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Marcy Wheeler, at the blog Emptywheel , said the explanation may go back to a two-year-old immigration application.

Rentboy applied for an H1B visa for its accountant, Marco Soto Decker, which may have tipped off the feds to the website's existence and activity. Wheeler pointed out that there have also been some rumors — noted in several media outlets — that money laundering was involved.
It's also possible that the feds got an insider at Rentboy in recent years, which allowed them to pursue an investigation. Another theory, suggested by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate , is that the feds simply think gay sex is icky. This might seem ridiculous — but reading the detailed federal complaint certainly gives a vibe that what's being described isn't just disapproved of because it's prostitution, but because something about the actual sex acts is fundamentally gross.
Stern explained:.
I agree, and strongly suspect discomfort with gay sex drove the government to focus on Rentboy. Its luridly detailed complaint describes graphic gay sex acts with shuddering relish. It's also possible that the feds and other police agencies saw going after Rentboy as a profitable venture. That's not a lot of money in federal budget terms, but it's still a decent cash grab for some of the individual federal and local agencies involved.
Still, it's impossible to say for certain what motivated the feds until the case moves forward. But the hit on Rentboy is certainly raising a lot of questions — not least because there's a growing push to decriminalize prostitution. There are two main arguments for criminalizing prostitution: a moralistic one, and one that's a bit more practical — although not supported by any good evidence.

The moral argument, as Vox's Amanda Taub explained, is that sex work — including but not limited to prostitution — is inherently or at least largely exploitative. Under this view, all sex work should be eradicated, and governments should do everything in their power to make sure this happens. In the more extreme version, advocates see sex work itself as inherently degrading and exploitative.
To them, all prostitution is a crime against women. Accordingly, their goal is to end it entirely.
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The less extreme version of this, the one that [Lena] Dunham advocated on Twitter, says that prostitution can in theory be a legitimate choice, and that for some women it is, but that many other women are coerced or trafficked into it. This argument tends to focus on, for example, girls who are recruited into sex work before the age of consent or women whose history of abuse or poverty leaves them especially vulnerable to exploitation.
They argue that this exploitation is so entrenched in the practice that the only way to protect vulnerable women and girls is by stopping all sex work. The less moralistic and more practical argument is that decriminalizing prostitution can increase sex trafficking and coerced prostitution. Unlike other arguments against decriminalization, this poses an empirical question — and proponents of this view often cite studies that suggest decriminalization leads to more trafficking.
The most widely cited study , from the London School of Economics and Political Science LSE , suggested that the decriminalization of sex work in several countries led to increased human trafficking. Anti-decriminalization advocates often cite this study as evidence of decriminalization's downsides — it was, for example, the main study cited in a letter signed by celebrities and activists around the world asking Amnesty International, a human rights group, to not support decriminalization because it would lead to an increase in sex trafficking. But this research is, frankly, bad. I outlined the big problems in a previous post that you can read for more detail, but the short of it is that the data the study drew from — by the researchers' own admission — is completely unreliable.
For one, it looks at all human trafficking, which includes forms of labor far beyond sex, so it's entirely possible that the higher rates of human trafficking were in industries that had nothing to do with sex. And the data, researchers wrote, "does not reflect actual trafficking flows," and it's "difficult, perhaps impossible, to find hard evidence establishing" a relationship between legal prostitution and human trafficking — disclaimers that suggest the study's findings are essentially meaningless. But even if it were true that allowing prostitution somehow enabled more sex trafficking, this doesn't apply to Rentboy.
The complaint against the website has nothing in it to suggest trafficking was an issue. Shackford wrote, "There is absolutely nothing in the complaint that even hints at the idea that there is anything nonconsensual happening, that so much as a single human being is harmed, even tangentially, by letting men pay for sex with other men. Besides, the website, by its very act of linking sex workers directly to clients, cut out middlemen pimps who could have been coercive and exploitive.
It was instead up to individual escorts to choose to participate on the site. Based on this fact alone, Rentboy might reduce the levels of coerced prostitution. As one of the Rentboy escorts wrote on Gawker :. Rentboy has made this a safer business to be in. It's much easier to pick up and put down since you're not tied to a pimp. If you get a day job or want to move or get in a relationship, there's no one there telling you that you can't because you have to keep working. There's no one telling you, "If you do that, you'll never be allowed to list with our service again.
So if the federal government is going after Rentboy, it's likely based on moralistic and legal objections to prostitution — primarily the view that all sex work is in some way exploitative, so it's the government's role to crack down on it. Or something else is at play, such as money laundering, as some reports have suggested.
And, in fact, there's evidence that allowing prostitution in safe spaces like Rentboy can benefit everyone — not just sex workers, but the general public as well. Multiple studies have found good things happened for public safety and health after the decriminalization of prostitution. A paper , published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that rates of rape and gonorrhea dropped dramatically after Rhode Island decriminalized indoor prostitution in , and a study of decriminalization in the Netherlands, published by the Institute for the Study of Labor, produced strikingly similar results.
These findings applied to both sex workers and the general public. The Rhode Island study said there was a likely explanation for the drop in gonorrhea cases: With the decriminalization of indoor prostitution, more of the industry moved indoors, which is generally safer than street prostitution since it tends to involve more condom use and less-risky sex acts. But researchers couldn't draw a definitive conclusion for the drop in rape, instead proposing a variety of theories.
For one, decriminalization may give sex workers a better bargaining position relative to their clients — allowing them to seek help from employers and police should something go wrong. And decriminalizing sex work allows businesses to invest more money in security locks, security cameras, security guards , and decreases the potential for police corruption so cops are less likely to demand sex from a sex worker when a worker turns to them for help — both of which could lower the incidence of rape.
There's also a more troubling explanation for the drop in rape offenses: Some violent men perhaps substituted rape with prostitution.
The study found that the market for prostitution expanded following decriminalization. With more accessibility and no criminal penalty, would-be rapists may have shifted away from sexual violence and instead purchased sex. Other research shows something similar happening with porn — in which some violent men substitute rape with porn. So there's good reason to think that allowing something like Rentboy could have similar effects. Services like it connect clients directly with the escort, who can negotiate with the client and decide whether he wants to participate at all.
As the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf explained, "The practical effect of the site and others like it has been to move prostitutes off the street and onto the web and to enable safer, more predictable encounters for prostitutes and customers.
And there is zero chance that taking the site down will end gay prostitution. Will you help keep Vox free for all?
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