11 ms·

I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs:

I've never heard a good argument against prostitution. The arguments that I hear are against trafficking, rape, child molestation; which are all non-sequiturs: true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself. Can anyone here argue against prostitution per se? I'll listen.

draw_down 5y ago
I don’t mean to be rude but this is hopelessly naive. This isn’t MasterCard engaging in a marketplace-of-ideas good faith debate. This is using whichever tactics work to score points against whatever you’re trying to defeat. Thus the junk about CP, trafficking etc. I would hesitate to even describe this as politics 101, it’s more like what students understand before they walk in the door of politics 101. If someone says “your mom is so fat she sits around the house”, you don’t retort with an accurate measure of your mother’s BMI paired with a series of astute points about how it’s impossible to compare an adipose human body with the size of a dwelling. Like... seriously
cblconfederate 5y ago
how is onlyfans prostitution?
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Part of the arguments in the tweet is based on reports that caught some accounts offering live sex to paying participants. That's apparently part of what lead to the story of OF removing sexual content.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
vbezhenar 5y ago
A generic argument: prostitution allows woman without any skills to earn plenty of money which might convince women do go this way even if they don't really enjoy it. The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Earning money without enjoying it is what coalminers and rubbish-collectors do. People who enjoy their jobs are the lucky ones.
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Having an intellectually stimulating job and enjoying it is a real luxury.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- daptaq 5y ago
  One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling their body and their consent. > The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains. I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used. They are competing with puppets and animals (e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10 https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10), and are as such reduced to objects potentially beyond human dignety.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    As an enginer you are sometimes reduced below human dignity.
  - thomastjeffery 5y ago
    This is a great argument for Universal Basic Income, or some other system that allows people to choose not to work. It's naive to think that there aren't people being pressured into "selling their body and their consent" to work that is generally considered moral. > I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used. GP's argument was poorly stated. It's more genuine to compare sex work to hard labor. There is the risk of physical harm (STDs/injuries), a low barrier to entry (attractive and have a camera/in decent shape and can get to/from work), is considered by many as demoralizing (gross prostitute/dumb factory worker) but also glorified by many (high-class escort/blue collar backbone of our country). In what ways is it truly different for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for rejecting a hard labor job than it is for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for refusing to be a sex worker (prostitute)?
denton-scratch 5y ago
It's said to objectify women. More specifically, the Johns are treating women's bodies as something that can be traded commercially. The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes. If you don't think objectifying women harms them, then that's not a "good" argument, I guess. FTR, I'm against laws controlling consensual sex. Not all harmful behaviour should be criminalised.
- neolog 5y ago
  Bodies are used commercially all the time, such as in manual labor, physical therapy, disability care, security, policing, military service, athletics, dancing, commercial modeling, ... The problem that's particular to sex work is legal systems that fail to prevent coercion. This is exacerbated by religious advocacy groups that try to make sex work harder without making it safer.
  - slippery_bridge 5y ago
    Paying somebody to do something physical and paying somebody to physically use their body are two completely different things
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - neolog 5y ago
      I don't think that distinction is useful on this question. Lots of non-sex physical work involves just being present, and lots of sex work involves skill.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      I think parent means "paying somebody so that you can physically use their body". Clearly, paying somebody to use their own body to e.g. pitch hay for you isn't much different from paying them to use their own body to do any other kind of physical labour for you. Paying people to be physically intimate with you is definitely different. But it's worth considering cases that don't involve sex: carers dress you, they wash you, including your sex organs and your arse, and they clean up after you. All that is definitely physically intimate - arguably much more intimate than a 15-minute bump-and-grind session with a person that despises you.
throw_awa123 5y ago
This is just an opinion from a real world example: I've done some stripping when I was young. I did it because my gf was doing it and was making a lot of money. This was the only way we could make good money without breaking the law. I've met the most broken and scummy people there is during that time. It ultimately broke our 7 year relationship. You pay an emotional price for making easy money. You have to be very stable to be able to endure that kind of work over time as you deal with a lot of broken people doing very intimate work. Drugs are very accessible and an easy fix to deal with the emotional toll. People who can work in this industry for more than a year and leave unhurt probably belong in the 1% IMO.
- abrazame 5y ago
  I’m really interested in reading more of your story. Have you ever done a write up or a longer piece? Or is there one by someone else that you think is fairly on the mark? Do you think there’s a way of mitigating the risk of being hurt / lowering the emotional price for sex work?
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Wouldn't you think that's the result of the fact that it's illegal and pushing away 1. legal protections for the performers 2. "not broken" people who are driven away due to seeing it as "skeevy" 3. As seen here, other mediums where the performer has almost 100% control over the audience? I imagine in some bizzaro world where cash registery workers are "illegal" that you'd run into very similar problem. People suck. And these "dirty" jobs make you run into sucky people more often.
- rendall 5y ago
  I had 2 close friends who stripped. One was on the ball. Had software that kept track of her income, and banked it. The other earned 5k-10k a night, but did speed to handle it, got super irrational, and turned her entire 250k savings over to some crazy guru character. That sucked
neutronicus 5y ago
The usual argument relies on: "On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."[1] The increased demand for sex work in the wake of legalization results in more people forced into involuntary sex work, despite the presence of legally-protected sex workers. [1] https://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065 https://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  I wonder if this has actual correlation or is a result of "population maps": https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
Chris2048 5y ago
> true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself How about the argument that if prostitution is legal, it's possible for an illegally coercive (trafficked) business to pose as legitimate; whereas if prostitution is not legal, any appearance of prostitution can warrant scrutiny.
- nybble41 5y ago
  Too broad. "If selling jewelry is legal, it's possibly for a fence to pose as legitimate; whereas if selling jewelry is not legal, any appearance of selling jewelry can warrant scrutiny." Some people offer things for sale which they don't have any right to sell. That doesn't imply that those who do have that right should be prevented from exercising it just to make things easier for law enforcement. You do more direct harm by unjustly prohibiting the activity than you stand to (possibly) prevent.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    But you can require jewelry sellers to keep records to prove their items are not stolen. How do you prove your prostitutes are no coerced? Further, stealing is usually considered less severe than rape. At least people can take measures to prevent theft.
    - johnnyanmac 5y ago
      >How do you prove your prostitutes are no coerced? I don't know. How do you prove that any paying job between a paying company and their employees aren't coerced and that the company isn't abusing their employees? As seen with some recent lawsuits, you don't for years until something eventually prompts investigation. I imagine it's the same here. If it's illegal then the workers have no legal resource and are trapped until someone discovers the company (if ever. Many times these "companies" are just private individuals. i.e. pimps). If it's legal there's at least some chance the worker than defend themself against abuse if contracts are breeched.
      - 5y ago
WhompingWindows 5y ago
"I've never heard a good argument against injecting heroin. The arguments that I hear are against overdose, shared needles leading to infectious disease, and destitution and poverty; which are all non-sequiturs." You've completely removed all the main "negatives" of prostitution, saying those aren't "real arguments." While it's possible that heroin injection and prostitution may be done in a safe and clean way, the reality is extremely far from that in both cases.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  I've heard plenty of good arguments against using heroin. It's extremely (and immediately) addictive. Recovering from that addiction is nearly impossible for most people. Even if a person safely uses it, and can safely and legally maintain their addiction, heroin is inherently harmful to that person. Is sex work (prostitution) inherently harmful? I don't think so. Sure, there are plenty of closely related things that are inherently harmful, but sex work can be done without them. There is the idea that because heroin use often involves second-order effects like shared needles, overdose, etc. that it should be prevented. The reality is that most efforts to prevent heroin use tend to make these second-order effects more prevalent. Recently there has been a movement to decriminalize drug use, including heroin. The idea is to replace measures that work to prevent heroin use with measures that work to help people overcome heroin addiction, and safely use heroin in the mean time. This way, we fight the second-order effects directly, which is much more effective. It's a similar story with sex work. Many efforts to decriminalize sex work still have the end goal of getting people to stop engaging in it. This is in contrast to legalization, which would promote sex work while working to minimize the second-order problems that are common to black market sex work. This is the crux of GP's question: Is there any good reason outside second-order effects to get people to stop doing sex work? I personally am convinced there are none, though my conservative Christian parents disagree.
  - hume_annoyed 5y ago
    You act as if heroin and sexwork are in two different universes. They are in the same universe and they overlap quite a lot. You can be pro-sex without being a Pollyanna about it across the board. Things happen in both domains that don't fit either the happy model or the doomful one. Edit: you say recovering from heroin addiction and second-order effects are all negative as if sexwork has no impact on, for example, human relationships, and while I like some of the thought that went into your post, it still reads as a bit absurd.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
Prostitution leads to higher rates of STDs. Even with STD testing, you cannot wait between each client, get a test, wait for the results to get back, and then get a new client. That would take days and you'd make no money.
detcader 5y ago
The best argument "against prostitution" is the moral argument against consuming it: you don't and _can't_ know if the person you're paying for is too poor or too wasted to be able to choose to participate, or if they're being threatened with violence into participating by a pimp, for example. Coerced sexual activity with another person is r-pe (as opposed to, say, working at Burger King, which might be coerced by the need to survive but is not r-pe.) Enjoying r-pe is wrong. If you don't think coerced sexual activity is r-pe, or you don't think that enjoying r-pe is wrong, the argument falls apart, of course, which is why this comment section is the way it is.
- neolog 5y ago
  Do you think enjoying the product of all coerced labor is wrong, or only sexual coerced labor?
  - detcader 5y ago
    "Do you think all violence is wrong, or only murder?" Of course there are degrees. I don't really see the gotcha here -- if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves, would you still be able to enjoy it?
    - neolog 5y ago
      It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha. Coerced work is bad, especially so if the work is damaging to the worker. My point is that this isn't specific to sex work. Products produced by workers under wage slavery can be avoided using supply chain management, while promoting ethical labor practices that permit workers security and independence. A tradeoff exists between reducing risk of nonconsenting work while enabling consenting work. Similarly, policies are available that can enable safe and consensual sex work. Supposedly "well intentioned" policies that reduce workers' social and financial support system are moves in the wrong direction: abuse is enabled by isolation and marginalization.
      - detcader 5y ago
lishzen 5y ago
Yours is a short question to make, but it requires a very long answer, not fit for a comment box. The negative consequences of prostitution are deeply personal because the effects of sex on the participants go deeper and last longer than the effects of the act of copulation. If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships...
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships... yes, but many actions have those links. this is the basis for the war on drugs that is just now ending in my country. The argument isn't "does it affect people", but "does it CONSISTENTLY affect enough people negatively that it needs to be outlawed/extremely restricted?" Many of the argument I read against prostituion would be solved by... making it legal and having legal protections of workers. Or at least decriminalizing it for workers so they aren't punished for reporting abuse.
- throwaway210821 5y ago
  You are probably right, but what is the alternative? banning prostitution is to me a very bad idea, it won't end it, it will just force the women to work illegally without the protections of the state. I've been a customer of several sex workers in many countries and most of them are actually OK with their job and lifestyle (I've asked several). In many places it's the best/only opportunity they have to earn good money and be independent. They find it better to sell their bodies for 1 hour tops with rules and regulations to several men than to have to marry and stay with one man that hits them and makes their life miserable Another thing I've found by experience is that most women see prostitution as a temporal thing to make some money and then quit. I'd love to see research on the topic but from my experience it's a job that they do for months, maybe 1 year at maximum, but do enough money to quit and do something else. I think overall legal prostitution is way better than black market prostitution. No-prostitution just won't ever happen no matter what, isn't it the oldest of jobs?
- rendall 5y ago
johnnyanmac 5y ago
I haven't heard a good one either. But I've heard many times that quashing prostitution is well worth stopping trafficking/rate/etc. So that's how these tactics work. In theory I think so too, but in reality I'm going to guess most of the actual trafficking isn't actually happening in the open on one the biggest adult sites. They just have the biggest targets to hit.
alexashka 5y ago
Why should anyone argue for/against it? It's like being grossly obese - it speaks for itself. Now some people can pretend they're happily obese - they're not fooling anyone but other fools. Whether or not being a fool should be illegal is a different matter. My take on it is if it's not hurting anyone else - go for it, just don't expect medical treatment for self destructive behaviour afterwards - we have an over-abundance of fools on this planet as of late.

draw_down 5y ago

I don’t mean to be rude but this is hopelessly naive. This isn’t MasterCard engaging in a marketplace-of-ideas good faith debate. This is using whichever tactics work to score points against whatever you’re trying to defeat. Thus the junk about CP, trafficking etc. I would hesitate to even describe this as politics 101, it’s more like what students understand before they walk in the door of politics 101. If someone says “your mom is so fat she sits around the house”, you don’t retort with an accurate measure of your mother’s BMI paired with a series of astute points about how it’s impossible to compare an adipose human body with the size of a dwelling. Like... seriously

cblconfederate 5y ago

how is onlyfans prostitution?

johnnyanmac 5y ago
Part of the arguments in the tweet is based on reports that caught some accounts offering live sex to paying participants. That's apparently part of what lead to the story of OF removing sexual content.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

vbezhenar 5y ago

A generic argument: prostitution allows woman without any skills to earn plenty of money which might convince women do go this way even if they don't really enjoy it. The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains.

denton-scratch 5y ago
Earning money without enjoying it is what coalminers and rubbish-collectors do. People who enjoy their jobs are the lucky ones.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  Having an intellectually stimulating job and enjoying it is a real luxury.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
daptaq 5y ago
One aspect I find frightening about interpreting prositution as a "real job" is that women could be denied unemployment benifits if they reject a job that would involve them selling their body and their consent. > The same argument could be made about IT. Prostitutes sell their private parts, programmers sell their brains. I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used. They are competing with puppets and animals (e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10 https://www.vice.com/en/article/dpdnp7/yo1-v14n10), and are as such reduced to objects potentially beyond human dignety.
- hulitu 5y ago
  As an enginer you are sometimes reduced below human dignity.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  This is a great argument for Universal Basic Income, or some other system that allows people to choose not to work. It's naive to think that there aren't people being pressured into "selling their body and their consent" to work that is generally considered moral. > I don't think this works, because a brain is a "tool" used to "produce" a service, while a prositute is actually just providing their body to be used. GP's argument was poorly stated. It's more genuine to compare sex work to hard labor. There is the risk of physical harm (STDs/injuries), a low barrier to entry (attractive and have a camera/in decent shape and can get to/from work), is considered by many as demoralizing (gross prostitute/dumb factory worker) but also glorified by many (high-class escort/blue collar backbone of our country). In what ways is it truly different for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for rejecting a hard labor job than it is for someone to be denied unemployment benefits for refusing to be a sex worker (prostitute)?

denton-scratch 5y ago

It's said to objectify women. More specifically, the Johns are treating women's bodies as something that can be traded commercially. The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes. If you don't think objectifying women harms them, then that's not a "good" argument, I guess. FTR, I'm against laws controlling consensual sex. Not all harmful behaviour should be criminalised.

neolog 5y ago
Bodies are used commercially all the time, such as in manual labor, physical therapy, disability care, security, policing, military service, athletics, dancing, commercial modeling, ... The problem that's particular to sex work is legal systems that fail to prevent coercion. This is exacerbated by religious advocacy groups that try to make sex work harder without making it safer.
- slippery_bridge 5y ago
  Paying somebody to do something physical and paying somebody to physically use their body are two completely different things
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - neolog 5y ago
    I don't think that distinction is useful on this question. Lots of non-sex physical work involves just being present, and lots of sex work involves skill.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I think parent means "paying somebody so that you can physically use their body". Clearly, paying somebody to use their own body to e.g. pitch hay for you isn't much different from paying them to use their own body to do any other kind of physical labour for you. Paying people to be physically intimate with you is definitely different. But it's worth considering cases that don't involve sex: carers dress you, they wash you, including your sex organs and your arse, and they clean up after you. All that is definitely physically intimate - arguably much more intimate than a 15-minute bump-and-grind session with a person that despises you.

throw_awa123 5y ago

This is just an opinion from a real world example: I've done some stripping when I was young. I did it because my gf was doing it and was making a lot of money. This was the only way we could make good money without breaking the law. I've met the most broken and scummy people there is during that time. It ultimately broke our 7 year relationship. You pay an emotional price for making easy money. You have to be very stable to be able to endure that kind of work over time as you deal with a lot of broken people doing very intimate work. Drugs are very accessible and an easy fix to deal with the emotional toll. People who can work in this industry for more than a year and leave unhurt probably belong in the 1% IMO.

abrazame 5y ago
I’m really interested in reading more of your story. Have you ever done a write up or a longer piece? Or is there one by someone else that you think is fairly on the mark? Do you think there’s a way of mitigating the risk of being hurt / lowering the emotional price for sex work?
johnnyanmac 5y ago
Wouldn't you think that's the result of the fact that it's illegal and pushing away 1. legal protections for the performers 2. "not broken" people who are driven away due to seeing it as "skeevy" 3. As seen here, other mediums where the performer has almost 100% control over the audience? I imagine in some bizzaro world where cash registery workers are "illegal" that you'd run into very similar problem. People suck. And these "dirty" jobs make you run into sucky people more often.
rendall 5y ago
I had 2 close friends who stripped. One was on the ball. Had software that kept track of her income, and banked it. The other earned 5k-10k a night, but did speed to handle it, got super irrational, and turned her entire 250k savings over to some crazy guru character. That sucked

neutronicus 5y ago

The usual argument relies on: "On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows."[1] The increased demand for sex work in the wake of legalization results in more people forced into involuntary sex work, despite the presence of legally-protected sex workers. [1] https://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065 https://papers.ssrn.co/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065

johnnyanmac 5y ago
I wonder if this has actual correlation or is a result of "population maps": https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/

Chris2048 5y ago

> true and valid statements that do not support the argument itself How about the argument that if prostitution is legal, it's possible for an illegally coercive (trafficked) business to pose as legitimate; whereas if prostitution is not legal, any appearance of prostitution can warrant scrutiny.

nybble41 5y ago
Too broad. "If selling jewelry is legal, it's possibly for a fence to pose as legitimate; whereas if selling jewelry is not legal, any appearance of selling jewelry can warrant scrutiny." Some people offer things for sale which they don't have any right to sell. That doesn't imply that those who do have that right should be prevented from exercising it just to make things easier for law enforcement. You do more direct harm by unjustly prohibiting the activity than you stand to (possibly) prevent.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  But you can require jewelry sellers to keep records to prove their items are not stolen. How do you prove your prostitutes are no coerced? Further, stealing is usually considered less severe than rape. At least people can take measures to prevent theft.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    >How do you prove your prostitutes are no coerced? I don't know. How do you prove that any paying job between a paying company and their employees aren't coerced and that the company isn't abusing their employees? As seen with some recent lawsuits, you don't for years until something eventually prompts investigation. I imagine it's the same here. If it's illegal then the workers have no legal resource and are trapped until someone discovers the company (if ever. Many times these "companies" are just private individuals. i.e. pimps). If it's legal there's at least some chance the worker than defend themself against abuse if contracts are breeched.
    - 5y ago

WhompingWindows 5y ago

"I've never heard a good argument against injecting heroin. The arguments that I hear are against overdose, shared needles leading to infectious disease, and destitution and poverty; which are all non-sequiturs." You've completely removed all the main "negatives" of prostitution, saying those aren't "real arguments." While it's possible that heroin injection and prostitution may be done in a safe and clean way, the reality is extremely far from that in both cases.

thomastjeffery 5y ago
I've heard plenty of good arguments against using heroin. It's extremely (and immediately) addictive. Recovering from that addiction is nearly impossible for most people. Even if a person safely uses it, and can safely and legally maintain their addiction, heroin is inherently harmful to that person. Is sex work (prostitution) inherently harmful? I don't think so. Sure, there are plenty of closely related things that are inherently harmful, but sex work can be done without them. There is the idea that because heroin use often involves second-order effects like shared needles, overdose, etc. that it should be prevented. The reality is that most efforts to prevent heroin use tend to make these second-order effects more prevalent. Recently there has been a movement to decriminalize drug use, including heroin. The idea is to replace measures that work to prevent heroin use with measures that work to help people overcome heroin addiction, and safely use heroin in the mean time. This way, we fight the second-order effects directly, which is much more effective. It's a similar story with sex work. Many efforts to decriminalize sex work still have the end goal of getting people to stop engaging in it. This is in contrast to legalization, which would promote sex work while working to minimize the second-order problems that are common to black market sex work. This is the crux of GP's question: Is there any good reason outside second-order effects to get people to stop doing sex work? I personally am convinced there are none, though my conservative Christian parents disagree.
- hume_annoyed 5y ago
  You act as if heroin and sexwork are in two different universes. They are in the same universe and they overlap quite a lot. You can be pro-sex without being a Pollyanna about it across the board. Things happen in both domains that don't fit either the happy model or the doomful one. Edit: you say recovering from heroin addiction and second-order effects are all negative as if sexwork has no impact on, for example, human relationships, and while I like some of the thought that went into your post, it still reads as a bit absurd.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

Prostitution leads to higher rates of STDs. Even with STD testing, you cannot wait between each client, get a test, wait for the results to get back, and then get a new client. That would take days and you'd make no money.

detcader 5y ago

The best argument "against prostitution" is the moral argument against consuming it: you don't and _can't_ know if the person you're paying for is too poor or too wasted to be able to choose to participate, or if they're being threatened with violence into participating by a pimp, for example. Coerced sexual activity with another person is r-pe (as opposed to, say, working at Burger King, which might be coerced by the need to survive but is not r-pe.) Enjoying r-pe is wrong. If you don't think coerced sexual activity is r-pe, or you don't think that enjoying r-pe is wrong, the argument falls apart, of course, which is why this comment section is the way it is.

neolog 5y ago
Do you think enjoying the product of all coerced labor is wrong, or only sexual coerced labor?
- detcader 5y ago
  "Do you think all violence is wrong, or only murder?" Of course there are degrees. I don't really see the gotcha here -- if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves, would you still be able to enjoy it?
  - neolog 5y ago
    It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha. Coerced work is bad, especially so if the work is damaging to the worker. My point is that this isn't specific to sex work. Products produced by workers under wage slavery can be avoided using supply chain management, while promoting ethical labor practices that permit workers security and independence. A tradeoff exists between reducing risk of nonconsenting work while enabling consenting work. Similarly, policies are available that can enable safe and consensual sex work. Supposedly "well intentioned" policies that reduce workers' social and financial support system are moves in the wrong direction: abuse is enabled by isolation and marginalization.
    - detcader 5y ago

lishzen 5y ago

Yours is a short question to make, but it requires a very long answer, not fit for a comment box. The negative consequences of prostitution are deeply personal because the effects of sex on the participants go deeper and last longer than the effects of the act of copulation. If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships...

johnnyanmac 5y ago
>If you want a good argument against prostitution one route could be to understand the link between sexual expression and: intimacy, self esteem, love, relationships... yes, but many actions have those links. this is the basis for the war on drugs that is just now ending in my country. The argument isn't "does it affect people", but "does it CONSISTENTLY affect enough people negatively that it needs to be outlawed/extremely restricted?" Many of the argument I read against prostituion would be solved by... making it legal and having legal protections of workers. Or at least decriminalizing it for workers so they aren't punished for reporting abuse.
throwaway210821 5y ago
You are probably right, but what is the alternative? banning prostitution is to me a very bad idea, it won't end it, it will just force the women to work illegally without the protections of the state. I've been a customer of several sex workers in many countries and most of them are actually OK with their job and lifestyle (I've asked several). In many places it's the best/only opportunity they have to earn good money and be independent. They find it better to sell their bodies for 1 hour tops with rules and regulations to several men than to have to marry and stay with one man that hits them and makes their life miserable Another thing I've found by experience is that most women see prostitution as a temporal thing to make some money and then quit. I'd love to see research on the topic but from my experience it's a job that they do for months, maybe 1 year at maximum, but do enough money to quit and do something else. I think overall legal prostitution is way better than black market prostitution. No-prostitution just won't ever happen no matter what, isn't it the oldest of jobs?
rendall 5y ago

johnnyanmac 5y ago

I haven't heard a good one either. But I've heard many times that quashing prostitution is well worth stopping trafficking/rate/etc. So that's how these tactics work. In theory I think so too, but in reality I'm going to guess most of the actual trafficking isn't actually happening in the open on one the biggest adult sites. They just have the biggest targets to hit.

alexashka 5y ago

Why should anyone argue for/against it? It's like being grossly obese - it speaks for itself. Now some people can pretend they're happily obese - they're not fooling anyone but other fools. Whether or not being a fool should be illegal is a different matter. My take on it is if it's not hurting anyone else - go for it, just don't expect medical treatment for self destructive behaviour afterwards - we have an over-abundance of fools on this planet as of late.