The Urban Institute’s report, released this week, draws on interviews with dozens of child pornographers, sex workers, pimps, traffickers, and local law enforcement officials in a bid to outline the inner workings of the business in eight American cities. The role of pimps, in particular, has been underinvestigated by social scientists. The Urban Institute begins to correct that oversight by speaking with 73 incarcerated pimps and traffickers, many of whom seemed eager to challenge cultural assumptions about pimping, starting with the word itself. Most of the Urban Institute’s subjects preferred to identify as business managers, businessmen, or madams. “I never considered myself to be a pimp. I just considered myself to be a part of the urban lifestyle,” one man told them. Said another, “A pimp has the hat, the cane. Those are pimps.” As one incarcerated woman put it: “I am a madam. I am not a pimp. Pimps are bitches.”
Here’s a link to the actual report. The New York Times broke this down further, including a helpful infographic that apparently won’t save on my computer for me to embed. Combine that chart with this article and maybe Atlanta isn’t the best place to move to.
Couple of other interesting nuggets from this study, which was government-funded: there are 4,790 Asian massage parlors in the U.S., and apparently the lines between what’s comparatively good and less good morally are blurred:
Those interviewed project the image of a kinder, gentler pimp. One even said that he turned to pimping from selling drugs in part because he perceived it as less “evil.” (“To be honest,” he said, “I was psyched thinking I was doing the right thing.”)
It’s all pretty interesting. I was actually having a discussion at a bar last night with my wife and this random guy to the right of us (from Houston, in Minneapolis for business) about why prostitution is illegal, but pornography isn’t. If you want to know the answer to that question, read here and here. I think the idea of sex trafficking is awful, but beyond that, I think I may have become more libertarian — I think that’s the right term — as I grow up. I do think that if you have horrible things (morally horrible, let’s say) that people are still going to do, why not tax the ever-loving shit out of it and channel that money back to education or student loan debt removal? It’s obviously not that easy, but what if America’s vices could ultimately help fuel the renaissance of America’s middle class? That’d be cool, no?
Is prostitution immoral? What is the difference between going out with a girl, having dinner and a movie, having sex then never calling her again? What’s the difference between going to a bar, buying a woman drinks and then have a one night stand? Why is one illegal and the other not illegal. Its still a defacto exchange of sex for money.
Now a “good Christian” would say both are immoral, but one gets you put in jail and the other doesn’t. Why?
The only reason why is because housewives don’t want their husbands visiting prostitutes. It has nothing at all to do with morals.