In the past, I was pretty against the sanctimonious attitude against prostitution and thus likely to support legalizing it. Today, not much has changed. I still support the rights of sex workers, and am still against the sanctimonious attitude against it. However, I am against the slavery that is often involved, and am also against people using women and girls to make money off of them, which leads us a problem associated with one of the oldest trades: pimps and traffickers.
The idea of a pimp sounds so funny when joking about old blaxploitation films and rap culture, but in reality, the idea of a pimp is not so nice (and by the way, not all pimps are black, or have to be; the image above is something of a common stereotype). Pimps exist solely to use prostitutes and make money off of what they do, and are completely worthless.
Then there’s traffickers, who are equally worthless, who base their lives around smuggling people and making them their slaves.
Why aren’t we putting more focus on dealing with them rather than prostitutes or strippers? Besides the STD risk in the case of prostitutes, they are not a problem compared to people who exploit them and even force innocent, often younger, people into working for them. In other words, before you say anything about prostitution, get a sense of perspective on the matter, and realize that the exploiters are a bigger problem.
The sad thing is, we stigmatise prostitutes, and strippers, to the point that we don’t even consider them to be ordinary people anymore, let alone just people. We view them as less than that, despite that they really are just people. The people who exploit or use them to make money off them, such the pimps and traffickers, really are less than human.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 