The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings. - Charles Dickens, The Chimes
Despite the neofeminist pretense that the majority is behind them and politicians’ boasts of “Prohibition now, prohibition tomorrow and prohibition forever!”, the fact is that there are already deep cracks in what I’ve described as the dam of prohibitionism. Trust in government is at an all-time low, people are becoming increasingly intolerant of arbitrary bans on consensual activities, health authorities around the world recognize that decriminalization is the best way to fight HIV, human rights authorities understand that it’s the only way to effectively protect sex workers’ rights, and many countries are moving toward decriminalization despite US threats, just as some countries and American states are defying Washington’s authoritarian proscription of marijuana. The end will come, even if old crones like me will be too long in the tooth by then to really appreciate it; as I wrote a year ago in “Crystal Ball”,
…skepticism about “trafficking”…will slowly increase, and by about 2015 it will be possible for a major media outlet to publish articles critical of both the statistics and the very concept. By 2017 public funding for anti-sex worker hate groups will begin to dry up, and by 2019 or 2020 we should expect it to virtually disappear from public discourse except for a wave of books and documentaries by “experts” who couldn’t be bothered to speak out against it while it was going on but are happy to make a quick buck from it after it’s safely over. Sometime soon after this there may be a pro-sex work backlash against the hysteria, just as public atheism became much more palatable to general audiences after the death of the “Satanic Panic”. I suspect that at this point the ACLU will finally deign to take up a challenge to prostitution law, and sometime in the late 2020s the SCOTUS will issue a landmark decision overturning prostitution laws on civil rights grounds just as Roe vs. Wade overturned abortion laws and Lawrence vs. Texas overturned sodomy laws.