Who is to blame for prostitution, the suppliers or the consumers (to put it in crass economic terms)? The question itself betrays a false assumption. Does it really have to be one or the other? Apparently, France seems to think so.
It has passed a law, similar to those passed in a few other countries such as Sweden, criminalizing the patronage of prostitutes. Patrons will be fined and sent to an education course on the harms of prostitution. The supply side will not be criminalized, however, because the suppliers—those who in right-thinking publications such as the world’s leading medical journals are now called sex workers—are considered victims.
Yes, it has to be one, men are to blame, simple.
An interesting blog I read from time to time, though I’m ambivalent about religion is Dalrock’s. This Tricks/sympathy article promoted me to look it up and sure enough here’s a sample of the latest insallment:
“In a follow up post Wilson reiterates that the problem is Christian men being unwilling to marry the large number of unmarried Christian women who want nothing more than to be godly wives (emphasis mine):
3. I am a pastor, and this is a pressing pastoral problem. And I have talked to many other pastors who agree that it is a pressing pastoral problem. The nature of the pastoral problem is that of a large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives. In the conservative church, it would not be unusual to find this cohort of women outnumbering the men in the same station of life by a factor of about 5 to 1. Some of this is caused by the church’s hostility to masculinity, resulting in men being made to feel unwelcome in the church, and some of it is caused by the men who remain being encouraged to perpetuate their teen years by a decade or so. Singleness is a gift, the teaching goes.
In short, Wilson has the problem exactly backwards. He overlooks the fact that women are very open about their desire to ride the carousel for as long as possible before marriage. He also clearly doesn’t understand the realities of the sexual marketplace (SMP) and marriage marketplace (MMP). Young women are the rockstars of the SMP, while young men are near the bottom. Since young women have the power, they set the terms. And what women want* is years, if not a decade or more, of sex with a small subset of the most attractive men before settling for a boring loyal dude. It makes no sense that men would prefer to marry just when their SMP stock is on the rise, and just when the SMP stock of their soon to be bride is rapidly declining.”
When in 1971(?) Michael Parkinson asked Muhammad Ali how manages to stay on top (an extremely important question, when you think about it), Ali initially plays down the idea that it’s difficult, he’s a bit vague, as I recall, and coy as he goes on to describe a party and the “pretty women”… It’s obvious this was something of a dilemma for the religous Ali. He explains how he’ll leave the party early and go to bed but he can hear the music; he demonstrates the convulsions of restlesness. The problem is all too clear. Ali had hardly been a saint, he knew only too well what ‘liberation’ for western women really meant.
If anyone could be in any doubt, Parkinson interviewed him again about two years later and this time Ali sent his very clear, very public, message across the bow of western civilisation. He lectured Parkinson on his liberal stance to sexually liberated women and even had three or four of his conservatively dressed Muslim sisters stand up in the audience as an example to the decadent west. Ali, I’m quite sure, even as he had revelled in liberalism was ultimately appalled at the thought of the women in his life doing likewise. He might just as well have said, if you give your women these freedoms (connive in the wilful narrative women lacking moral agency) trouble will ensue… sharia will happily step in to fill the moral vacuum.
Prompted… not promoted.
One of Dalrymple’s best, I think, even if he doesn’t really come to a conclusion. But the (spoiler alert!) pimp = ‘sex work human resources manager’ joke had me chuckling throughout.