Men need sex. Not in the sense that we need food and water to live, but it the sense that a person needs food every day to feel satisfied, or needs to urinate before their bladder reaches the bursting point, or needs to scratch a giant, persistent itch on their nose, or needs to speak their mind when feeling offended. It's not a need for survival, but a need for normal operation and interaction in society. It's an evolved biological imperative that must be fulfilled for the sake of psychological health.

That being said, nobody's needs trump anybody else's rights. Just as your need for food does not give you a right to violate others' property rights and steal for it, a man's need for sex does not give him a right to take away a woman's right to do with her body as she wishes. There is NO justification for taking what you need from someone else without their permission. When we allow this, civilization breaks down.

So men are naturally desperate for sexual interactions that women have a right to not give them. How do we resolve this? There is a simple solution that nobody seems to be talking about:

If prostitution were legal everywhere, men would not be so desperate for sex.
More of the men who engage in sexual harassment would instead take their feelings to the brothel, where women are perfectly happy to indulge them for a price. This would allow men to take care of their biological needs in private, at the times when they most need it, without feeling the need to break down the boundaries of civilization to get it. Fewer women would feel like they are under constant assault from every guy around.

However, this alone would not have stopped Elliot Rodger. He clearly needed more than just sex to achieve sanity. If sex was all he needed, he could have roadtripped to Reno, NV and paid for it. Every weekend, if he wanted. It would have cost less than the insurance payments on his BMW. What he needed was self-validation. He needed to stop feeling inferior to everyone else, even if it was nothing more than a psychosis.

So legalizing prostitution alone would not have stopped these murders. But normalizing prostitution might have. If our society were to see prostitution not as a moral failing, but as a rational, common way to take care of our biological needs and get back to acting civilized, then fewer men would develop these inferiority complexes over issues of sex. And the first step to making it normal is of course to legalize it everywhere. The more men that use it, the fewer that would feel like a failure for having to use it.

So my simple proposal is to legalize prostitution and stop treating it as shameful. I truly believe it could give us a far more civilized society. What do you all think?