Essentially…because of religion.

It goes deeper than that, but the taboo attitude towards sex is largely brought back to religion.

So as long as sex is taboo to talk about…anybody running on elected office saying “hey we oughtta regulate sex work and get a slice of this pie” (pin unintended) will probably not get re-elected.

This is also why you’re seeing people lighten up about weed. It’s not taboo anymore.

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because we decided to poison the government with christianity

Depending on where you are. It is not illegal.

Most human societal ills can be blamed on the religious, conservative, and rich

Puritanical prudes and those that agree with them and think they should have control of another’s body.

Buckle up, bucaroos.

The world’s oldest profession is a catch-all for desperate, impoverished, oppressed women who “join” (under duress) the workforce in this industry. Sex work is more broad than prostitution. Porn models, escorts, and many others exists under its umbrella.

The woman’s body is the highest prize in patriarchal society. Men who get the prize without “earning” it (i.e. through marriage) and instead pay for it, feel ashamed, which they then project upon the worker. The quick ROI of the market attracts the worst predators in society, who harm and abuse the workers. (Not ALL men do this, yadda yadda).

The workers need extra legal protection, but there’s a significant overlap of predatory men and rulers, politicians, et. al., who don’t want their prey to have protection.

Whenever it is legalized, some horrific murder or routine abuse gets publicized and causes patriarchal moral panic. The blame inevitably gets placed on the sex worker, and the solution by the men in power is to outlaw it (begrudgingly, because they know it will now be harder to access). It’s the exact same reaction you see when a monogamous man gets caught cheating on his wife with an escort. In that case, the wife acts as an arm of the patriarchy and demands her husband blame the sex worker, which helps her avoid feeling the tough emotions that might otherwise end the marriage.

If you look at our current system, Only Fans is known to be a safe harbor for some sex workers. But we’re starting to see vultures called OF Managers (née pimps) moving in to commodotize the market. They are always here. The industry shifts and adapts to new societal norms (aka the regulatory environment) and the pimps are always right behind. The workers need extra legal protection from this threat.

But you’ll also notice how the manosphere (The Young Predators) has thoroughly entrenched a specific dehumanizing narrative online about OF workers. There is no legal appetite to adapt to the new threat. It will continue this way, sex workers being preyed upon, until something horrific gets publicized. Then there is a little battle between activists crying for better legal protection and the patriarchy crying for bans. The winner of the battle dictates which direction the legal system responds. Rinse and repeat.

“Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?

               ~George Carlin~

A number of reasons:

• For a number of people, they just could not fathom buying sex. Part of that is some kind of pseudoreligious idea, part of that is also that they just don’t understand why you would want casual sex. These people often don’t understand why in the hell you would want to be a prostitute or a John, and don’t see why it shouldn’t be illegal.

• Another number of people see it as “losing”. As in, you would only ever want to buy sex if you’ve failed to get it some other way. Essentially, if you want to buy sex, something is wrong with you. So they look down on those who buy sex (even though they’re sometimes secretly those who also buy sex themselves - sort of like the anti-gay republicans who get caught… well, you know).

• There’s also the view that no woman in her right mind would ever want to sell sex, framing selling sex as abuse. Never mind that that’s not necessarily the case and that selling sex is not just something women do, but if you see it like that, it makes sense to outlaw it, since you’re trying to remove a source of harm.

Because it’s difficult to tax.

Almost every single way of making money that does not harm anyone that is illegal is only illegal because the government can’t reliably take shit from it.

It also is mysogyny in this case. The vast majority of sex workers are women.

My 2c:

Religion, and likely a concept by those in power that sex should be free whenever they want it.

because religious zealots and/or conservative politicians love the pearl clutching and ride to power on a wave of moral hypocrisy

A more nuanced question would be where is it legal or illegal, and what are the restrictions or conditions where it is legal? How is sex in general seen in those places? The correlation, if any, may highlight some things.

But it isn’t illegal.

The problem is that it was proven to be incredibly difficult to ‘manage it’. Even where it is legal many sex workers are often being abused and human trafficking is a problem, because demand tends to be bigger then supply (there is more people who want to fuck than the people who would like to be fucked for money). And where it is illegal the sex workers are still being abused, but not only by the industry, but also by the law and the society, which does not help the victims at all…