Going back to the "prostitution has always been with us" argument, and my counter-claim that people used to say that about slavery, I came across the following in today's Washington post:
"This same conflict could be seen in the issue of slavery. In the 19th century, pro-slavery sentiment had long claimed that the practice in the United States was milder than in the Caribbean. Southern niceness, as imagined under slavery, fed this myth of American exceptionalism, leading Northerners such as the physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to claim that slavery in the United States was practiced “in its best and mildest form.”
"Yet former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass dismissed the myth of the kind slaveowner as “most absurd.” How can kindness play any role in slavery, Douglass asked, when one is “robbed of wife, of children, of his hard earnings, of home, of friends”? If kindness were the rule in the master-slave relationship, Douglass argued, then Southern newspapers would not be filled with runaway-slave notices describing branding with irons and scarring from whips."
I want to be like Douglass, not like Wendell Holmes. The massive PR industry bankrolled by pimps and punters, dedicated to promulgating the myth of the happy hooker shouldn't gaslight us into taking our eye off the ball: for most women in prostitution, it is a nasty, abusive, dangerous and miserable business to be in.