Free Diddy

he did nothing wrong.

P Diddy, also known as Sean Combs, has just been convicted of “transportation for prostitution.”

He faces 20 years in jail.

Meanwhile, we’ve got guys running around with 10 arrests, 20 arrests, 30 arrests, 40 arrests, 50 arrests, 60 arrests, 80 arrests, 90 arrests, 100 arrests, 101 arrests, 123 arrests, 1,500 arrests…

428,000 individuals are arrested three or more times per year.

source

The vast majority of harmful crime is caused by poor citizens, not rich rappers.¹ If we want to prevent harm, we should target poor communities by applying maximum policing pressure. Militarized SWAT teams should patrol the inner cities, and offenders should be deported to Haiti.

When there is a really bad problem, but people are disinterested or afraid to solve that problem, they engage in scapegoating. For decades, the left-wing has claimed that policing does more harm to poor communities than it helps. On the other hand, the right-wing has focused its ire away from actual offenders, and scapegoated everything from rap music to video games to pornography.

Diddy stands at the cross roads of a perfect storm of scapegoating. He is rich, perverted, a rapper, an “elite.” Rather than go after the actual criminal rapists who violently kidnap and murder their victims, American society would rather scapegoat an innocent man for the crime of being successful and being freaky.

Should prostitution be banned?

Currently, Diddy is facing 20 years behind bars for the crime of “transportation for prostitution.” This means he paid for a plane or an Uber for a prostitute. Should this be illegal?

In order to justify the criminalization of prostitution, we need to accept a few things:

• Harmful jobs should be criminalized;

• Prostitution is uniquely harmful;

• Prostitution is more harmful than pornography, homosexuality, adultery, and transgenderism, all of which are legal.

If those three things are not true, then targeting Diddy is hypocritical scapegoating.

Should harmful jobs be criminalized?

• Jim works as a cop. Every night he patrols neighborhoods where the average person is actively hostile to him. When he makes arrests, bystanders scream at him and obstruct him. When attempting to solve crimes, witnesses refuse to talk to him. Jim ends up dead.

• Bob is a serial blood donor. He donates plasma twice a week, earning $700 a month. Bob feels a bit fatigued after donating, but he knows that what he is doing is helping to save lives. Eventually, however, his immune system weakens and he develops life-long osteopenia.

• Daniel is an internet celebrity known for doing dangerous stunts. Millions of people watch him climb mountains without a harness, escape from handcuffs while underwater, and hike shirtless in the snow. But one day, a stunt goes horribly wrong, and Daniel ends up dead.

• Carol works in customer service. Every day, customers come up to her and scream in her face. This causes her to develop complex PTSD which haunts her for the rest of her life.

• Kathy is a waitress. Her job is stressful, and it doesn’t help that her boss sexually harasses her. In order to keep her job, she ends up sleeping with her boss, but it’s an abusive relationship she can’t escape. She quits her job and works at a different restaurant, only to encounter a similar situation all over again.

• Susan is a porn star. She has sex with hundreds of men every year, which causes her physical and emotional pain. She copes with a fentanyl addiction, and eventually overdoses.

• Riley is an OnlyFans star. She doesn’t have sex with men, but she does chat with them and sends them videos and pictures of herself. Spending endless hours talking to lonely, misogynistic, and perverted men deeply affects her, psychologically and emotionally. She ends up spending thousands of dollars on therapy, but is never able to have a successful relationship with a man for the rest of her life.

• Rose is a prostitute. She has sex for money. Like in the cases of Susan and Riley, this job causes her immense emotional and psychological harm. Unlike Susan and Riley, because her job is illegal, she is subjected to physical harm and abuse from pimps and clients, and because she is afraid of the police, she is unable to report this abuse. She ultimately dies from injuries sustained as a result of this physical abuse.

In the case of Jim the cop, his job is essential. Someone has to enforce the law, otherwise, gangs and militias will form to do the same job with greater levels of corruption and violence.

In the case of Bob the plasma donor, his side-hustle is technically optional — we could just prohibit people from donating blood entirely, and allow people to bleed out in the hospital. More people would die, but life would go on, as it did before blood transfusions were invented. On net, however, the benefits of allowing blood donations probably outweigh the costs.

What I just said might sound like a no-brainer, but in Europe, it is illegal to pay Bob. This is because Europeans fear that men like Bob are risking their health.

In the case of Daniel the extreme sports celebrity, it’s not apparent that we need internet celebrities doing extreme stunts. It brings momentary entertainment to millions of people, and titillates the senses, but strictly speaking, it’s not necessary in the way that policing is necessary. We could ban racecar drivers, rock climbers, and scuba divers without taking a huge loss to safety or prosperity.

In the case of Carol the customer service agent, we could argue that customer service is necessary, and without it, the economy wouldn’t function. This isn’t true, however. Some businesses have a “no refunds” policy, and thus, have no need for customer service. If “customer service” was outlawed, this would surely hurt a few customers (who would be without recourse), but it would save women like Carol from working a stressful job.

In the case of Kathy the waitress, the economy would function without waitresses. The pleasures of dining out are non-essential. No one needs to be waited on. If we banned “waiting tables,” many people would lose their jobs, but life would go on.

In the case of Susan and Riley, both jobs are unnecessary. There is enough porn to last everyone an infinite amount of time — there’s no porn shortage that requires constant production to fulfill an essential demand. If we banned hardcore porn and OnlyFans, millions of men would be disappointed, but life would go on.

In the case of Rose, the criminalization of prostitution doesn’t erase her job from existence. Instead, it exposes her to greater harm.

Christianity Against Prostitution

The medieval European position on prostitution was one of begrudging toleration:

Throughout the fifteenth century, municipal authorities all over Austria established urban brothels under their control for the benefit of the pax urbana.

In the same way that Jews at certain times were required to wear certain markings to distinguish them from Christians, prostitutes were also designated a dress code by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities:

In order to set them apart from “decent” women and avoid confusion, the church required that prostitutes adopt some type of distinctive clothing, which each particular city government was allowed to select. For example, in Milan the garment of choice was a black cloak, while in Florence prostitutes wore gloves and bells on their hats. According to Bullough, a citizen who found a prostitute clothed in anything other than the official dress had the right to strip them on the spot.

The medieval practice of state-sponsored brothels was only brought to an end by the fanaticism of the Reformation. This fanatical period was relatively brief and faced a strong intellectual backlash.

Martin Luther wrote in 1543,

Such a syphilitic whore… is to be accounted a murderer, as worse than a poisoner... Those who wish to be whoremongers may carry on elsewhere... I must speak plainly. If I were a judge, I would have such venomous, syphilitic whores broken on the wheel and flayed...

In the opinion of Luther, prostitutes are murderers who “ruin our poor young men.” While he advocates for the death penalty for prostitutes, he says that those who pay prostitutes “may carry on elsewhere.” Even though Luther’s position on prostitution was more extreme than anything ever conceived of in 2,000 years of known European history, he still prescribed no punishment for those who pay prostitutes, or those who transport them.

From the earliest records of western civilization, going back 3,500 years, there is no evidence that men who hired prostitutes were ever prosecuted prior to the 19th century. They may have been looked down upon, excluded from church services, and called to repent, but there is no evidence that legal action was ever taken against them.

Laws against prostitution were related to prohibitions on disorderly conduct and obscenity. Sex workers were considered both obscene and disorderly, and banned from public spaces, forced underground into brothels. However, men who frequented brothels were never subject to legal action.

During the Civil War,

The provost marshals of Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee … began the first American experiment in legalized prostitution. The military hoped that regulation, which required sex workers to purchase licenses and pass medical exams, would curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Although both prostitutes and Union soldiers seem to have benefited from legalization, civilians vehemently and publicly proclaimed its negative effects on society. Despite the experiment’s medical and financial success, civic authorities deregulated the sex trade once the war ended and the military governance ceased.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the target of anti-prostitution laws were always the prostitutes themselves, and never the purchasers of their services:

Before the war, most successful prostitutes operated on the fringe of public consciousness and seldom made spectacles of themselves in the respectable quarters. In return, most antebellum towns tolerated the sex trade with a wink and a bribe…

In Nashville, for example, Jane Ross worked the sex trade with her sixteen year-old daughter two doors down from a policeman and down the street from a Presbyterian clergyman…

Reporters seldom seemed surprised to find family-run brothels, perhaps because they assumed that such immorality was hereditary. When a Memphis paper noted the arrest of a mother who ran a bagnio with her two daughters, the reporter emphasized the character flaws of such women and not the conditions in which they had been raised…

Sarah Hughes, a forty-two-year-old married sex worker, lived with an older woman in a flat between a policeman’s family and a university professor. In the relaxed toleration of pre-war Nashville, law enforcers and religious representatives frequently shared residences with prostitutes.

Before the war, there was an attempt to crack down on prostitution, but this crackdown amounted to a form of taxation:

Beginning in 1855, Nashville’s council issued sporadic ordinances against prostitution, forbidding lewd women from using vulgar language to passersby or exposing themselves in street doorways. As in many cities, police in Nashville arrested brothel madams such as Puss Pettus and Nannie McGinnis at approximately monthly intervals, fined them according to the number of prostitutes they housed, and then released them. This loose system effectively taxed madams according to how many operatives they claimed. When Nashville police hauled brothel-owner Betsy Crank into court, a reporter wryly noticed that she was “not a debutante in this institution. In fact, she has played several star engagements upon the stage of disorder.” One jaded Memphis judge even offered a brothel madam a municipal loan so that she could resume her business.

The American attitude toward prostitution amounted to a “catch and release” program where prostitutes paid a regular fine to the state in exchange for toleration. Even then, prostitutes were not arrested for private infractions, but for publicly harassing and soliciting men by flashing their undergarments at pedestrians.

“Although the watchmen were restrained in their treatment of madams and brothel workers, they cracked down on streetwalkers and independent operatives flaunting their wares in public. Citizens were willing to overlook, and even in some cases support, prostitution as long as its participants stayed away from the respectable public space.”²

The relationship between prostitution and the state was not uniquely American. In 1810,

“Parisians created the “police des moeurs” and compelled prostitutes to register with a central agency and to pass monthly inspections. If women failed the health exam, they landed in a prison hospital.”³

The popular view at the time was that prostitutes were not victims of their clients, but that

The majority of prostitutes entered the sex trade because of their natural sinfulness, indolence, and love of drink, fashion, bad companions, and other vile amusements…

Men, who were once honest, become tainted in principle and depraved in conduct…

As the female embodiment of sexuality, prostitutes wielded almost magical power over male restraint. ⁴

The traditional American and French view of prostitution is that prostitutes are predators who prey upon foolish and weak men, who seduce them and extract money from them, like parasites or vampires. Prostitutes were punished for publicizing their business, but their clients were viewed as innocent.

With the rise of the Progressive movement, prostitution was associated with racial pollution, since brothels had “high rates of Irish prostitutes.”⁵ Just as the fight against alcohol was a reaction to Irish drunkenness, the fight against prostitution was a reaction to Irish licentiousness.

In 1910, American Progressives passed the Mann Act, which was motivated by a conspiracy theory⁶ in which Jewish men drugged Christian women, hypnotized them, enslaved them, and forced them to become prostitutes:

Muckraker George Kibbe Turner called prostitution “white slavery,” and in a 1907 article in McClure’s Magazine claimed that a “loosely organized association... largely composed of Russian Jews” was the primary source of supply for Chicago brothels.

The term “white slavery” was used in a Nordicist context, where Jews, Italians, and Irish were considered non-white predators on Aryan women. The panic around “white slavery” mirrors in many ways the present panic around 25 year old women having sex with 16 year old boys, or the claim that teachers are “grooming” kids. It’s a historically unprecedented fear which emerged not from a change in material conditions, but a crisis of faith in America’s racial, political, and religious stability.

British Laws

Across the pond, although Britain did not receive the same level of immigration as America, rapid urbanization brought millions of former peasants into cities. Whereas in rural areas, a prostitute would not have many clients, in urban areas, demand was high and peasant women adapted to meet that demand. The development of British prostitution law is slightly complex, and requires some explanation.

Firstly, in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, it was declared illegal to “procure any woman or girl to become, either within or without the Queen’s dominions, a common prostitute…” or to “procure any woman or girl to leave her usual place of abode in the United Kingdom (such place not being a brothel), with intent that she may, for the purposes of prostitution, become an inmate of a brothel within or without the Queen’s dominions.”

The language of the act is preoccupied with preventing the transformation of women into prostitutes, but it does not outlaw the purchase of services from women who are already prostitutes.

What it does outlaw is male prostitution:

Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor…

The fact that the law specifically targets male procurement makes it very clear that men who procured similar services from women, so long as that woman was already a prostitute and not previously innocent, were exempt.

Secondly, the Vagrancy Act of 1898 targeted, among others, “those men who lived by the disgraceful earnings of the women whom they consorted with and controlled.” The text of the law states:

Where a male person is proved to live with or to be habitually in the company of a prostitute and has no visible means of subsistence, he shall, unless he can satisfy the court to the contrary, be deemed to be knowingly living on the earnings of prostitution.

While this criminalized pimping, it still did not actually criminalize the purchase of sexual services.

Conclusion.

We live in a sexual dystopia which ruthlessly persecutes freaky men. In 1999, the “Swedish Model” demanded that cops begin posing as prostitutes to entrap men. In 2021, Texas became the first state in the union to make purchasing sex a felony.

America wasn’t always this way. Chuck Berry was arrested in December 1959 for procuring sex from a 14 year old girl — he was convicted twice, and spent 20 months in jail, from February 1962 to October 1963. Chuck went on to have a successful career, and even performed at the White House under Jimmy Carter.

To be clear, Berry’s actions were wrong, but the punishment he received serves as an excellent barometer for the rise in sexual Puritanism in this country. Unless you’re Pakistani, gay, or transgender, the state and the populist mob are obsessed with hunting down perverts.

Why are right-wingers so obsessed with Diddy? The answer is in substitution, transference, and scapegoating. The right-wing today is full of impotent, hypocritical, hysterical victims who realize that they have lost the war against homosexuality and transgenderism. Instead of trying to kick Scott Bessent out of the White House, they’re focused on prosecuting an innocent black man for the crime of owning too much baby oil, and paying people for sex.

Traditional Christian morality demands that homosexuality and transgenderism be removed from public life. Since that is a political impossibility, right-wingers transfer their hatred and resentment toward the sin of prostitution. Rather than attacking the prostitutes, as Luther did, they attack Diddy as a predator, and defend the prostitutes as victims. The sexual crusade of the so-called Christian right today is nothing more than a re-hash of the worst instincts of the progressive left from 100 years ago.

Jealousy is a sin, but there exists no Christian state which ever attempted to regulate or criminalize jealousy. What’s more, adultery is a sin, a violation of the sacrament of marriage, but you will scarcely hear any Christian talk about prosecuting adulterers.

The driving emotion behind conservatism is spite. Because Christianity failed and collapsed as a state religion, they take out their rage on Diddy.

Diddy is an innocent victim of a moral panic. He may be guilty of other crimes, like assault, but he was not charged with those crimes. People who are deeply unhappy with their own sexual dissatisfaction are the most aggressive witch-hunters against the perverts.

It is ridiculous and beyond parody that we live in a world where a woman can have sex on camera with hundreds of men, but it is illegal to do so without a camera. Those calling for Diddy’s prosecution should be ashamed of themselves. They are a parasitic stain of gerontocratic litigiousness upon a formerly strong and healthy nation.

1. Specifically, of the most frequent offenders, 46% were white, 28% were black, and 18% were Hispanic. Given that 44% of young people are white, 16% are black, and 26% are Hispanic, Hispanics are underrepresented.

2. Page 5, Public Women in Public Spaces: Prostitution and Union Military Experience, 1861-1865. University of Tennessee, 2007: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/273

3. Page 6, Public Women in Public Spaces: Prostitution and Union Military Experience, 1861-1865. University of Tennessee, 2007: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/273

4. Page 7, Public Women in Public Spaces: Prostitution and Union Military Experience, 1861-1865. University of Tennessee, 2007: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/273

5. Page 3, Public Women in Public Spaces: Prostitution and Union Military Experience, 1861-1865. University of Tennessee, 2007: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/273

6. It is true that the Irish, Italian, and Jewish mafia controlled prostitution. However, the moral panic over prostitution bears a sociological resemblance to modern day conspiracy theories — whether or not those theories turn out to be true or false.