Prostitution:

Prostitution describes sexual intercourse in exchange for remuneration. The legal status of prostitution varies in different countries, from punishable by death to complete legality. A woman who engages in sexual intercourse with only one man for support is a mistress, and not normally considered a prostitute. Male prostitutes offering services to female customers are known as "gigolos" or "escorts". The term is used loosely to indicate someone who engages in sexual acts that are disapproved of, such as sexual promiscuity or sex outside of marriage.

Cultural usage varies widely, and the use of the term as a pejorative indicates acts that are not formally considered prostitution in a cultural context. As the cultural and economic capital of the United States, New York City has attracted people from across the country and over the globe. Today, approximately one of every three New Yorkers was born outside the United States. Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America (Larry Whiteaker, 1997). It has frequently provided an environment in which homosexuals, transgender, and other queer people have found their niche. No doubt, the percentage of glbtq people (by any definition) living in New York City far exceeds the conventional estimate for the population as a whole. Current estimates range from 750,000 to more than one million glbtq people living in New York City proper. But New York City, probably more than any other city in the country, is also the capital of sex. Walt Whitman celebrated this aspect of New York in his poetry. "City of orgies, walks and joys," he wrote, "as I pass O Manhattan your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love."

New York City was the stage upon which millions of men and women realized desires--sexual, artistic, and commercial--that they could never have fulfilled in the small towns and provincial cities of America. At one end of the legal spectrum, prostitution carries the death penalty in some Muslim countries; at the other end, prostitutes are tax-paying unionised professionals in the Netherlands and brothels are legal and advertising businesses there (however, prostitutes must be at least 18 and the age of consent is 16 in other contexts). The legal situation in Germany, Switzerland (where the issue of legal age is a source of avid dispute, some insisting that one can legally be a prostitute as of one's sixteenth birthday, other maintaining it is eighteen), and New Zealand is similar to that in the Netherlands. In all but two U.S. states, the buying and selling of sexual services is illegal and usually classified as a misdemeanor (George Kneeland and Katharine Bement Davis, 1969).

Prostitution has long been illegal in the vast majority of the United States. Unfortunately, laws against prostitution often bring out the worst among the nation's law-enforcement agencies - and pose a growing threat to public health. As fear of the spread of AIDS rises, the legalization of prostitution offers one of the easiest means to limit the spread of the contagion - and of improving the quality of law enforcement in this country. Since neither prostitutes nor their customers routinely run to the police to complain about the other's conduct, police rely on trickery and deceit in order to bust people. In San Francisco, the police wired rooms in the city's leading hotels to make videotapes of prostitutes satisfying their customers. But given the minimal control over the videotaping operation, there was little to stop local police from also watching and videotaping ordinary married couples engaging in coitus solely for the purpose of procreation (Melissa Farley, 2004).

A 1994 New York sting operation could indirectly have helped out the New York Mets: two San Diego Padres baseball players were arrested after speaking to an undercover policewoman. A Seattle journalist who also got busted described the police procedure to Newsday: "He said that he was stuck in traffic when he discovered that a mini-skirted woman in a low-cut blouse was causing the jam, approaching the cars that were stopped. 'She came up to the windows, kind of swaggering,' he said. He said that she offered him sex, he made a suggestive reply, and the next thing he knew he was surrounded by police officers who dragged him out of his car and arrested him." In some cities, laws against prostitution are increasingly transforming local policemen into de facto car thieves. Policewomen masquerade as prostitutes; when some john stops to dicker prices; other police rush out and confiscate the person's car under local asset-forfeiture laws. Such programs are currently operating in Detroit; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; and New York City. The policewomen who masquerade as prostitutes are, in some ways, worse than the prostitutes - since at least the hookers intend to render value for payment received, while the police simply intend to shake down would-be johns. The futile fight against prostitution is a major drain on local law-enforcement resources. A study published in the Hastings Law Journal in 1987 is perhaps the most reliable estimate of the cost of prostitution enforcement on major cities. Locking up prostitutes and their customers is especially irrational at a time when more than 20 states are under court orders to reduce prison overcrowding.

Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of the Chiefs of Police, has come out in favor of legalizing prostitution. Dennis Martin, president of the same association, declared that prostitution-law enforcement is "much too time-consuming, and police forces are short-staffed." Maryland Judge Darryl Russell observed, "We have to explore other alternatives to solving this problem because this eats up a lot of manpower of the police. We're just putting out brush fires while the forest is blazing." National surveys have shown that 94 percent of citizens believe that police do not respond quickly enough to calls for help and the endless pursuit of prostitution is one factor that slows down many police departments from responding to other victims. In 1994, Edward Delatorre, police commander of New York City's 43rd Precinct, said of Operation Losing Proposition, a big crackdown on prostitutes and their customers in the Bronx, that his policy was to "make this an issue as important as any issue can be." Yet, while prostitutes cluttering up a street can be a damn nuisance, the average New Yorker is probably far more irritated and injured by the city's sky-high rate of car theft not to mention its high murder rate (Conner Gorry, 2002). In contrast, brothels are legal in ten rural Nevadan counties - and the legal brothels tend to be comparative paragons of public safety. The University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health studied the health of legal Nevada brothel workers compared with that of the jailed Nevada streetwalkers. None of the brothel workers had AIDS, while 6 percent of the streetwalkers had AIDS. Brothel owners had a strong incentive to police the health of their employees, since they could conceivably face liability if an infection were passed on to a customer. Bans on prostitution actually generate public disorder - streetwalkers, police chases, pervasive disrespect for the laws, and condoms littering people's lawns. As long as people have both money and sexual frustration, some people will continue paying other people to gratify their desires. The issue is not whether prostitution is immoral, but whether police suppression of prostitution will make society a safer place.

The ultimate question to ask about a crackdown on prostitution is: how many murders are occurring while police are chasing after people who only want to spend a few bucks for a few jollies? Lysander Spooner wrote in 1875, "Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness." Many of the worst abuses of law enforcement stem from political wars on vices. Government power must be limited to protecting citizens from other people's aggression, not from their own stupidity or weakness (Larry Whiteaker, 1997). Vices are not crimes. Despite centuries of attempts to suppress prostitution, the problem continues to flourish little has changed. Simply because prostitution may, in many people's opinion, be immoral is no reason for police to waste their time in a futile effort to suppress the oldest profession.