8 ms·

This is the real story: "While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that his

by moomin 9y ago

This is the real story: "While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking." Too many laws in America are stalking horses for restricting, not just commercial sexual activity, but all unapproved sexual activity. And the people who'd be doing the approving don't look like people I want in charge of my or my kid's sex life. Child pornography and sex trafficking are both real, serious, problems. We should deal with them, not work to make it harder for sex workers and horny teenagers. But for a lot of the pressure groups in this area, the second thing is _their actual goal_.

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
One should look at the history behind why certain currently banned obscenity is banned, and what the goals of the groups were who originally pushed the ban. >Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet This is one of their main goals. >blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking I think this has largely been achieved.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  > I think this has largely been achieved. Indeed, “combating sex trafficking” seems to already be a euphemism for cracking down on sex work of all kinds.
  - hedora 9y ago
    “Combating sex trafficking” is also a euphemism for cracking down on free speech on the internet, privacy, and small competitors to the big two internet firms. In the same week, we’ve also gotten the cloud act, and widely expanded censorship on youtube. The big two seem to welcome these changes: google lobbied in support of at least some of this, while zuckerberg says he’s ok with expanded regulation of facebook. Reglatory capture is being used to lock down our industry (and, maybe democracy) before our very eyes.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > I think this has largely been achieved. Definitely true, and it's worth noting that crackdowns on 'trafficking' and 'abetting' sex work in the US consistently undermine not sex work but safe sex work. - Acts like "renting an apartment out for a sex worker" become abetting, which drives sex work to happen on the street and at client's residences - the places where serious violence are most likely. - Any attempt at collaboration, like sex workers sharing the cost of private security or hygienic supplies, can be reclassified as a form of trafficking. (The tortured legal logic is that "you give me $10 and I buy paper towels for us both" constitutes taking money from a sex worker and enabling their business, and therefore trafficking.) - When Washington, D.C. attempted to crack down on sex work, women carrying condoms were arrested or forced to throw them away - a move which did nothing to prevent trading sex for money, but effectively undermined safety and disease prevention. - When the government moved against Backpage, quite a lot of sex workers were deeply upset. Because the website didn't make sex work happen, it helped it happen safely, allowing workers to choose their clients before meeting them in person. Over and over again, we see that anti-trafficking laws are actually used to marginalize sex work and destroy any possibility of a safe, healthy, or voluntary environment for the workers. At a certain point, it looks like the scenario of vulnerable sex workers who face constant violence is actually being driven by these laws that punish any worker who tries to live a better life.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Right but you have to address the solution which is proposed by the authors of these laws -- don't be a sex worker. It's not exactly a secret that the goal is to outlaw any kind of sex work but you don't get anywhere punishing the victims so you go after people trying to legitimize it. They view sex work as fundamentally abusive and degrading, something that no one should even consider as an option, and therefore needs to be illegal so that police can intervene -- just like organ harvesting, suicide, and a lot of drug laws. Then you make the punishment for facilitating it in any way steep as a deterrent.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      I agree, and I didn't mean to downplay that. My concern is that even within a framework where all sex work is objectionable, these are bad laws. If they made voluntary sex work harder, they'd be successes within that frame. But they don't - they leave the basic transaction untouched, and only undermine worker safety from disease and assault. The situation is actually very similar with drugs. A law that reduced voluntary, non-addictive use would upset some people and please others. But the laws we actually have aren't a success even if you think all drug use is immoral. Crackdowns on supply haven't reduced use, but have increased prices and violence while lowering purity. Crackdowns on drug trafficking haven't reduced use, but have, though the iron law of prohibition, driven a shift to harder and deadlier drugs. And restriction of paraphernalia hasn't reduced use, but has pushed users to unsafe practices like sharing and reusing needles. Deterrent effects are real, though they're exceptionally weak in these cases; sex and drugs have some of the most inelastic demand outside of food and water. But my concern is that these laws aren't actually deterrents against any step essential for the transaction. They're entirely deterrents against incidental features that make the transaction safer or healthier, and so rather than reducing the behavior they simply reduce safety.
- azernik 9y ago
  >>blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking >I think this has largely been achieved. The text of the bill makes this obvious; whatever the public rhetoric, the legal text talks about prostitution, period. No qualifications regarding consent or exploitation.
- otakucode 9y ago
  The majority of modern anti-sex policies and mindsets stem from the same place. The Industrial Revolution. With the advent of factory-driven production, urban centers grew up and factory owners did not wish to pay adolescent workers a wage sufficient enough to enable them to support a family. Prior to this, they could apprentice and otherwise obtain jobs which paid enough to enable them to care for any children they produced. This led to urban poor facing a real problem. Their adolescent children produced their own children, but the family as a whole did not earn enough to support them. So, people starved to death. This created a problem that faced both the religious and the secular authorities of the time. The solution they landed upon was to destroy sex. Considering other factors, this actually was mostly their only option. Sex was ever-present in the life of pre-industrialized groups. Homes were built with only 2 rooms generally, a kitchen and a common room where everyone slept and screwed. Abstinence was a superpower only saints (their version of comic book superheroes, and not seen as human) could do. So it wasn't easy. But between doctors inventing horrific tales of the health dangers of masturbation and profligate sexual activity and the clergy literally rewriting scripture to oppose sexuality (the story of Onan being the clearest case), they did pretty well. Far worse than we have done ourselves since the mid 1990s (no one has ever been as prudish as a modern prude), but pretty well. They changed how homes were built, what entertainment was considered acceptable, changed acceptable dress, changed courting practices, changed parenting practices, and reorganized a great deal of how society in general functioned. All so factory owners didn't need to pay adolescent workers a living wage. Things changed slowly enough that by the time we overcame all of the practical reasons that motivated the changes in the first place, most people didn't even know why they hated sex and the body so much. They just figured that was how it was. There was hope with the Sexual Revolution in the 1970s (on the back of the birth control pill which really should have seen most such ideas die off).... but that was killed by the 80s moralizer backlash, STDs, and the final nail staked in it with the pedo panic started in the 90s. The sociology of sexuality is a tremendously fascinating topic and I've been following it for decades. There are certainly many who still bang the drum in an attempt to destroy or control one of the most fundamentally human bodily functions... and they make easy progress in a society as easily manipulated by emotional appeal as our own.
djsumdog 9y ago
In more sane high income countries, New Zealand, parts of Australia, the UK, et. al, prostitution is legal and regulated. If sex workers get into trouble, there are places and people they can go to get help. It at least attempts to be a legitimate industry. In America, we have parts of Nevada and that's it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it's why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that's another issue entirely...) The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex/their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work. This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we're fighting the same bullshit.
- BuildTheRobots 9y ago
  I'm wasn't aware of the UK having legal and/or regulated sex workers. The closest I'm aware of is that Leeds has the first (and only?) "official" red light district, and my understanding was that that's more a case of the police not asking or prosecuting rather than it actually being allowed or legal. (There's plenty of discussion to be had over whether we should or not, this reply is more of a "oh really, do we?" sorta comment).
  - learnstats2 9y ago
    Sex work is perfectly legal in the UK, subject to certain restrictive conditions. You cannot work in a "brothel" (i.e. not under the same roof as another sex worker), you cannot have a paid "pimp" (arguably not even to do the accounts or to make sure you are safe), you cannot solicit in a public place. As you say, sometimes police will not enforce these rules, but other times they may use the threat of criminalisation to coerce sex workers. Sex workers typically advocate for the "New Zealand model" of full decriminalisation - which is understood to be safer for sex workers.
- bitwize 9y ago
  As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well). This is one of those areas where the rubber of libertarianism meets the road of reality. If you really want to curb sex trafficking, the best way to do it is to go after the demand side: decriminalize prostitutes, but punish pimps and johns severely.
Eridrus 9y ago
> blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking. It seems like they are succeeding already: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-google-drive-error https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-go...
gowld 9y ago
Perhaps the anti-sex crowd would stop being the vanguard of the anti-trafficking movement, if anyone else took up the cause with more fervor.
c3534l 9y ago
That's nothing unique to legislation surrounding sex. Rebranding creationism to "intelligent design" and "teach the controversy" are great examples of disingenuous legislation attempting to create precedent and chip away at at issues in the background. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that things like literacy tests and poll taxes were such examples. It's standard fare for the course in politics. Law is one of those areas where the "slippery slope" argument does actually reflect reality.
bitL 9y ago
I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. It might sound silly and not modern, but the history and its established norms can point out an "algorithm" that preserved continuation of humanity, despite how horrible it might seem and how taxing it always was. A question is if our technological advancements are sufficient to sustain artificial rules that would be otherwise eliminated by evolution in natural environment, or if it falls apart like all previous attempts to deviate from a known "stable" model passed by traditions of what worked before. Not sure I want to be a guinea pig for social engineers either. See what Tinder did to dating; nobody can have any illusion they are getting a "premium" faithful partner and it pushes the attractiveness/transaction narrative and quick disposability to most intimate relationships. Not a way to build a stable civilization, rather a hyper-competitive cruel society where nothing is ever enough. Unless these warts are addressed by a proper patch, our civilization has no future (IMO). I can wonder about motivations of those groups, whether it is really continuation of civilization, or just taking advantage of usual biological idealistic attitude of males to work hard for carrot-and-stick motivations in a form of a woman they desire, and harvesting that energy for their own selfish reasons, painting it white as necessary for everybody.
- 8note 9y ago
  You can say the same about most things that happen currently. historically, civilizations that survived did not use computers, for instance. Thus, if you want to avoid socital collapse, you should enforce that nobody uses computers.
  - bitL 9y ago
    Yes, I think it's an experiment. I am more-less certain without technology this approach would fall apart in 1-2 generations due to human nature; the question for me is if current/future tech is sufficient or we will mess it all up. Warning signs are there - you have plenty of males that decided it's no longer worth it to be involved with society as they are denied females due to their low attractiveness, so if this continues, we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything). It's easier if you restrict access to sex to males, make rules that almost everybody can get it at some point in a committed relationship, instead of having only the most attractive males having it all with most females and the rest waiting for leftovers, and to drive any aberrations from this ideal underground, out of sight. I believe that's how past civilizations worked and in general people didn't talk openly about their side affairs and society built guilt/shaming wall to publicly scorn anyone that was doing it outside private sphere and didn't keep secrecy/discretion. We call it repression now, though it likely had its evolutionary reason as those rules survived and attempts to get rid of them vanished.
matheusmoreira 9y ago
> the groups behind SESTA Which groups are you referring to?

by moomin 9y ago

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago

One should look at the history behind why certain currently banned obscenity is banned, and what the goals of the groups were who originally pushed the ban. >Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet This is one of their main goals. >blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking I think this has largely been achieved.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
> I think this has largely been achieved. Indeed, “combating sex trafficking” seems to already be a euphemism for cracking down on sex work of all kinds.
- hedora 9y ago
  “Combating sex trafficking” is also a euphemism for cracking down on free speech on the internet, privacy, and small competitors to the big two internet firms. In the same week, we’ve also gotten the cloud act, and widely expanded censorship on youtube. The big two seem to welcome these changes: google lobbied in support of at least some of this, while zuckerberg says he’s ok with expanded regulation of facebook. Reglatory capture is being used to lock down our industry (and, maybe democracy) before our very eyes.
Bartweiss 9y ago
> I think this has largely been achieved. Definitely true, and it's worth noting that crackdowns on 'trafficking' and 'abetting' sex work in the US consistently undermine not sex work but safe sex work. - Acts like "renting an apartment out for a sex worker" become abetting, which drives sex work to happen on the street and at client's residences - the places where serious violence are most likely. - Any attempt at collaboration, like sex workers sharing the cost of private security or hygienic supplies, can be reclassified as a form of trafficking. (The tortured legal logic is that "you give me $10 and I buy paper towels for us both" constitutes taking money from a sex worker and enabling their business, and therefore trafficking.) - When Washington, D.C. attempted to crack down on sex work, women carrying condoms were arrested or forced to throw them away - a move which did nothing to prevent trading sex for money, but effectively undermined safety and disease prevention. - When the government moved against Backpage, quite a lot of sex workers were deeply upset. Because the website didn't make sex work happen, it helped it happen safely, allowing workers to choose their clients before meeting them in person. Over and over again, we see that anti-trafficking laws are actually used to marginalize sex work and destroy any possibility of a safe, healthy, or voluntary environment for the workers. At a certain point, it looks like the scenario of vulnerable sex workers who face constant violence is actually being driven by these laws that punish any worker who tries to live a better life.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Right but you have to address the solution which is proposed by the authors of these laws -- don't be a sex worker. It's not exactly a secret that the goal is to outlaw any kind of sex work but you don't get anywhere punishing the victims so you go after people trying to legitimize it. They view sex work as fundamentally abusive and degrading, something that no one should even consider as an option, and therefore needs to be illegal so that police can intervene -- just like organ harvesting, suicide, and a lot of drug laws. Then you make the punishment for facilitating it in any way steep as a deterrent.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I agree, and I didn't mean to downplay that. My concern is that even within a framework where all sex work is objectionable, these are bad laws. If they made voluntary sex work harder, they'd be successes within that frame. But they don't - they leave the basic transaction untouched, and only undermine worker safety from disease and assault. The situation is actually very similar with drugs. A law that reduced voluntary, non-addictive use would upset some people and please others. But the laws we actually have aren't a success even if you think all drug use is immoral. Crackdowns on supply haven't reduced use, but have increased prices and violence while lowering purity. Crackdowns on drug trafficking haven't reduced use, but have, though the iron law of prohibition, driven a shift to harder and deadlier drugs. And restriction of paraphernalia hasn't reduced use, but has pushed users to unsafe practices like sharing and reusing needles. Deterrent effects are real, though they're exceptionally weak in these cases; sex and drugs have some of the most inelastic demand outside of food and water. But my concern is that these laws aren't actually deterrents against any step essential for the transaction. They're entirely deterrents against incidental features that make the transaction safer or healthier, and so rather than reducing the behavior they simply reduce safety.
azernik 9y ago
>>blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking >I think this has largely been achieved. The text of the bill makes this obvious; whatever the public rhetoric, the legal text talks about prostitution, period. No qualifications regarding consent or exploitation.
otakucode 9y ago
The majority of modern anti-sex policies and mindsets stem from the same place. The Industrial Revolution. With the advent of factory-driven production, urban centers grew up and factory owners did not wish to pay adolescent workers a wage sufficient enough to enable them to support a family. Prior to this, they could apprentice and otherwise obtain jobs which paid enough to enable them to care for any children they produced. This led to urban poor facing a real problem. Their adolescent children produced their own children, but the family as a whole did not earn enough to support them. So, people starved to death. This created a problem that faced both the religious and the secular authorities of the time. The solution they landed upon was to destroy sex. Considering other factors, this actually was mostly their only option. Sex was ever-present in the life of pre-industrialized groups. Homes were built with only 2 rooms generally, a kitchen and a common room where everyone slept and screwed. Abstinence was a superpower only saints (their version of comic book superheroes, and not seen as human) could do. So it wasn't easy. But between doctors inventing horrific tales of the health dangers of masturbation and profligate sexual activity and the clergy literally rewriting scripture to oppose sexuality (the story of Onan being the clearest case), they did pretty well. Far worse than we have done ourselves since the mid 1990s (no one has ever been as prudish as a modern prude), but pretty well. They changed how homes were built, what entertainment was considered acceptable, changed acceptable dress, changed courting practices, changed parenting practices, and reorganized a great deal of how society in general functioned. All so factory owners didn't need to pay adolescent workers a living wage. Things changed slowly enough that by the time we overcame all of the practical reasons that motivated the changes in the first place, most people didn't even know why they hated sex and the body so much. They just figured that was how it was. There was hope with the Sexual Revolution in the 1970s (on the back of the birth control pill which really should have seen most such ideas die off).... but that was killed by the 80s moralizer backlash, STDs, and the final nail staked in it with the pedo panic started in the 90s. The sociology of sexuality is a tremendously fascinating topic and I've been following it for decades. There are certainly many who still bang the drum in an attempt to destroy or control one of the most fundamentally human bodily functions... and they make easy progress in a society as easily manipulated by emotional appeal as our own.

djsumdog 9y ago

In more sane high income countries, New Zealand, parts of Australia, the UK, et. al, prostitution is legal and regulated. If sex workers get into trouble, there are places and people they can go to get help. It at least attempts to be a legitimate industry. In America, we have parts of Nevada and that's it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it's why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that's another issue entirely...) The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex/their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work. This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we're fighting the same bullshit.

BuildTheRobots 9y ago
I'm wasn't aware of the UK having legal and/or regulated sex workers. The closest I'm aware of is that Leeds has the first (and only?) "official" red light district, and my understanding was that that's more a case of the police not asking or prosecuting rather than it actually being allowed or legal. (There's plenty of discussion to be had over whether we should or not, this reply is more of a "oh really, do we?" sorta comment).
- learnstats2 9y ago
  Sex work is perfectly legal in the UK, subject to certain restrictive conditions. You cannot work in a "brothel" (i.e. not under the same roof as another sex worker), you cannot have a paid "pimp" (arguably not even to do the accounts or to make sure you are safe), you cannot solicit in a public place. As you say, sometimes police will not enforce these rules, but other times they may use the threat of criminalisation to coerce sex workers. Sex workers typically advocate for the "New Zealand model" of full decriminalisation - which is understood to be safer for sex workers.
bitwize 9y ago
As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well). This is one of those areas where the rubber of libertarianism meets the road of reality. If you really want to curb sex trafficking, the best way to do it is to go after the demand side: decriminalize prostitutes, but punish pimps and johns severely.

Eridrus 9y ago

> blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking. It seems like they are succeeding already: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-google-drive-error https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-go...

gowld 9y ago

Perhaps the anti-sex crowd would stop being the vanguard of the anti-trafficking movement, if anyone else took up the cause with more fervor.

c3534l 9y ago

That's nothing unique to legislation surrounding sex. Rebranding creationism to "intelligent design" and "teach the controversy" are great examples of disingenuous legislation attempting to create precedent and chip away at at issues in the background. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that things like literacy tests and poll taxes were such examples. It's standard fare for the course in politics. Law is one of those areas where the "slippery slope" argument does actually reflect reality.

bitL 9y ago

I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. It might sound silly and not modern, but the history and its established norms can point out an "algorithm" that preserved continuation of humanity, despite how horrible it might seem and how taxing it always was. A question is if our technological advancements are sufficient to sustain artificial rules that would be otherwise eliminated by evolution in natural environment, or if it falls apart like all previous attempts to deviate from a known "stable" model passed by traditions of what worked before. Not sure I want to be a guinea pig for social engineers either. See what Tinder did to dating; nobody can have any illusion they are getting a "premium" faithful partner and it pushes the attractiveness/transaction narrative and quick disposability to most intimate relationships. Not a way to build a stable civilization, rather a hyper-competitive cruel society where nothing is ever enough. Unless these warts are addressed by a proper patch, our civilization has no future (IMO). I can wonder about motivations of those groups, whether it is really continuation of civilization, or just taking advantage of usual biological idealistic attitude of males to work hard for carrot-and-stick motivations in a form of a woman they desire, and harvesting that energy for their own selfish reasons, painting it white as necessary for everybody.

8note 9y ago
You can say the same about most things that happen currently. historically, civilizations that survived did not use computers, for instance. Thus, if you want to avoid socital collapse, you should enforce that nobody uses computers.
- bitL 9y ago
  Yes, I think it's an experiment. I am more-less certain without technology this approach would fall apart in 1-2 generations due to human nature; the question for me is if current/future tech is sufficient or we will mess it all up. Warning signs are there - you have plenty of males that decided it's no longer worth it to be involved with society as they are denied females due to their low attractiveness, so if this continues, we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything). It's easier if you restrict access to sex to males, make rules that almost everybody can get it at some point in a committed relationship, instead of having only the most attractive males having it all with most females and the rest waiting for leftovers, and to drive any aberrations from this ideal underground, out of sight. I believe that's how past civilizations worked and in general people didn't talk openly about their side affairs and society built guilt/shaming wall to publicly scorn anyone that was doing it outside private sphere and didn't keep secrecy/discretion. We call it repression now, though it likely had its evolutionary reason as those rules survived and attempts to get rid of them vanished.

matheusmoreira 9y ago

> the groups behind SESTA Which groups are you referring to?