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The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” — Former Cuban president Fidel Castro in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Castro later said he meant “exactly the opposite.”
Myths about selling sex 5 by Sudhir Venkatesh
ast weekend, Craigslist, the popular provider of Internet classified advertising, halted publication of its “adult services”
section. The move followed criticism from law enforcement officials across the country who have accused the site of facilitating prostitution on a massive scale. Of course, selling sex is an old business — most say the oldest. But as the Craigslist controversy proves, it’s also one of the fastest changing. And as a result, most people’s perceptions of the sex trade are wildly out of date.
Prostitution is an alleyway business.
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It once was, of course. In the late 1800s, as Northern cities boomed, the sex trade in America became synonymous with the seedy side of town. Men who wanted to find prostitutes combed alleys behind bars, dimly lit parks and industrial corridors. But today, only a few big cities, such as Los Angeles and Miami, still have a thriving outdoor street market for sex. New York has cleaned up Times Square, Chicago’s South Loop has long since gentrified, and even San Francisco’s infamous Tenderloin isn’t what it used to be. These red-light districts waned in
part because the Internet became the preferred place to pick up a prostitute. Even the most down-and-out sex worker now advertises on Craigslist (or did until recently), as well as on dating sites and in online chat forums. As a result, pimps’ role in the sex economy has been diminished. In addition, the online trade has helped bring the sex business indoors, with johns and prostitutes increasingly meeting up in bars, in hotels, in their own homes or in apartments rented by groups of sex workers. All this doesn’t mean a john can’t get what he’s looking for in the park, but he had better be prepared to search awhile. Although putting numbers on these trends is difficult, the transition from the streets to the Internet seems to have
by Joseph J. Thorndike A
mericans hate taxes, right? We vote for candidates who promise to cut them and pun- ish candidates who pledge to raise them. We tell pollsters we
don’t want to pay them. And we teach our children that the nation was founded to resist them. From the Boston Tea Party to Shays’s Rebellion to California’s Proposi- tion 13, we are a nation of tax revolters. Hand us a pitchfork, and we’ll march on Washington — just witness the “9/12 Tax- payer March” on Sunday on the Mall. This is the history underlying today’s
battle over the Bush tax cuts, the econo- my and President Obama’s complicated call for new business tax breaks even as the nation faces crippling budget deficits. Yet it’s a history that doesn’t quite meet the test of, well, history. Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” and for more than 200 years, Americans have been remarkably willing to pony up. It’s not that we hate the financial inconven- ience of paying taxes — we hate the in- justice of an unfair tax code. We’ve long agreed to pay the price for civilization. We just can’t tolerate anyone looking for civilization on the cheap. Consider the Boston Tea Party, the
creation myth for today’s anti-tax activ- ists. It was a protest not against taxes but against tax loopholes. The colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor were ob- jecting to a special tax exemption that Parliament had granted to the East India Company, a well-connected enterprise that in the early 1770s happened to be in dire need of a government bailout. In the centuries since, national crises
have periodically transformed our fiscal infrastructure. Wars have usually been the catalysts, establishing the need for new revenue and exposing the inadequa- cy of existing taxes. Economic collapse has also triggered change, particularly during the Great Depression, when Presi- dent Franklin Roosevelt gave the federal tax system a distinctly progressive cast. But if crises have sparked change, they
have not shaped the details. Deep popu- lar worries over fiscal unfairness — and over tax loopholes in particular — have
been central to the overhauls, with presi- dents from Abraham Lincoln to Wood- row Wilson to Barack Obama struggling to reconcile fiscal imperatives with pre- vailing norms of social justice. Since at least World War II, when our
current tax system took shape, the feder- al revenue structure has been undergird- ed by an implicit bargain. Middle-class Americans have agreed to shoulder much of the burden, through income and pay- roll taxes. In return, they have insisted that rich Americans pay higher rates — sometimes much higher. Such progressive taxation has some- times been proposed as a means to make society more egalitarian. In 1935, for in- stance, Roosevelt defended his plans for tax reform by highlighting the failures of the existing system. “Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few,” he declared, “and they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power.” More often, however, progressive taxa- tion has been advanced as a means to re- distribute the tax burden more fairly. Rep. Cordell Hull of Tennessee, a champi- on of the income tax during the 1910s, re- peatedly stressed the need to reallocate fiscal responsibilities, not overall wealth or economic power. “I have no disposi- tion to tax wealth unnecessarily or un- justly,” he said, “but I do believe that the wealth of the country should bear its just share of the burden of taxation and that it should not be permitted to shirk that du- ty.”
But here’s the problem with progres- sive taxation, especially when it features high rates on the very rich: Carried to an extreme, it can prove its own undoing. When faced with high marginal rates, wealthy taxpayers always seek loopholes. Such tax avoidance costs money, but even worse, it undermines the legitimacy of the tax system itself, eroding what econo- mists call “tax morale.” Commentators who bemoan the decline of Americans’ trust in government need look no further than the public suspicion that the tax sys- tem is not fair — that some people are shirking their fiscal duties through legal tax avoidance or illegal tax evasion, with the help of lawyers, campaign contribu- tions and lobbyists.
been very rapid. In my own research on sex workers in New York, women who in 1999 worked mostly outdoors said that by 2004, demand on the streets had decreased by half.
Men visit sex workers for sex. 2
Often, they pay them to talk. I’ve been studying high-end sex workers (by which I mean those who earn more than $250 per “session”) in New York, Chicago and Paris for more than a decade, and one of my most startling findings is that many men pay women to not have sex. Well, they pay for sex, but end up chatting or having dinner and never get around to physical contact. Approximately 40 percent of high-end sex worker transactions end up being sex-free. Even at the lower end of the market, about 20 percent of transactions don’t ultimately involve sex. Figuring out why men pay for sex
they don’t have could sustain New York’s therapists for a long time. But the observations of one Big Apple-based sex worker are typical: “Men like it when you listen. . . . I learned this a long time ago. They pay you to listen — and to tell them how great they are.” Indeed, the high-end sex workers I have studied routinely see themselves as acting the part of a counselor or a marriage therapist. They say their job is to feed a man’s need for judgment-free friendship and, at times, to help him repair his broken partnership. Little wonder, then, that so many describe themselves to me as members of the “wellness” industry.
Most prostitutes are addicted to drugs or were abused as children.
confirmed. But the population of women choosing sex work has changed dramatically over the past decade. High-end prostitutes of the sort Eliot
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This was once the case, as a host of research on prostitution long ago
Spitzer frequented account for a greater share of the sex business than they once did. And as Barnard College’s Elizabeth Bernstein has shown, sex workers today tend to make a conscious decision to enter the trade — not as a reaction to suffering but to earn some quick cash. Among these women, Bernstein’s research suggests, prostitution is viewed as a part-time job, one that grants autonomy and flexibility. These women have little in common with the shrinking number of sex workers who still work on the streets. In a 2001 study of British prostitutes, Stephanie Church of Glasgow University found that those working outdoors “were younger, involved in prostitution at an earlier age, reported more illegal drug use, and experienced significantly more violence from their clients than those working indoors.”
Prostitutes and police are enemies.
quasi-social workers. Peter Moskos’s recent book, “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District,” describes how police often play counselor to sex workers, drug dealers and a host of other illegal moneymakers. In my own work, I’ve found that cops are among the most empathetic and helpful people sex workers meet on the job. They typically hand out phone numbers for shelters, soup kitchens and emergency rooms, and they tend to demonstrate a great deal of sympathy for women who have been abused. Instead of arresting an abused sex worker, police officers will usually let her off with a warning and turn their attention to finding her abusive client. Unfortunately, officers say it is becoming more difficult to help such women; as they move indoors, it is simply more difficult to locate them. Of course, many big-city mayors embrace this same turn of events, since the rate of prostitution-related arrests drops precipitously when cops can’t find
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When it comes to the sex trade, police officers have in recent decades functioned as
anyone to nab. But for police officers, it makes day-to-day work quite challenging. Officers in Chicago and New York who once took pride in helping women exit the sex trade have told me about their frustration. Abusive men can more easily rob or hurt a sex worker in a building than on the street, they say. And while cops may receive a call about an overheard disturbance, the vague report to 911 is usually not enough to pinpoint the correct apartment or hotel room. There are few things more dispiriting, they say, than hearing of a woman’s cries for help and being unable to find her.
Closing Craigslist’s “adult services” section will significantly affect the sex trade.
sexual services, its significance has probably been exaggerated. Even before the site’s “adult services”
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section was shut down, it was falling out of favor among many users. Adolescent pranksters were placing ads as hoaxes. And because sex workers knew that cops were spending a lot of time responding to ads, they were increasingly hesitant to answer solicitations. I found that 80 percent of the men who contacted women via Craigslist in New York never consummated their exchange with a meeting. How the sex trade will evolve from here is anyone’s guess, but the Internet is vast, and already we are seeing increasing numbers of sex workers use Twitter and Facebook to advertise their services. Apparently, the desire to reveal is sometimes greater than the desire to conceal.
su185@columbia.edu
Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of “Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.”
Although Craigslist offered customers an important means to connect with sellers of
Wedon’t hate taxes. We hate tax loopholes.
President Ronald Reagan understood the political dangers and opportunities presented by this fact. “The American people are always willing, even eager, to do their duty,” he observed during his campaign to reform the tax system in 1985. “But you quite naturally resent it when you see others shirking theirs. It rankles to know that your tax rates are so high because others who can afford high- priced lawyers and tax consultants are able to manipulate the system to avoid paying their fair share.” Populist resentments have often been used to justify even higher rates for the rich. As President John F. Kennedy point- ed out in 1961, “Whenever one taxpayer is permitted to pay less, someone else must be asked to pay more. The uniform dis- tribution of the tax burden is thereby dis- turbed and higher rates are made neces- sary by the narrowing of the tax base.” But as Kennedy, Reagan and other presidents have understood, the effort to offset tax avoidance with higher rates is self-defeating. Wealthy taxpayers will re- double their efforts to identify and win tax preferences, lawyers will rake in more money advising their clients on how to do it, and tax cynicism will grow among the populace. In an arms race between tax collectors and tax avoiders, the latter usually win. With ample means and mo- tivation, they will never abandon the fight. Twenty-four years ago, a recognition of this reality helped produce the Tax Re- form Act of 1986, the greatest peacetime tax reform in U.S. history. Lawmakers eliminated many tax preferences, ex- panding the size of the tax base dramat- ically. The broader base allowed them to cut marginal rates, reducing the incen- tive for aggressive tax avoidance. It was a good bargain — but not a dura- ble one. In the two decades since Reagan shepherded tax reform into reality, perni- cious dynamics have returned in full force. As economist C. Eugene Steuerle, an architect of the 1986 reform, has ob- served, “Helped by pollsters skilled at making private greed appear like public need, even the White House, Treasury, and tax-writing committees have increas- ingly used the tax code to serve special in- terests instead of the common good.” Today, once again, the resentment is
ALEX NABAUM
dent in the 2008 campaign but largely absent during much of his presidency. His insistence on ending the Bush-era breaks for the nation’s wealthiest taxpay- ers seems calibrated to appeal to angry voters, who continue to tell pollsters that they support higher taxes on the rich. “I believe we ought to make the tax
cuts for the middle class permanent,” Obama said in Ohio on Wednesday. “These families are the ones who saw their wages and incomes flatline over the last decade — you deserve a break.” The president also decried Republicans’ plans to “cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations.” Obama would do well to remember
that soak-the-rich taxation, while politi- cally appealing and perhaps even morally justified, carries its own risks. Sure, vot- ers need to believe that the wealthy are paying their fair share. But the best way to provide that assurance is by closing loopholes and keeping them closed. By deepening the incentives for tax avoid- ance, high rates on the rich by themselves pose a long-term threat to the nation’s tax system.
evident around us. The “tea party” move- ment, in particular, draws sustenance from a deep-rooted suspicion that politi- cians serve the interest of a well-connect- ed minority, not a long-suffering major- ity. For many tea partiers, the loophole- ridden tax code is Exhibit No. 1 in their indictment of American government. In recent days, Obama seems to have rediscovered his populist voice, so evi-
Real tax reform — the kind we need to solve the nation’s long-term fiscal crisis — will involve sacrifice from everyone, not just the fortunate few.
jthorndike@thorndike.com
Joseph J. Thorndike is the director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts in Falls Church and the author of “Their Fair Share: Why Americans Tax the Rich,” forthcoming in 2011.
Outlook’s editors welcome comments and suggestions. Write to us at
outlook@washpost.com.
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