I live near Cincinnati, Ohio. This past week, a 58-year-old retired police lieutenant was arrested in a prostitution sting carried out at a Cincinnati-area hotel. This was a major news item, as the reader can imagine.
The retired lawman paid $200 for a voluntary sexual encounter with a known sex worker. He was not caught with his pants down, but arrested after the act. No word on whether or not the arresting officers allowed the woman to keep the $200. She definitely lost a future client.
If you live in Ohio, you’ve seen scores of prostitution busts on your local news reports in recent months. Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, has made the elimination of sex-for-hire his signature policy initiative. No greenbacks for hanky-panky in Ohio. The hotel rooms and private bedchambers of the Buckeye State will be free from such iniquities.
This is not something that the voters necessarily asked for as a priority. Most of us are far more concerned about our sky-high residential property taxes, and the violent crime in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.
AG Yost claims that he is combatting a pandemic of human trafficking. But the attorney general’s results don’t square with his claims. Most of these busts involve female sex workers in their 30s, and even older male clients. Middle-aged people, in other words, engaging in consensual encounters. Yost has yet to provide hard, publicly available evidence of said trafficking. Certainly the taxpayers have been shown nothing that would justify such an outlay of public resources.
This is what happens when one political party becomes entrenched and complacent. Ohio used to be a “swing state”. In recent election cycles, however, Ohio has become a GOP stronghold, such that there is now very little competition between the two major political parties at the state level.
And Ohio’s GOP, now safely in control, has chosen to concentrate on sex, sex, and more sex, with AG Yost leading the charge.
The query “Ohio prostitution bust” yields many pages of results on Google News. Here’s a sample:
“17 arrested in Ohio prostitution bust include college professor and dentist”
Yes, a college professor and a dentist! These reports always involve a lot of pearl-clutching on the part of the media and interviewed law enforcement officers. How could it be that “ordinary” men are drawn to the promise of illicit, no-strings sex? Quite shocking, isn’t it? As if any of this were a concept that hasn’t existed since the literal dawn of civilization.
But it isn’t only men who are getting in trouble over sex work. At the national level, we’ve all seen news stories about female public school teachers getting fired after they were discovered to be moonlighting on OnlyFans.The incidents of public school teachers engaging in OnlyFans side hustles have become so common in recent years that ABC News devoted an entire report to that sole topic last August.
I think we know what motivates the men. But why do women do this? At the end of the day, the incentive to engage in sex work would seem to come down to supply-and-demand. To be blunt about it: women can make a lot of money doing this.
A 2021 divorce case in NYC revealed that a surgeon’s (soon to be former) wife, who had won beauty pageants, made $700,000 as an “escort”—another name for a call girl.
In 2023, the New York Post interviewed an escort who sometimes made $34,000 per week, serving as a “professional girlfriend” to Wall Street bankers. The escort, Mia Lee, is a former accountant.
And then there are the women who have made six and seven figures on OnlyFans. Twenty-year-old OnlyFans model Sophie Rain claimed to have made $43 million in 2024.
There is a part of me that can understand a man paying to sleep with a beauty queen. I cannot understand why any man would spend money on OnlyFans. But gazillions of men obviously do. The sex business is a business with almost infinite demand, and there are many permutations of it.
I should also point out that while there are beauty queens in the business, a large number of the women interviewed in these articles (or exposed in news stories) are not beauty queens. In fact, the beauty queens seem to be relative outliers. The vast majority of these women are average looking, and many will never see the age of 35 again. (The aforementioned Mia Lee is 36 at the time of this writing.) In short, this is an economic opportunity that is available to almost any woman who is willing to partake.
The downsides, of course, are not insignificant. Ours is an era in which all forms of sex between consenting adults are on the table. But the minute one injects money into the equation, it’s back to Puritan times. Sex work side hustles can ruin women’s vanilla careers. Just ask the many teachers who have been fired for their OnlyFans accounts.
And, of course, not every woman relishes the idea of being the sex object of multiple, random men. In fact, we can safely assume that most women, when presented with the career options available in the male entertainment industry, are going to say, “No thanks.” (But then, not every woman wants to be a teacher.)
This is why Mia Lee, and the ex-wife of that NYC surgeon, can make such a killing. Demand for their services far outstrips (no pun intended) supply. In economic terms, that’s a recipe for high prices, and big payoffs to those who are willing to exploit market scarcity.
Does this mean that no women are being “trafficked” in sex work? Well, of course not. There are people being forced to work against their will in mining, the restaurant business, and textiles, too. In some parts of the world, children are regularly pressed into military service.
Yet somehow we manage to make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary labor in these industries and professions. No one claims that the textile industry should be outlawed, because textile workers have been exploited in specific situations. Instead we focus on eliminating those specific instances of abuse.
Why should sex work be any different? And how can a blanket human trafficking theory explain women like Mia Lee, who are obviously not trafficked (and who probably make more than some of their clients)?
***
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost seeks to change human nature, to eliminate demand by subjecting the noncompliant— both male and female—to legal penalties and public shame.
Yost is a conservative Republican. But in this regard, he has much in common with social engineers of any ideological stripe. Humankind will conform to his vision of how humankind should be…or else.
I’m not here to advocate that anyone participate in sex work, on either the demand or the supply side. I still don’t understand why any man would want to spend a dime on OnlyFans. Nor do I fully understand the mindset of those men who pay Mia Lee her princely $1,300 per hour fee (according to her website). I mean, jeez, you can get a laptop computer for $1,300. Or an airplane ticket.
But if you can give something away, you ought to be able to sell it. And if you can accept something gratis, then you ought to be able to pay money for it. Such transactions among consenting adults are none of the government’s business. Or so says the libertarian in me.
-ET