Many people think that prostitution is a free choice but Melissa Farley thinks differently. She thinks this because of all the research that is done on prostitution, most of the women are in it because when they were young children they were beaten or sexually abused themselves. Because that happened to the young girls, they think that they are worthless and they go to the only thing that they have ever known, prostitution.

On the view of this issue I believe the same as Melissa Farley. Before reading the article in Seeing Ourselves by John J. Macionis and Nijole V. Benokratis, I already knew that most women did it because of bad childhoods and they thought that they were worthless, but I didn’t know the extent to why they thought they way that they did. I never thought of tanning salons and massage parlors prostitution. I knew that rape happened at these kinds of places, it can happen anywhere, but I never knew that people prostituted there.

Prostitution reflects the intersection of race, sex and class oppression. It reflects race in the studies we read about in Seeing Ourselves. It says that “women of color are overrepresented in prostitution(172)’.  “96 percent of White European American, more than half of the women in strip club prostitution are women of color(172).  It reflects sex in a way that it’s alright for the women to become prostitutes. Their pimps tell them that they’ll make a lot of money and have nice things, but they accually get almost to nothing except for beatings. The girls think that it’s the only way to live and they don’t feel like they are good for anything except sex. When the girls are young before even going into the world of prostitution they are raped and molested, by family members or acquaintances. All they know from a young age is sex. Class oppression also plays a big role in why a girl is in prostitution. If a girl is poor and has little to no money, and was abused as a child whether it be sexually, mentally, or physically, she has a much larger chance of ending up in prostitution than a wealthy girl who has everything she wants or needs. In a lot of countries, including out own, a lot of the high-up wealthy people looks down on the poor. They see them as doing nothing with their lives and the wealthy accept prostitution more for the poor than they do themselves.

Decriminalization and legalization differ. The way that they differ is that decriminalization says that it’s not totally criminal act to have sex for money, clothes, food, or housing but in a way its not the right thing to do either. Legalization is saying that it’s okay for young girls to go out and have forced sex with men to live. Farley is opposed to this because a girl should never be forced to have sex for money, clothes, food, or shelter. She should never have sex unless she to wants it. I agree with her on this position because young girls and women should have options. They need to know that they are worth something and they they aren’t a nobody and they can do something amazing with their lives. By LAURA