Maggie McNeill Quotes

I do agree with Ms. Post about one thing, though; the legal status of prostitution is indeed a measure of a society, and it does indeed set a tone. When government is allowed to criminalize the consensual behavior of rational adults, it makes a statement. When women's work is devalued as being "receptacles for men," and when sex is defined as the totality of our being (so that sale of sex is defined as sale of our whole persons), it makes a statement. When individual choices are dismissed by powerful authorities whose decisions are inflicted on those individuals by organized violence, it makes a statement. And when the sending of such "messages" takes precedence over the health and well-being of real humans, it makes a very real and truly horrifying statement.

Meanwhile, Hawaiian politicians tried to make up for lost time by officially granting cops the "right" to rape sex workers by spelling the permission out in the text of the new prostitution law. When a legislator discovered this provision in 2015 and rewrote the law to scrap it, the cops demanded that their decades-old droit du seigneur remain in place, and it probably would've had not the media gotten hold of the story and a public outcry not ensued. Now there's a movement to decriminalize sex work there, which might at last free Hawaiian whores from the tender mercies of cops.