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Brothel. Mustang Ranch and Its Women, by Alexa Albert. New York: Random House, 2001. 271 pp., $24.95. DOI: 10.1002/pam.10035
Recent decades in the United States have witnessed a significant liberalization of the regulations governing such vices as gambling and pornography, and even the war on drugs shows signs of retreat. "Deviant" sexual behaviors, including most adultery, fornication, and homosexual activity, have been decriminalized, at least in a de facto sense. Prostitution is one venerable vice, however, that largely has been exempt from the American deregulatory deluge.
Appeals to morality having lost much (though not all) of their purchase as rationales for regulation, controls over commercial sex can still be justified on the basis of "harm to others," in John Stuart Mill's (1978, p. 9) famous formulation. First, children, falling as they do outside Mill's characterization of individuals "in the maturity of their faculties," are widely regarded as fit objects for prohibitions against consuming or producing any vice, including commercial sex. Second, prostitution is frequently accompanied by a variety of social costs. For instance, neighborhoods inundated with streetwalkers or brothels might be hotbeds of public nuisance, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) might be spread through contact with prostitutes. Marriages might be threatened by prostitution, and a social environment inhospitable to women fostered. Finally, adults caught up in a web of vicious activity do not themselves always appear to be "in the maturity of their faculties." While it is with respect to substance abuse that consumption decisions are particularly apt to seem unsound, choices to be a customer or a provider of prostitution likewise may not be fully rational-and decisions to use illegal drugs and to engage in prostitution are frequently linked. One variant of this argument in the commercial sex realm is that gender and economic relations in society are so biased against women that seemingly voluntary participation in prostitution (or, at the extreme, any consensual sex) cannot be viewed as non-coerced. From this perspective, then, the Millian deference to individual self-regarding behavior might be questionable when applied to prostitution.
Noting that under-age participation or negative externalities frequently accompany prostitution, of course, does not in itself argue for a prohibitory regime backed by criminal penalties. The external effects may not be inherent in prostitution itself, but...