There was a segment on 20/20 Downtown about an American woman who is 
currently living in Amsterdam with her seven year old daughter. Nothing very 
unusual about this story except for one thing: she supports her family by 
prostitution.

This isn't like being a prostitute in the United States. The major difference 
is that prostitution is legal in the Netherlands. The women who have sex for 
money are required to pay taxes on their income, and because their profession
isn't a crime, they are entitled to health insurance, pensions, and police 
protection.

The interviewer, and to a certain extent the interviewee, could not keep 
their nice middle class American values from showing. The reporter's face 
stretched into a grimace of disbelief when the woman said that this was a job 
that
allowed her to live in a style of her own choosing, that since it was more or 
less a brainless job, made none of the demands that her fast paced career in 
New York City had, leaving her time to spend with her daughter and her 
mother, shop for beautiful things, make her own choices, all those things 
that she couldn't do while she was working 70 hours a week for someone else. 
The woman, when asked if she would want her daughter to make the same choice, 
emphatically denied it, saying, "It's all right for me, because it was my 
choice."
Presumably she is raising her daughter to make her own choices when the time 
comes, but I guess that's a moot point.

Whatever their polls might say, the Dutch government has realized one thing: 
the only difference between a prostitute and a professional athlete is that 
the athlete makes more money. Both are being paid for what they can do with 
their
bodies, and the better shape they are in and the better they can perform 
their chosen task, the more likely they are to make money.

We have this puritanical idea that prostitution is evil, that anyone who does 
it is either forced into it by financial circumstance or is a junkie of some 
sort, trading sex for a fix. We pay people to dance, to dig ditches, to toss 
garbage bags into a truck. What are all of those occupations except the use 
of the body? And while anyone who does those things might finish their work 
and reflect that they hate their job, none of them are likely to be arrested 
for doing what they do with their bodies. The obvious conclusion is that the 
real difference in our perception is that there's no sex involved in being a 
trash collector. I say, so what? If it is legal for me to sell the labor of 
my body moving dirt from one place to another, why should it be illegal for 
me to sell the labor of my body to make another consenting adult happy? I 
suppose the obvious next
question is what is it about sex that makes it so different from all the 
other things a person can do with their body?