BOB HERBERT: Fantasies, Well Meant

[kevinmc]

I must have hit a nerve. While in Las Vegas last week, I interviewed the mayor, Oscar Goodman, who enthusiastically explained how legalizing prostitution and creating a series of “magnificent brothels” could be a boon to his city’s development.

Vegas is already a paradise for pimps, johns and perverts, and I accused the mayor in a column of setting the tone “for the systematic, institutionalized degradation” of women.

Mr. Goodman was not pleased. He snarled to the local press that he had no use for me, and added, “I’ll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here.”

The mayor, who made a name for himself as a defense lawyer for mobsters, loves to slip into a clownish, tough-guy persona. (He never lets anyone forget that he had a walk-on as himself in the movie “Casino.”) But behind his bluster is a serious issue that should be addressed.

A lot of people more thoughtful than Oscar Goodman believe that prostitution should be legalized as a way of protecting and empowering the women who go into the sex trade. I’ve lost patience with those arguments, however well meaning. Real-world prostitution, in whatever guise, bears no resemblance at all to the empowerment fantasies of prostitution proponents. I have never seen such vulnerable, powerless women as those in the sex trade, legal or illegal.

At Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about an hour’s ride outside of Vegas, the women have to respond like Pavlov’s dog to a bell that might ring at any hour of the day or night. It could be 4 a.m., and the woman might be sleeping. Or she might not be feeling well. Too bad.........

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/09/bob-herbert-fantasies-well-meant.html

[Skittles]

1. it is disgusting and sleazy

no matter how they try to sugar-coat it

[Mythsaje]

2. I don't think there's any perfect answer to this problem...

It being illegal isn't stopping it. Never has and never will. It puts them on the fringes, unable to rely on any sort of protection whatsoever from anyone on either side of the law.

Of course, putting them in the hands of the mob and state-approved pimps isn't any better. Obviously.