People Still Want Sex on Holiday

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Maine town is shaken by Zumba prostitution scandal (Reuters)

It figures that a story like this would break when I was hit with the double whammy of a bad sinus infection and planning for an additional teaching gig I picked up in the middle of the term. I can’t think of a story more well-tailored to discuss some major themes of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. It’s hardly been a huge national story because of the election, but it’s had some staying power, so at least I can write about it now without it seeming out-of-date.

Reading the shocked reactions of Kennebunk residents to this story has provided me with some much-needed laughter lately. My first instinct when I hear words along the line of “I can’t believe something like this would happen here” is empathy for the speaker. That’s a pretty powerful phrase, and we’re used to hearing it in the context of things that are truly shocking and awful, like murder or suicide or violence or a drug epidemic. You can understand a reaction of disbelief to those things because there really shouldn’t be any place where people are driven to such lengths that they would kill someone or themselves, or hurt someone else badly, or that people would be so unable to find comfort in anything else that they’d turn to illegal narcotics as a last resort. Particularly in picturesque vacation towns, where so much of the town’s identity and economy is based on that idyllic setting that gets shattered when “something like this” happens, the reaction is understandable.

To have this kind of a reaction to a prostitution scandal, though, is comical. It seems like the people of Kennebunk want to believe that their town is so beautiful and wonderful that visitors completely forget about sex once they enter, that the scenery and the townspeople are just so incredible that people ignore or shut off their sexual desires as soon as they set foot in the town. Now, I have never been to Kennebunk, or anywhere else in Maine for that matter, so it may be possible that the town really is so great that people have those kinds of reactions. (Remember, this is right by the Bush family summer home.) Somehow, though, I doubt that Kennebunk, or any place on earth, could provoke that kind of reaction in any more than a small handful of people. Given the hectic pace of modern life, I’d be surprised if some of the customers of this service didn’t want a sexual encounter on their vacation or holiday simply because they had difficulty finding time to fit sex into their regular schedules.

The whole taboo surrounding prostitution in our culture is based on this idea that sex is this bad thing that we shouldn’t talk about, and should only use for purposes of procreation. It may be okay to use the power of titillation, as evidenced by so much of the advertising you see these days, but it’s another thing entirely to perform actual sexual acts. This is the driving force behind the wildly ineffective (and self-sabotaging) abstinence-only sexual education classes that were the norm during the Bush 43 years, it’s the driving force behind homophobia, and it’s the driving force behind a significant portion of the “culture wars” in our country. This is why the “I can’t believe this would happen here” reaction, when placed against our larger culture, does make sense. Hearing that reaction is a particular case, though, unless we’re talking about a convent or monastery or something along those lines, is absurd.

As with so many other things that cultural conservatives rally against, there’s a kind of magical thinking on their part that by making something illegal — prostitution, marijuana, abortion — it will cease to exist, when clearly that isn’t the case. Because prostitution is illegal in all but one state in this country, people who desire sex but don’t have someone in their lives to provide it for them, and don’t have the time or resources to fly to Nevada, have to have their needs met elsewhere. Prostitution operations like the one out of this Zumba studio in Maine may make a big splash in the press and generate all these “shocking” headlines, but they’re hardly isolated. Particularly in the northern states, where walking the streets showing a lot of skin just isn’t feasible for half the year, enterprising people who see a need that a lot of people have that isn’t being fulfilled by others will find a way to fill that need, whether it’s out of a fitness studio in small-town Maine or, like in The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, a library in small-town Minnesota.

To be clear, I am only defending the act of sex itself as not being inherently immoral. If someone breaks a promise to their partner to remain monogamous then that is clearly bad, although I don’t think it’s any more of my business than non-sexual promises the same person might make to their partner and then break. I sense that many people conflate prostitution with adultery, which simply isn’t the case.

The question then arises as to what should be done. When we identify a behaviour that we see as not being good in any degree, too often we respond by condemning it outright without thinking about what could have caused this behaviour and what we could change in our culture, and our laws, to make sure that it happens less often in the future. This is deeply embedded in our history, this idea that there is a stern higher power watching over all of us and any deviation from that higher power’s laws should be severely punished. Clearly there are some acts, like murder, that cannot be justified by anything but considerable extenuating circumstances (like self-defence) because of the grievous harm they inflict on others. For harder drugs it can be extremely difficult to figure out if, and how, the drugs may be used in a way that ultimately doesn’t cause harm to others, which is why I still struggle with the idea of legalizing anything stronger than marijuana; my liberal and libertarian beliefs really clash there and I can’t find any solutions I’d be happy with.

If people are so desirous of sex that they would pay other consenting adults to have sex with them for money, our culture’s reaction is just as punitive as it is to murder and assault, and that makes no sense because prostitution is pretty much the textbook definition of a victimless crime. The punitive response only makes sense in a culture where religious law and secular law are conflated, or a culture where there are incentives, like the potential for profit, to put as many people behind bars as possible. Treating the “War on Drugs” as a criminal problem rather than a health problem has destroyed families and communities and it certainly hasn’t taken drugs off the streets to a significant degree; similarly, treating prostitution as a criminal problem neither treats the causes of the “problem” nor makes it significantly less prevalent than it would be if it were legal.

Our response to cases like this Zumba studio in Kennebunk, and elsewhere, should be to take a look at what causes people to want to have sex — an easy enough question to answer for most people — and to see how we can fill that need in a manner that is as safe as possible for both these people and the communities they live in. Not only does keeping prostitution illegal push it out to the fringes where there isn’t the same accountability there would be in a free and open market, but it also prevents there from being any oversight to make sure that the risks of sexual activity — sexual transmitted infections and security in the event that anything non-consensual happens, just to name two — are minimized. The “problem” of prostitution requires a combination of both market and government forces to handle, but right now all we have is the biggest kind of government regulation there is: Making something illegal.

Operations like the one in Kennebunk are all too common in America; if you can’t see the prostitutes in the city or town you live in, you’re just not looking hard enough. Maybe the arrests and publicity make for splashy and entertaining headlines like we’re seeing now, but those just mask the real problems behind keeping prostitution illegal and how much trouble they cause, not just for those involved with prostitution but our communities as a whole. People want sex, whether you’re in a big metropolis like New York City or a scenic hamlet like Kennebunk, and nothing short of mass sterilization is likely to change that. Are we going to take a good look at the causes of prostitution and come up with some real alternatives to the current system, or are we going to keep it in the black market where it can cause such serious harm to everyone?

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