Prostitution has always been present in human history and it has ALWAYS involved the exploitation of women BY men through violence, power, drugs, etc.
There is no getting away from the fact that bad men will exploit the weak and vulnerable in order to feed their vices. Legalizing it doesn’t change human nature it merely legitimizes it’s worst features.
You apparently don’t have the moral and intellectual depth to discern this. Your belief that sexual relations are always a commercial transaction one way or another demonstrates this.
You are simply wrong in your understanding of human nature and your prescription for change will increase misery, not reduce it.
You say that with the same conviction that Andrea Dworkin who said "All heterosexual sex is rape".
Exploitation of people by other people covers the gamut from slavery to employment. In most of human history, women have been little more than chattel. Their entire lives were exploited, and their sexuality is only part of that.
Only in modern times, and in some places, do women have the opportunity to *not* be exploited from cradle to grave, so only now, when even the *law* must say that their sexuality is their own, and not the property of others, do they even have a chance to be a prostitute on their own.
"You apparently don’t have the moral and intellectual depth to discern this. Your belief that sexual relations are always a commercial transaction one way or another demonstrates this."
I do indeed have the moral and intellectual depth to discern this. But it seems that *you* might not. That is, if you persist in thinking that *you* should have some say, through force of law, as to what women can do with their sexuality.
And, I might add, that I *never* said that "sexual relations are always a commercial transaction one way or another", or anything to that effect. That is a construction of your mind, most likely based on the idea that a middle class woman, perhaps married and living in the suburbs would *not* have sex with strangers for money. Ever.
The vast majority of married sexual relationships are monogamous, and no prostitution in any sense of the word is involved. But that is not the *only* form of marriage out there.
Would it surprise you that many pornographic movie actors are married, and *not* to people they have sex with on camera? And they make a middle class amount of income, so why wouldn't they live in the middle class suburbs?
But they are a tiny minority, compared to the hidden middle class sex workers. And that doesn't include the "swingers" who don't have sex for money, just for fun.
I bet you wouldn't even guess that retirement communities and nursing homes often have members who prostitute themselves to other members.
"You are simply wrong in your understanding of human nature and your prescription for change will increase misery, not reduce it."
And you are quite wrong in thinking you understand human nature, and especially that you think that you have enough moral superiority to determine what others do with their lives.
Right now, by keeping prostitution illegal, prostitution is not controlled, in fact, it runs rampant. Serious crimes feed off of that illegality, not prostitution itself, because when legalized under tightly controlled circumstances, like Nevada, other crimes are kept at arms length.
The same argument was made about gambling, that permitting it around the country would destroy us. For many decades this idea was promulgated, and advocates of legal gambling were shouted down by those who said they didn't "understand human nature."
This is not to say that gambling or prostitution is harmless. Yet for the vast majority of people who gamble, or involve themselves in prostitution in Nevada, it is a not a life-shattering trauma.