“…What is it with liberals and accusations of “moralizing?” Right before reading Bazelon’s piece, I was scrolling through the comments on a subreddit where someone had shared my last post on prostitution. There too, the most common response by far was a curt dismissal on the grounds that I just have a “moral problem” with prostitution.
Well, here’s my confession: They’re right! I do have a moral problem with prostitution. I think buying sex is wrong. It’s bad. It’s not okay. It’s unacceptable, reprehensible, indefensible, shameful, disgraceful, appalling, and every other word the Left has banned for fear of “moralizing.” But buying sex should be moralized, because buying sex is immoral. It’s something a person ought not do.
That’s not all, though. I don’t just want to call it immoral — I want the government to enforce that morality! I want the police and courts to punish men who purchase sex. I want them fined, or even thrown in jail, and I want that done solely because what they are doing is immoral.
I have no idea why anyone would think I pretend otherwise.
On the subject, I have moral problems with some other things: Police brutality, domestic violence, religion, capitalism, and the entire global system of industrial civilization, to name a few. I think it’s objectively immoral to assault your partner or appropriate the means of production for private profit. A white cop murdering an African civilian is impermissible to me. And destroying the entire planet in an orgy of white supremacist, patriarchal settler colonialism for the profit of shareholders and CEOs is certainly something I think a person ought not do. These things are wrong, like buying sex is wrong, and that is reason enough to abolish them…
Left-wing men have cordoned off sex from ethics because ethics is, at its heart, a search for rules that transcend desire. Most of them don’t desire to run a Fortune 500 company, or dig an oil well, or invade another country, so they don’t mind prescriptions on behavior that restrict those things. But many, many men on the Left want to fuck female strangers, or want the power that comes from knowing those fucks are an option. No wonder, then, so many oppose “moralizing” around sex.
But of course they don’t actually escape a moral system — they just construct a remarkably shitty one. Don’t tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies. If it’s consensual, you have no right to judge. Don’t be a prude. What are all of these things except universal prescriptions on behavior, which is all that morality ever was? Someone needs to remind these men that Thou Shall Not Slut Shame and Thou Shall Not Lie With Mankind as With Womankind are equally commandments.”
Left-wing men have cordoned off sex from ethics because ethics is, at its heart, a search for rules that transcend desire. Most of them don’t desire to run a Fortune 500 company, or dig an oil well, or invade another country, so they don’t mind prescriptions on behavior that restrict those things. But many, many men on the Left want to fuck female strangers, or want the power that comes from knowing those fucks are an option. No wonder, then, so many oppose “moralizing” around sex.
More people need to read this.
Last week, the New York Times ran Emily Bazelon’s piece, “Should Prostitution be a Crime?” Like most articles in support of the sex trade…



















