I think the problem is that in most places the world over, whether it is legal or not, both laws and regulations surrounding sex work tend to have very misogynistic outcomes.
So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women.
But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished.
So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias.
In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point.
In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.
Some of your arguments are used to justify the Nordic Model -- only clients should get arrested. However, it somehow always seems that it's the sex workers who suffer, even being arrested and gaoled for working/living together, etc. It's a rad fem authoritarian utopia that damages SWers routinely, and has had not noticeable impact on already-illegal trafficked SWer situation (generally from former USSR and the middle-East).
An awful lot of feminist stuff seems to grow out of the poison seed of an idea that the cure for the way the world hates on women is to replace policies that hate on women with policies that actively and intentionally hate on men.
It is a fundamentally broken mental model that I cannot support. It is a variation of what so many activists do where they decry the injustice of the current system and how it mandates that Group A is allowed to shit on Group B, but their proposed solution is "As a member of Group B, I want a mandate that Group B gets to shit on Group A instead."
If all you are doing is rearranging the pieces on the gameboard without fundamentally changing the rules, you are merely reassigning which parties get unjust treatment. You aren't actually creating a more just world.
Given that this often boils down to saying to privileged people in power "I would like to stop being the world's toilet and I would like you to virtuously volunteer to take my place as a toilet," it's really not surprising that so much activism gets aggressive pushback from those currently in power.
The path forward is to find a rule set which states "Shitting on people is bad and forbidden. We don't care who they are, don't shit on them. Please and thank you (and backed up with a big stick if polite requests don't work on you)."
So they say sex work is illegal, but they mostly arrest prostitutes, not their clients nor the pimps. From what I have read, it's hard to prove a man is a pimp, so this is not entirely due to people simply hating on women.
But the fact that they tend to arrest prostitutes, but not their clients, tends to reflect the fact that in this mostly heterosexual world, most sex workers are female and clients are typically male. There is a general widespread attitude that "men have needs" and it's okay for them to get laid, but women who put out without being married to the guy are an evil and immoral influence and they must be punished.
So when a man and a woman have consenting sex outside the bonds of marriage, whether money is involved or not, a great many people view his actions as fine, but hers as morally reprehensible and in need of punishment. It's really no surprise then that the way these rules (whether laws or regulations) get written and/or enforced all too often reflects that bias.
In an ideal world, we would have rules that protect both sex workers and their clients equally. But we have a very long ways to go to get to that point.
In the interim, decriminalization seems to be the least worst answer, if only because when sex work is illegal, people who are being trafficked can't go to the police for fear of being arrested themselves -- even though they are being forced to engage in this kind of work against their will. It's a huge injustice and we shouldn't abide it.