Rachel Resnick on Legalized Prostitution Rachel Resnick | Big Think

Rachel Resnick on Legalized Prostitution

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Rachel Resnick on whether buying sex can save the world.

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Rachel Resnick:

Rachel Resnick is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick and Love Junkie. She has published articles, essays, and celebrity-profile cover stories in the Los Angeles Times, Women's Health, and BlackBook, The Time of My Life, Damage Control, The Dictionary of Failed Relationships, The Best American Erotica 2004, Women on the Edge, L.A. Shorts, and Absolute Disaster. She is also a contributing editor at Tin House magazine. Resnick is the founder and CEO of Writers on Fire, provider of luxury writing retreats both in the United States and abroad.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Rachel Resnick: I’m not going to say that I’m totally informed, but my gut instinct is absolutely legalize it. Yeah. Because I think if you look at places like Amsterdam, you know, that part of it is about creating this aura. I mean, who are the people who have the most rabid fantasies and actual perversities, generally speaking. We got the Republicans, you know? I mean, I find that hypocrisy just so delicious not being one, so, you know, but there… what is that about? It’s like deny, deny, deny and then it’s going to emerge, because if you’re not willing to face your [id] and you’re not willing to kind of embrace it and embrace the kind of earthy sexuality, whatever manifestation it might take on, and then that’s okay and that can work with the kind of mature love, but it just seems like we’re really immature for [IB]. Similarly with prostitution, I mean, look at what happens when you push it underground, human trafficking. I mean, how much human trafficking is going? It’s like unbelievable the way people can split, I think, in this country and I know others as well but this is the place I know best, so, absolutely, I would advocate for legalization of prostitution. It feels like a very fertile time to educate Americans about love and sex addiction and also romance, relationship. Men, as I understand it, tend to be more able to be sex addicts straight up whereas women more love addicts, not that the sex is necessarily braided in, but they’ve got to have the emotional component. Alanis Morissette, speaking of celebrities, was another one who publicly proclaimed that she was a love addict and, in fact, wrote her latest album “Flavors of Entanglement” was all fueled by that experience with the Ryan Reynolds’ dumping, whatever. You know, he ran off and married Scarlett Johansson. So, I think that it’s important to talk about, you know, that for men… some of those men who weren’t able to act on their sexual impulses that were kind of secretive back to that whole since that it’s subterranean impulse that we don’t acknowledge and integrate that people who maybe weren’t able to do anything about it can when it’s porn online, okay. Similarly, women who need that idea of lovers or an emotional component, they’re on the dating sites spending like how much time and energy and vitality, so part of when it becomes an addiction is when in interferes with your life and that’s for both men and women, but I think the internet pulls generally if we’re going to talk about male and female in different ways.