There’s a tension in the way the left thinks about heterosexual sex. The more libertarian position advocates sexual liberation and holds that the only boundary worth enforcing is consent, and sex between consenting adults, no matter how transgressive, is not society’s business. Opposing this is a camp that recognizes that, empirically, men as a class tend to behave badly when it comes to sex, and that giving men carte blanche past the point of consent allows them to indulge in, maintain, and reinforce harmful social expectations of women (at minimum) and structural misogyny (if we’re being honest).
This tension is not new. It has haunted the left since at least the beginning of the sexual revolution, and possibly earlier. (My knowledge is imperfect.) And it is hard not to sympathize with both perspectives. Sexual repression is bad for humanity, and anyone who thinks they have a right to judge consenting adults for what they do in the bedroom can go to hell. But then, sexual liberation has paved the way for men to demand things of their sexual partners, such as the attainment of certain beauty standards, and back up their demands with a credible and socially sanctioned threat to go find someone else. (This “someone else” can be another person or a porn habit; “prostitute” was always a possibility.) One need not go so far as Catherine MacKinnon to concede the point.
Attempts to reconcile the tension fail. Efforts to criminalize the purchase of sex while permitting the sale of sex, for example, have, at best, produced mixed results. It seems you either bite the bullet and legalize sex work entirely, or you have an illicit (and hence dangerous) market for sex.
There are other issues at play besides prostitution, but I want to drill down here for a bit. I think the feminist debate around prostitution is a pretty good synecdoche for the overarching tension. To put a finer point on it, your attitude on prostitution should determine your attitude on a whole host of other issues as well. Prostitution, after all, is an arena where men can have sex with the women they want to in the way they want to without having to agree to any of the traditional rules of the game. They just need to put up the cash. (Sure, some sex workers service women. But they represent a vanishingly small slice currently and historically, even among male sex workers.) If you’re okay with prostitution, it’s hard to object to pornography, age gap relationships, and the like. Why should we allow men to pay women for sex but break out the pitchforks (or the indictments, if you’re Catherine MacKinnon) when men watch pornography where the actors are being paid or date much younger, more physically attractive women in exchange for money (paid over the long run rather than in discrete payments for individual sexual acts) or access to high society or whatever? Why should we criticize Leonardo DiCaprio for serially dating young, attractive women if we shouldn’t criticize him for hiring young, attractive prostitutes?
None of this is to come down on one side or the other. The reader may be able to guess that, for my part, I am a sexual libertarian. (I am also a straight man. You are free to decide whether any motivated reasoning is afoot.) That is beside the point. The point is: a tendency for sexual repression and/or rule-enforcement in one context naturally translates to other contexts. It doesn’t matter whether this repression or rule-enforcement is carried out through the legal system or social shaming. Either you let the prostitutes work in peace, or you shun them entirely. There is no space to reconcile the tension.