is that we have two very different and really opposed traditions in the United States. We have the tradition of liberty, going back to the Founding Fathers and the philosophical and classical liberalism. But we also had—let’s face it—we also had a lot of Puritans settle here. A lot of people who religiously had some ideas of trying to create their view of a perfect society, and that society was founded on Christian principles. And so you have these two different threads running through American history, and I think what happened is merely that over the first couple of centuries, the puritanical streak got stronger.
Historical Context: Prostitution in the Church and Rome [12:39]
Bob Zadek: Although I should point out that the history of the criminalization of prostitution through much of the civilization of the planet—even in the church—prostitution was accepted as necessary, as biologically necessary and important in many ways, and was almost never criminalized. Indeed, you weren’t even one down. Even the church didn’t criminalize or consider prostitution to be a sin. And it was only—and in the early days of our country, prostitution was not a crime. Most people don’t understand this. They just think, well, it’s always been a crime. But it’s relatively new. I think it happened in the very beginning of the 20th century that we started to criminalize prostitution.
Maggie McNeill: Yes. Well, it was considered a sin in Christian thought, definitely. But basically the medieval church’s view was that basically it was a lesser sin that prevented a greater sin. They considered it more or less the lesser of two evils. So there was this view that almost kind of like a scapegoating type of thing, the idea that prostitutes were committing a sin in order to prevent other people’s greater sin.
And so in the 13th century, you actually had this movement start where the church actually started doing this thing where, yes, we have prostitutes and we’re tolerating them, but we’re going to make it possible for them to get out of that sin if they want to. And actually the church even encouraged men to marry prostitutes for a while, you know, to save their souls. But it was not considered a secular thing. It was definitely a church thing.
There were certainly laws in many periods of history involving prostitution, but what they mostly were intended to do was not to stop it. They were mostly intended to segregate the “good women” from the “bad women.” In other words, you see things like sumptuary laws. These were very, very common. At some periods in Roman history, for instance, and again in Italian history of the Renaissance, you’ll see that prostitutes have to wear a certain color. You know, there was a time in Roman history when all prostitutes had to wear yellow. If you were a prostitute, you must be wearing yellow, because the idea was, okay, oh, there’s a woman that’s wearing yellow, she must be a prostitute. So we can’t mistake her for a good woman.
And this was especially important because for these people, because, you know, they wouldn’t want—my goodness, we wouldn’t want a man marrying one. You know, so this idea of creating this separate class, this separate group of people who can do this. And of course, part of the thing was that especially the higher-priced sex workers, they could dress so nicely, they could dress in such rich clothes that they could potentially be mistaken for a woman of the upper classes. And of course, in those days, class was everything. So we couldn’t have that. You know, nobody cared—nobody among the lawmakers, anyway—nobody among the lawmakers cared if a working-class woman was mistaken for a prostitute. But goodness, we can’t have, you know, the senatorial class women be mistaken for that. And so that’s why you get these things. They’re basically intended to just draw these lines to separate the good women, the socially approved women, from the bad women that we will nonetheless tolerate because we know we need them.
The Progressive Movement and Criminalization [16:38]
Bob Zadek: In discussing the legalization of prostitution and how we got there, I invite my friends out there to do the intellectually interesting step of going backwards one step and assume that prostitution was not illegal and ask yourself, should it be illegal? And if so, why? That’s the first intellectual question. The second intellectual question is, as you think about the issue, ask yourself, what is prostitution? And test your definition against normal social behavior in America or in the rest of the world. And if you do that, it’s inescapable to conclude that we just are trapped in this mythology that we just have today, but we don’t know how we got here and why we’re here, and we can’t defend it. It just always has been.
And in America, as I said earlier, we had prostitution was not a crime until maybe anywhere in America, until maybe the Progressive movement of around 1909 or thereabouts. And in a remarkable five-year period, prostitution from being not a crime became a crime. And it was only—and it was because—it wasn’t because of any morality as such. It was because women were felt to be inferior and had to be rescued, rescued from an occupation they voluntarily chose. So it came about in a way that ought to make feminists aghast, that women somehow needed to be protected from society, from carrying on an occupation they have chosen. And it was only in a five-year period in this burst of progressive frenzy that something which was acceptable and not a crime became a crime. And so today we are just assuming it is—we know it is—that it should be a crime without asking ourselves why and what is—what exactly is prostitution? And if you go there, you find yourself stuck and you can’t answer those questions, which means it’s bad public policy. It’s contrary to how Americans behave, and it denies the legitimate carrying on of an occupation which is purely voluntary.
And Maggie, the role of feminists—it’s a very strange role. Feminists ought to be insisting that this occupation not be criminalized, because if women are victims, they’re victims of the law, not of the profession.
Choice Feminists vs. Abolitionists [20:14]
Maggie McNeill: No, I agree. And there are some feminists, to be fair—there are some groups of feminists who do agree with that, who do feel as though, you know, women’s choice needs to be respected and that women’s labor needs to be respected and that, you know, and that sex work is fine. And these feminists will defend, and often vehemently. The problem is that there is more than one strain of thought that calls itself feminist. And there is another group whose viewpoint basically is—I guess you could kind of call them a sort of collectivist feminist. They basically feel as though womankind and their views for womankind are more important than any individual woman. And they will deride the other kind of feminist as “choice feminists,” and they use that as a slur, actually, that something’s wrong with the idea of allowing women their choices. And they use this very—they’ll use this very Marxist kind of speech. They’ll talk about “false consciousness,” that, you know, we can’t possibly be making our choices in our right minds. We’re suffering from false consciousness, we’re victims of the patriarchy, blah, blah, blah. They’ll even trot out—they’ve even trotted out in the past years “Stockholm Syndrome” to try to explain why we just don’t see that there’s something wrong with it. “My goodness, how can you not see that?” they say.
Bob Zadek: The Stockholm Syndrome, just for the audience, is a syndrome where generally if you are a captive, you end up having a bond with your captor, even though your captor ought to be your enemy, but in some ways you start to get won over by your captor. It’s a psychological phenomenon somewhat documented, but I just wanted to help the audience understand what you meant by Stockholm Syndrome.
Maggie McNeill: I’m sorry about that.
Bob Zadek: You’re not going to believe it, Maggie, but some listeners—not many of them, but a few—may not spend 24/7 worrying about all of these issues, or they may have been worrying about them but got so distracted they might have forgotten about the Stockholm Syndrome. So I just had to jump in, and for the one or two listeners who forgot what the Stockholm Syndrome was, I had to remind them.
Maggie McNeill, we are talking about prostitution. Should it be a crime? What is prostitution? Why is it a crime? And shouldn’t it be decriminalized? Indeed, shouldn’t it be totally legitimatized? Maggie is a former sex worker, a former librarian, but we are not talking about library science in this show today. We are talking about sex work. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. When we come back, I’m going to ask Maggie to share with us, to the extent relevant to the conversation, some of her personal experiences as a sex worker which helped her form her views about the legalization of prostitution. You won’t want to miss this. I’ll be back in 60 seconds.
Maggie’s Personal Journey [25:04]
Bob Zadek: Maggie, tell us about—tell us about, so the audience can get to know you, your firsthand experience with sex work and how it helped you form your opinions which led to your writing extensively in your blog on sex work and the legalization of prostitution.
Maggie McNeill: Well, it was a long—I once said to my husband, if prostitution is something you fall into, it was a very long, slow fall for me. It started when I was a teenager. I had always been fascinated by, you know, reading about the lives of the courtesans and things like that. It was definitely something I fantasized about. I never really thought it was something I’d end up doing, but it just, you know, it was something I thought about.
And then when I was in school, when I was at UNO, there were often times when, as happens to every student, I simply didn’t have enough money to make ends meet. And so it got to the point where I started engaging in what is sometimes called in the literature “casual prostitution.” In other words, almost like your lady friend that you started talking about at the very beginning, but a little bit more obvious than that. To the kind of point where I would do something like, “Oh, well, Joe, you know, I’d love to go out with you tonight, but I have this bill I’m concerned about.” “And oh, how much is it, Maggie?” “Oh, well, it’s $70.” “Oh, well, I’ll pay that bill for you.” And that sort of a thing. And I did this, you know, on and off through school. And then after school, I got married—not to my present husband.
Bob Zadek: And did your friends—did your friends, do you discuss it with your friends or was it something you wanted to keep quiet?
Maggie McNeill: No, I had an unusual circle of friends. We were rather sexually open. And this was in the early ’80s. The country’s attitude—a lot of people may not remember that in the sexual revolution times in the ’60s and ’70s, there was a lot of move toward prostitutes’ rights, as it was called in those days. You know, Margo St. James did a lot. It became really kind of, at one time, NOW’s—one of NOW’s planks in their platform.
Bob Zadek: NOW is the National Organization for Women, a feminist organization that was formed in the, I guess, ’70s or ’80s.
Maggie McNeill: Yeah, they were—in the ’70s is when they had—it was in their platform. And then they kind of drifted away from that. Well, it’s a big long story in the ’80s. But in any case, in the early ’80s, it wasn’t quite so such a horrible thing in the minds certainly of people in my circle. I knew two other girls, actually, that used sex to get money. One who did it sort of indirectly—she sort of had a bunch of arrangements with various people that they would give her things in exchange for sex. And I had another one who she would just normally go about doing things, you know, regular job and getting money from her ex-husband and things like that. And then every once in a while, if she really had a big problem, she would just say to me, “Oh well, looks like I gotta go turn a few tricks.” And she would. You know, she just had some people she could call that she knew would always be up for it. So in my circle it was not—it was not normal, it wasn’t like everybody did it, but there were several others that did and nobody really thought too much about it.
Escorting vs. Dating [28:33]
Bob Zadek: And then in your bio you describe being a madam. Was that a change in your, if I can use the expression, business plan?
Maggie McNeill: Well, what happened was, when I first started—I had gotten kind of sick of stripping. And when I started escorting, I started working for this one agency.
Bob Zadek: Tell us about escorting. Tell us about the activity of escorting.
Maggie McNeill: Well, basically, it’s sometimes not a lot different from dating. You know, a lot of the times you’re just going out—I mean, I had guys take me to the symphony, I had a lot of guys take me to dinner. I mean, that was not unusual. Even in a short call, even in a typical one-hour type of thing, there’s a lot of conversation. The only really difference between it and normal dating is A, it’s a lot shorter, and B, the guy knows what he’s getting. You know, the guy’s not wondering the whole time, “Am I going to get lucky?” He knows he’s going to get lucky. It’s just a matter of, you know, how long it takes to get there.
Bob Zadek: And “getting lucky,” of course, is a strange expression. It’s like when I go into a restaurant and I order a meal, I don’t consider myself getting lucky when they actually bring it to me! So it’s not like I hit a home run, they brought me what I ordered.
Maggie McNeill: In an ordinary day, I mean, you know.
Bob Zadek: I understand. I’m just teasing.
Maggie McNeill: But you know, so it’s different. I mean, different guys are different. You know, some people wanted to do role-playing type things. Some were men of very few words, they wanted to kind of get straight to it. Other guys wanted to have their back rubbed, or, you know, mostly they wanted conversation. A lot of them wanted conversation.
Bob Zadek: And so this was just a transaction. And the thought that it is somehow—that what you were doing, and in some states I should mention the criminal activity is the male paying for it. And states try to reduce prostitution by criminalizing—and they used to publicize when they caught males buying sex, they would publicize their names and try to shame them into better behavior. So, but here you have two adults, no coercion, both getting a benefit, both perfectly happy with the exchange, both better off for the exchange, and yet in the big picture, they were committing a crime. And they were committing a crime because somebody else who was not a party to that transaction felt they shouldn’t have done it. How intrusive can that be? Somebody who was not involved in the transaction, i.e., a legislator, has the temerity to say, “It doesn’t affect me in any way, but I will cause what you are doing voluntarily to be a crime.” Man, how offensive can it get?
The “Sex Trafficking” Narrative [31:52]
Maggie McNeill: Extremely. But they simply—the people who are in favor of this—well, you see, you have to—this is one of the reasons for the whole sex trafficking thing starting, is that I think what was happening is that people were beginning to see what we’re just talking about. A lot of people were beginning to see that it is offensive, that it is ridiculous, that it is silly, that the government—
Bob Zadek: When you say it’s offensive, what’s offensive—what you mean is, the criminalization is offensive, not the act.
Maggie McNeill: Yes, the criminalization. No, no, no, yes, the criminalization. Right. And I think that part of that was tied to the whole issue of gay rights. I think as gay people began to gain more rights, people began to look at other consensual sexual activities and say, “Well, wait a minute, why should this be criminalized either?” And so we were definitely moving in a direction, I think, of where it was going to be—we were definitely moving toward decriminalization or legalization, something like that.
But—and that’s why the opponents, the people who want it criminalized, the people who have an agenda—the same people who want porn illegal—these people had to come up with a new way to represent it, a new way to sell it. And in fact, in one of the documents, the internal documents of one of the big abolitionist organizations, they come right out and say it—and this is available on the internet, I’ve got a link to it on my website—they come right out and say it. They say, “Well, if we frame the transaction as being coercive, if we say it’s sex trafficking, if we talk about coercion and pimps and that sort of thing, people will then be more amenable to laws about it than if we just represent it as prostitution.” And so they began to see this, you know, and this is why we’re having this whole sex trafficking moral panic going on right now, is because of that conscious and cynical redefinition of adult consensual prostitution into something coercive.
And of course, there’s always the derail. As soon as you start talking about consensual prostitution as we’re doing, suddenly it’s, “Well, what about the coerced ones? Well, what about the children? Well, what about this?” You know, they—
Moral Panic and Coercion [34:21]
Bob Zadek: It’s always the children and the coercion. And the fact is, I have no idea—by the way, Mag, I have to digress for one second. You used the phrase which I—my lights went off. You used the phrase “moral panic.” And you couldn’t hear me, but I smiled, because I said to myself, how can one have a moral panic? What that means is you are having a panic attack because somebody else is doing something that you wish they wouldn’t do. How could that be the cause of panic? Just go about your life! What they are doing is not your problem. And so the whole phrase “moral panic”—those two words should never exist side by side. I just had to digress. I couldn’t stand not butting in with that comment.
But you mentioned coercion, and that’s so interesting, as if prostitution is the only voluntary exchange that is not really voluntary, it is coerced. Now, what is there in the world, what is there about that activity that is more subject to coercion than any other activity on earth? And who exactly is the coercer? Who’s doing the coercing?
I want to quickly say, Maggie, this is Bob Zadek, I’m talking with Maggie McNeill. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. We are talking about the legalization of prostitution. Maggie is a former sex worker, now she blogs on it. Maggie, tell us your blog.
Maggie McNeill: It’s The Honest Courtesan. The address is maggiemcneill.wordpress.com.
Bob Zadek: Thank you. So now this concept—how did we get to this concept, and the feminists love to talk about it—how did we get to an activity that is thousands of years old and was never any more subject to coercion than any other activity? The coercion is, “I’ll pay you to do it.” Well, in that case, I’m coerced into being a lawyer every day because somebody is tempting me by paying me, and therefore I’m a coerced lawyer. Where does the coercion come about? A woman wakes up one morning and decides the highest and best use of her time, or the way she can satisfy a practical requirement in her life or an emotional requirement, is by being a prostitute. A decision voluntarily made. But yet the specter of teenage girls being dragged from third-world Asian-Pacific countries here in shackles—that’s the image they use to criminalize prostitution, while of course that might happen, just as it happens that we have garment worker sweatshops where they may be underage illegal immigrants working long hours who don’t have the ability to protect themselves. And yet we don’t criminalize apparel factories. We just say, if bad behavior happens, let’s criminalize the specific bad behavior, but not the profession itself.
Maggie McNeill: Yes, absolutely. And you see this all the time. You know, nobody is calling to abolish farming. Nobody’s calling to abolish clothes. Nobody’s calling to ban iPads or iPhones. And yet there’s coercion—or domestic service. My goodness, I mean, that’s a real—you see that one all the time, you know, that these women get into these live-in maid situations where there’s extremely coercive situations. But I’m not seeing anybody calling for banning maids. You know, this is all things that they don’t involve sex, and it’s that simple. It’s just when sex is involved, people go crazy. People insist on putting moral dimensions and other—you know, creating these narratives about these things that simply don’t exist, that simply don’t make sense. They make sense to those people. It’s all well and good for a woman to say, “I would never do that.” And that’s fine. You know, I personally could never clean toilets for a living. I could not do that. You know, that’s not to say that cleaning toilets is bad or wrong or that we should criminalize it, or that a woman who does that is low or bad. I just could not do that for a living, me personally. And so for another woman to say, “I could not, you know, take money to have sex with strangers,” well, that’s fine. You don’t have to. You don’t have to. But I don’t want you standing in my way if I want to. And not only that, not just not standing in my way, but actually sending armed men after me to drag me from my workplace and throw me in a cage, supposedly for my own good.
And this happens the world over, these so-called rescue raids. And one of the things that amazes—and I collect these on my website—you see this over and over and over and over again, that you have these situations where the so-called rescuers standing with their mouths open because the women then escape from the so-called rescue center. They bring them in, they lock them up, and then they wonder why they climb the wall. There was last year, there were two of them in India who escaped from a rescue center and they drowned because there was a river—they wanted to get across the river and they didn’t—I don’t remember the exact details, whether the river was just in a high flood stage or whether they didn’t swim well or whatever the reason. But the point is they drowned trying to escape from this place. They considered swimming in this dangerous river to be preferable to staying in this so-called rescue center. And this happens all the time. And you’ll see these crazy, convoluted descriptions in the papers of, “Oh well, they were broken out by pimps from the rescue center,” or “abducted from the rescue center,” or crazy things like that, you know, ignoring the fact that the women left on their own power.
Class and Hypocrisy: Sugar Daddy Websites [41:11]
Bob Zadek: And you know, to me, the area of the criminalization of prostitution is really—it is class and to some degree ethnic discrimination. If you are poor and you exchange sex for money, you’re a whore, you’re a prostitute, and you have to be locked up or dealt with through the criminal justice system. If you are middle-class white or upper-class and you do the same activity, it is part of society. And rather than seem like I’m just railing, I would ask my friends out there just to think about the following.
There are lots of websites which I will call collectively, because that’s what they call themselves, “Sugar Daddy” websites. Now, we all know what in American social mythology Sugar Daddies are. Sugar Daddies are wealthy men who take care of women economically. They look after their economic needs. And the exchange is these women, who are often eye candy, young, attractive, and very often quite intelligent with advanced degrees—these women are on the arm of these wealthy men and they are economically taken care of. That male is called a Sugar Daddy.
And there are websites—there are many websites, not just one—which are called collectively Sugar Daddy websites. And in these websites, women, often maybe mostly—but I don’t know statistically—college-educated, who advertise that they are looking for a Sugar Daddy. And they will list their background, their educational background, of course a photo, and they will also list their requirements, such as, “Before you connect up with me through this electronic dating system, understand I expect you to pay my rent or my tuition or pay for my cosmetic surgery. That’s the expectation. Do not click my website unless you’re prepared to do that.” And the males do that.
And just to read to you from the—it’s one sentence from one of the websites called Mutually Beneficial Relationships. This is a quote from the website, and I ask anybody out there to tell me why this is not prostitution. This is a quote from the website called Mutually Beneficial Relationships. It says, quote, “Whether you’re looking for intimacy or you want your tuition paid, help with your career, financial help with your rent or cosmetic surgery, our website will help you search, match, and find it.”
Now, you’ve just heard the website description of what it provides to women. Now let me read to you the California Penal Code definition of commit prostitution: “to engage in sexual conduct for money or other consideration.” You’ve just heard two sentences. How is that website, which connects up white—I’ll say maybe not all white, but upper-class, middle-class women, educated, who voluntarily want to earn extra money, hook them up with quote “Sugar Daddies”—how in the world is that not prostitution? So it is utter hypocrisy for us to criminalize that behavior. It’s criminal if you’re lower class. It’s not criminal if you’re white, college-educated, middle-class.
We lost Maggie, we’ll get Maggie back in a second. So the question is, that is—how in the world can that be criminal behavior? Isn’t that utter hypocrisy? And for the feminists who consider prostitution to be demeaning, I will simply say: demeaning to them, but not to the person doing it. Let each person decide voluntarily what activities are too demeaning for them to engage in and what activities are fine. People have a right to make a decision. Prostitutes and sex workers provide a product or service that somebody is willing to pay for. It is good for both. How did we get to a place where that is criminal? 800-345-5639 if you can help me sort this out. We lost Maggie for a second, but now Maggie, you’re back.
Maggie McNeill: I’m back.
Bob Zadek: So Maggie, these Sugar Daddy websites—how can that not be prostitution?
Maggie McNeill: Well, it is. It’s that simple, it is. You can parse it and you can draw lines all you want. And this is one of my pet peeves, actually, and I promise not to go on about it too long. But there’s this thing that we even call—we sex workers among ourselves, especially the more activisty kind like me—we refer to this as the “whorearchy.” It’s this kind of thing where different kinds of sex workers will pretend that they’re better than other kinds. Or that people who do work like Sugar Babies will say, “Well, no, no, no, I’m not a sex worker.” And like you’ll have dominatrices will do this. They’ll say, “Oh no, domination is not—is not sex work.” Others disagree. You even have strippers that will say, “Stripping is not sex work.” Of course it is, but they’ll say it isn’t. Because they, again, they want to draw the lines. They want to say, “Our kind of prostitution is not as bad as that other kind.” You even have the escorts will say they’re better than the street workers, and so on and so forth. And you have all these lines that get drawn.
And the lines are drawn because because of criminalization. Because of this, you know, if one group is okay for the police to pick on, obviously everybody wants to not be that one. You know, they don’t want to be the one the hot potato stops on. They don’t want to be the one that the police are going to be beaten up and thrown in cages. And so that’s where you have that. I’ve seen these crazy song and dance the Sugar Babies will do. “Well, it’s because, you know, mine’s longer term.” It’s like, yeah, well, you know, I’ve had clients that had relationships with for years.
The “Danger” Argument [48:25]
Bob Zadek: And Maggie, another complaint by those who are social conservatives or consider themselves to have the moral high ground or are protecting women, or even the feminists who oppose prostitution—they worry about the dangers inherent in the activity. That somehow prostitutes have shorter lifespans, they’re more exposed to danger, they’re vulnerable because they carry on their activity somewhere that’s very much in private where they could be victimized. In as somebody who participated in the activity, is that overblown, nonexistent? What is the effect of the fact that women are susceptible to danger? How does that play into it?
Maggie McNeill: Well, part of it—I mean, it’s true to a degree. And what I mean by that is, anytime a woman goes on a date with a guy she doesn’t know—whether it be a blind date, whether it be from a match website, whether it be because he chatted her up in public and she really doesn’t know what he’s like—but people do this all the time, and nobody’s talking about criminalizing dating. The difference is numbers. So whereas a non-professional woman might do this, let’s say, once a week, on average I did it 16 times a week. So if being in a place with a man you don’t know has X amount of danger, well, for me it was 16X. You see what I’m saying? Because I did it more often. It’s not that the activity’s more dangerous, it’s that it’s more frequent. When you do anything more often, obviously the whatever risk there is—if the risk is, you know, 0.01, well, now if you do it six times as much, now it’s 0.16. Because it’s just because of frequency. So that’s part of it.
Another part of it is criminalization. When you criminalize an activity, you ensure that the people doing that activity are going to have to do it out of sight. And this is particularly true with the street workers. This is something that the Canadian Supreme Court back in December struck down the three main laws that were used to control prostitutes in Canada. Now, unlike in the United States, prostitution itself—the actual exchange, like you read out of the California Penal Code—that’s never been illegal in Canada. And that’s actually pretty much the norm in the Western world, that the act itself is not criminalized. What they tend to do, which you see in Great Britain, Canada, in some Australian states, in India, all over Europe—
Bob Zadek: New Zealand.
Maggie McNeill: New Zealand’s different. Well, we’ll get to that in a little bit. But what you see in all those places is that it’s not that the act itself isn’t criminalized. It’s certain things around the act that are criminalized. So in Canada, for instance, one of the things that was illegal was so-called brothel keeping.
Bob Zadek: Maggie, I’m afraid we’re going to have to—we’ll be back. Maggie is going to stay with us through the next half hour. We’ll be back in 60 seconds after our break. I’m talking with Maggie McNeill. We are talking about the legalization of prostitution. How did we get to a place that a perfectly natural voluntary exchange has become a crime? Should it be a crime? What is a prostitute? Is every female listener to the show a prostitute as defined under the law? 800-345-5639. We’ll be happy to take your calls. I’ll be back in 60 really short seconds.
Economic Necessity vs. Preference: The “Barbie” Story [54:01]
Bob Zadek: Maggie, one of the arguments made in favor of the criminalization, the continued criminalization, is that it’s an activity which poor women are drawn into. And therefore it’s an activity where poor women, who are considered to be more vulnerable—a word which I despise, but I have to use it because they use it—is that poor women are drawn into it out of desperation. Now, it seems to me that can be said about any job that most people would consider to be unpleasant. If you don’t have a lot of skills, you’re left with the leftover occupations, the ones that other people don’t want. And of course I think about—to make maybe an okay parallel—is that in the Middle Ages and even during the Renaissance, Jews—the activity of money lending was considered to be an immoral activity. It was specifically mentioned in the Bible, the usurious temple. And so nobody wanted to lend money, but it really had to be done. So when Jews were in host countries, they were prohibited from carrying on most professions, but they were allowed to be money lenders because somebody had to do it. So the Jews became money lenders, and they prospered in those countries doing a job that nobody else wanted, but they were coerced into it. Now, the same is believed with respect to poor women and prostitution. Is that really accurate? Are women—in your experience, and you’ve had a lot of personal experience—do most women who exchange sex for money, are they coerced into it or have they made a reasonably rational choice that that was the highest and best use of their time?
Maggie McNeill: Well, that’s the thing. That’s what you just—the very last thing you said. It’s, you know, there’s all kind of talk about limited options. And that’s true. But if a person—I mean, let’s play devil’s advocate for a second. If a woman has, let’s say, five options—if let’s say everybody else normally has 15 or 20 options and this one woman only has five because of her level of education, her low income—if she only has five options, how can it be moral for you to reduce that to four? It makes no sense. If sex work—there’s very, very—I cannot think of too many cases where a woman would have literally no options other than sex work. Because there always are the other jobs, like you say, the other jobs, things like being a maid, things like working in a sweatshop, things like—you know, all these sorts of things. And so she has these options and she says, “Okay, of these options, which one is the best one for me?”
I have an example of that, actually. One of the girls that worked for me when I had the escort service was—I’m going to call her Barbie. That’s what I used to call her on the blog, that’s what I call her. That’s not the name she went by, it’s not her legal name, but I’m going to call her that. She was 28 years old, she had two kids, she was divorced, her ex-husband was kind of useless, so he didn’t really—he couldn’t support the kids. She had a high school education, she did not have a college education. The only jobs she could find, pretty much, was cashier. And cashiers don’t make a lot of money, and they have to work very long hours. So basically she was making not enough money to support her two kids. She never saw them because the shifts they wanted to give her, of course, were when they were home from school, that’s when they wanted her to work at night. So by working for—by doing escort work, she made a tremendous amount of money in comparison with being a cashier, for sure. And she yet she had plenty of time to be with her kids.
Now, she was raised Catholic. She did not like being an escort. It bothered her, it annoyed her. And so what happened with this girl was about twice a year she’d go through these cycles. She’d work for me for a while, and then she would, as we would say, Barbie flaked out again. You know, she’d suddenly decide, “No, no, no, I can’t do this, I quit.” And she’d go back to working as a cashier at the local grocery store. And then after working at the grocery store for two or three months, she’d realize she couldn’t make bills anymore. She’d call me back, she’d say, “Hey, can I do some work?” And I’d say, “Sure,” because she was a good girl, she was very nice, guys liked her, she was very dependable. And so I mean, I didn’t mind taking her back, certainly, because she—I knew she’d be dependable, I knew she’d be okay. But that would be the cycle with her, be going back and forth. So she had several options. One of them was sex work, another one was being a cashier. But when she looked at her different options she had, she always kept coming back to sex work as the best use of her time, as the best use of her abilities, as the most lucrative means, even though she didn’t really like it that much.
And this is one of the funny things, this is one of the things that activists often talk about. Why is it that sex work is the only job that you’re required to love in order to get rights, in order to have the right to do it? You know, a lawyer doesn’t have to—isn’t required to sign a statement that he loves and adores being a lawyer in order to be allowed to be a lawyer. He might hate being a lawyer. You know, I’ve met doctors who couldn’t stand being doctors. You know, and that’s true with every job. There’s people who love the job, who think they have the greatest job in the world. There’s people who think they have the most terrible job in the world. And there’s a gamut all between those two. And I think the majority of people in every job—
Bob Zadek: But whether you like it or not has nothing to do with whether it should be criminal.
Maggie McNeill: Correct.
Caller Audrey: Impact on Marriage [60:29]
Bob Zadek: And Maggie, we have a caller. I’d like to try to take as many callers as I can. We have Audrey. Audrey, welcome to the show.
Caller (Audrey): Yeah, hello. Hi. I’d like to chime in a bit. I think that there’s such a danger in oversimplifying some of this stuff. And we’ve done a good job of doing this. And that’s why more and more it’s okay to just do a lot of things with—and we’re just pooh-poohing things like this. What we fail to understand is that many of us, we require discipline to get out of bed every morning when we need to go to work. If we were allowed to just sit and stay home, we would. But the idea that some of these things are attacking marriages, attacking families, and we pretend it’s just okay. If there weren’t women around willing to have affairs with men or have relationships, even for money, with men, married men, many of marriages would work—many couples would work harder at fixing what problems they have in their marriages. But when there’s a diversion, when there’s a distraction, when it’s okay, when we begin to trivialize the importance of working at marriages because we’re allowed to have options outside of it, we begin to weaken our marriages, weaken our families, attack them. I’m a very liberal woman, but I can tell you right now that I think that we make a grave mistake when we think that this is so—oh, it’s just a simple thing. People just go out to live their lives, let sex workers do their jobs. We’re destroying the fabric of our very—the very—of our society, of what works for us, our families, our marriages. So let’s not—this idea that somehow this is—oh, come on, lighten up, it’s two consenting adults. That’s not always the case. There are third parties involved here: the wives, the husbands, the people who are being hurt, seriously being hurt by these—oh, come on, live and let live.
Bob Zadek: Audrey, I’d like to ask you one—just to help us focus and to help me focus. You raise, of course, a very quite an excellent point. But my observation is, are you complaining that, in this case, the male has—is seeking an easy way out of a marriage that maybe requires work, and the sex worker provides that easy way out? Are you really focusing on more of the demand than the supply, to use sort of cold economic terms? I think your—
Caller (Audrey): It’s a combination of everything. It’s a combination of what is happening to the man who’s seeking pleasure outside his marriage. It’s also a combination of a woman who begins to think it’s okay, that this is an optional job scope of work that she can actually embrace and earn money doing. It gets easier to do things like that. It gets easier to become a sex worker when you think, “Well, it’s okay, I’m not hurting anyone. I can do this, I can make a living, and it’s okay.” So it’s not just the man, it’s also—it makes it—it excuses everybody to begin to do things that eventually hurt a lot of people. It excuses the sex worker to do this, to actually embrace this as a profession and actually do it, saying, “Excuse—justifying it, validating in her heart and her mind that I’m hurting no one, I’m making an income. Too bad the woman isn’t taking care of business at home. I can make money here, and I don’t care who’s hurt by it.” And it excuses the man to leave his marriage, get out of his marriage, go do things like this. It excuses society to do a lot of things that we begin to just, you know, it’s okay, we make it validated.
Bob Zadek: Audrey, Maggie wanted—I can hear Maggie wanted to comment on your observation. Go ahead, Maggie.
Maggie McNeill: I do. I mean, one thing that Audrey seems to be saying—and I hope she’s not saying this—is that if a woman has an option to get out of a bad marriage, that she’ll take it and that we should close down that option. I don’t think that’s what she’s saying, but that sounds like what she’s saying to me. The other thing is that every sex worker I know will agree with this statement: that we have saved far, far more marriages than we have ended. Because the fact of the matter is, when a man wants to stray, feels the urge to stray—whether that’s because he’s just horny, whether it’s because he feels he’s misunderstood, whether it’s because the wife’s not giving him what he thinks he’s due, whatever the reason is immaterial—the fact of the matter is, the majority of men are not going to simply sit there and say, “Oh well.” The majority of men are going to go out and look for it.
And this is something that our society wants to pretend isn’t true, but it is true. It’s absolutely true. Most men will go and look for it. Now, when they go and look for it, they can have two options. They can go to a professional who does not care about them, you know, as far as isn’t going to interfere with their relationship, isn’t going to call them, isn’t going to say, “When are you going to leave your wife for me?”, isn’t going to say, “Oh, you don’t spend enough time with me,” isn’t going to do any of those things a mistress does. He has that option, or he has the option of getting a girlfriend. He has the option of sleeping with some girl he meets at a bar and getting her pregnant and getting sued. He has the option of running into a fatal attraction situation—I mean, that’s an exaggeration, but you know, a woman who becomes obsessed with him and calls him at home and all this kind of thing. Those are the two things. And so when you have a situation like that, which one is better? In my mind—certainly, and you may disagree, certainly—but in my mind, if it was my husband, I’d much rather my husband be paying the professional and then coming home and it’s a business transaction, than him getting involved with somebody that potentially he could leave me, he could, you know, diverting a lot more money in the long run too, you know, to maintain a mistress certainly than to maintain an escort. To maintain an escort, he can simply look at his bankbook and say, “Can I afford that this week?” With a mistress, she’s going to be making financial demands whether or not he can afford it. And so, you know, what you’re talking about is an absolutist situation. In a perfect world, would people cheat? Maybe not. But this is not a perfect world.
Bob Zadek: Audrey, thank you so much for your call. We appreciate your being a listener and for your raising an important point. Thank you so much.
Caller (Audrey): May I just say something before you put me off? What I’d like to say here is this description just—it’s a very warped and twisted argument that validates bad behavior. Like men are such powerless, undisciplined, ugly, horrible people who will stray, who will cheat, so you’ve got to give them options of where to go. So heaven forbid they go to this other woman who’s not a professional, so we’ve got to give them the other professional woman so we’re guaranteed he comes back to us. That is such a twisted and warped way of looking at—I hope no man wants to be described as so powerless and so undisciplined and so silly and so needy that he desperately needs to get out of his marriage to go have sex to feel better about his own marriage. I hope no woman is married to a man who’s that sad.
Bob Zadek: So do we. Maggie, I share your concern. And thank you so much for the call. We appreciate Audrey, and thank you for being a listener.
Primal Nature: Monkeys and Currency [68:55]
Bob Zadek: Maggie, in your writings, there was something which I found so interesting, and that is the primal nature of paying sex for money. And the research that was done, which I know my audience would find so interesting—tell us about the experiments with some would say lower forms of primate, the monkeys. Tell us about the experiment, because it’s a fascinating story.
Maggie McNeill: Well, the nutshell version is that when researchers taught monkeys to use money—basically they gave them little plastic coins and they taught them how to use money, they taught them that they could exchange the coins to get treats besides their usual rations—and as soon as the monkeys learned the value of money, then a male monkey offered a female monkey a coin in exchange for sex. They immediately picked up on it once they understood this is a medium of exchange.
We’ve seen in chimpanzees—chimpanzees are primarily herbivorous and insectivorous because meat’s hard to get for them. But when a male monkey manages to get a hold of some meat—you know, catch some rodent or something—very often he will share the meat with a female in exchange for sex when he has something valuable, he has something that not everybody has. You know, it’s not just leaves, it’s not just ants, it’s something different, it’s something that has value. And so essentially it’s a form of currency and he can use it to exchange.
And we see this in—I understand how Audrey feels, but it seems to me that Audrey is guilty of the idea that this is something new, that prostitution just was invented recently, and of course it hasn’t.
Bob Zadek: Invented in 1909 in the United States. That’s one of our products. We criminalized prostitution for the first time on the planet. Before that, it was just another business.
Maggie McNeill: Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but like I said, most of the laws were designed to control it, to separate prostitutes from other women, to say—well, a good example, the very first law on prostitution in New Orleans, my own hometown, was the so-called Laraket ordinance, which said you cannot perform prostitution on the first floors of buildings. Now, the idea was, in other words, to keep it off the street, to keep it to where the nice good ladies wouldn’t have to see it. So it could only be up on the second floor.
Victimless Crimes and Civil Liberty [76:58]
Bob Zadek: One of the problems, or one of the arguments in favor of criminalization of prostitution, is that it is an inherently dangerous job and we have to protect women from engaging in dangerous activities. In America, the most dangerous job for anybody to engage in is, of all things, fishing. Does anybody suggest that merely because of the danger we should criminalize fishing? What about being a soldier? Should we criminalize being a Navy SEAL because it’s inherently dangerous? So that argument is totally specious. The fact that it is dangerous is built into the equation of whether a woman wants to go into the activity. If in fact it is dangerous, they—the women or the male, if it’s a male prostitute—will simply take that into consideration. Just like policemen do if being a policeman is inherently dangerous—I don’t know if it is or not, but if it is, that simply is a factor in considering whether you want to do that. For a woman, you consider whether you want to go to law school or become a prostitute, and one of the considerations is the perception or the reality of it being dangerous. So the fact that something is dangerous is not a reason to make it a crime. It’s just—it’s a rational person making a decision whether to engage in activity which has certain detriments, and one of them is—
Maggie McNeill: Well, one of the things that’s interesting, I find, Bob, is that a lot of the same people who are all up in, you know, all wanting to criminalize prostitution—“Oh, we’ve got to make it worse, we’ve got to, you know, make it as criminal as possible, we’ve got to really crack down on this”—are the same people who want women to be allowed to serve in combat in the military. So danger is nothing to do with it.
And a lot of the feminists—again, I’m talking about a particular kind of feminist, I’m talking about these anti-sex feminists, you know, the same ones who oppose porn—a lot of these people really are just against sex. And that may sound like an inflammatory statement, but it’s really not. Sheila Jeffreys, who is an academic in Australia, she’s one of the big, big, you know, researchers that’s often quoted by the anti-prostitution people—she has gone on record as saying that all penis-and-vagina sex is rape. This is her opinion. And a lot of the people who support these views, a lot of these anti-prostitution people, that’s the way they feel. Maybe not quite that extreme, maybe they feel that there’s some sex that’s okay, but the fact of the matter is they believe at least some heterosexual union is bad, wrong, horrible, evil, to be prevented. If they stood up in public and said that, they would be laughed out of the discussion. But if they only attack prostitutes, well, then they can kind of disguise it. You know what I’m saying? Then they can kind of say, “Well, we’re not really talking about all sex,” but they are. It’s just that they’re talking about that subset of heterosexual sex that they can get away with attacking.
Bob Zadek: And you know, this is a libertarian show, and an important principle in looking at these issues from a libertarian perspective is that, in general, there cannot be a crime if there isn’t any victim. That is to say, behavior that doesn’t hurt anybody cannot be or should not be a crime. And in the crime of prostitution, there is no victim. The only victim is when you criminalize it, making somebody engaged in activity that is not otherwise bad, making that a crime. Then you are making—then the act of criminalizing it creates the victim. The victim is either the prostitute who is denied a lawful activity that otherwise would be lawful to earn money, and denying somebody the right to earn money in a way that they choose to do so is so violative of core civil liberties to say, “I cannot engage in an activity that nobody will be adversely affected by, but I am simply—I cannot do it, it’s against the law.” That is so patently offensive.
Maggie McNeill: Well, we see one of the things, Bob, that I see is that people do, I think, people do realize that, and so they’ll do kind of like what Audrey was doing in the sense of saying, “Ah, but there is a victim, there’s the wife,” let’s say. Well, the thing is, if you allow that kind of displacement of the victim effect, then you have to say, “Well, there’s wives that are ignored because of football, so now we have to ban football.” You know, there’s people, you know, children in the house are harmed by smoking, so therefore we have to ban smoking. If people drink, then, “Oh well, you know, a guy who goes out and gets drunk all the night, his marriage might break up, that hurts his wife.” And in fact, a lot of the temperance propaganda at the turn of the century leading up to Prohibition was based on that.
Bob Zadek: When Audrey was talking about the wife being the victim, I flashed back to the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and Prohibition, when demon rum was destroying the households and destroying families, and that was the driving principle behind Prohibition. How’d that work out for us? Pretty darn good. Exactly. So her argument indicates the intellectual bankruptcy of criminalizing prostitution. And it was a wonderful way to bring it all together, to show how you can’t use a moral code to drive criminal statutes. Criminal statutes are derived to discourage behavior that will hurt somebody directly, not to be the vehicle to impose somebody’s moral code on somebody else.
And that’s—and we end the show on that important libertarian principle. And that is why this topic was so important. It brings together so many important issues that people ought to be talking about and will be talking about when the time is right, just like the decriminalization of homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage, both of which were using statutes to affect morality, which cannot be done.
Maggie, thank you so much for sharing your time and your insights with us. It’s been a great show, and thank you so much. And I’d like to make, for my audience, a public service announcement. I am responsive to what you want and need, and many of my listeners have complained about Sunday morning being full of deferred gratification, when people wake up and they have to wait for three and four hours until I broadcast. Well, I have heard you, and as a public service announcement, I’ll be off for the next two weeks. I’ll be at Cato, the Cato Benefactor Summit, then I’ll be taking a week off. When I come back on March 10th or whatever that Sunday is, I’ll be broadcasting at 9:00 AM. New time, 9:00 AM. So no longer will you have to walk around grumpy all morning, “When is the Bob Zadek Show going to start to broadcast?” You can roll out of bed, gulp down your coffee, and turn on your radio or your computer, and there I will be. You will be starting your day on the right foot, it’ll put a spring in your step. So good news for all of my listeners who were growing impatient and grumpy on a Sunday. And Maggie, thank you again for an hour and a half of your time. Tell us once more about your website as we close.
Maggie McNeill: It’s maggiemcneill.wordpress.com. You can just—if you search The Honest Courtesan on Google or if you search Maggie McNeill on Google, I’ll be up at the top of the results. So if you can’t remember the site, it’s easy to find that way.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Maggie. And thanks again to all my friends. I’ll be back on the air 9:00 AM Sunday, three weeks from today. Next two weeks are archive shows. Thanks again and have a good day.