There are prostitutes in my neighborhood. Apparently quite a few. My neighbors spend all day talking about them. Have multiple social network groups where they discuss how to deal with them. Where they live. How they proposition people and their children. How they’ve taken to calling them into the non-emergency police line every single time they see them.
If you see something say something they say. Along with a bunch of other racist, sexist, transphobic, and misogynistic language. And I don’t know if it’s the isms or the fact that I try to mind my business that has me cringe whenever I read the posts on NextDoor right under a post about free events for children at the library and above posts looking for a decent electrician.
I think of how most prostitues are made. How people steal children enslave them, get them hooked on drugs and alcohol, use them up for sex slavery and then throw them away like discarded pieces of paper.
I think of how most prostitutes are made. How husbands beat wives, beat boyfriends, beat girlfriends, and children. How they escape from that abuse to another location. How these people with little to no skills or ways to make money to feed themselves and their families except the easiest thing to sell on earth which is the one thing (or things) that are always on your person.
I think of how prostitutes are made. How people who own themselves decide to sell themselves cause that’s what the fuck they want to do.
I wonder which of my neighbors who complains about them is secretly seeing these ladies of the night. Because in the service industry people don’t build businesses in places where they can’t make any money and sure there is easy access to the highway and multiple things in the neighborhood to make these particular corner dwellers more marketable but most successful businesses don’t setup where they can’t benefit from the local traffic.

Every time I see a certain neighbor who has a “police car” and uses it to breed fear in individuals they deem as criminal, post about them, I think to myself that either he got the clap from one back in the day, his mama was a prostitute, or his life is so meaningless that he has time to actually ride around in a car that looks like a cop car with the sole intention of scaring and harassing people.
It’s funny because I wonder what my neighbors would have the police do with the prostitutes. Should they kill them? Ship them somewhere else so they can become a blight onto someone else’s neighborhood. Take them somewhere so that they can get help for the multitude of issues that lead to prostitution?
I know that crime such as prostitution brings home values down and that something should be done about the crime in our area but I can’t help but wonder why I never see anyone comment about the many white collar crimes that are surely happening in our neighborhood. Or why no one seems to notice that my next door neighbors are probably running a meth lab out of their home and have different cars all up in through their place at all hours of the day and night. Probably because their complexion and age grant them a certain amount of privilege where they can get away with all sorts of shit and still have people say, “They were always so nice. So normal. Unlike those transexual prostitutes on the next corner.”