Curious

Unlike me, Anna Merlan at Jezebel didn’t like Jimmy Carter’s opinion piece on prostitution and decriminalization. She didn’t bother to be especially honest about it though.

Writing for the Washington Post, Carter editorialized that sex work is bad and oppressive. He’s against Amnesty International’s call to decriminalize all aspects of adult, consensual sex work, because he doesn’t think consensual sex work is real.

Some assert that this “profession” can be empowering and that legalizing and regulating all aspects of prostitution will mitigate the harm that accompanies it. But I cannot accept a policy prescription that codifies such a pernicious form of violence against women. Normalizing the act of buying sex also debases men by assuming that they are entitled to access women’s bodies for sexual gratification. If paying for sex is normalized, then every young boy will learn that women and girls are commodities to be bought and sold.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s curious to suggest that decriminalizing sex work would lead to a wholesale devaluation of womanhood, but other aspects of Carter’s argument aren’t new.

You see what she did there? Se casually translated what Carter said into something else – she bolded his words, just as I did, but then she misrepresented them. He didn’t say “decriminalizing sex work would lead to a wholesale devaluation of womanhood”; he said something more interesting than that, and less easy to brush aside. Maybe that’s why she ignored it in favor of something sillier and more banal.

Explain to me why he’s wrong. Why is he wrong to say that normalizing the rental of women for sex will teach boys that women and girls are commodities to be bought and sold? Why wouldn’t it do that? If it becomes legal to buy and sell access to women, isn’t that teaching boys that women are a category of people who can be rented? Not simply paid to do some work, but rented for access.

But then again – human beings do have a long history of rising above prejudices of that kind, and treating everyone as an equal no matter what cues their society gives them.

Cue hollow laughter.

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