4 ms·
Some people choose to do sex work. Making that more dangerous for them when their choice of work isn't harming anyone else seems fairly petty.
by darawk 9y ago
Some people choose to do sex work. Making that more dangerous for them when their choice of work isn't harming anyone else seems fairly petty.
- relics443 9y agoI wouldn't be so quick to say it doesn't harm anyone else. It's not so far fetched to imagine a married family man acting on an impulse to hire a prostitute. It's a situation where if one wasn't so easily available, he wouldn't have done it. Not such a stretch of the imagination to imagine this person getting found out by family. Bam! Instant harm to multiple innocent people.
- darawk 9y agoYou're right, the availability of sex and sexuality is too much for men to handle. We should criminalize prostitution - and while we're at it, why not criminalize yoga pants? I know those are pretty tempting to me.
- relics443 9y agoI think the question you mean to ask is why criminalize anything, and IMO that's out of the scope of this forum. But once you receive the answer to your real question, the reason why prostitution is criminal, while yoga pants are not should be self evident.
- darawk 9y agoUm, no. Things like murder are criminalized because they involve the infringement upon the rights of others against their will. Prostitution does not infringe upon anyone's rights against their will.
- relics443 9y ago"Things like murder are criminalized because they involve the infringement upon the rights of others against their will." Correct, that's why murder is criminalized, and not the reason why prostitution is criminalized.
- yters 9y agoNo one is making it more dangerous. Backpage may or may not make it less dangerous.
- darawk 9y agoThe claim by the woman on Twitter is that it made it less dangerous for her. The general claim made by most people who look at this is that it makes it less dangerous. I've not studied it personally, but I see no reason to doubt those claims.
- DanBC 9y agoIt's probably true for prostitution ads in general, but Backpage in particular did make things more dangerous. They applied filters to ads which made it harder for law enforcement to search for and find trafficed women; those filters were instant and permanent and so evidence was destroyed. Backpage themselves claimed (in many of the lawsuits brought against them) that they were unable to take any action on ads for children who were being solf for sex because of the Communications Decency Act. And people seem a bit confused by the offer: street work is obviously terribly risky. But small ad sex work is still very dangerous. The vast majority of people who sell sex do so to feed an addiction, or because they're being coercively controlled. This is not a willing exchange of a good for money.
- darawk 9y ago> The vast majority of people who sell sex do so to feed an addiction, or because they're being coercively controlled. That may be true for the vast majority of sex work in general. But I think it's pretty unlikely to be true for the vast majority of sex work advertised online, particularly in places like this. This is an empirical question, of course, but the sexworkers subreddit is some decent evidence in this camp.
- yters 9y agoWhy is prostitution something worth promoting anyways? It is harmful to the person selling themselves, and the people buying. Capitalism doesn't magically make all 'products' morally good. Nor should we allow immoral products merely because 'capitalism'.