Transcripts:
They say prostitution is the world's oldest profession. So why is it really illegal? And who's behind that? And when you look at the laws, they certainly raise some questions. Where I live, for instance, you can pay someone to have sex with you on camera. That's legal. You can pay someone to be your girlfriend, give her gifts, cover her rent, and as long as nobody says the transaction out loud, that's fine.
But if you hand a woman cash for sex in a hotel room, you're now a criminal. So what exactly are we policing and preventing? I'm Ken Laort. I dig into questions that polite people sometimes don't like to touch because they tell us a lot about our society and why the world is the way it is. So, here's the elephant in the room.
Prostitution has been legal, even celebrated for most of human history. But now, it can lead you right to jail. Why? We'll trace the evolution of prostitution throughout history and take a look at the common answers for why it's illegal. Then we'll dig into the concept of strengthening the family with a reason that nobody likes to admit out loud.
And finally, we'll examine the female factor and why it matters a lot more than most people realize. So, for much of human history, prostitution wasn't just legal, but in a weird twist, it was actually run by governments and religious leaders. In ancient Mesopotamia, temple brothel were run by the priests of the goddess Ishtar.
Some women performed religious sex rituals, others worked on the temple grounds, and the lowest tier walked the streets. It was ordinary civic life woven into religion and commerce. The Greeks took this and scaled it up. Athens had stateowned brothel that funded public works, including a temple to Aphrodite. Cortisans weren't just prostitutes.
The high-end ones were educated companions who dined with philosophers and politicians. They paid taxes, wore distinct clothing, and occupied a recognized place in society. Rome had the same model. Prostitution was legal, taxed, and kind of everywhere. Walk through the ruins of Pompei, and you'll find brothel etched into the graffiti.
There, a visit could cost you what you might pay for a loaf of bread. And then, Christianity spread and the mood shifted. The church shut down pagan temples and pushed prostitution into a lower status. Catholic doctrine declared sex outside the marriage sinful and condemned prostitution outright. But the reality was messier.
Church leaders viewed prostitution as a necessary evil that prevented worse sins like rape or the seduction of respectable women. St. Augustine put it bluntly. If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lust. That uncomfortable tolerance lasted until the plague and the Protestant Reformation changed everything.
The civilist outbreak of 1494 turned prostitutes into scapegoats. Protestant reformers saw brothel as symbols of Catholic corruption and they pushed for purity. Catholic leaders feeling the pressure, they started advocating stricter morals themselves and by the 1600s prostitution was criminalized across most of Europe.
The 19th century saw crackdowns worldwide. Prior to that, growing industrial cities often had red light districts like New Orleans Storyville or San Francisco's Barbar Coast before reformers shut them down. Today, it's a bit of a patchwork, but in most of the world, it's still largely banned. A few countries have legalized it outright, while others treat it as a serious crime.
And in general, laws tend to be a little stricter in Asia and Africa and very strict in the Middle East. So, that's a quick history, but it doesn't really get into the wise. But before that, a little aside. Years back, I had an office in a newsroom where I had a bank of televisions across the wall. And it was the first time that I could clearly visualize media bias and action.
Because when you have just one source or point of view for news, it's super hard to see how they're spinning things. That's why I use and really dig today's sponsor, Ground News. I check it every day for an overview of the day's news, but more importantly to see not just who's covering what, but who's ignoring what.
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I use the Vantage plan and if you want to give it a try, you can get 40% off with my link in the description. Ground.news/elephants or scan the QR code here. Okay, so back to prostitution. Let's take a look at the most common answers we hear for it being outlawed. The most popular argument is that we're protecting women from exploitation.
Progressive era reformers, they worried about white slavery, gangs abducting innocent girls into brothel. And the modern version is similar with the DOJ prosecuting hundreds of trafficking cases each year. And to be clear, these cases have real victims. Women in poverty, runaways, homeless teens pressured by people or circumstances to turn to prostitution.
Opponents of legalization argue that normalizing the sex trade would create more demand, that traffickers could hide victims in the legal system with false documents and threats. But here's the thing, voluntary sex work gets lumped together with forced trafficking, and the state justifies arresting women supposedly for their own good.
And the women who actually get arrested the most, they're not the high-end escorts, they're the poorer ones. Okay, so public health has been another rationale for centuries, like the syphilis outbreaks I mentioned. In the 1800s, Britain's contagious diseases acts forced suspected prostitutes to submit to invasive medical examinations.
During World War I, the US detained thousands of women near American military bases under the American plan. Okay, so then there's what I call the nuisance factor. When prostitution is visible, residents complain. cars circling blocks, john's and prostitutes loitering in neighborhoods. And and this is why poor people get arrested more than wealthy ones.
I mean, if you quietly meet someone and go to a hotel room, few people even notice. But when you're doing your business in a car or someplace more visible, people want you gone. Okay, so these are the reasons we hear the most, but they don't fully explain why prostitutional is criminalized almost everywhere while other risky jobs aren't.
I mean, coal mining kills worker at a rate twice the average person. And it's a hard way to live your life, but it's called honest work. We allow people to sell their blood, rent their wombs as surrogates, and work in all sorts of dangerous jobs that wreck their bodies and their health. If safety were the real concern, legalization with regulation would also work better than pushing everything underground.
I mean, if health were a priority, you can look at Nevada's legalized brothel that they essentially prove that testing and condoms can drop the STD rates to almost zero. So, the common answers are real, but they're not the whole story. And much of that story comes down to strengthening the family unit.
Throughout history, even more so than today, we've seen a strong correlation between religion and outlawing prostitution. But why? Now, for believers, the case is simple. Prostitution violates God's design for sex and marriage. It's sinful. It's wrong. But religion also serves a social function beyond theology. Churches have always been enforcers of family cohesion.
They marry couples, baptize children, and create community around the nuclear family. Whether you see religious teachings as a divine command or social engineering, the effect is the same. Stronger families. And stronger families truly benefit everyone. Countries with more nuclear families do better across all metrics. They have lower crime and higher income.
Children from nuclear families have higher levels of education. Parents are more engaged in their communities and they want to improve them for their kids. They volunteer more. They vote more. Subgroups with higher marriage rates and more nuclear families succeed more on nearly every metric you can measure. For instance, children from married parent homes in the United States, they're about five times less likely to live in poverty than kids from single parent homes. On one level, it's basic math.
You can earn more with two parents. And it's well beyond that though because as every parent knows raising kids takes a lot of resources beyond money like time and emotional energy. And all of that is easier with two people. And these correlations they hold up across race, religion, income level.
Strong families create strong communities. And that's why governments promote marriage. Sometimes it's basic tax breaks or extra financial protections for married people like letting a surviving spouse get social security or other retirement benefits. Governments even offer breaks for other things that encourage families like buying a home, child tax credits, even subsidized education.
And it's also why society celebrates weddings with public vows and a big party. Saying those vows in front of everyone, it puts pressure on people to follow through. For most of our history, and even for a lot of people now, there's an element of shame and embarrassment if your marriage falls apart.
That social pressure isn't comfortable, but it also helps keep families together. Okay, Ken. So, where does prostitution fit into all this? Well, marriage also kind of guarantees you a sexual partner. And studies show that married people have more sex than single people. For men who want that, marriage makes it more likely.
It's it's just part of the deal whether people say it out loud or not. And data from some countries show that clamping down on prostitution increase marriage rates and divorce rates lessen. Prostitution can fill in some marriage needs and lower the number of nuclear families. Easy access to paid sex can make men more selective or just less likely to want to get married.
I mean, why commit to a relationship, work through conflict, or build a life with someone when you can pay for what you want and walk away? Now, look, that's obviously a massive oversimplification. Sex isn't the only thing in a relationship or a marriage, but it's a real factor. And the availability of prostitution changes the entire dynamic of courtship and commitment.
Look at it from a purely economic angle. Marriage involves negotiation. Men, they usually offer commitment, resources, and stability. Women, they offer companionship, partnership, and sex. And when one side of that equation becomes easy to buy, the bargaining power shifts. If sex is available on demand for the price of a dinner or a few hundred bucks, its value in a relationship diminishes.
This isn't just theory. I mean, we we've seen what happens when sexual access becomes easier outside of marriage. Generically, as as moral standards have changed over the past 50 years and sex outside marriage became more socially acceptable, marriage rates dropped and the age of first marriages rose, legalized prostitutions would push that dynamic even further.
So, church doctrine and state interest align perfectly. Both want the family preserved. Religious leaders see prostitution as sin and preach against it from the pulpits. And government sees strong families as the foundation of a stable, prosperous society. But in democracies, laws need votes. I mean, religious leaders can preach and governments can do their tax breaks, but neither can ban prostitution without political support.
You need organized pressure that goes beyond sermons and statistics. And that support comes most strongly from women. Now, let's look a little deeper at the female factor overall in outlawing prostitution. And hey, as a reminder, if I make a substantive mistake here, yell at me in the comments and I'll address it in the description box below.
I also have a link to my script and my research notes. Okay, so polling data shows females are much less likely than men to support legalized prostitution. The gap runs about 10 to 20 percentage points depending on the country and depending on the survey. Men more often take the libertarian point of view talking about freedom of choice and consenting adults.
Women, they more often describe prostitution as exploitation. The pattern holds across most of the world and across age groups and education levels. Women consistently opposed legalizing prostitution more than men do. In the instances where women weren't around that much, the prostitution trade boomed.
Take a look at the California gold rush of 1849. In some camps, the ratio of men to women was 50 to1. That scarcity made prostitution not only common, but openly so. Brothel and dance halls, they were major money makers. And the women who migrated there found they could earn quite a bit. Everyone looked the other way until civilization encroached.
And that civilization was carried forward especially with women. The purity crusade of the late 1800s and the early 1900s was powered by women's groups especially after they got the right to vote. Those groups provided the political muscle that the church doctrine alone couldn't deliver. The church built the vocabulary sin, exploitation, moral decay, and women helped turn that into policy.
Groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Female Moral Reform Societies, they organized petitions. They testified at hearings. They aggressively lobbyed politicians for vice crackdowns. Early efforts also include opening rescue homes for prostitutes. The man act which made it a federal crime to transport a woman for prostitution passed in 1910 again with the support from a coalition of religious leaders and women's groups.
And beneath the moral language and the broader concerns were more practical ones as well. I mean women didn't want their husbands bringing home disease and they didn't want their family money spent on brothel. That dynamic hasn't changed. Although among feminists today, there's deep disagreement about prostitution.
Anti-prostitution feminists see it as essentially sexual slavery. They argue that no woman can truly consent to prostitution when you consider the broader inequalities in power and resources. They often push the Nordic model, which arrests buyers and treats sellers as victims who need rescue.
Sex positive feminists argue the opposite. To them, prostitution is labor. Sex workers deserve the same rights as any other workers with safety and legal protections. And groups like Amnesty and International agree and they endorse full legalization worldwide. It's a serious debate and both sides claim to speak for women's interests, but both sides can't be right.
Still, only one side is really winning. The anti-prostitution view dominates policy across almost all of the world. The sex positive feminists have academic support and some high-profile advocates, but they still don't have the votes or the political power that comes from that. But without women's influence, prostitution laws would look very different.
You'd absolutely see more legal brothel and decriminalization. You'd see politicians willing to touch the issue without fear of a backlash. Instead, prostitution is illegal almost everywhere. It's not a conspiracy or a behind-the-scenes power grab. It's governments responding to what their citizens, especially women, want their society to look like.
So, from prostitution to pretty much every other type of crime, when you look at criminal justice statistics, one number jumps out like crazy. Asians don't commit much crime. I went through it in this video here. Now, I'm mainly talking about East Asians, both there and in the United States and other countries where they've immigrated.
And it's not just a stereotype. And the numbers themselves, they're eyepopping, especially because they blow up the universal belief that poverty equals crime. Something else is going on and it's worth examining.
