So our current model for any legislation on this topic boils down to "Sex is bad. Sex in exchange for money is downright evil. We must discourage sex from happening at all and especially punish people exchanging money for sex."

Historically, you see more prostitution in "Victorian" style eras of prudery. During "Hippie" style eras where ordinary women will put out for free because they actually enjoy sex, you see less sex in exchange for money.

Let me remind people that marriage is the only contract that is considered void and annullable if it is not consummated with an act of sex and dividing up marital assets and monies is a big part of concerns about divorce and rightly so. Historically, a man was hired to a lot of jobs more or less on the assumption that he had a wife at home to cook for him, do the grocery shopping and clean up after him so he could focus on his job and then his money was viewed as "family money" not his personal income. She had a right to it and those rights have eroded over time.

This is not at all a simple topic because if you assume that couples must marry for life ("until death do us part") and cannot divorce and yadda, then you are saying people have to stay in abusive relationships and that's all kinds of problematic.

Anyway, our laws surrounding topics like this generally do a poor job of protecting the people we claim to be protecting because our mental models aren't actually about human rights. They aren't actually about things like agency, quality of life etc for women and children.

They are about prudery and an assumption that sex is bad and somehow adding money to the mix makes it pure evil.

And, yet, men tend to be expected to pay for dates and men tend to be expected to support their wives financially, etc. So there are lots of ways in which money is already tied to sex and in a gendered fashion. Sex workers are typically women. Their clients tend to be men.

There is a lot of growing that needs to happen before we can get to a point of actually giving a damn about the welfare and agency of people who are at risk of ending up sex workers for various reasons.

At the risk of having this misconstrued as usual:

When I was homeless, men would straight up offer me money for sex based solely on being pretty plus very obviously poor while at the same time trying to network via HN and figure out how to adequately support myself some other way has gone very poorly for a lot of years. There are lots of factors suppressing my income. It's not just my gender. But my gender is a factor and most of the time when I bring that up, I get a lot of not great replies that boil down to people trying to deny that men here are somehow guilty of something .

I'm not trying to point fingers and say "men are bad people." But the reality is that simply being female makes it hard to figure out how to connect with businessmen in a way that helps improve my bottom line and doesn't get misconstrued as me offering to date someone, in essence.

I don't know how to solve that. I've worked on it a lot of years and things are less crazy making than they used to be, but I haven't found any slam dunk wins substantially moving the needle on my bottom line.

So if you are inclined to be all "La la la not listening, not my problem" about how the highest ranked woman on HN finds HN not fertile ground for trying to establish an income when lots of men have no problem using it that way, then you are part of the problem here. Women tend to do sex work because it pays better than a lot of jobs that are open to women and it's amazingly hard to keep "choosing the high road" when that involves literal starvation. (For those who did not get the memo: I was openly homeless for nearly six years and an active participant here for most of that time.)

So think on that. This issue is complex and cannot be resolved by just focusing on sex work per se. It isn't going to be resolved until there are other avenues for women to readily support themselves, among other things. "Just say no to sex work" when there are no ready replacements for such income for so many women is simply not a viable method of fixing the underlying social stuff that fosters current outcomes and statistical trends for this issue.