Spread’em, bitch
Definitely. Pimps are just doing an honest day’s work. Johns are wise consumers keeping the economy going. Traffickers are forward-looking globalists. Being raped for cash is a career any parents would want for their daughters. Liberty liberty liberty.
When the trans lobby are claiming to be the most oppressed group ever, isn’t one of the claims that they are forced into prostitution in order to survive? They say it like it’s a bad thing, but according to the ACLU we should just shrug our shoulders and reply that it pays better than cleaning toilets.
The worst part about someone being prostituted is that they may be misgendered, amirite?
Decriminalising sex work doesn’t imply allowing pimping.
Decriminalising sex work would allow the women to organize legally.
I understand there is a lot of abuse going on in the sex work business but I am not sure the best way to fight the abuse is by keeping sex work illegal.
Axxyaan, I suspect Ophelia would agree with the Nordic model, but when anyone proposes that, they are treated like they are “Anti-sex-worker”. For some reason, most of the “sex positive” woke community is against any regulations that would make the pimping illegal while not making it criminal for the women.
I am pretty sure the ACLU is meaning it in the broad way, though you can’t necessarily tell from this tweet. I think that because they seem to be on board with everything woke.
Axxyaan, it depends on the proposed legislation whether pimping counts as sex work. In any case, the ACLU and other organisations that used to know better are promoting legalisation. That’s quite a different ballgame. As we’ve found in New Zealand, it’s very hard to identify sex trafficking in an environment where prostitution and the running of brothels is legal. Even more to the point, Police and other Government agencies seem to be paying only lip service to even trying to do so.
The Nordic model decriminalises the prostitute, while leaving pimping and johns criminalised. That might make it harder for women who actually want to be prostitutes to practice their chosen profession, but it significantly de-risks life for the women, while sending a clear message to all that society is trying to discourage prostitution.
A number of commenters here (myself included) find the so-called Nordic Model compelling. It decriminalizes the selling of sex, while maintaining criminal penalties for buying sex and for pimping and trafficking. It also offers support and resources to help people leave prostitution.
https://nordicmodelnow.org/what-is-the-nordic-model/
I doubt any of the regulars here want to keep prostitution illegal, but there are nonetheless still alternatives to full decriminalization.
#3,
Given the reality that men are overwhelmingly the ones seeking to buy sex, pimps are unavoidable as middlemen to collect payment (actually, it’s to threaten retaliation if the johns don’t pay) and make sure the prostitutes deliver the goods, whether they want to do it or not.
As far as women organizing legally, where prostitution is legal in the U.S. the brothels still aren’t owned by women, again because of the nature of the clients. Prostitution isn’t work like a typical job where you exchange your time and effort in exchange for payment, it’s renting your body as so much meat at the market. It dehumanizes women.
… and I’m slow on the typing again. What they said.
The ACLU put together a study about various models of prostitution reform, including Nordic Model. They came down on the side of full decriminalization. I asked Nordic Model Now about it, and they said the arguments were the same as one’s they’ve seen before, and pointed me at a few articles on their web site.
Items they suggested:
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/02/07/a-critical-review-of-revolting-prostitutes-the-fight-for-sex-workers-rights-by-juno-mac-and-molly-smith/
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2021/01/11/dame-diana-johnsons-sexual-exploitation-bill-the-debate/
I don’t have the link handy for the ACLU study.
But who would want to leave sex work? It’s a worker’s paradise!
Isn’t one of the “woke” sex positive types’ basic guidelines “listen to sex workers, (unless they’re former sex workers, at which point they should definitely be ignored)?”
Anything short of the Seamstresses’ Guild (owned and operated by women) where the prostitutes are allowed to maim or kill misbehaving johns with little interference isn’t acceptable, so the Nordic model is the way to go.
I don’t think the Nordic model protects prostitutes that much. It make prostitutes part of an illegal activity. Now all their clients are per definition criminals. This makes it more likely their clients will try to persuade the prostitute to come with him to a remote place where he runs little risk of being caught. But this makes her also more vulnerable.
I also don’t see how the Nordic model would help if Police and other Government agencies seem to be paying only lip service to trying enforcing the law. The police in Antwerp here in Belgium seems to be able to distinhuish between legal activities and traficking. Every house where window-prostitution happens, has to be registered and has to have an alarm installed, which the prostitute can use when she feels in danger and which will have police arriving shortly.
So torn by this. To me it seems degrading and victimizing. Yet, it is not being merely woke to realize that in some cases it is chosen or better than many alternatives. And it depends on the definition of “sex work”. There is a lot of internet soft porn that seems pretty harmless to the purveyors (not children, of course, but…)
But the vast majority of the business is pretty sordid.
It’s just like “drug possession decriminalization”. If one decriminalizes the market for a product (drugs, sex), how can one expect those who supply the “product” to go away? Especially if some users of the product are themselves causing serious problems (cleaning up needles and human waste and dealing with petty theft to support an addiction are minor issues only for cossetted suburbanites who don’t have to deal with it.
Ach. No answers from me. :(
Sure, sex work is work. And work is being exploited by those who have power over you and use your labour to enrich themselves. Why stop at decriminalising sex work? Why not bring back child labour and get rid of weekends and pensions?
Even if you overlook the de facto sexism of “let’s decriminalise sex work work see what happens to women or whatever” it seems pretty right wing to want to overturn laws against dangerous work.
The Nordic model protects women in a few ways. Firstly, even when caught in the act, the women does not get detained, arrested, charged and convicted. I think we would all agree that one (or many) convictions for prostitution would hamper a woman’s ability to move on in life. because the woman has done nothing illegal, if she is cheated of her fee or roughed up by a John or pimp, she has one less hurdle to cross to seek assistance and redress. Again, she has done nothing illegal. An indirect benefit is that because the buying of sex or pimping remains illegal, it has a suppressing effect on demand and the social disapproval and marginalisation of the activity suppresses the supply of women and girls entering the activity. Once prostitution is legal, it becomes ‘more’ acceptable and there is less emphasis on helping women and girls avoiding entering prostitution and leaving it once there. I’m sure others can come up with other examples.
Using a prostitute, especially a street walker, is usually a private activity. Even in NZ where this is legal. Women are still taken out of view to be used and they are still cheated, raped, beaten and murdered. Legalisation does not protect women or girls.
Maybe Belgium’s police and Government agencies are particularly enlightened compared to those elsewhere. Do prostitutes in Belgium not get cheated, beaten, raped and murdered? I think the difference is that, based on NZ experience, when an activity is legal, police treat the activity as, well, legal. It therefore receives less scrutiny and as a result activities that remain criminal, such as sex trafficking and sex with minors, can more easily run under the cover of the legal activity. Because police simply aren’t looking as hard, they are less likely to see and be aware of the illegal activity.
I’m not sure what job alternatives are worse than prostitution. Working as a cleaner? I’ve done that. Fast food? Better than starving on the streets? Sure, but that’s not an occupation and many women and girls living and starving on the streets resort to prostitution to survive while still living and starving on the streets. Being a prostitute does not lift them out of a precariat existince. Not all, even most, prostitutes earn a thousand dollars a day. Based on the anecdotal stories of a friend who lived on a street corner frequented by prostitutes, the most common transaction was a blow job at $10-20 a pop.
Better to have a society and frame work that (1) provides opportunities and a frame work that makes other choices available, and (2) that helps give women and girls in prostitution a way out.
Long term, the answer is to have a new standard in which society, and men in particular, find it abhorrent to purchase sex. No society that views women as fully human would deem it acceptable to purchase sex from a marginalised class of people (women).
As for safety, the record of The Nordic Model is excellent in reducing murders in jurisdictions that introduce it, more successful than any other model.
Murder numbers in varying jurisdictions: https://nordicmodelnow.org/facts-about-prostitution/fact-prostitution-is-inherently-violent/
My off-the-cuff thoughts.
Full decriminalization/legalization: Decriminalization works for drugs because supply is suppressed by law, and it can rise to whatever demand there is, thereby reducing market value and the profitability of black markets. But with prostitution? Demand, previously suppressed by illegality, surges. Supply, however, does not, because it isn’t suppressed—it’s naturally low. That’s a recipe for some bad shit.
Nordic model: Every john is still a criminal and so is still influenced by all the usual incentives toward unethical behavior, plus one: the prostitute is a non-criminal who holds information on and perhaps evidence of his criminal act. If you’re the sort of person to pay for sex, then you’re likely the sort of person to view that as a problem to be dealt with. That’s a recipe for some bad shit.
So neither alternative strikes me as a perfect solution.
Related: an argument I keep seeing in these discussions relates to consent. The gist is this: the woman doesn’t want to have sex with random men, and money doesn’t create consent, therefore paying for sex is rape. This seems a shite argument on its face, and I’d really rather people stop using it when there are so many good arguments to be made.
Alternatively under legalization, availability of supply increases, reducing market value, driving differentiation of product/service, which for prostitutes means more degrading and dehumanizing acts. For less money. And that repeats in a race to the bottom, both in price and dignity.
And the Nordic model is definitely preferable to that.
The way I view it, if use of a woman’s body is just a commodity that can be sold, then rape is just theft.
Nullius, sometimes criminals kill people for capricious and unfathomable reasons, but as a general rule criminals go around doing criminal things quite regularly without killing every person who has knowledge of their activities. using a woman or girl for their kicks is unlikely to elicit the view that they should kill them to cover up the activity. other than my starting point of course that sometimes criminals kill for pointless and fucked up reasons. Empirically this is evident. Prostitution has long been illegal almost everywhere. Johns who kill are the exception, not the rule and they do it for reasons other than fear of being charged with using a prostitute.
As for the argument that paying for sex is rape by definition, because in the absence of payment the woman would not consent. Well, it may not be the absolute strongest argument, but it’s not shite either. Most jurisdictions have laws against coercion for sex and also trafficking. If a woman would not agree to have sex for fun, then payment can be seen as a form of coercion, especially where there is a power imbalance or the woman’s survival or security is at stake. Where the woman or girl is transported from one location or another for the purpose of sex, that adds the trafficking component.
Which reminds me of a scandal from the US recently. A sex trafficking task force busted an operation that had trafficked over a hundred women for sex. The women, many johns and a few of the organisers were all rounded up to much fanfare. A few months later, somehow no charges have been laid against the johns, organisers or others implicated in the trafficking, but ICE is having a merry old time with the victims, the trafficked women. Yay Justice.
Ophelia, quite. I can imagine a time when rape of a prostitute becomes nothing more than a civil tort. Breach of contract?
Rob, that’s exactly it. Why would a john worry? He isn’t likely to be charged; the law goes much easier on the men than the women in these cases. I suppose if he’s caught he might lose some respect, and he might find his marriage in trouble, but I doubt most men are going to kill someone just to prevent that. Murder is a much bigger charge than paying for sex.
Rob: Not being a murderer myself, I can only guess at one’s internal life. If the real net effect on the homicidal impulse is a reduction, that’s not intuitive to me, but reality is under no obligation to conform to my intuitions.
As for my evaluation of the argument from the supervenience of consent on remuneration, I stand by “shite”. Including mere remuneration in the intension of “coercion” draws an enormous circle, causing an untenable proportion of banal choices normally considered free to be forced. Such a broad understanding of coercion cheapens the concept of rape, sharing a space with the kid mowing his neighbor’s lawn for money to buy a new game console. It might be possible to rescue the argument by including, as you do, additional qualifiers beyond mere payment. Care must be taken, however, to avoid the implication that a hypothetical imperative constitutes coercion.
Nullius, I think that is a reductio ad absurdum. There is a big difference between a kid mowing his neighbor’s lawn and a sexual act. I hope you can see what that difference is…
iknklast:
Bingo. In fact, it’s almost certainly true—and a big reason the topic is philosophically interesting—that different choices admit different degrees and varieties of coercion in determining their freedom.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying it’s bad to argue that women do not freely choose prostitution (that their choice is coerced). I’m saying it’s bad to argue it in a particular way.
I love me some good reducto ad absurdum, I’ve been known to use the technique myself. I’m not sure that the fact an argument can be reduced to the absurd necessarily negates it utterly. It just means that there may be edge cases or complexities that must be considered alongside the basic argument. Very little in real life can be educed to slogans or memes and remain completely true. I don’t think the argument above is bad, I think it’s not necessarily strong.
I think the distinction between renting out ones labour and renting out ones body and psyche in the most intimate manner possible is a distinction that renders analogy to lawn mowing or other such trivial labour tasks itself absurd. But that’s just my intuition :-).
An insightful story about how easy it is for a woman who isn’t desperate or abused to get gradually drawn into sex work, and the effect it had on her mental health:
https://archive.is/DJgeC
Prostitutes in Belgium are not detained, arrested, charged and convicted either when they are caught in the act. So that is not an advantage the Nordic model would have over the Belgian model.
I have no numbers on prostitutes getting cheated, beaten, raped and murdered. But if it happens I doubt it happens in the designated neighbourhoods that are patrolled by the police prostitution team and where every prostitute has an alarm knob at her disposal to call the police in case of trouble.
I am not saying all is well for prostitutes in Belgium. One of the big problems we have here are the “loverboys” or Romeo pimps. These are young men who seduce young women, often underaged. Once the girl/young woman is in love, she is seduced into prostitution.
This is completely illegal, especially with the underaged woman. As far as I know, this is were the Belgian model and the Nordic model overlap, because when a minor is involved, the minor is treated as a victim and the client is treated as a criminal. However for as far I have knowledge of the situation, victims of a “loverboy” are more at risc than prostitutes in the regular circuit.
This may be one of those areas where my philosophy background is making us talk past each other. When you speak of the argument, you seem to treat it like a car. Suppose you’re a mechanic, and I bring you my broken car for you to fix. I come back later, and you’ve fixed my car, and my car isn’t broken. Hurray! Now my car isn’t broken. Likewise, I bring you a broken argument, you fix it, and now the argument isn’t broken. Right? From my perspective, you’re not fixing my car. You’re pointing to a different car and telling me my car isn’t broken.
I’m talking about the argument P, while you’re talking about some other argument P`. Yes, from P we can produce an argument that isn’t broken, but that argument is not P. It’s P`.
Nullius, it’s an interesting discussion, if at a tangent to the thread. I suspect in outcome we may not be far apart.
Isn’t a better analogy though, that I’m pointing at my car saying ‘it works fine’, and you’re pointing at your car and saying ‘no it doesn’t, see this car doesn’t work’? Both statements are true, but by applying the reducto so indiscriminately, you’ve reduced the argument to something other than what it is.
Reducto is a powerful tool when used to strip and argument of disguising fluff to show it for what it is. I think it becomes a fallacy when used to strip an argument of core context and qualifiers. I might be wrong, after all I have no training in philosophy at all and have not read philosophers deeply.
@Rob
The problem with your argument at #20 is that it is special pleading. What is your general principal?
You might as wel argue that paying for goods is theft by definition, because in the absence of payment the owner woudn’t have handed it over. Or that paying for labour is slavery, because in the absence of payment the person wouldn’t have worked for you.
Nobody would agree with those arguments because we accept that money can persuade people to do/allow things they otherwise wouldn’t and we see that as legit. So why should we accept your argument when it is about sex.
I think it’s because sex is a special case, i.e. not just a humdrum form of work like housecleaning or driving a bus. The people who talk about being “sex negative” say that’s wrong, but I think they’re probably wrong. Maybe it’s a fight or flight thing – a built-in need for some physical space between people who aren’t intimates, or maybe it’s not, maybe it’s just puritanism. I doubt that last though.
Sorry, to be going on with this, but regarding Belgium, the following brief paper (in English) summaries the situation well.
https://beobachtungsstelle-gesellschaftspolitik.de/f/18c81917c6.pdf
Interestingly nearly all the prostitutes are Eastern European or African and Belgium is listed as a destination for Sex Trafficking, with an average of around 450 prosecutions per year. I have no proof, but I’d put that number at the tip of an iceberg.
The issue isn’t whether the police arrest the woman/girl or not. They don’t arrest them in NZ where prostitution is legal, or Norway where it is decriminalised (for the prostitute), or apparently Belgium where it is sort of not illegal by a curious mashup of federal law and municipal by-laws/police tolerance. The issue is which system results in the best outcome for society in the long run.
Is the argument (not of my origination I point out) special pleading? What is the universal principle that is being excepted without justification?
If the universal principle is that ‘All commercial transactions are morally and ethically indistinguishable, regardless of context’ I refuse to accept that paradigm.
At it’s core my objection is not about the buying and selling of safe sex between a willing seller and a willing buyer. In an ideal world, if a woman had multiple options for ensuring her economic and physical welfare which all required similar effort and provided similar recompense, and she opted to sell sex because she enjoyed that and found it fulfilling, well, why not I guess. But we don’t live in such a world. The number of prostitutes who are able to claim that would be vanishingly tiny. Predicating a structure for that scenario, while ignoring reality is in my view the untenable position.
Some women enter prostitution through choice, others drift in via combination of need and accident (see link @26), some are desperate but ‘choose’, others are forced or trafficked. While some women actively engaged in the industry say they love it and think it’s great, it’s interesting that the overwhelming majority of women given a chance to do something else do so and that most of those I’ve heard interviewed after having left the work talk about how corrosive and horrible it was. Something they often didn’t recognise until later. The only woman’s account I’ve read in NZ saying they really enjoyed being a prostitute and think its a valid career notably no longer works as a prostitute, but as a business advisor and media commentator.
What’s my general principle?
Sex work differs from labour by the fact that it requires the renting of a persons psyche and the interior of their body for use in a manner determined by the buyer.
I, and others, have stated this previously. There is no unjustified or unstated exception to the rule, no double standard and so no special pleading.
In the actual world we live in, as opposed to a thought experiment or a blasé middle class, prostitution is corrosive to the physical and mental safety of women and girls. It persists largely because society lacks the will to tackle underlying issues of poverty, discrimination and violence against women. Legalising prostitution ultimately will not help women, it simply adds a screen that makes the still criminal, but harder to detect, activity very difficult to root out, and still allows the harm to continue to all of the women involved.
I should have refreshed first. Ophelia cut to the point. Apologies.
There are a number of good essays about why prostitution does not meet an appropriate definition of “work”. Here is one essay I remembered reading and finding helpful a while back.
http://logosjournal.com/2014/watson/
The author, Lori Watson, looks at three areas: worker safety, sexual harassment, and civil rights, making primarily legalistic arguments. The main point I’d say is that prostitution, by its very nature, flies directly in the face of many rules and practices governing these three areas in US law.
While re-reading, and after seeing Ophelia’s #32, I noted: sexual harassment. The topic head is not harassment, but sexual harassment. It’s a separate thing from harassment, and deservedly so, for good reason. It’s different.
There are other, better articles, but both behind paywalls.
The Northern Territory, Australia, fully decriminalised prostitution (with the full support of the Scarlet Alliance, the purported sex worker lobby in Australia), and now, a dissatisfied client can sue for poor service by the prostitute whose services he bought. I cannot see how this empowers “sex workers” at all.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7729203/Prostitutes-sex-workers-soon-sued-poor-performance-clients-NT.html
Rob:
Nope, because I’m not saying, “No, it [your car] doesn’t work, because this [my] car doesn’t work.”
I am saying, “No, it [your car] may work fine. Great, let’s go for a drive! Before we go, though, let’s put a sign on this [my] car to let people know its brakes don’t work.”
Because, for the third time, my criticism is not of P` (your car). It is of P (my car).
[doubletake] I think you’re talking about something completely different from a reductio. A reductio ad absurdum is just a proof by contradiction. There is no “stripping” of anything, not of disguising fluff and certainly not of any core context or qualifiers.
Once again, I am not criticizing any argument aside from the one I stated, which I will call P:{ But for payment, no consent. Therefore, rape. } I am saying that I see people expressing precisely P, with no other words, no alterations, no additions or subtractions, no difference whatsoever. Just P.
There are people who advance an argument like yours, which we’ll call P`:{ But for payment, no consent. A. … O. Therefore, rape. } I have no problem with P`. P` is a friend of mine. P, though? P came to my house and kicked my dog.
The ACLU defending child porn possession, child marriage, and book burning:
https://mobile.twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1367170809865768962
Effects and evidence of a “race to the bottom” and empowerment of buyers under the German Model (full legalisation): https://www.trauma-and-prostitution.eu/en/2018/06/19/the-german-model-17-years-after-the-legalization-of-prostitution/
I accept that sex is special. Regrettably that doesn’t help much. Starting from sex is special IMO doesn’t provide a clue in deciding how best to proceed. “Sex is special therefore we should adopt the Nordic/Belgian/… model” doesn’t work.
And yes Rob, your argument is special pleading. Not because there are universal principles that are expected without justification, but because I expect you yourself don’t accept as general principle the argument you implicitly invoked. Your argument boils down to the idea that if somehow money is the principle persuader for someone to do/allow something he/she otherwise wouldn’t do/allow that we should consider that as illegal. That is the general principle behind the idea that if a woman wouldn’t have sex with someone unless she is payed, we should consider the sex as rape or sexual assault. However I doubt that you accept the general principle behind that.
I also think there is too much focus om trafficking. Yes trafficking should be fought but traficking is broader than prostitution. Important sectors here in Belgium where trafficking occurred were the produce sector and the constrcution sector. Almost nobody think it is a sound argument from trafficking occuring in the produce sector or the construction sector to just jumping to the conclusion it should be illegal to grow vegetables/fruit or to construct buildings. But when it is about prostitution suddenly the presence of trafficking would allow for this kind of conclusions. I also doubt the nordic model is a guarantee against trafficking.
I agree that prostitutes need protection. However society can’t provide that protection when it is illegal. However legalisation is not enough. Society needs to change its attitude and take measures to actively organise safe spaces for prostitutes to work in. The first priority of police agents that come into contact with prostitution should be the protection of the prostitutes. If your police force only plays lip service to that, the prostitutes will be the victim, even within a nordic model.
Regarding payment and consent for sex: I’d argue that once payment is introduced, consent as we (and laws) generally understand it is not possible. There are several reasons I think this, but I’ll stick to one: a central principle of consent is that it can revoked at any time prior to or during the sex. When payment is involved, this is not likely to be true in practice.
So if we are to argue that sex is a service like any other, we need either to fundamentally change the way we understand consent or introduce a special case for prostitution.
The problem isn’t solved if we think of what’s being purchased as the consent itself because the prostitute is rarely in a position to argue if the punter decides to change the terms and conditions part-way through.
@latsot
Is that only a problem for sexual services? If I hire someone to do some chore for me there needs to be consent too. I can’t force someone to work for me even if I pay him. So does that consent become impossible if I pay someone in advance?
I don’t see a problem here if we would treat a sex service like an other service. With other services if I pay in advance I still can’t legally force you to do the chore I paid you for. The only things I can legally do is to ask my money back and file a complaint if that doesn’t work.
That the prostitute is rarely in a position to argue when the punter changes the terms and conditions doesn’t change by having regulations. That can only change by providing a safe environment for the prostitute. That is why I at this moment I favor the red light district regulations in Antwerp where when a prostitute feels at risc she can call the police by a push on a knob.
Yes. By ‘consent’ I mean ‘consent to sex.’
We treat consent to sex differently to consent to other things in society and in law. One might argue that it could or should be otherwise (I don’t) but it ain’t.
If I agree to have sex with someone, it isn’t a contract. If we make it a contract, then it isn’t consent. There are no longer penalty-free ways for me change my mind.
Bear in mind that the penalties I’m talking about could be but are not necessarily legal ones.
Remind me where I said it did…
@Latsot,
What do you mean exactly with a contract? Does that need to be written and signed or is an oral agreement also a contract? In the latter case do you consider paying back the money the prostitute received when she later changes her mind, a penalty? Because that is often enough all that happens when one party in an oral agreement changes his/her mind.
Axxyaan,
It doesn’t matter what I mean by ‘contract’ or what the penalty I might have in mind. But I wasn’t thinking of formal paper contracts signed in front of witnesses, I was thinking of anything considered binding by the John. And I didn’t have anything specific in mind as a penalty, but the prostitute having the shit kicked out of her is one of the more likely ones that comes to mind.
I think we’re talking at cross purposes. You’re thinking about legal agreements, I’m thinking about the practical impossibility of a prostitute changing her mind. If that decision can’t be made safely in practice then there’s no consent. I’ve never been in a brothel but I have known a few prostitutes and from what they’ve said I find it difficult to believe that a panic button would constitute an ability of a prostitute to change her mind.
Latsot, what would you suggest? It seems the only possible conclusion is to forbid prostitution. Because no matter what regulation is proposed, one can argue that such regulation wouldn’t imply a practical ability of the prostitute to change her mind.
If police presence nearby with the ability to call them with the push of a knob, is not enough to recognize the ability of a prostitute to change her mind then it seems nothing can be enough.
In other words prostitution is inherently dangerous for the woman. Well yes, of course it is. How could it not be?
Then it seems one can hardly escape the conclusion that sex is inherently dangerous for the woman.
Sex is not synonymous with prostitution.
No prostitution is sex for payment.
Now we have lots of examples where X for payment is not inherently dangerous.
So that suggests that when X for payment is inherently dangerous, it must be the X that is already inherently dangerous.
So if sex for payment is inherently dangerous it is the sex that is inherently dangerous.
Axxyaan:
I don’t have a suggestion, that’s far too big a question. The solution, if there is one, is a complicated, ongoing process of balancing risks in a complex, changing environment. What risks those are, what the ideal balances are, how we measure them and what factors we must adjust (and how) to reach the balance is all almost entirely beyond me.
That’s exactly why I stuck to my one point, no matter how much you’ve tried to goad me into talking about something else.
Latsot,
If that is the case it seems there is no point to your point.
That doesn’t follow at all. I’m surprised I need to explain why, but here’s an example:
Suppose that sex is only inherently dangerous if there is a certain type of power imbalance between the participants and that payment increases the likelihood of that power imbalance occurring…
The example is deliberately abstract and I have no intention of justifying any part of it. I’m not making a factual claim, I’m describing a hypothetical state of affairs in which the fact of payment might result in danger where it didn’t exist (or existed less) before.
If you mean that it didn’t answer your specific question then I’m happy with that. There are other questions in the world.
@Latsot
I don’t agree with your contra-point but I am going to drop this. I don’t think it is productive to straighten the logic out.
I would just like to leave this with the positive notion that we share a real concern for the women who prostitute themselves and want them to be as safe as possible. We may not agree on the means of how best to accomplish that but we agree on the goal to reach.