as well as the empowerment that sex radicals perceive. "I don't think prostitution is the ultimate in women's liberation," she says. "But I think it's better understood as work than as inevitably a form of sexual violence." What prostitutes need, she argues, is not a bunch of goody-goodies looking down on them, but decent working conditions. Chapkis believes prostitution should be decriminalized. Just because it can be lousy work doesn't mean it should be stamped out, she argues. After all, she says, "there are lots of jobs in which women are underpaid, underappreciated, and exploited." Criminalizing the profession just exacerbates prostitutes' problems by isolating them from the law and leaving them vulnerable to abusive pimps and johns. "In a profession where women traditionally are not treated well, aren't empowered, and should be able to go to the police for protection and assistance," she says, "we make the police an extra obstacle, another threat." In the Netherlands, by contrast, where prostitution is decriminalized, police and prostitutes are on the same side: hookers speak at police academies to educate the officers about their work, and Chapkis says the communication pays off in safer working conditions for the women. But what of the radical feminists' claim that prostitution is too patriarchal to be tolerated? Chapkis points out that many things in modern life began as patriarchal institutions -- marriage, for example. Problems within marriage, she says, can be addressed without resorting to abolition: these days, marital property is distributed more fairly, and abused wives have place...
