That's exactly what happened in Sweden. — Benkei

That's what the article is about.

Violence against prostitutes hasn’t risen. No prostitutes were murdered in Sweden last year; in Germany, where prostitution is legal, 70 were killed by pimps or buyers.

Enforcement hasn’t increased policing costs, even though there is a prostitution unit as well as a trafficking unit staffed by 25 detectives and a social worker.

Prostitution hasn’t been eliminated, but surveys indicate that the percentage of Swedish men who buy sex dropped to 7.4 per cent in 2014 from 13.6 per cent in 1996; only 0.8 per cent said that they had bought sexual services within the last year. (In the United States, one in five men reports buying sex. There is no available Canadian data.)

One interesting aspect of the law is that fines are based on income. If the buyer is unemployed, the minimum fine is the equivalent of about $400. For everyone else, the maximum is 50 days’ worth of income.

It seems to me a more socially responsible way to deal with the issue than many other countries have chosen.

Is sex "work"?
Is sex "an industry"? — BC

Sex necessarily involves work from at least one participant.
Why would sex be an industry? You mean sex for money? If so, how could it not be an industry?

Well sexual relations are in demand and thus can act as a commodity. Trading in that commodity can thus constitute a business. Referring to the business as a whole would make it an industry.

As to legalization or at least decriminalization (which I prefer), a good balance is to prosecute for the crime of pampering, but not for prostitution

I think this gets at the "Treadmill Effect," for certain words, whereby if a world is used for a marginalized group, regardless of whether the group first applies the name to itself, it eventually gains derogatory connotations. Then the term must be replaced by a new one. Longer terms like "sex worker," fair better here because long, generic sounding terms don't make for good slurs when slinging invective around.

E.g., the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wasn't trying to be derogatory with the term "colored people," which only later became widely considered inappropriate. Of course, more recently, "people of color," became popular again, so now it seems more acceptable again.

I encountered this in my work with people with developmental disabilities and brain injuries. Some state departments still use the term "retarded," in their name, largely because no widely appropriate term has come to replace it. Retarded grew to have negative connotations, to the extent that it is even awkward to talk about "retarded economic growth," or "the Principle of Retarded Action," in physics. IMO, this grows out of childhood experiences of being told that certain words are wholly off limits, which then taints the word for all contexts, even if it has previously been used is contexts that no one finds offensive. "Oriental," is another such a term.

We also have some turns of phrase that sour even if they aren't derogatory. E.g., William Durant's Story of Civilization is a broadly liberal and open minded project, but the early works (from the 30s-40s) seem quite awkward when they refer to Europe as "the white man's world," or even "Christendom."

This sort of thing is different from out and out slurs, which never were proposed as acceptable terms.

Of course, if you think prostitution is wholly inappropriate, then arguably "sex worker," is also doing the same thing that a term like "collateral damage," is doing. It's trying to make something morally repugnant more abstract so that people don't think about what the term actually entails.

Personally, I'm on the fence. I get the argument that sex work shouldn't not be seen as necessarily different from therapy, which also involves close intimacy for pay, or massage therapy/physical therapy, etc., which also involves close physical contact for pay. I just don't think it totally works, precisely because how prostitution is normally preformed and because reproduction is necessarily more intimate than other forms of physical contact.

That said, if I was going to make one thing illegal, prostitution, where people interact with another living person in some regulated, controlled environment, versus pornography, which I'd argue objectifies people even more and often tends to gravitate towards less respectful depictions of sex, I'd make the pornography illegal first. Plus, it's not like the porn industry isn't known for being generally morally bankrupt either. Prostitution seems less alienating for both parties to me.

Prostitution seems less alienating for both parties to me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a very interesting observation. Having considered it for about five minutes, I'm very much inclined to agree. The client can actually have a conversation with a person hired to provide some form of sexual service. Those services vary greatly as to nature, purpose and quality. They certainly can't all be lumped into the same category of interaction. The client can even have some kind of relationship with an inflatable, virtual or robotic surrogate.
Some of these issues were explored in the television series Boston Legal
But watching dirty movies is entirely passive; that really is a commodity to buy, own, use up and throw away. And it doesn't engage the user on any but the most primal level .

There are ways of getting around laws.

Instead of buying sex you buy a very expensive carrot. And the buyer of a very expensive carrot is given the option of sex for free. You are purchasing a carrot, not sexual services.

Similar to getting a free muffin if you buy a cup of coffee. But you can't buy a muffin by itself.

Instead of buying sex you buy a very expensive carrot. And the buyer of a very expensive carrot is given the option of sex for free. — Agree to Disagree

Sounds a bit unwieldy for street prostitution. I mean, where would she keep all those carrots?

Well sexual relations are in demand and thus can act as a commodity. Trading in that commodity can thus constitute a business. Referring to the business as a whole would make it an industry. — LuckyR

I'm not sure if that means sex is an institution or that sex can be viewed from the perspective of institutions.

Well since the majority of sexual relations are NOT a commodity, the latter.