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It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate moral
by paulgb 7y ago
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
- hiram112 7y agoIt isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where the product / service carries less legal risk and societal stigmas than before. Thus, men are far less likely to pay large premiums for sex with non-prostitutes including 'courting', dating, marriage, etc.
- avgeek23 7y agoAh this comment sums up perfectly.
- scarejunba 7y agoYou don’t need complex market forces. It is fairly common for people to disallow other people from doing things: * for their own good * for perceived externalities This is common enough for drugs, heavy metal, child employment, and contracting that it doesn’t surprise me they would apply it to prostitution. In fact, I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
- arcticbull 7y agoFor context, I'm a left-wing Canadian socialist. 1. Drugs should all be legal as Portugal's legalization of all drugs has shown us the war on drugs is a massive boondoggle. [1] So has Canada's legalization of marijuana. 2. Child employment is legislated on the basis that children aren't able to make their own decisions, and that sounds ok. 3. Heavy metals, I assume you don't mean the music, is regulated to protect the welfare of the entire population. 4. Contracting? > I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low. I can't think of a single reason to legislate consenting adults exchanging money for sex. It's not for me, but as with the war on drugs, the medicine is so much worse than the cure it's time we dropped it. The only thing harmed by regulated, clean and safe prostitution is property value and puritanical sensibilities. Especially when scientists taught monkeys the value of money and they first thing they did was exchange it for sex. [2] That might be the most fitting epitaph for humanity yet, actually haha. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic... [2] https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monkeys-the-concept-of-money-not-long-after-the-first-prostitute-monkey-appeared/ https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-mon...
- scarejunba 7y agoYeah, I'm sure you have these opinions, but lots of people with a high care index (in the Moral Foundations Theory sense) and low liberty index believe that we can't let people do things because they're going to harm themselves and they're incapable of making the tradeoffs. I meant heavy metal, as in the music. Contracting, like in AB5 in California. Etc. etc. It doesn't really matter. It is common among those on the left who conform to that high-care/low-liberty set (of which there are many) to infantilize people, remove any agency they have, and then claim to be protecting them. You don't need to invent this twisted "women want to corner the market for sex" crap to justify it. You just need people who think "oh no, those prostitutes must be doing it because they're forced; let's ban that"
- PTPoster 7y agoA created an account just to tell you that you are wrong about Portuguese laws. It's a common mistake. Here in Portugal drug use is what we call ”decriminalized”. It's forbidden but not persecutted/punishable. But I agree that going after drug users is a waste of effort, and more contries should do like us and just go after dealers and distributors. The only way you could go after users is if you use an extreme islam way, death penalty. Not very ethical.
- arcticbull 7y agoIndeed, I'm usually more careful to distinguish legalization and decriminalization. Marijuana is however legal in Canada.
- brutt 7y agoMarijuana is still illegal in USA.
- arcticbull 7y agoWell, not federally, I guess it's an opinion question re: how you feel about states rights.
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoSome feminists. I doubt that is a majority view.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoThere's strong factions on both sides.
- jniedrauer 7y agoThere are always outliers with strange opinions in any sufficiently large movement, but a much more common feminist position is to be strongly in support of sex workers rights and safety.
- hiram112 7y agoYou're very wrong - it is not just a few outliers. You can Google it easily enough, and that will show you many feminists are against it. But to truly understand the issue, see which groups, along with religious right, are the biggest lobbyists against any state bills that attempt to decriminalize prostitution. You will find that it's many women's groups, not just the evangelicals. https://now.org/media-center/press-release/decriminalize-prostituted-people-not-prostitution/ https://now.org/media-center/press-release/decriminalize-pro...
- helen___keller 7y agoIt's fine to just admit you don't know what you're talking about rather than trying to lump "feminism" as a big homogeneous opinion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_feminism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_feminism
- tomhoward 7y agoMy partner works as a government policy officer, researching and formulating sex work legislation, which means engaging with all stakeholder and advocacy groups in the community. Her experience indicates that feminist groups who oppose legalised prostitution are a very small minority, at least in our Australian state.
- ethiclub 7y agoFeminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.
- CuriouslyC 7y agoThat's your definition of feminism...
- anigbrowl 7y agoSome feminists surely do, but conflating some with all is a fallacy of composition that hinders discussion. Your reasoning in the rest of the comment seems rather questionable and veers into seeming even more like a generalization.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- taneq 7y agoI thought we’d decided “not all X” arguments were inadmissible?
- Quarrelsome 7y agonot all Hacker News posters are full of shit? Help out, I'm kinda lost now.
- twic 7y agoThis is untrue rather than inadmissible.
- wongarsu 7y agoHowever GP didn't say "all feminists", only "feminists". If I say "Germans eat bread for breakfast" that's generally understood to mean "In general Germans eat bread for breakfast" or "A majority of Germans eat bread for breakfast". Treating it as if I said "Every German eats bread for every breakfast" would be constructing a straw man. People generally understand that there is variation in every group, even if they don't explicitly put that disclaimer on every sentence.
- jarekkruk 7y agoIt is not exactly comparable. Prostitution is an important issue in feminism. Statement "environmentalists support nuclear power" would be a better analogy, because many environmentalists are for nuclear power and many are against.
- mwgalloway 7y agoYou're treating feminism as a simplistic monolith rather than a multifaceted movement across different cultural groups and sects. There are plenty of differing opinions and trends within the umbrella of feminism that don't always agree with one another, often the divisions seem to fall across generational and national boundaries. It seems to me though that feminists, and the left in general, in the US are very much in favor of the decriminalization of sex work.
- apatters 7y agoWhy not look at numbers rather than anecdotes? A poll by YouGov in 2016 found that Republicans were 7% more likely than Democrats to believe sex work should remain illegal: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-men-women-poll https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me... But the real gap was between the genders. Women were 14% more likely to say sex work should be illegal than men. They were also 18% more likely to say it's immoral. Now what "feminists" think is another question, I doubt that has been studied, and that term means a lot of things to a lot of people. But according to the polls the majority of the opposition in the US to legalizing and tolerating sex work comes from women, regardless of their political orientation. One can extrapolate that electing more women would lead to harsher laws about sex work and indeed both have happened in the past decade.
- jessaustin 7y agoYour numbers confirm rather than refute parent's hypothesis. Prostitutes sell what men want more cheaply than other women sell it. Some other women disapprove. Some portion of those other women are feminists.
- gruturo 7y agoYou could frame this a some kind of regulatory capture by the current monopolists.
- urbanjunkie 7y ago"Prostitutes sell what men want more cheaply than other women sell it" You poor incel.
- apatters 7y agoYouGov's numbers neither confirm nor refute the parent's hypothesis because women and feminists are not the same thing. No evidence has been presented to support the parent's anecdotal belief about what feminists think. I have spoken to plenty of feminists over the years and have found them to be split pretty evenly over this issue. My point was that the opposition to legalizing sex work is mostly from females, and may or may not be from feminists (whatever that word even means in 2020).
- umanwizard 7y agoSome self-described feminists think prostitution should be legal, and some don’t. There’s not one uniform “feminist opinion” on the subject. As for those who are against it, sure, maybe some reason in the cynical way you describe. But I think the lion’s share are motivated by other reasons. Typically they argue that prostitution is coercive, as you can’t call something “consensual” that someone needs to do to survive. Personally I think prostitution should be just as legal as any other kind of work; but that’s not a license to grossly misinterpret the arguments of those who disagree.
- dgzl 7y agoI'm more curious about people who still think Democrats and Republicans are so different from each other
- throwawaybbb 7y agoPartisanship is a hell of a drug.
- afarrell 7y agoThey pass notably different types of bills and are reliant on different sets of key supporters.
- chrischen 7y agoThere’s definitely a cross section of highly biased and partisan supporters that could have swung either direction at some point in their life if they had hung out with different people.
- paggle 7y agoAlmost every person on earth could have swung in any direction if they had hung out with different people. If you or I hung out with Ancient Egyptians our whole lives we would have thought burying kings with living slaves was about as normal as surfing Hacker News.
- Quarrelsome 7y agowhich holds the implication that people as an abstract between now and ancient Egypt are not actually that different. They're just responding to different stimuli in their respective environments.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThat's an implication a lot of people will do a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid because it means you can't just ignore the misadventures of various societies throughout history by saying "we're smarter now" or something like that.
- paggle 7y agoWhy do you think that the... Democratic Party... doesn’t want to “legislate morality.” That is the essence of what all politicians do. Bernie Sanders talking about the 1% and 99% is trying to legislate morality.
- Thorentis 7y ago> designed to legislate morality Like... almost all other laws? Do you think murder is immoral? Well guess what? There's a law for that. Just because you disagree with the morality being legislated, you can't pretend that "legislating morality" is the problem.
- chrischen 7y agoCall me sociopath but murder is impractical in a functioning society. Outside of society, such as wars, it’s totally morally acceptable.
- cameronbrown 7y agoI think they mean: Laws codify common morals. They are not themselves morals. Pushing this underground will hurt nothing but victims in the long run. Is that moral? Of course not.
- Thorentis 7y agoWell it depends if you like it's moral for people to use social media for prostitution. If your code of morals thinks that shouldn't be allowed, then these laws make sense. If you disagree - and that's fine - you can't blame "legislating morality".
- 0xBA5ED 7y agoMy guess is "legislating morality" refers to pushing legislation based solely on moral concerns. There are other reasons to outlaw murder than just morality.
- thundergolfer 7y agoAll those other concerns bear out as moral concerns. Much legislation is technocratic and hides its moralism, but it’s all questions of right and wrong, good and bad, at the end of the day.
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- Al-Khwarizmi 7y agoIt seems to be a universal phenomenon (I see similar trends in many European countries, including mine) and I wouldn't use the word "played". The left seems to be as keen on legislating morality as the right.
- huffmsa 7y agoOh very much so. For different stated reasons, but "government" (sometimes wearing the mask of religion) has always wanted to control behavior, and as a subset, morality.
- endymi0n 7y agoEspecially if there would have been reasonable, well researched alternatives, like criminalizing the buyer, and not the seller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Model_approach_to_prostitution#Evaluation_of_the_model's_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Model_approach_to_prost... > It has also been reported that 12,5 % of men used to solicit prostitutes before the implementation of the law in 1999 whereas in 2014 only 7,7 % of men purchased sexual services.[5] As the top comment said, this was never about actually decreasing prostitution, but about victimizing and outcasting women.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AsyncAwait 7y agoExcept that there's no universal definition of the left, what you're thinking about is usually the "center-left", who use social issues to avoid addressing economics and smear these to their own left, who usually oppose their policies.
- thinkingemote 7y agoSex trafficking is slavery. It's something every political wing is against.
- narag 7y agoRight/left axis is becoming useless, except as a branding system. It's much more useful to find out if someone is outcome/negotiation oriented vs. thinks in absolutes.
- jariel 7y agoFirst - every country legislates morality in a variety of ways, and making/keeping prostitution illegal is not merely a religious issue. The majority of people oppose decriminalisation [1] even in fairly progressive Ontario, Canada, 6 in 10 oppose it [2] Second - it's a very reasonable course of action to make an activity which is deemed harmful - actually illegal. "Smoking is bad" -> "Let's make it widely available" is generally not the first order course of action. Ergo - your assumptions about 'moralising and not caring' is starting to inch into anti-religious bigotry territory. Now - obviously this is a nuanced issue - and it's possible more permissive laws might lessen harm, but this is by no means obvious. We saw this with vaping: once something becomes socially normative, behaviours can grow rapidly. There is a black market for almost everything, legal or not. A large, wide open, legalised & regulated sex trade may simply provide more customers for nefarious sex-traders who can take all the profit & provide underage girls (which will surely remain illegal). The cigarette industry provides good parallel example, although it's surely not perfect. [3] In short - increased taxes (i.e. supply curve shift) and overall changes in social norms away from smoking have not caused an increase in illicit consumption - just the opposite. Illicit consumption is down. This might imply that creating more barriers to the sex trade (law), and also reducing demand (social norms), would likely have the overall effect of reducing black market for sex-slavery. Of course, it's not nearly a perfect analogy, and it's a complicated subject and of course there are individuals and groups who are probably more concerned about morality than justice, but it's still not fair to castigate a policy as being one way or the other. Personally, I don't see how normalising the sex trade and providing vast online services decreases frequency of transactions, but I'm open minded about the right way to do this. Though I personally think it should be 'decriminalised' (not illegal, but sex workers not allowed to go to 'job fairs' at high school!), I would put the wellbeing of those being trafficked ahead of any of that. [1] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000121 https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID... [2] https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/LAWC-and-CATW-Prostitution-Poll-July-2018 https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/LAWC-and-CATW-Prostit... [3] https://tobaccoatlas.org/topic/illicit-trade/ https://tobaccoatlas.org/topic/illicit-trade/
- paulgb 7y agoSure, I think we actually mostly agree. My issue with SESTA/FOSTA is that if trafficking is truly the issue, it's far from clear to me that this was the right approach -- there have been credible pleas, including from law enforcement, that shutting down online solicitation would make it harder to fight actual trafficking because it drives it underground. Meanwhile, SESTA/FOSTA effectively puts such a burden on web operators that even legitimate sites (like Craiglist personals) have been shut down out of fear that they will be liable if someone misuses them. This is even true in states and municipalities that choose to legalize prostitution. The effect of SESTA/FOSTA is to usurp states' ability to decide for themselves how they want to regulate the sex trade, at least as far as it comes to the communication platforms they can use. If the intent of SESTA/FOSTA was to inhibit prostitution that didn't involve trafficking, fine, but that's not how it was sold by elected Democrats. I wouldn't be so cynical about this, except that there is a long history in the US of using moral panic around trafficking to enforce moral preferences -- look at how the Mann act was used against interracial couples, for example. I'm all for helping actual victims of trafficking, but using outrage about trafficking for other political purposes upsets me.