Jeremiah Keenan | The price of selling sex

Keen on the Truth | While Jara Krys tells the tale of a “successful” prostitute, the average story – even where prostitution is legal – sounds different

By Jeremiah Keenan 10/14/14 10:13pm

I mag ine, for a moment, if Jara Krys were a “straight” woman instead of transgender. She lost her virginity at 13 , learned the sex trade from a pimp in high school and started selling her services to cover costs. She came to UPenn on a full scholarship , but after a few years she decided she’d like to work as a prostitute full time. Her price is $300 an hour; it’ll cost you $1,200 if you want her for the entire night.

Thanks to business savvy and hard work, the future looks bright for this woman — she has a porn business and some amount of capital. While she’s thinking about racking in some more bucks as the personal attendant (kept woman) of some wealthy businessman , she is also strongly drawn towards lobbying for prostitutes’ rights in the sex trade . Prostitution should be legal, she argues, and cites the fact that in her various illegal exploits she has lacked police protection.

This is not a life that any of us can condemn. You just don’t condemn a woman for becoming a prostitute when she was seduced by a pedophile at 14. Growing up in poverty, suicidal in middle school, beaten by her father, orphaned by 16, doing the rounds of a number of adult men before she got out of high school — it’s not a background anyone would want.

But are the conclusions which Jara drew from her background — and her adult experience as a full-time prostitute — representative of the trade? Should prostitution — as Jara would suggest — be legalized?

Arguments for prostitution legalization have thrived for centuries. In 1413, the pious council of Amsterdam declared that “whores” were a necessary (if regrettable) part of city life allowed by the “holy” church “on good grounds.” Russian aristocracy of the 19th century explained that it was necessary to sacrifice “a certain percentage” of lower-class women in order to keep their daughters virgin-pure. The modern argument makes a novel contribution to its predecessors by claiming that women have a positive right to rent their bodies — and if they do so in a free market, it necessarily implies they want to!

This argument sounds nice when it’s coming from a Nevada porn star wearing a pink dress, but statistically it’s false. Consider human trafficking — arguably the severest form of abuse in the underground sex trade. Theoretically, human trafficking would decrease when prostitution is legalized because victims forced to work as prostitutes should no longer be afraid of the police. A detailed 2012 study, however, came to the opposite conclusion. Countries with legal prostitution are a prime destination for victims from all over the world. The ease with which kidnappers can market the services of their slaves outweigh any difficulties with registration.

Human trafficking — bad enough in itself to discredit legalization — is not the only problem. One multi-national study found an incredible 68 percent of those engaged in prostitution — legal or illegal — suffered from PTSD. Sure, a few ambitious, business-savvy entrepreneurs (pimps and non-pimps) will make a load of money and claim no emotional harm. But they are exceptions — not the norm.

Melissa Farley , after 15 years of work with trafficked women, aligns with radical Swedish feminists in the claim that prostitution — legal or not — is fundamentally dehumanizing to women. She states that women are turned into “living, breathing masturbation fantasies” — bodies designed to gratify the male sex drive . Dr. Farley backs up her ideas with statistics and endless nauseating quotes from sex market reviews about fisting, the cum shot and the like, that leave little doubt about how dedicated johns view the “services” they are buying.

While some prostitutes may claim to be acclimated — or even enjoy the sex routine — those that suffer no harm from their work are invariably in the mino rity.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College sophomore from China studying mathematics. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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