It’s perfectly all right to pay a pretty young woman to give you a back massage, defense lawyers like to joke. Just don’t roll over.
At the heart of the apparent Craigslist killings is a murky brew of law, culture, morality and marketing.
What was it exactly that Julissa Brisman, the 26-year-old woman killed at the Marriott Copley, was selling when she posted her massage services on Craigslist?
Journalists are treading a bit lightly on what the women might have had for sale, besides a cure for aching muscles. But, in fact, if the girls were hookers with a subtle marketing message, then the tale becomes more complicated.
That’s not to say that prostitutes are fair game for nutty young guys, but it helps explain why women are willing to put themselves in dangerous, solitary circumstances, as opposed to getting a day job at an expensive health spa.
State attorneys general are all over Craigslist to banish the “erotic services” ads – even if they are promoting “massages,” which seems pretty harmless. It’s just, like, a massage, right?
The distinction between sex-for-hire and a massage complicates the scenario. In a culture that views extramarital sex as less disturbing than a flat tire on the Mass. Pike, could the massage girl and her client make up a story that passes muster, that keeps both of them out of trouble?
“Well, I gave him a massage and he paid me and, well, we were really attracted to each other. So, we had sex. It wasn’t like I was a hooker or anything.”
Bank Fees
So, if two bankers who don’t know each other close a deal, money is exchanged, and that night they celebrate, get tipsy, and have sex, is that far removed from prostitution, because the money changed hands for another purpose – sort of like a massage?
If a young fella takes a girl out to dinner, buys her dinner, pays all the taxi fares, pays for the $400 hotel room, and then they have sex, is that a “date” – or is that bad girl providing sex for money? If the culture no longer frowns on casual sex, what is it exactly, as a matter of law, that distinguishes prostitution from passion?
Society was perhaps most comfortable with crackdowns on prostitution when we could create a scenario in which the women were victims of some sex-slave pimp – or the girls lowered real estate values by standing around on street corners, looking come-hither in a Cohen the Columnist kind of way.
Moral Decay
There is still plenty of that around – as well as horrific tales of parents selling young girls into prostitution, and the peddling of young immigrant girls like bags of grain.
But the Craigslist killings suggest something different – the cost of doing business in a risky field that is marginalized, if not criminalized, for reasons that aren’t always easy to explain.
The Craigslist killings could be positioned as a morality tale – not just a tut-tut at the creepy young man, not just the massage professionals, but also the rather elaborate infrastructure we have built to satisfy sexual urges.
You don’t have to be a preacher to be troubled by the “Decline and Fall of the West” sense that the Craigslist advertising creates. Isn’t it interesting that the attorneys general are focused not on the “fornicators,” as some preachers might put it, but only on the advertising – which is a public display of our embarrassing instincts and crumbling morals?
As Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan once said in an interview, “I do sense that there’s a rot spreading at the core of our culture. I’m not religious…but I have very reluctantly come to the view that maybe some religion is needed, certainly more than we have.”
What Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called the “dark side of the Internet” is, in truth, the dark side of a culture that really just doesn’t want to be embarrassed in public.
A Stanford University law school graduate pleaded guilty early this year to failing to pay taxes on the $82,000 she made as an “escort,” in one year. The sex wasn’t the problem. She needed a better accountant.
