PHYLLIS CHESLER: Communism and Prostitution.

Why would a socialist-communist paradise require the degradation of womankind in order to be able to pay for…Stuff?

Mamdani, New York City’s Mayoral frontrunner, is in favor of de-criminalizing it, which is the same as legalizing what he and others call “sex work.” In my view, “sex work” is not work. It is violence against the girls and women and against the boys and men who are trafficked into it, either due to extreme parental abuse, psychiatric fragility, enormous poverty, and a complete lack of economic alternatives. “Working” as a prostitute, is like working in a plutonium factory and being assured of a very short shelf life. Although there are rare exceptions, I do not see women of wealth choosing this so-called job.

Why would a socialist communist paradise be so impoverished that it would have to cater to male lust and damn its most vulnerable victims? Won’t there be employment for everyone? If not, why not?

Historically, Soviet Russia, communist China, and communist Cuba all viewed it as a capitalist and “foreign” practice and outlawed it. In the Soviet and Cuban cases, that practice returned, because the state needed tourist dollars to pay for their gulags, torture chambers, and dachas. In China’s case, it slowly returned as an illegal and “invisible” activity but one needed in order for the prostituted to earn better money and/or in order to obtain privileges from their leaders.

In 2017, the New York Times assured me that there was so much sweet, sweet love and sexytime flowing in the former Soviet Union, that the entire nation resembled the Chateau Marmont when Led Zeppelin was in town, thus rendering prostitution completely anathema.