PERVERSE INCENTIVES Maggie McNeill Ronald Weitzer Dianne Post Steven Wagner

• Maggie McNeill. Retired call girl and madam Maggie McNeill reviews the various legal regimes that have been set up to regulate and/ or prohibit sex work. She concludes that many approaches, particularly the most restrictive ones, increase the likelihood of harm to all participants. They tend to infantalize women and invest law enforcement with arbitrary and dangerous powers.
• Ronald Weitzer. He argues for a set of “best practices”that would entail some government regulation of sex work, including subjecting business owners to background checks and licensing, zoning regulations, and restrictions on advertising. These measures would make decriminalization politically palatable and protect against a possible backlash. He also finds, contrary to McNeill’s claim, that no country has fully deregulated sex work.
• Dianne Post. argues that prostitution is a form of exploitation, and that the only proper response is to abolish it.Prostitution, she argues, only exists because of material inequalities. Worse, it tends strongly to produce further inequalities –material, social, and political in nature. Prostitution traps women in economic dependency
• Steven Wagner argues that the large majority of prostitutes are not workers at all, because they are not acting voluntarily: they are enslaved. Wagner likewise prefers the Swedish approach, in which prostitutes are not treated as criminals, but those who attempt to buy sex are.
• RISPOSTA A POST Though Ms. Post’s position differs from mine far more substantially than does Dr. Weitzer’s, it is difficult to respond to it on a philosophical level due to its deep reliance on a priori arguments. This difficulty is best represented by Ms. Post’s statement that “the radical feminist stance against prostitution is based on the lived realities of women,”when in fact the exact opposite is true;
• RISPOSTA A WAGNER Mr. Wagner’s essay suffers from the same critical flaw as does Ms. Post’s, an almost complete dependence on a priori statements, unsupported factual claims, Surveyed sex workers (even in so-called “hotbeds”of “trafficking”like Cambodia) consistently report coercion rates below 2%, which is very similar to the fraction of women in the general population who report an abusive or controlling boyfriend or