Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes comesque corporis!
Quae nunc abibis
In loca, pallidula, frigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos?

He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger's argument about the use of moods.
We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods.
It is state-of-mind that discloses to us
(Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

New Ending:
All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand
in hand.

Change doesn't happen because of how we invest our money. Change happens because of how we invest our human energy, and it always has since we came down from the trees. Everyone's got a margin of discretionary energy -- ten percent, twenty percent -- that isn't used up making their way in the world. That's the energy that's available for social change.

Consider the mentalspeak word "issue". "Issue" is an all-purpose word that has replaced several other words, such as dilemma, conflict, quandary, confusion, mess. What did people have before they had issues? How did we talk to each other about our blind confusions, our heart-stopping fears, sweet hopes, crippling loses and hot-blooded enthusiasms before we started calling everything an "issue"? I saw an advertisement in one of my local newspapers a few weeks ago offering counseling for "grief issues". What if I only had the grief, and not the issue?

OK so Bambi -- or Kristen - or whatever her name is this week -- is a truly pretty woman. But that's where the similarities between the prostituted woman used by recently deposed New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and the famous Julia Roberts movie end.

There's nothing "pretty" about prostitution, notwithstanding the glamorization of the Emperor's Club as a kind of Neiman Marcus-version of what goes on for 25 bucks in dilapidated drug-fueled shacks in inner-cities across the United States.

Nearly all prostituted women were abused as children and end up selling their bodies out of desperation, drug and mental health problems, or because the trauma they suffered as kids literally trained their brains to believe that sexual exploitation is a form of affection.

Notwithstanding this shocking data, prostitution is often depicted as a desirable lifestyle, characterized as an expression of women's free choice. No surprise there, it's to be expected in a society where myths are perpetuated to facilitate all sorts of entitlements on behalf of the powerful.

And in classic hypocritical style when it comes to American attitudes toward women, our culture celebrates prostitution while condemning it as a crime. Worse, though designed to punish equally the men and women involved in the crime, the laws are enforced disproportionately against women. The johns and pimps are rarely brought to justice. Is it any wonder Eliot Spitzer thought the odds were good that he could avoid prosecution?

Prostitution causes other crimes, too, including child sex abuse and child pornography. When the claim is made that women have a "right" to sell their bodies, ACLU-types push the point and argue that children as young as 13 should be able to claim a similar right to sexual freedom.

Quite apart from the risk of harm to children is the risk to public health. A recent study found that 1 in 4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. This is the next generation of prostituted women who will be engaging in sex acts with, and infecting, men across all social, economic and class lines.

The fight against prostitution has nothing to do with prudishness and is not an anti-sex moral tirade. We should all, male and female alike, be having more sex with as many consensual partners as we desire, consistent with our individual values and lifestyles. The problem is not a sexual one, it is one of financial exploitation and virtual slavery particularly affecting vulnerable women and teenage girls.

It's easy to say the sale of sex for money is good for women. They can earn a living while engaging in pleasurable conduct, the argument goes. It even sounds like the women are successful and productive citizens because we've started to call them "sex workers" instead of "hookers", "whores" and other pejorative terms.

But the truth is so much uglier. Most prostituted women become addicts because they use drugs just to tolerate the experience, and nearly 100% have been raped "on the job". Virtually all sexual assaults of prostituted women go unreported and even the women who do come forward rarely have their cases investigated or prosecuted. In other words, a huge population of women is routinely being raped with impunity primarily because the violence they suffer is all wrapped up in confusing rhetoric about freedom and choice.

Prostitution has nothing to do with freedom and is more akin to slavery. Laws in this country forbid the selling of people because it is barbaric to treat human beings as commodities. Abolitionists taught us this important lesson many years ago when we put a stop to the slave trade and the sale of African Americans. (Just imagine calling slaves "cotton workers").

The problem is, we never quite stepped up to the plate to condemn the sale of women, and while reasonable people will argue that slavery is different, sale of the intimate self is as close to slavery as any activity could possibly be.

If prostitution were a business that facilitated the sale of sexual access to black citizens rather than women -- anti-racism leaders in this country would not be celebrating the activity as a type of "freedom". They would be demanding government support for sexually exploited minorities and stiff punishments for the pimps and the johns who use them.

We need to ask ourselves why we don't feel the same revulsion when we hear about the sexual exploitation of women of all colors.

Wendy Murphy
New England School of Law