A Modest Proposal to Return Unemployed Sex Workers to the Deuce

Photo of 42nd Street in l985 by JG Klein

If everyone gets mentally healthy and poverty is eradicated where will the prostitutes come from? The world’s oldest profession will come to a halt. What will politicians like Eliot Spitzer do when they need to destroy their careers? But the problem is even more profound. Sexual trafficking is being attacked by writers like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and someday it may even be eradicated and then what will happen? Will the whole world become like 42^nd Street. Once the Deuce, as it was called in its bawdy heyday, was a magnet for human degradation. Flesh was cheap and perverts had their pick of cathouses and XXX peep shows. The human cost was tremendous, but is what replaced it any better? Is there a latter day Damon Runyon who will record the sites and sounds of what has become essentially a New Jersey mall situated in the middle of what was once the most cosmopolitan city in the world? Midnight Cowboy recorded the squalor of 42^nd Street in its prime as did Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But malls in New Jersey are now open season for carjackers and snipers and let’s just hope that the price for the suppression of one form of human misery isn’t something even worse. Once prostitution is finally eliminated, let’s employ all the unemployed streetwalkers to simply prowl the neighborhood and protect it from terrorists.