I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself.
Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.
This is just an opinion from a real world example:
I've done some stripping when I was young. I did it because my gf was doing it and was making a lot of money. This was the only way we could make good money without breaking the law.
I've met the most broken and scummy people there is during that time. It ultimately broke our 7 year relationship. You pay an emotional price for making easy money. You have to be very stable to be able to endure that kind of work over time as you deal with a lot of broken people doing very intimate work. Drugs are very accessible and an easy fix to deal with the emotional toll.
People who can work in this industry for more than a year and leave unhurt probably belong in the 1% IMO.
Wouldn't you think that's the result of the fact that it's illegal and pushing away
1. legal protections for the performers
2. "not broken" people who are driven away due to seeing it as "skeevy"
3. As seen here, other mediums where the performer has almost 100% control over the audience?
I imagine in some bizzaro world where cash registery workers are "illegal" that you'd run into very similar problem. People suck. And these "dirty" jobs make you run into sucky people more often.
I had 2 close friends who stripped. One was on the ball. Had software that kept track of her income, and banked it. The other earned 5k-10k a night, but did speed to handle it, got super irrational, and turned her entire 250k savings over to some crazy guru character. That sucked
I’m really interested in reading more of your story. Have you ever done a write up or a longer piece? Or is there one by someone else that you think is fairly on the mark?
Do you think there’s a way of mitigating the risk of being hurt / lowering the emotional price for sex work?
It's said to objectify women. More specifically, the Johns are treating women's bodies as something that can be traded commercially. The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes.
If you don't think objectifying women harms them, then that's not a "good" argument, I guess.
FTR, I'm against laws controlling consensual sex. Not all harmful behaviour should be criminalised.
Bodies are used commercially all the time, such as in manual labor, physical therapy, disability care, security, policing, military service, athletics, dancing, commercial modeling, ...
The problem that's particular to sex work is legal systems that fail to prevent coercion. This is exacerbated by religious advocacy groups that try to make sex work harder without making it safer.
It seems that you equate sex to manual labour, when it is one of our important biosocial functions (if not the central) that involves much more complex reactions and distortions at all sides (a prostitute, a client, an aware neighborhood/society) than kicking a shovel into the dirt or massaging a muscle. It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process akin to workout and/or blowing a nose. If it’s kind of the same, why hiding it from kids and not serving clients right on the squares, like hotdog stands do.
gp: The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes
I’d argue it damages society as a whole. Even if prostitutes and all women could be fine and safe by some magic mean, distorted concepts of a “succesful social woman” hit men back as well.
I don't equate sex to manual labor, they are of course different. But it won't do to reduce manual labor or disability care to "kicking a shovel into the dirt" either. Each of the physical occupations I listed plays a critical social role and involves the mind and body of its occupants in a unique and significant way. See Metaspencer's critique on this point, "what is a knowledge worker".[1]
Much of the criticism of normalizing sex work seems to be masking a motivation based in religious morality which considers sex shameful. I believe that adequately protected professionals can be successful in sex work, just as they can in other fields.
>It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process akin to workout and/or blowing a nose.
at the end of the day, that's all it is. There will be people who put more thought and care into the action and treat it as an intimate ritual to be done on special occasion, and then there will be people who treat it as another biological commodity to manage like food or air. People do so regarding various other activities after all.
I don't think either viewpoint is invalid. it comes down the individual like every other action in our lives. but the argument here that it "damages women" arguably harms both of the described behaviors. One for feeling the action "binds" them to people that may otherwise be (or have become), incompatible or even toxic to them. But they were inside so they gotta stick around. And the other for making it increasingly difficult to perform an activity they enjoy.
> It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process
I am equally baffled by people who try to render it as some supernatural mystical magical soul-corrupting[0] process ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[0] unless done between a married man and woman in the missionary position with the lights off for the sole purpose of reproduction and neither of them enjoys it, of course
I think parent means "paying somebody so that you can physically use their body".
Clearly, paying somebody to use their own body to e.g. pitch hay for you isn't much different from paying them to use their own body to do any other kind of physical labour for you.
Paying people to be physically intimate with you is definitely different. But it's worth considering cases that don't involve sex: carers dress you, they wash you, including your sex organs and your arse, and they clean up after you.
All that is definitely physically intimate - arguably much more intimate than a 15-minute bump-and-grind session with a person that despises you.
If the two parties consent to the action and transaction, there's no business difference. governments have just decided one action is illegal while the other not.
I don't think that distinction is useful on this question. Lots of non-sex physical work involves just being present, and lots of sex work involves skill.
> It's said to objectify women... The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women. If you don't think objectifying women harms them, then that's not a "good" argument, I guess.
To accept the argument at all is to agree with the original premise. Which I don't, even assuming we could come up with a definition of objectification we could both accept. But... let's give it a go.
Let's posit there is a thing that happens called objectification. Whatever it is, it causes men to treat women badly, specifically, causes unwanted advances and sexual harassment.
A man somehow catches this because he can pay a woman to give him an orgasm. He doesn't even have to actually do it. Just knowing this is something he can do is enough. Then he goes out and... what? Expects to be able to pay every woman for orgasms? He won't treat his woman boss with respect? I'm trying to understand the mechanism here.
Does this same phenomena happen in any other arena of life? Is it a kind of bigotry? Does bigotry operate a similar way?
> ...the Johns are treating women's bodies as something that can be traded commercially. The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes.
Sex workers are "selling their bodies" no more than your local bartender or barista does. Sex workers provide a service no more magical than they do either. If you were to expand on this "selling their bodies", I think you will find that it is meaningless.
So, no, I don't think it's a good argument at all until we can demonstrate that "objectifying all women" is something that happens when prostitution is legal.
"On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."[1]
The increased demand for sex work in the wake of legalization results in more people forced into involuntary sex work, despite the presence of legally-protected sex workers.
Yours is a short question to make, but it requires a very long answer, not fit for a comment box. The negative consequences of prostitution are deeply personal because the effects of sex on the participants go deeper and last longer than the effects of the act of copulation. If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships...
You are probably right, but what is the alternative? banning prostitution is to me a very bad idea, it won't end it, it will just force the women to work illegally without the protections of the state.
I've been a customer of several sex workers in many countries and most of them are actually OK with their job and lifestyle (I've asked several). In many places it's the best/only opportunity they have to earn good money and be independent. They find it better to sell their bodies for 1 hour tops with rules and regulations to several men than to have to marry and stay with one man that hits them and makes their life miserable
Another thing I've found by experience is that most women see prostitution as a temporal thing to make some money and then quit. I'd love to see research on the topic but from my experience it's a job that they do for months, maybe 1 year at maximum, but do enough money to quit and do something else.
I think overall legal prostitution is way better than black market prostitution. No-prostitution just won't ever happen no matter what, isn't it the oldest of jobs?
The most basic question of all when banning private transactions between consenting third-parties is that why you are more qualified to judge the trade-offs of the trade than the participants, as the participants know their own values best, and hold their own best interest in mind (while you might be incentivized to benefit yourself in some way, e.g., boss others around, virtue signal, etc).
There are lots of jobs that cost the workers something precious. Banning them is likely to hurt the workers, not help them. To help the workers, opportunities for learning marketable skills must be presented, and productive job positions created.
>If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships...
yes, but many actions have those links. this is the basis for the war on drugs that is just now ending in my country.
The argument isn't "does it affect people", but "does it CONSISTENTLY affect enough people negatively that it needs to be outlawed/extremely restricted?" Many of the argument I read against prostituion would be solved by... making it legal and having legal protections of workers. Or at least decriminalizing it for workers so they aren't punished for reporting abuse.
The argument for is pretty compelling: consenting adults have the moral right to sexual privacy, and other adults do not have any moral rights to pry or interfere.
The argument against must be at least as clear and compelling, not "well, it's complicated..."
"I've never heard a good argument against injecting heroin. The arguments that I hear are against overdose, shared needles leading to infectious disease, and destitution and poverty; which are all non-sequiturs."
You've completely removed all the main "negatives" of prostitution, saying those aren't "real arguments."
While it's possible that heroin injection and prostitution may be done in a safe and clean way, the reality is extremely far from that in both cases.
I've heard plenty of good arguments against using heroin. It's extremely (and immediately) addictive. Recovering from that addiction is nearly impossible for most people.
Even if a person safely uses it, and can safely and legally maintain their addiction, heroin is inherently harmful to that person.
Is sex work (prostitution) inherently harmful? I don't think so. Sure, there are plenty of closely related things that are inherently harmful, but sex work can be done without them.
There is the idea that because heroin use often involves second-order effects like shared needles, overdose, etc. that it should be prevented. The reality is that most efforts to prevent heroin use tend to make these second-order effects more prevalent.
Recently there has been a movement to decriminalize drug use, including heroin. The idea is to replace measures that work to prevent heroin use with measures that work to help people overcome heroin addiction, and safely use heroin in the mean time. This way, we fight the second-order effects directly, which is much more effective.
It's a similar story with sex work. Many efforts to decriminalize sex work still have the end goal of getting people to stop engaging in it. This is in contrast to legalization, which would promote sex work while working to minimize the second-order problems that are common to black market sex work.
This is the crux of GP's question: Is there any good reason outside second-order effects to get people to stop doing sex work? I personally am convinced there are none, though my conservative Christian parents disagree.
You act as if heroin and sexwork are in two different universes. They are in the same universe and they overlap quite a lot. You can be pro-sex without being a Pollyanna about it across the board. Things happen in both domains that don't fit either the happy model or the doomful one.
Edit: you say recovering from heroin addiction and second-order effects are all negative as if sexwork has no impact on, for example, human relationships, and while I like some of the thought that went into your post, it still reads as a bit absurd.
>They are in the same universe and they overlap quite a lot.
not really. 95+% of the population will experience some sexual activity at some point in their life. It is argued as a basic biological need in some psychologies, and a basic pscyological/social need for the rest that may not want to compare it to food/water/shelter. 95% of the population will never do heroin. I argue over half will never even see heroin tools.
That's what makes the controlling of sex more contentious than a very addictive drug. It's a normal (but private) activity that the vast majority of society participates in. It's legal to do it for free, it's legal to pay for content that has people having sex in it. What makes the barrier of paying to do it yourself different?
A generic argument: prostitution allows woman without any skills to earn plenty of money which might convince women do go this way even if they don't really enjoy it.
The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains.
One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling their body and their consent.
> The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains.
I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used. They are competing with puppets and animals (e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10), and are as such reduced to objects potentially beyond human dignety.
This is a great argument for Universal Basic Income, or some other system that allows people to choose not to work.
It's naive to think that there aren't people being pressured into "selling their body and their consent" to work that is generally considered moral.
> I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used.
GP's argument was poorly stated. It's more genuine to compare sex work to hard labor. There is the risk of physical harm (STDs/injuries), a low barrier to entry (attractive and have a camera/in decent shape and can get to/from work), is considered by many as demoralizing (gross prostitute/dumb factory worker) but also glorified by many (high-class escort/blue collar backbone of our country).
In what ways is it truly different for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for rejecting a hard labor job than it is for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for refusing to be a sex worker (prostitute)?
> One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling their body and their consent.
Imagine vegan denying butcher work. It's not wildly different, I guess? I think that laws should allow some flexibility in choosing work, when it comes to unemployment benefits. And questionable jobs should not even be offered.
>while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used.
I imaging it depends on the person and area, much like every other "social job", no?
I argue the lack of legal protections are what allows them to be reduced to objects. For the tech equivalent, look at the game industry and some of the more extreme examples of crunch. Not just some month long sprint before release, but months, sometimes years of 12 hour work days to some billion dollar coporation not paying overtime, that may not even give you paychecks on time.
and those are "legal jobs". I can't imagine how much lower it goes when the governemt not only turns a blind eye, but punishes you on top of it all.
The military is probably a better analogy. Well paid with few skills required to enter. High risk of permanent injury. Generally not reviled with paternalistic and degrading thoughts about those who choose to do it.
It's like being grossly obese - it speaks for itself.
Now some people can pretend they're happily obese - they're not fooling anyone but other fools.
Whether or not being a fool should be illegal is a different matter. My take on it is if it's not hurting anyone else - go for it, just don't expect medical treatment for self destructive behaviour afterwards - we have an over-abundance of fools on this planet as of late.
I haven't heard a good one either. But I've heard many times that quashing prostitution is well worth stopping trafficking/rate/etc. So that's how these tactics work.
In theory I think so too, but in reality I'm going to guess most of the actual trafficking isn't actually happening in the open on one the biggest adult sites. They just have the biggest targets to hit.
> true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself
How about the argument that if prostitution is legal, it's possible for an illegally coercive (trafficked) business to pose as legitimate; whereas if prostitution is not legal, any appearance of prostitution can warrant scrutiny.
Too broad. "If selling jewelry is legal, it's possibly for a fence to pose as legitimate; whereas if selling jewelry is not legal, any appearance of selling jewelry can warrant scrutiny."
Some people offer things for sale which they don't have any right to sell. That doesn't imply that those who do have that right should be prevented from exercising it just to make things easier for law enforcement. You do more direct harm by unjustly prohibiting the activity than you stand to (possibly) prevent.
>How do you prove your prostitutes are no coerced?
I don't know. How do you prove that any paying job between a paying company and their employees aren't coerced and that the company isn't abusing their employees? As seen with some recent lawsuits, you don't for years until something eventually prompts investigation.
I imagine it's the same here. If it's illegal then the workers have no legal resource and are trapped until someone discovers the company (if ever. Many times these "companies" are just private individuals. i.e. pimps). If it's legal there's at least some chance the worker than defend themself against abuse if contracts are breeched.
> How do you prove that any paying job between a paying company and their employees aren't coerced and that the company isn't abusing their employees?
You can't/don't, but regular jobs are not usually associated with trafficking. And three tends to be less privacy - people don't care as much to file their brothel visits as their cafe visits - wrt regular business, the IRS is known to be formidable if all activity is known about.
> If it's illegal then the workers have no legal resource
prostitution is the job many locals don't want. A similar situation might arise in say, illegals trafficked in and having their passport taken, but this is considered less of an issue do to competition from non-coerced labour, and that labourers are harder to threaten by single "pimps".
The best argument "against prostitution" is the moral argument against consuming it: you don't and _can't_ know if the person you're paying for is too poor or too wasted to be able to choose to participate, or if they're being threatened with violence into participating by a pimp, for example. Coerced sexual activity with another person is r-pe (as opposed to, say, working at Burger King, which might be coerced by the need to survive but is not r-pe.) Enjoying r-pe is wrong.
If you don't think coerced sexual activity is r-pe, or you don't think that enjoying r-pe is wrong, the argument falls apart, of course, which is why this comment section is the way it is.
"Do you think all violence is wrong, or only murder?" Of course there are degrees. I don't really see the gotcha here -- if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves, would you still be able to enjoy it?
It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha. Coerced work is bad, especially so if the work is damaging to the worker. My point is that this isn't specific to sex work. Products produced by workers under wage slavery can be avoided using supply chain management, while promoting ethical labor practices that permit workers security and independence. A tradeoff exists between reducing risk of nonconsenting work while enabling consenting work.
Similarly, policies are available that can enable safe and consensual sex work. Supposedly "well intentioned" policies that reduce workers' social and financial support system are moves in the wrong direction: abuse is enabled by isolation and marginalization.
I didn't advocate for any policies though. As I said, it's a "moral argument against consuming" (or buying) sex work. If you want to run the risk of r-ping someone, or getting off to r-pe videos, that's a choice made by many; I just think very few are honest about it.
that you don't give to sex work because "you just don't know".
We never know, but odds are the best way to know is by encouraging workers to report abuse. Something the tech industry has institutionally failed upon over the deacdes to do despite being shown as "honest, intellectual work".
>if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves
There are degrees, apparently.
But for the sake of reducto ad absurdum: If there was an entire sweatshop of talented slave labor making Toy Story, I'd be impressed first, and then mortified. But I guess my brain just ticks differently in that regard. Maybe I've just seen/heard enough evil that these "revelations" are surprising but not taking me completely off guard.
Part of the arguments in the tweet is based on reports that caught some accounts offering live sex to paying participants. That's apparently part of what lead to the story of OF removing sexual content.
Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.