The Dallas Cowboys were the first professional football team to dress its cheerleaders as hookers.

The Cowgirls remain the standard for the tart sideline, although other teams have seen the marketing potential in making those women on the field look just like those women on the stroll. Take them out of the stadium and over to a nearby street corner and the vice squad might show up.

There’s simply no way to determine the first mother to send a daughter off to school dressed as a hooker, but that too seemed to catch on as more and more schoolgirls starting showing up for geometry class with a commercial look about them.

And who’s to say at what exact moment television made the turn and turned cops, lawyers and the girl next door into visions of teasing possibility.

So there’s something almost quaint about the women of Rhode Island who make their legal living from sex. They seem from another time, before sexual invitation could be had with a turn down the frozen food aisle or a seat at the bar.

They seem from a time when sex still had a forbidden allure, when there was still mystery, still secrets.

We don’t see these women. They are not caught in the headlights, dressed like Cowboy cheerleaders as they stand at the curb to work the cruising sex shoppers. They work inside. That is why they can legally do what they do. Prostitution in Rhode Island is legal if carried on indoors.

And we got to see them this week in a way we probably wouldn’t expect. We got to see them in jeans and sweatshirts, talking about their working lives.

At least The Journal’s Steve Peoples got to see them that way at a meeting on Sunday hosted by Direct Action For Rights and Equality.

And in his story in The Journal on Monday, Peoples told of how these women worry about the loss of their jobs.

One woman talked of how it will interfere with her ability to send her daughter to college. Another suggested that the work she does is better than stealing.

But they will lose their jobs. The Rhode Island legislature will end its slow crawl to the moral high ground this week by eliminating the legal loophole that has allowed indoor prostitution to flourish.

Those who sell sex and buy sex and provide places for the sex trade to take place will be facing criminal penalties.

It had to happen. Being the only state outside of Nevada to offer legal prostitution is not the kind of thing to put in the promotional brochures — although some conventioneers have no doubt given Rhode Island bonus points for those spas that offer soothing refuge after a hard day of brainstorming and interfacing at the Convention Center.

Still, it all seems out of sync here in the strip club capital of New England. It seems like making a really big show of stomping out a brush fire while the entire forest burns all around.

It won’t really end anything.

Prostitution is, after all, the unworthy use of talent or ability. It can take many forms. The working duds don’t have to be high boots and hot pants. They can be pinstripes and cashmere.

There will be people at the State House this week speaking of the need to bring an end to legal prostitution in Rhode Island. They will be speaking of the form of prostitution that involves sex.

The other forms with which they are familiar will no doubt continue.

bkerr@projo.com