In my previous blog post I wrote about the website “Maggie McNeil, The Honest Courtesan, frank commentary from an unretired call girl”.

Maggie McNeil is not her real name, it is a pseudonym that she chose for herself to protect her identity.  Maggie McNeil received her B.A. in English, and her M.S. in Library Science.  She became married after graduating and began working as a librarian.  When she became divorced after four years of marriage, she began working as a stripper in New Orleans to pay off debt that she was left with.  While working as a stripper, she found out that she could make more money as a prostitute, so she became a prostitute.

Maggie McNeil writes about all aspects of her life, but mostly she writes as an advocate for women’s rights, especially the right for women to earn their living by having sex for money, without being persecuted and treated like a criminal.

Maggie McNeil came from a stable family, was mentally and physically healthy, completed her education, and was not destitute.  She chose to become a prostitute, she was not forced into it.  She writes that she enjoys having sex and she likes being a prostitute.  She has always been able to manage her own affairs, she has always been in control of her life.  She was never under anyone else’s control, and she was not victimized.

Maggie McNeil writes that there are many women throughout the world that are just like her.  There are many women throughout the world that are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, and they to chose to have sex for money as a profession.  Maggie McNeil has written more than a thousand blog posts on the subject of people working as prostitutes.  She reads research, studies, and news articles from around the world related to prostitution daily, and she posts links, summaries, and commentary.

I am writing about Maggie McNeil on my blog website, because I would like for people in North Dakota to consider some things in a rational, logical way.  When you have 20,000 male oil field workers move to Williston, North Dakota, there are not enough local women for the oil field workers to court, become engaged, and become married like you Catholics would like.  The ratio of men to women was probably 10:1.

Throughout the history of the world, in most parts of the world, there has been the situation where there were great numbers of men, and very few women.  Wars in remote locations, mining and lumber operations in remote locations, settling of frontiers and far away countries, gold rushes, oil booms.  There has been prostitution everywhere that there has been great numbers of men and few women.

Readers probably have images in their heads of dirty, filthy, diseased women working as prostitutes near battle fronts and mining towns.  The truth is, if these women working as prostitutes didn’t have access to clean lodgings, bathing facilities, and medical care, they might be dirty and diseased.  The best thing for women working as prostitutes and the men using these prostitutes, would be that these women have a clean, safe, regulated environment to work in.

What the North Dakotans should have done, was acknowledge and understand that there were going to be way more men than women due to the oil boom.  There was going to be prostitution.  When prostitution is illegal, and law enforcement and the judicial system seek to find and arrest all prostitutes, prostitution is conducted as a criminal enterprise, by criminals.  No normal woman is going to want to come to North Dakota to work as a prostitute when law enforcement is determined to arrest all prostitutes.  So instead what you get in North Dakota is, gangs, pimps, and criminals in other states get girls and women addicted to drugs, keep them high on drugs, beat them, threaten them, and drive them to North Dakota and force them to work as prostitutes.  These women are so drug addicted, so high on drugs, so coerced, that they have no control over how many men they have sex with, take no health precautions for their own safety, and take no health precautions against spreading disease to men.

If North Dakota would have allowed prostitution to be conducted as a legal business, there could have been normal, healthy, safety conscious women working in safe, clean places of business, with good access to health care, and some regulation.  Instead with North Dakotans vilifying and criminalizing prostitution, you have gangs and pimps drugging girls and women, holding them against their will, and forcing them to have sex with as many men as possible with no regard for their own health, for their customer’s health, or for spreading diseases.