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Cash/Consent: The war on sex work

315 points by Spellman 7y ago

redm 7y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.
- buboard 7y ago
  She was not lying about being articulate
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling. I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences. To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives. You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way. Why? We're not and should not be robots.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      It seems like an extreme false dilemma to end with the sentence “We’re not and should not be robots.” What has that got to do with anything I said? Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic. It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
      - brenschluss 7y ago
        I understand what you are saying, but I disagree. Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
        luckylion 7y ago
        Should we create policies that disregard facts and are based on emotions, beliefs, desires and imaginations? My impression is that we're typically actively trying to keep the non-factual out of the law-making. "I had a dream once that a great evil will come if we tax corporations more" shouldn't be an argument against new tax laws.
      - istjohn 7y ago
        To understand a complex issue, you need quantitative and qualitative data. The anecdotes provide that qualitative data.
        angry_octet 7y ago
        Moreover this is not attempting to present anecdotal data, but to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white. I think it's the grey that hurts people's brains.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        > “this is not attempting to present anecdotal data” > “to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white.“ these two items from your comment seem to contradict each other.
        angry_octet 7y ago
        You are confusing anecdotal data (a collection of individual experiences, possibility collected in a systematic way, with structured sampling etc), individual anecdotes ("but when I did went there... ")(which people sometimes call 'anecdata'). It is wrong for anecdata to be given equal weight in an argument to systematic collection, whether qualitative or quantitative. She is not doing either of these things. Instead she explains her history, and then explains the impact of shutting down 3rd party sites has on risk to sex workers. Like many experts in a field, she sees that simple solutions are not going to work.
  - h0l0cube 7y ago
    To quote the article: > Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data. The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you: > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      > “This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.” I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
      - h0l0cube 7y ago
        >emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it. Edit: > I disagree very strongly about all this You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
  - yowlingcat 7y ago
    If you can't see a structure in something and it feels like idiosyncratic noise, does that mean that it's noise or that there's a structure you're failing to identify? In general, I'd say it depends, but in this case, you may be missing the point. If you read through the entire thing, you'll see that she presents her story of how she got involved with sex work, and how that particular vocation for her changed over time, highs and lows, major and minor characters included. There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation? I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally? I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases? All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
  - inimino 7y ago
    > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm. > “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.” This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say. Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people. You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism. You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
      - inimino 7y ago
        (First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.) Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level. > All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice. You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.) What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong. Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong. Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
  - lnanek2 7y ago
    I found the narrative very useful. For example, she asserts that rape and prostitution feel very different, and that American laws (compared to UN ones) consider them similar in that there can be no consent in either case. But if she had just said they are different, it would just be a meaningless opinion. Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work. Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      > “That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.” Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases. But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent. It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.” This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing. This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.
hlieberman 7y ago
This war very much effects us as technologists, both directly as restrictions on what we may build and operate, as well as indirectly through our ethical obligations to act with the public interest in mind. For example, it would be illegal for me to run a website which let sex workers anonymously check a particular client’s phone number to see if someone had previously reported them as violent. FOSTA/SESTA would expose me to both criminal and civil liability, even if it wasn’t intentionally made with sex workers in mind, if I didn’t act to stomp out any sex workers from using the service.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  So why are Equifax and Experian and TransUnion or any of the other operations that feed them data allowed to operate? They get hacked and go unpunished... They lie about me, and when I complain, they tack on notes about me being a complainer. America is done. End it for good.
- lxmorj 7y ago
  That's bonkers.
  - snagglegaggle 7y ago
    And arguably going to be overturned after a couple attempts at enforcement. Backpage was taken down with the law after making themselves a political target. If they hadn't been painted as supporting sex trafficking I think people would realize the law is unconstitutional. It attempts to place prior restraint on speech.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      Even worse - Backpage was taken down without the use of SESTA/FOSTA.
- dual_basis 7y ago
  On the other hand, I sort of worry about anonymously crowd-sourcing reputation like this. Putting aside the notion of sex workers for a minute, suppose you ran a site where people could report bad drivers by their license plate numbers. (I believe such sites exist.) If someone doesn't like you, they go on and file fake reports about you, and now you can't get a delivery job (etc). There have already been issues with more public entities on sites like Yelp which have caused people to lose their entire livelihood, and now you want to bring that sort of thing to individuals?
rhcom2 7y ago
I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should actually talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people.
- buboard 7y ago
  The law should seek, more than just protect workers (the catchy part) to regulate their work.
  - trehalose 7y ago
    Well, on the flipside, it should certainly seek, more than just regulate their work (the politically correct part) to protect them. How could the law succeed at either without input from the workers?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Many years ago, I read the biography of a sex worker whose previous work had somehow been in politics, I think related to organizing and running political campaigns. After she voluntarily chose to become a sex worker in her late twenties, she turned her political background towards sex work. She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better. She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal. Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
    - patmcc 7y ago
      There's an distinction made between legalization and decriminalization in terms of sex work (that I think is the reverse of how they're used in regards to drugs). Legalization, to sex workers, implies regulation, licensing, additional taxes charged, etc. Decriminalization means no laws against adults selling sex (except perhaps any standard employment laws, etc.) It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).
ilaksh 7y ago
I wonder if some people's attitudes towards sex work may change if we get realistic sex robots.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
draw_down 7y ago
This is probably the best thing I have ever read on this issue. I really enjoyed it.
mnm1 7y ago
While the US is passing more and more stupid laws banning consensual sex between adults, many countries in Europe and South America have legalized prostitution and bettered the lives of sex workers. I'm sure that won't happen in the puritanical, impractical US but it's something to think about for when the idiots in charge here get replaced by slightly less idiotic idiots who actually want to help people rather than pretend like they're on the moral high ground while doing the same things they outlaw for others.
- detcader 7y ago
  If you don't know whether the person you're paying needs the money to survive, it's immoral to buy "sex." You don't know to what degree it's "sex" or they are forced into it, which is called "rape." Banning the purchase (the "Nordic model") is the same as banning other immoral acts. It's the same with porn by the way. You don't know if the women you're watching are on drugs, being threatened by men, or just needs the money to survive. So what what are you watching? "Sex" or rape?
  - ahaferburg 7y ago
    That's not the point. Consider reading the article.
scarejunba 7y ago
There are people who will say "I want to do this for this person in exchange for what they're offering me". There are people who will say "You can't do that. You're hurting yourself". Usually the people in the second group then leave happy having done their job of saving the people in the first group. Then the first group starves. As a minor, I did all sorts of work over the Internet, and got paid fraudulently over Paypal. Boy am I glad child labour experts didn't get in on that shit. Moralists never really care to help.
werber 7y ago
I wish we could have something akin to the laws that protect people from drug prosecution for bringing someone to an er for an overdose for sex workers who are raped to come forward and prosecute without fear of prosecution while we figure out how to inact realistic laws that actually protect victims of trafficking and don't turn willing sex workers into trafficking victims or criminals
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Is there talk about changing the legislation? When Sweden flipped the legislation some years back (selling is now decriminalized while buying is illegal) I thought that was part of a global trend? To me it always seemed like a rational change.
  - werber 7y ago
    I honestly don't follow it enough to know, but politics in my country (United States) tend to lean towards the extreme instead of incremental, because of what I see as, political posturing
rolltiide 7y ago
I think the focus on the early 2000s doesn't provide enough history to holistically address sex work in the USA. Yes, many more additional laws were passed since then but a lot of them are based on the public health concerns, not solely this one dimensional human trafficking idea. The public health concerns can be addressed now. Syphilis, for example, was a real debilitating problem 70+ years ago. Today, its something everyone actively avoids, and also quickly treats. So this particular public health issue isn't perpetuated by rampant diseased sex workers. Regulated sex workers are cleaner than the general population due to frequent testing. There is room for many state-level prohibitions to be challenged now, due to the rationale that passed their old laws. Sure there are people that will cite the law as preventing and criminalizing human trafficking, but go back to the public policy discussions regarding the drafted laws and you will often see public health issues that are no longer relevant today. The judicial branch can easily then strike them down. Forcing the legislatures hand.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y ago
However people end up in sex work, their worst enemies are authorities and dogooders. While suchlike pretend concern with sex worker welfare, they offer SFA in the way of true help. The best way to help sex workers trapped in their occupation, mostly by financial pressure and discrimination, begins with decriminalization.
- detcader 7y ago
  Why leave out the Nordic model as an option? It doesn't direct the authorities to harm sex workers. If business suffers as a result, they aren't chained to selling "sex" as a way to make money (and we should providing a UBI system anyway)
  - angry_octet 7y ago
    The Nordic Model doesn't work to protect sex workers, it puts them in more harm, and facillitates illegal sex trafficking. It's the work of a coalition of the religious right and rad fem TERF left, so hardly surprising.
    - detcader 7y ago
      Is it wrong or unexpected for feminists to question an industry that primarily objectifies women's bodies? Let's say you don't agree that it's ethically problematic for a john to buy from a person without knowing if they're actually able to consent vs. being threatened/poor/addicted to drugs. Would it not be rational for a feminist who does think that way, to advocate for the Nordic model?
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        The problem with saying that that is a feminist perspective is that it is primarily concerned with the moral expectations on men, while ignoring the reality of women, underprivileged or trafficked, and the inevitability of criminal violence in illegal industries. It's positively Victorian. It does also seem to infantilise women who are capable of making a choice. I've only heard arguments that prohibition is 'for their own good' or necessary to correct male behavior. Many women in illegal and coercive prostitution face the reality that their families will be injured or killed if they escape or go to the police. They will also likely be deported even if they aren't arrested for prostitution. I would rather reduce the client base for illegal prostitution by allowing legal prostitution, which removes it from the nexus of drugs of dependence, corrupt policing and criminal violence.
rolltiide 7y ago
I had read a discussion on whether Nevada could ever offer the decadent day spa style that you see in Germany, and basically a bunch of sex workers in this forum revealed how lazy they were and benefitting from the continent wide prohibition. Compare this to $75 day pass to massive grounds that would put anything on Game of Thrones to shame. $150-$200 per hour to do anything private and sexual. A budget Norwegian Air flight, accomodations and 10 hours of your wildest sexual fantasies and you'll still have spent less than any of the bullshit you'll encounter in North America. I personally see that model over there and it seems pretty awesome, but people are always looking for something wrong to rationalize their opinion on all sex work, but most of whats wrong applies to any job in these regulated environments. People talk to sex workers, and assume they are all being coerced to say something positive.
randyrand 7y ago
“Women only go into sex trade because they have no better option” “We should ban sex work, because that’s best for women” This always felt like an oxymoron to me.
- shard972 7y ago
  Because the first is a left wing opinion and the 2nd is right wing.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  I think a lot of people are pro-sex work when it comes to commenting on the theory of it, but a lot of people would also be remiss if their daughter/wife/mother was a sex worker. On top of that, if you didn't want your daughter being a sex worker, I would go as far as to say you also wouldn't want her hanging out with any known sex workers.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    Never mind their wife / daughter. A bunch of people in this thread are saying there's nothing wrong with sex work, but if I offered £30 for them to give me a blowjob not one of them would take the money. There's a weird disconnect here: people think women selling sex enjoy it, and they don't recognise that the vast majority of women are only selling sex because they have no other option.
    - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      I made a post about this on reddit and the most upvoted comment is from some woman bragging how she already has a bunch of casual sex with practically strangers anyway, she might as well go get paid for it...
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      If you'd offer me to pay me the minimum wage for an hour of scrubbing toilets, I'd ferociously decline, but that doesn't imply that there's something wrong with janitor work. I'd also not want my wife and daughter to work in many professions that are known to be harsh, exploitative physical work in abusive conditions that's likely to bring in long term health conditions for measly pay. There are so many jobs that objectively suck, and being able to refuse money because the job is really bad is a privilege that most people don't have. So that criteria also isn't really sufficient to distinguish sex work from many other options that are and will continue to be legal.
deleted 7y ago
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tempsy 7y ago
Maybe I just had my head in the sand, but I only just discovered this whole social media "findom" subculture last week. Apparently there are "master/dom" type people who have social media profiles where they "dominate" followers by asking them to send them money through Square Cash/PayPal/Venmo to pay for things. They do nothing any more sexual than post pictures/videos/text. Honestly, quite fascinating.
cies 7y ago
The freedom to not be prosecuted for a victimless crime should be a constitutional right.
throwaway87378 7y ago
The economic exploitation underlying the need for women (and to a lesser extent, young men) to prostitute themselves is central to the subject, and highlighted well by this essay. Chris Hedges did a very moving interview with Rachel Moran about her experiences as a prostitute that describes these issues. Trigger warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I
ralusek 7y ago
I'll bring up the point I always bring up regarding sex work: why are so many people focused on whether or not this actually produces better results for people? Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives. Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply should not be legislating in search of outcomes. In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence, etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position. It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.
- danielbln 7y ago
  > we oppose prohibition from a principled position Is that true? There are still many dry counties in the US, and full scale prohibition was an utter and total desaster. Seems more that people learned that alcohol prohibition doesn't work which lead to its abolishment, not a principled position.
- aurea 7y ago
  > Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? What are you advocating here? There are many transactions in which modern states interfere that are between consenting adults. In countries with minimal wage you could consent to being paid below it, but it would remain illegal. You can consent to being scammed in a transaction, but it remains illegal. Etc. These interference are meant to protect citizens. Just because the transaction would involve a sexual exchange doesn’t mean it’s any different.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
The odd thing about this topic is that I think nobody has articulated the fear of legalizing sex work well. The reason most men don't want to make sex-work legal, deep down, maybe so deep they don't realize it, is because sex holds such symbolic importance in our society. The fear is that legalizing sex work would have the side effect of morally legitimizing sex work (i.e. making it less shameful), which in turn would push us a bit more toward a world where we might see the people hiring numerous sex workers as a status symbol rather than a shameful secret. Imbalance in wealth is a loaded topic. But imbalance in sexual satisfaction is a much heavier one, particularly for those at extremes. That said, I don't have an overall opinion on the issue, this is just to try to elevate the debate.
orasis 7y ago
Wow, what a beautiful essay. This is the one piece anyone contemplating the politics of sex work should read.
sershe 7y ago
Somewhat relevant, about the "specialness" of sex work: https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-wouldnt-fck-a-grapefruit-for-money-i-dont-know-whats-wrong-with-you/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-w...

315 points by Spellman 7y ago

redm 7y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.

buboard 7y ago
She was not lying about being articulate
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling. I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences. To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives. You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way. Why? We're not and should not be robots.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    It seems like an extreme false dilemma to end with the sentence “We’re not and should not be robots.” What has that got to do with anything I said? Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic. It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
    - brenschluss 7y ago
      I understand what you are saying, but I disagree. Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        Should we create policies that disregard facts and are based on emotions, beliefs, desires and imaginations? My impression is that we're typically actively trying to keep the non-factual out of the law-making. "I had a dream once that a great evil will come if we tax corporations more" shouldn't be an argument against new tax laws.
    - istjohn 7y ago
      To understand a complex issue, you need quantitative and qualitative data. The anecdotes provide that qualitative data.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        Moreover this is not attempting to present anecdotal data, but to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white. I think it's the grey that hurts people's brains.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        > “this is not attempting to present anecdotal data” > “to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white.“ these two items from your comment seem to contradict each other.
        angry_octet 7y ago
        You are confusing anecdotal data (a collection of individual experiences, possibility collected in a systematic way, with structured sampling etc), individual anecdotes ("but when I did went there... ")(which people sometimes call 'anecdata'). It is wrong for anecdata to be given equal weight in an argument to systematic collection, whether qualitative or quantitative. She is not doing either of these things. Instead she explains her history, and then explains the impact of shutting down 3rd party sites has on risk to sex workers. Like many experts in a field, she sees that simple solutions are not going to work.
- h0l0cube 7y ago
  To quote the article: > Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data. The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you: > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.” I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
    - h0l0cube 7y ago
      >emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it. Edit: > I disagree very strongly about all this You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  If you can't see a structure in something and it feels like idiosyncratic noise, does that mean that it's noise or that there's a structure you're failing to identify? In general, I'd say it depends, but in this case, you may be missing the point. If you read through the entire thing, you'll see that she presents her story of how she got involved with sex work, and how that particular vocation for her changed over time, highs and lows, major and minor characters included. There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation? I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally? I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases? All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
- inimino 7y ago
  > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm. > “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.” This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say. Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people. You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism. You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
    - inimino 7y ago
      (First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.) Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level. > All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice. You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.) What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong. Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong. Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
- lnanek2 7y ago
  I found the narrative very useful. For example, she asserts that rape and prostitution feel very different, and that American laws (compared to UN ones) consider them similar in that there can be no consent in either case. But if she had just said they are different, it would just be a meaningless opinion. Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work. Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.” Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases. But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent. It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.” This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing. This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.

hlieberman 7y ago

This war very much effects us as technologists, both directly as restrictions on what we may build and operate, as well as indirectly through our ethical obligations to act with the public interest in mind. For example, it would be illegal for me to run a website which let sex workers anonymously check a particular client’s phone number to see if someone had previously reported them as violent. FOSTA/SESTA would expose me to both criminal and civil liability, even if it wasn’t intentionally made with sex workers in mind, if I didn’t act to stomp out any sex workers from using the service.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
So why are Equifax and Experian and TransUnion or any of the other operations that feed them data allowed to operate? They get hacked and go unpunished... They lie about me, and when I complain, they tack on notes about me being a complainer. America is done. End it for good.
lxmorj 7y ago
That's bonkers.
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  And arguably going to be overturned after a couple attempts at enforcement. Backpage was taken down with the law after making themselves a political target. If they hadn't been painted as supporting sex trafficking I think people would realize the law is unconstitutional. It attempts to place prior restraint on speech.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Even worse - Backpage was taken down without the use of SESTA/FOSTA.
dual_basis 7y ago
On the other hand, I sort of worry about anonymously crowd-sourcing reputation like this. Putting aside the notion of sex workers for a minute, suppose you ran a site where people could report bad drivers by their license plate numbers. (I believe such sites exist.) If someone doesn't like you, they go on and file fake reports about you, and now you can't get a delivery job (etc). There have already been issues with more public entities on sites like Yelp which have caused people to lose their entire livelihood, and now you want to bring that sort of thing to individuals?

rhcom2 7y ago

I thought this was incredibly interesting. The author directly confronts the grey and ambiguous areas around consent when money is involved. It really drives home the point that if you want to legislate ways to protect sex workers, you should actually talk to sex workers and not make up feel good bs that can harm people.

buboard 7y ago
The law should seek, more than just protect workers (the catchy part) to regulate their work.
- trehalose 7y ago
  Well, on the flipside, it should certainly seek, more than just regulate their work (the politically correct part) to protect them. How could the law succeed at either without input from the workers?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Many years ago, I read the biography of a sex worker whose previous work had somehow been in politics, I think related to organizing and running political campaigns. After she voluntarily chose to become a sex worker in her late twenties, she turned her political background towards sex work. She was against regulation. She concluded that regulation never protected sex workers and it generally made their lives worse, not better. She was for decriminalizing it, a term that gets interpreted very differently by different people. If I recall correctly, she simply wanted no law or regulation that made selling sexual services illegal. Edit: The book is Working: My Life as a Prostitute by Dolores French
  - patmcc 7y ago
    There's an distinction made between legalization and decriminalization in terms of sex work (that I think is the reverse of how they're used in regards to drugs). Legalization, to sex workers, implies regulation, licensing, additional taxes charged, etc. Decriminalization means no laws against adults selling sex (except perhaps any standard employment laws, etc.) It's an interesting distinction, and talking to people about it really brings up the core complaint against sex work, which almost always ends up being a moral one (i.e. that it is not work that should be done, it's wrong).

ilaksh 7y ago

I wonder if some people's attitudes towards sex work may change if we get realistic sex robots.

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draw_down 7y ago

This is probably the best thing I have ever read on this issue. I really enjoyed it.

mnm1 7y ago

While the US is passing more and more stupid laws banning consensual sex between adults, many countries in Europe and South America have legalized prostitution and bettered the lives of sex workers. I'm sure that won't happen in the puritanical, impractical US but it's something to think about for when the idiots in charge here get replaced by slightly less idiotic idiots who actually want to help people rather than pretend like they're on the moral high ground while doing the same things they outlaw for others.

detcader 7y ago
If you don't know whether the person you're paying needs the money to survive, it's immoral to buy "sex." You don't know to what degree it's "sex" or they are forced into it, which is called "rape." Banning the purchase (the "Nordic model") is the same as banning other immoral acts. It's the same with porn by the way. You don't know if the women you're watching are on drugs, being threatened by men, or just needs the money to survive. So what what are you watching? "Sex" or rape?
- ahaferburg 7y ago
  That's not the point. Consider reading the article.

scarejunba 7y ago

There are people who will say "I want to do this for this person in exchange for what they're offering me". There are people who will say "You can't do that. You're hurting yourself". Usually the people in the second group then leave happy having done their job of saving the people in the first group. Then the first group starves. As a minor, I did all sorts of work over the Internet, and got paid fraudulently over Paypal. Boy am I glad child labour experts didn't get in on that shit. Moralists never really care to help.

werber 7y ago

I wish we could have something akin to the laws that protect people from drug prosecution for bringing someone to an er for an overdose for sex workers who are raped to come forward and prosecute without fear of prosecution while we figure out how to inact realistic laws that actually protect victims of trafficking and don't turn willing sex workers into trafficking victims or criminals

alkonaut 7y ago
Is there talk about changing the legislation? When Sweden flipped the legislation some years back (selling is now decriminalized while buying is illegal) I thought that was part of a global trend? To me it always seemed like a rational change.
- werber 7y ago
  I honestly don't follow it enough to know, but politics in my country (United States) tend to lean towards the extreme instead of incremental, because of what I see as, political posturing

rolltiide 7y ago

I think the focus on the early 2000s doesn't provide enough history to holistically address sex work in the USA. Yes, many more additional laws were passed since then but a lot of them are based on the public health concerns, not solely this one dimensional human trafficking idea. The public health concerns can be addressed now. Syphilis, for example, was a real debilitating problem 70+ years ago. Today, its something everyone actively avoids, and also quickly treats. So this particular public health issue isn't perpetuated by rampant diseased sex workers. Regulated sex workers are cleaner than the general population due to frequent testing. There is room for many state-level prohibitions to be challenged now, due to the rationale that passed their old laws. Sure there are people that will cite the law as preventing and criminalizing human trafficking, but go back to the public policy discussions regarding the drafted laws and you will often see public health issues that are no longer relevant today. The judicial branch can easily then strike them down. Forcing the legislatures hand.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y ago

However people end up in sex work, their worst enemies are authorities and dogooders. While suchlike pretend concern with sex worker welfare, they offer SFA in the way of true help. The best way to help sex workers trapped in their occupation, mostly by financial pressure and discrimination, begins with decriminalization.

detcader 7y ago
Why leave out the Nordic model as an option? It doesn't direct the authorities to harm sex workers. If business suffers as a result, they aren't chained to selling "sex" as a way to make money (and we should providing a UBI system anyway)
- angry_octet 7y ago
  The Nordic Model doesn't work to protect sex workers, it puts them in more harm, and facillitates illegal sex trafficking. It's the work of a coalition of the religious right and rad fem TERF left, so hardly surprising.
  - detcader 7y ago
    Is it wrong or unexpected for feminists to question an industry that primarily objectifies women's bodies? Let's say you don't agree that it's ethically problematic for a john to buy from a person without knowing if they're actually able to consent vs. being threatened/poor/addicted to drugs. Would it not be rational for a feminist who does think that way, to advocate for the Nordic model?
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      The problem with saying that that is a feminist perspective is that it is primarily concerned with the moral expectations on men, while ignoring the reality of women, underprivileged or trafficked, and the inevitability of criminal violence in illegal industries. It's positively Victorian. It does also seem to infantilise women who are capable of making a choice. I've only heard arguments that prohibition is 'for their own good' or necessary to correct male behavior. Many women in illegal and coercive prostitution face the reality that their families will be injured or killed if they escape or go to the police. They will also likely be deported even if they aren't arrested for prostitution. I would rather reduce the client base for illegal prostitution by allowing legal prostitution, which removes it from the nexus of drugs of dependence, corrupt policing and criminal violence.

rolltiide 7y ago

I had read a discussion on whether Nevada could ever offer the decadent day spa style that you see in Germany, and basically a bunch of sex workers in this forum revealed how lazy they were and benefitting from the continent wide prohibition. Compare this to $75 day pass to massive grounds that would put anything on Game of Thrones to shame. $150-$200 per hour to do anything private and sexual. A budget Norwegian Air flight, accomodations and 10 hours of your wildest sexual fantasies and you'll still have spent less than any of the bullshit you'll encounter in North America. I personally see that model over there and it seems pretty awesome, but people are always looking for something wrong to rationalize their opinion on all sex work, but most of whats wrong applies to any job in these regulated environments. People talk to sex workers, and assume they are all being coerced to say something positive.

randyrand 7y ago

“Women only go into sex trade because they have no better option” “We should ban sex work, because that’s best for women” This always felt like an oxymoron to me.

shard972 7y ago
Because the first is a left wing opinion and the 2nd is right wing.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
I think a lot of people are pro-sex work when it comes to commenting on the theory of it, but a lot of people would also be remiss if their daughter/wife/mother was a sex worker. On top of that, if you didn't want your daughter being a sex worker, I would go as far as to say you also wouldn't want her hanging out with any known sex workers.
- DanBC 7y ago
  Never mind their wife / daughter. A bunch of people in this thread are saying there's nothing wrong with sex work, but if I offered £30 for them to give me a blowjob not one of them would take the money. There's a weird disconnect here: people think women selling sex enjoy it, and they don't recognise that the vast majority of women are only selling sex because they have no other option.
  - MuffinFlavored 7y ago
    I made a post about this on reddit and the most upvoted comment is from some woman bragging how she already has a bunch of casual sex with practically strangers anyway, she might as well go get paid for it...
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    If you'd offer me to pay me the minimum wage for an hour of scrubbing toilets, I'd ferociously decline, but that doesn't imply that there's something wrong with janitor work. I'd also not want my wife and daughter to work in many professions that are known to be harsh, exploitative physical work in abusive conditions that's likely to bring in long term health conditions for measly pay. There are so many jobs that objectively suck, and being able to refuse money because the job is really bad is a privilege that most people don't have. So that criteria also isn't really sufficient to distinguish sex work from many other options that are and will continue to be legal.

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tempsy 7y ago

Maybe I just had my head in the sand, but I only just discovered this whole social media "findom" subculture last week. Apparently there are "master/dom" type people who have social media profiles where they "dominate" followers by asking them to send them money through Square Cash/PayPal/Venmo to pay for things. They do nothing any more sexual than post pictures/videos/text. Honestly, quite fascinating.

cies 7y ago

The freedom to not be prosecuted for a victimless crime should be a constitutional right.

throwaway87378 7y ago

The economic exploitation underlying the need for women (and to a lesser extent, young men) to prostitute themselves is central to the subject, and highlighted well by this essay. Chris Hedges did a very moving interview with Rachel Moran about her experiences as a prostitute that describes these issues. Trigger warning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I

ralusek 7y ago

I'll bring up the point I always bring up regarding sex work: why are so many people focused on whether or not this actually produces better results for people? Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives. Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply should not be legislating in search of outcomes. In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence, etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position. It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.

danielbln 7y ago
> we oppose prohibition from a principled position Is that true? There are still many dry counties in the US, and full scale prohibition was an utter and total desaster. Seems more that people learned that alcohol prohibition doesn't work which lead to its abolishment, not a principled position.
aurea 7y ago
> Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? What are you advocating here? There are many transactions in which modern states interfere that are between consenting adults. In countries with minimal wage you could consent to being paid below it, but it would remain illegal. You can consent to being scammed in a transaction, but it remains illegal. Etc. These interference are meant to protect citizens. Just because the transaction would involve a sexual exchange doesn’t mean it’s any different.

alexandercrohde 7y ago

The odd thing about this topic is that I think nobody has articulated the fear of legalizing sex work well. The reason most men don't want to make sex-work legal, deep down, maybe so deep they don't realize it, is because sex holds such symbolic importance in our society. The fear is that legalizing sex work would have the side effect of morally legitimizing sex work (i.e. making it less shameful), which in turn would push us a bit more toward a world where we might see the people hiring numerous sex workers as a status symbol rather than a shameful secret. Imbalance in wealth is a loaded topic. But imbalance in sexual satisfaction is a much heavier one, particularly for those at extremes. That said, I don't have an overall opinion on the issue, this is just to try to elevate the debate.

orasis 7y ago

Wow, what a beautiful essay. This is the one piece anyone contemplating the politics of sex work should read.

sershe 7y ago

Somewhat relevant, about the "specialness" of sex work: https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-wouldnt-fck-a-grapefruit-for-money-i-dont-know-whats-wrong-with-you/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/alfred-macdonald/2014/12/if-you-w...