Prostitution was historically outlawed because the part of the city where it happened ended up being some run-down smelly area, where you'd catch a venereal disease just by looking at it. I don't think anyone had a problem with high-class prostitutes, but it's easier to ban X than to ban poor people doing X. For example, it was only in 2009 that Rhode Island banned prostitution; but they banned brothels long before then.
Historically, it looks like the prostitution ban was mostly pushed through by this women's organization. They also did Prohibition, and this all happened around the same time women got the right to vote and WWI.
I'm not sure how many of the historical reasons still apply: We're not in any serious war, zoning laws and city codes seem like they'd be sufficient to protect against slimy neighborhoods, there's been a 'safe sex' movement so it'd be less likely that people would freely transmit diseases, and abusive pimps don't seem as economically necessary.
Also, what's up with the VC that let a prostitute run up $60k on the tab. At no level of wealth are you ever "too busy" to watch your money, and this guy's job is to manage money.
This article, and the previous moral panic piece by the same author (Nancy Jo Sales), really do remind me of Scott Templeton from The Wire.
Quotes that are too perfect, stereotypes that are too stereotypical, plus a generous helping of "everyone is" quotes.
Mind you, accusing a journalist of outright fabrication is very serious.
What's more likely is that she was able to selectively form a narrative. Note the total absence of independent statistics. No interviews with police, independent researchers, other journalists, sociologists, economists. No quotes from people who break the narrative, creating a total absence of any alternative storyline.
Astute observation. There have been more documentaries and stories about this topic, and plenty of those seem plausible, but these often focus on webcamming and catering to specific fetishes and interests. Those stories also seem much more down to earth and less dreamlike.
Perhaps it was the 'jumbo-sized Danny DeVito's' that kinda broke the suspense of disbelief.
>“If prostitution is really just physical labor, if it’s no different than serving coffee or fixing a car, then why would we see rape as such a traumatic thing? If there’s nothing different about sex, then what’s so bad about rape?”
That was my thought too, I found this story to be really depressing.
But I feel like the author is trying to present this as a general and wide-adopted trend when it's probably quite marginal.
That's a bit of a stretch. If you're forced to serve someone coffee one time most people would agree that's messed up but not that big of a deal. If you're forced to have sex once, you've been raped and that's a life shattering event.
You're completely missing the point. The point isn't which is more life shattering (no one is arguing that), the point is that our laws should protect against coercion against one's body. Forced labor and rape are differing levels of infringement on ones body. However, sex and labor are still products of one's body and the individual has the right to do with their body as they wish.
Sorry but it's you who is missing the point here. Nobody's arguing about whether we should be able to be forced to do anything. Everybody agrees that we should not.
The point is that there's a difference between regular labor and sex.
I'm not missing that point. I didn't address that point of individual choice at all. I was highlighting the cultural difference. If you would take two seconds to stop being so dismissive and pedantic maybe you could actually understand what other people are saying.
What are you even arguing then? What's the importance of highlighting that difference? My point was that ANY coercive act against someone else's body should be prohibited and punishable under the law. The law should NOT allow the majority (in this case society) to dictate what I can do with MY body. I'm not being pedantic. It sounds like you are arguing "rape is bad, therefore we need to remove partial ownership of your own body and decide what you can and cannot do with it." That "logic" is offensive to me. If that's not what you're saying, I apologize. Maybe I am reading you wrong.
We may consider coerced sex to be more traumatic than coerced labor, but it's a difference in degree, not in kind. The author is arguing "If sex is just labor then it's ok to coerce people to do it" which is absurd. It's not ok to coerce people to do labor or have sex.
It's not about saying if it's ok or not, of course it's not.
It's about stating a difference because sex work being seen a mainstream practice is arguably not a good thing. (be it legal or not, that's not related here)
That's not really the point. That statement is being used to illustrate the fact that sex is not "just labor." If it were "just labor" it wouldn't be any more traumatic than being forced to make coffee or being forced to answer phones. Which would also be traumatic, but not as traumatic as rape.
But whatever, clearly there's a group of people here on HN who are taking the hard line "sex work is just labor" position and there's not going to be a rational discussion here.
Like I said, the difference is in degree, not kind. There's no reason two things have to be exactly the same amount of traumatic in order to be considered the same kind of trauma.
Losing 10% of your net worth and losing 90% of your net worth are both traumatic. One is more so because it's to a larger degree, but it's not an entirely different thing, it's just a different amount. That's why we have different punishments for petty theft and grand larceny. Not because they're completely different crimes, but because they're different degrees of the same crime.
That's one of those non-sequiturs so bizarre that it's hard to reply. I think it's because it's misleading in two dimensions: obviously rape is different from (all kinds of) consensual sex because it's, well, non-consensual; lets call this the dimension of coercivity.
It's also different from other (consensual or non-consensual) activities because it's sex; the same way that it's different from playing frisbee or (relating to the sibling comment) fixing a car; let's call this the dimension of intimacy.
So in binary terms, we have four quadrants, with prototypical examples of playing frisbee (non-coerced, non-intimate), forcing someone to fix a car (coerced, non-intimate), prostitution (non-coerced, intimate), rape (coerced, intimate).
I hasten to add that prostitution is often, in fact, very clearly coerced (by threat of violence), and of course there's an argument to be made that many other instances are also coerced (by threat of poverty).
Edit: Re-reading my comment, calling it misleading and bizzare seems unkind, I apologize. Thinking in terms of these two dimension is (I think) helpful, but it's also an arbitrary choice. When you choose other (or fewer) "variables", the point made in the article follows.
There is an obvious difference between being coerced by force and having no option due to circumstance.
Someone purposely pushing someone over a cliff is not the same as someone running out of water in the middle of a trek across a desert because the oasis they expected had run dry.
Well, if one is forced into labor, that is slavery, and slavery is bad. Therefore, forced sex i.e, rape is also bad.
This is not to say that I am completely comfortable with this thing, though. For someone like myself, this Sugar-daddy-baby thing feels like a 180 degree departure from the values that I grew up with, which society itself promoted as the right thing. Now I just feel lost and alone. Everything is depressingly transactional. In all honesty, I'm quite comfortable with that when it comes to most of my daily interactions. But when it comes to relationships, I feel shocked. Maybe I'm a hypocrite.
Banning prostitution is one of those silly policy mistakes that politicians around the globe have committed regularly in the past. There should be no place for morality in any modern legal framework. However prostitution still lacks a reasonable regulatory framework in most countries (with some Swiss cities being a notable exception).
> no place for morality in any modern legal framework
There's definitely a place for morality, but perhaps a better way to put it is that there should be no place for any non-utilitarian morality in any legal framework.
These thoughts scare me. Utilitarianism is far from perfect. For instance, would we as a society designate 5% of women as lacking right to their own body and allow any man to have them when he wishes? If the pleasure the men gained is greater than the suffering of the women, utilitarians say yes. And even if you say "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater," is that REALLY the reason that the action I stated above is wrong? Or is it...that women have a moral right to their body that is not subject to the whims of what is best for society
What you are referring to are "Utility Monster" arguments. I've yet to see a version of the Utility Monster that would actually happen in the real world. The better ones involve a computer that rules the world and is given a metric that seems good, but leads to bad consequences when it is maximized at the expense of everything else. But we aren't ruled by such a computer - we're still ruled by people.
> "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater"
IMO, this is obviously true. Why wouldn't it be the real reason?
> And even if you say "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater," is that REALLY the reason that the action I stated above is wrong?
Yes, that really is the reason it is wrong. Men aren't utility monsters, the existence (even hypothetically) of utility monsters is doubtful, and it is harmful to optimize a system of morality for situations that have an infinitismal probability of being realized.
No, not really. Utilitarianism has its place, but it always has a lot of flaws that make it very poorly suited as something to basic any legal framework of it.
Like the fact certain types can be used to basically justify anything the majority likes, regardless of whether it's really fair on anyone else. You could argue banning various social and religious views is acceptable as a utilitarian, so long as the majority of the population would be happier with them banned.
Morality: principles concerning the distinction between
right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
Let's say that violence is considered inherently wrong, that's morality. But it's an easily justified stance that allows us to legislate against murder, rape, theft, assault, and other crimes.
But non-violent crimes, then, or those that don't violate property or privacy? Who says you have a right to either of those? On what basis do they justify that position?
Morality and ethics are the very basis of legal frameworks. The question is, what do we consider moral/ethical and what is worth criminal/civil punishment versus social ostracization.
There's obviously a big overlap between ethics and morality. So how do we differentiate the two sources of law? To me, ethics are the result of a process of critical thinking. Morality is inherited and learned based on our peers and culture. In other words it's a case of deductive vs. inductive reasoning.
Most if not all laws are moral statements. Who may kill and when? How much can the government compel someone to pay for general services? What types of business practices are allowable in our society?
AFAIK, Germany and Netherlands have very well established frameworks for prostitution, which includes making sure that their tax withholdings and social security deductions are being made from income, etc. No different from any other job in that sense.
I want to offer a different perspective. This article is more itsightful than the comments tere suggest.
I have had multiple friends seriously consider this line of work, and some undertake it. No one talks about it. It's very secretive, and somewhat dangerous. It's not talked about with girlfriends at bars. It's not told to mom and dad, but it is all around you.
I once had one of these friends approach mose to ask if she could invest in my startup in cash because she had garbage bags of cash that she could no longer legally deposit in her bank. That cash put her through college.
Many of their clients do have significant others, and many of those significant others know what's going on. It's just "fun on the side". When this article says "tech guys" it doesn't mean senior developers; it means twenty-something VPs and CTOs.
> When this article says "tech guys" it doesn't mean senior developers; it means twenty-something VPs and CTOs.
Exactly. Funny how the phrase "tech guys" has morphed from programmers and hackers (1990s) into VPs and senior execs (2010s). No programmers I know are able to afford to spend $700/hr on anything, let alone something you can get for free.
The article has the name of one particular website repeated fourteen times, and it paints its marginal niche (sugar daddies) as something that everybody is doing, and as something normal and empowering for women. And, coincidentally, this website needs to attract women.
Everything about this screams "Bullshit marketing/PR piece". Is it only me?
That was absolutely my first thought. The article basically starts out with "everyone's doing it", then talks about how all the tech guys are taking part, and even goes as far as explaining the value proposition of "...girlfriend experience, without having to deal with an actual girlfriend.".
It reminds me of those "Don't buy <popular nutraceutical> until you read this" advertorials, which purportedly offer a critical look, but are actually written by the nutraceutical company.
I've flagged the post. I recommend you do the same.
... man, that's vanityfair, I don't even know why it's on HN. I opened it, I saw the boobs, then I saw the boobs again, then the name.
This sort of magazines are just a channel to present products and to imprint the fear of being an outcast into people, in case they don't prostitute themselves for a product-brand. Of course it's bullshit marketing piece!
Very very high chance that this is a marketing piece by SA--this has been their main marketing strategy for awhile.
At the same time, the "everybody is doing it angle" is basically true, especially in the cities with lots of attractive girls (LA, NYC, Miami, etc). My gay friends who sponsor younger dudes confirm the same on that side.
In a truly 'new whatever economy' with minimal barriers to entry and no middlemen, wouldn't the competition quickly reduce prices to subsistence levels?
If these women are truly able to charge hundreds of dollars for their time, I'm thinking this is way more of a niche activity than the author's implying.
I think 538 or one of those prominent economics blogs had an article about this; they looked at prices before and after the pill and sexual liberation of the 1960s, and concluded prices had collapsed. Basically they concluded that supply and demand (the default explanation) was working.
If social attitudes change, and tech lends a hand by making it easier and discreet, I don't see why the same dynamic wouldn't continue.
I think the social barrier to entry is extremely high so supply is not going to going to rise very quickly. The rich clientele here are looking for very attractive women who may have some college-education. In that group of people (and really any group) there is still a lot of stigma with this sort of thing. It can ruin relationships with friends and parents. It can also ruin prospects with long term partners. Not everyone would be willing to pay that price.
I'm sure prices will be driven down as stuff like this becomes more accepted but I doubt it will be driven down to subsistence levels. Sex work is not for everyone, even if it is more socially acceptable.
To try and ban such behavior is immoral. Look at the fruits of prohibition:
1. Prostitutes can not rely on the police for protection. This leads many women who practice this to be under the "administration" of a pimp.
2. Because it is illegal, criminals are the ones who engage in the activity. With little respect for the rule of law, other laws are ignored such as age of consent, kidnapping, coercion, etc. This leads to literal human trafficking.
When I read comments about a lack of "reasonable regulatory framework", I cringe. So what would this look like? A "reasonable" approach would be to have all sex workers and their customers tested for STDs. How do we enforce that? You get a certificate from a regulatory agency? How do we prevent that system from being corrupted? How often should one get tested? Would the burden and costs exceed that of engaging in "illegal" prostitution? There are lag times from when STD is detectable and transmissible. It is not possible, even within a regulatory framework, to prevent the transmission of STDs.
I much prefer a technological solution. If prostitution was legal, the need to be informed about your clients would be addressed by competing interests. We don't need a government agency telling us how to engage in the oldest and most ancient of professions!
Also, if it becomes common, there's no reason to think the network of infection would be connected in the current way. You might find a lot of casual workers who are less connected, rather than a few with a lot of connections.
Sex is probably the highest demand human 'service' right behind food and medical attention. It only stands to reason that the internet would enable that demand to find people willing to be paid exorbitantly to perform sex acts. Trying to stop that via legislation is just as, if not more futile than trying to stop drug use through prohibition.
What is interesting and scary at the same time is what happens to relationships and sexuality if all of a sudden anyone on both sides of the pay for dating->sex equation can find what they're looking for? Does it make it everyone more callous about sex knowing that it is a commodity with a free market? Does it increase infidelity? Will it make people more accepting of and open about sex? Does it create more angry and sexually-frustrated males feeling like they're beaten out by people who can pay?
With the sugar daddy phenomenon it could create a source of modest wealth for a some of these women. In several of these exposes some of the women were using their sugar daddies to fund their business ideas or to pay for higher education. And really, it's not prostitution in the legal sense.
I think there'll be a lot of surprising outcomes from this, some of the good, some of them bad.
I found the juxtaposition interesting in this article that one of the women got into "sugaring" because she was tired of dating "immature frat bros" and then found that many of her clients were lonely tech workers. At the risk of stating something which is a bit cliched, I think that there was an opportunity here missed where the woman could have legitimately dated a tech worker who wasn't an "immature frat bro" without having to resort to "sugaring". On the other hand, it doesn't speak highly of any of these men that they consider it okay to sexually objectify women by paying for sex, although I do understand their frustrations and loneliness when you're stuck working so many hours its impossible to even try to date.
To me, that would indicate that there's some quality that she doesn't like about the tech workers that the frat bros have. The frat bros have qualities that are ok at first get on your nerves over time.
Or maybe she's tired of dating in general. Might as well get paid for it then.
> To me, that would indicate that there's some quality that she doesn't like about the tech workers that the frat bros have.
I agree. I'm curious what that quality is specifically. Both for my own personal advancement and out of a general belief that people are individuals not the labels that they are described by. I would think certainly there's both a subset of "frat bros" and tech workers that these women might find fulfilling long-term relationships with.
I never got this "sexual objectification" thing. If it is sexual objectification to pay for sex (assumed consensual), then surely it's "intellectual/creative objectification" to contract someone to make a website, right?
I mean, if it was something special about sex, we wouldn't need to qualify it as sexual (prostitution is not 'sexual prostitution' or even 'sexual slavery').
So what is it that is the problem with sexual objectification? It's not the objectification proper since nobody is lamenting the objectification of plumbers and painters or what not. And it's not like anybody cares about what their feelings are like. Everyone seems to understand that it's a job.
So really, the aspect of sexual objectification people don't like is that they believe no one should be allowed to sell sex. And my question is why? We sure are allowed to sell food, either at the grocery or the restaurant. We're are allowed to sell and rent living arrangements. Although it's uncommon, there's even places charging for access to toilets.
If only Rusty would have restored kuro5hin.org by now, I would link to my diary titled "The difference between boys & girls"...
'Evolution' has decided that women get to choose who they have sex with. Women have to be picky, men tend to take what they can get. Some women are much more open to sex than others. Some women factor monetary considerations into their decision process.
I once picked a woman up in the taxi from a cheap motel, and took her south along I-17. When we drove past Cheetah's (a strip club), my passenger said, "I've bet you've picked up a lot of ho's there." I protested that strippers were just working. She'd had a lot more experience with strip clubs than I, and she said something like "all strippers are ho's". Which I guess might be true enough to be a truism.
I also had a stripper who'd been followed home and beaten up by some of the clubs' patrons, probably because she wasn't available for the services they wanted. (Edit: I had this woman a couple times. Sometimes she arranged for me to pick her up again for her trip home, instead of calling the taxi company for a random driver.)
I flinched when saw this headline, then cringed when I realized it wasn't just a terribly inappropriate reference to the "gig economy".
I wish we could restrict discussion about sex work to those who have been involved in it, or at least ensure their voices are included.
But I know this doesn't belong on hacker news. There's no tech, there's no engineering impact, and it's a dangerous topic given the delicacy of gender issues in a startup culture context.
Putting the prostitution to one side, the underlying issues are particularly concerning to me.
In this article, young people appear to have either large debt or expensive taste. They're encouraged to attend college, but increasingly find that the available jobs don't meet expectations. "Vanilla", low-paying employment.
The description of the young woman who learned how to present herself and even how to do an elevator pitch sound like the exception, rather than the norm. Not everyone is so ambitious. Instead, the article suggests that most young people start doing this out of desperation.
Desperation for paying off increasing debt, desperation for not having been taught or learned the skills necessary to have a non-vanilla, well-paying job, desperation for not being able to have the life that seems so accessible online today but only available to a few.
The most surprising thing in this piece was that Homeland Security is shutting down sugar daddy websites for facilitating prostitution. I thought they were only supposed to go after a different type of threat. This expansion of scope is troublesome.
"... on sites like RentBoy, which was busted and shut down in 2015 by Homeland Security for facilitating prostitution." - am I the only one who finds this a bizarre role for Homeland Security?
PS2: The article has lots of ads for luxury goods while describing women using prostitution to buy these products: "She became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods." I can't figure out if that is terrible ad placement or genius ad placement. And there's a strange circularity where the article creates demand for luxury goods (and sex), while simultaneously providing a solution for how to obtain the luxury goods (and sex).
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadHmmmm...
Historically, it looks like the prostitution ban was mostly pushed through by this women's organization. They also did Prohibition, and this all happened around the same time women got the right to vote and WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_Christian_Temperance...
I'm not sure how many of the historical reasons still apply: We're not in any serious war, zoning laws and city codes seem like they'd be sufficient to protect against slimy neighborhoods, there's been a 'safe sex' movement so it'd be less likely that people would freely transmit diseases, and abusive pimps don't seem as economically necessary.
Also, what's up with the VC that let a prostitute run up $60k on the tab. At no level of wealth are you ever "too busy" to watch your money, and this guy's job is to manage money.
Interestingly, too, women on the whole used to vote more politically conservative than men, while today they vote more politically liberal than men: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21700425-europes-far-ri....
Quotes that are too perfect, stereotypes that are too stereotypical, plus a generous helping of "everyone is" quotes.
Mind you, accusing a journalist of outright fabrication is very serious.
What's more likely is that she was able to selectively form a narrative. Note the total absence of independent statistics. No interviews with police, independent researchers, other journalists, sociologists, economists. No quotes from people who break the narrative, creating a total absence of any alternative storyline.
Perhaps it was the 'jumbo-sized Danny DeVito's' that kinda broke the suspense of disbelief.
That was my thought too, I found this story to be really depressing.
But I feel like the author is trying to present this as a general and wide-adopted trend when it's probably quite marginal.
The point is that there's a difference between regular labor and sex.
It's about stating a difference because sex work being seen a mainstream practice is arguably not a good thing. (be it legal or not, that's not related here)
But whatever, clearly there's a group of people here on HN who are taking the hard line "sex work is just labor" position and there's not going to be a rational discussion here.
Losing 10% of your net worth and losing 90% of your net worth are both traumatic. One is more so because it's to a larger degree, but it's not an entirely different thing, it's just a different amount. That's why we have different punishments for petty theft and grand larceny. Not because they're completely different crimes, but because they're different degrees of the same crime.
It's also different from other (consensual or non-consensual) activities because it's sex; the same way that it's different from playing frisbee or (relating to the sibling comment) fixing a car; let's call this the dimension of intimacy.
So in binary terms, we have four quadrants, with prototypical examples of playing frisbee (non-coerced, non-intimate), forcing someone to fix a car (coerced, non-intimate), prostitution (non-coerced, intimate), rape (coerced, intimate).
I hasten to add that prostitution is often, in fact, very clearly coerced (by threat of violence), and of course there's an argument to be made that many other instances are also coerced (by threat of poverty).
Edit: Re-reading my comment, calling it misleading and bizzare seems unkind, I apologize. Thinking in terms of these two dimension is (I think) helpful, but it's also an arbitrary choice. When you choose other (or fewer) "variables", the point made in the article follows.
Someone purposely pushing someone over a cliff is not the same as someone running out of water in the middle of a trek across a desert because the oasis they expected had run dry.
This is not to say that I am completely comfortable with this thing, though. For someone like myself, this Sugar-daddy-baby thing feels like a 180 degree departure from the values that I grew up with, which society itself promoted as the right thing. Now I just feel lost and alone. Everything is depressingly transactional. In all honesty, I'm quite comfortable with that when it comes to most of my daily interactions. But when it comes to relationships, I feel shocked. Maybe I'm a hypocrite.
We like to answer with "basic income" or "we'll create new jobs", but that's not always the case.
Uberization of prostitution, surrogacy, professional cuddlers. That should open our eyes.
There's definitely a place for morality, but perhaps a better way to put it is that there should be no place for any non-utilitarian morality in any legal framework.
> "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater" IMO, this is obviously true. Why wouldn't it be the real reason?
Yes, that really is the reason it is wrong. Men aren't utility monsters, the existence (even hypothetically) of utility monsters is doubtful, and it is harmful to optimize a system of morality for situations that have an infinitismal probability of being realized.
Like the fact certain types can be used to basically justify anything the majority likes, regardless of whether it's really fair on anyone else. You could argue banning various social and religious views is acceptable as a utilitarian, so long as the majority of the population would be happier with them banned.
is that something you actually support, or am I misinterpreting?
But non-violent crimes, then, or those that don't violate property or privacy? Who says you have a right to either of those? On what basis do they justify that position?
Morality and ethics are the very basis of legal frameworks. The question is, what do we consider moral/ethical and what is worth criminal/civil punishment versus social ostracization.
Ethics is a set of rules about what one person can do to another person. Is this act harmful to another person?
Morality is a set of rules about what a person can do to their own self. Is this act harmful to me?
All moral questions.
https://www.ted.com/talks/toni_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers...
I have had multiple friends seriously consider this line of work, and some undertake it. No one talks about it. It's very secretive, and somewhat dangerous. It's not talked about with girlfriends at bars. It's not told to mom and dad, but it is all around you.
I once had one of these friends approach mose to ask if she could invest in my startup in cash because she had garbage bags of cash that she could no longer legally deposit in her bank. That cash put her through college.
Many of their clients do have significant others, and many of those significant others know what's going on. It's just "fun on the side". When this article says "tech guys" it doesn't mean senior developers; it means twenty-something VPs and CTOs.
Exactly. Funny how the phrase "tech guys" has morphed from programmers and hackers (1990s) into VPs and senior execs (2010s). No programmers I know are able to afford to spend $700/hr on anything, let alone something you can get for free.
Everything about this screams "Bullshit marketing/PR piece". Is it only me?
It reminds me of those "Don't buy <popular nutraceutical> until you read this" advertorials, which purportedly offer a critical look, but are actually written by the nutraceutical company.
I've flagged the post. I recommend you do the same.
This sort of magazines are just a channel to present products and to imprint the fear of being an outcast into people, in case they don't prostitute themselves for a product-brand. Of course it's bullshit marketing piece!
At the same time, the "everybody is doing it angle" is basically true, especially in the cities with lots of attractive girls (LA, NYC, Miami, etc). My gay friends who sponsor younger dudes confirm the same on that side.
[1] https://www.seekingarrangement.com/
If these women are truly able to charge hundreds of dollars for their time, I'm thinking this is way more of a niche activity than the author's implying.
If social attitudes change, and tech lends a hand by making it easier and discreet, I don't see why the same dynamic wouldn't continue.
I'm sure prices will be driven down as stuff like this becomes more accepted but I doubt it will be driven down to subsistence levels. Sex work is not for everyone, even if it is more socially acceptable.
To try and ban such behavior is immoral. Look at the fruits of prohibition:
1. Prostitutes can not rely on the police for protection. This leads many women who practice this to be under the "administration" of a pimp.
2. Because it is illegal, criminals are the ones who engage in the activity. With little respect for the rule of law, other laws are ignored such as age of consent, kidnapping, coercion, etc. This leads to literal human trafficking.
When I read comments about a lack of "reasonable regulatory framework", I cringe. So what would this look like? A "reasonable" approach would be to have all sex workers and their customers tested for STDs. How do we enforce that? You get a certificate from a regulatory agency? How do we prevent that system from being corrupted? How often should one get tested? Would the burden and costs exceed that of engaging in "illegal" prostitution? There are lag times from when STD is detectable and transmissible. It is not possible, even within a regulatory framework, to prevent the transmission of STDs.
I much prefer a technological solution. If prostitution was legal, the need to be informed about your clients would be addressed by competing interests. We don't need a government agency telling us how to engage in the oldest and most ancient of professions!
What is interesting and scary at the same time is what happens to relationships and sexuality if all of a sudden anyone on both sides of the pay for dating->sex equation can find what they're looking for? Does it make it everyone more callous about sex knowing that it is a commodity with a free market? Does it increase infidelity? Will it make people more accepting of and open about sex? Does it create more angry and sexually-frustrated males feeling like they're beaten out by people who can pay?
With the sugar daddy phenomenon it could create a source of modest wealth for a some of these women. In several of these exposes some of the women were using their sugar daddies to fund their business ideas or to pay for higher education. And really, it's not prostitution in the legal sense.
I think there'll be a lot of surprising outcomes from this, some of the good, some of them bad.
Or maybe she's tired of dating in general. Might as well get paid for it then.
I agree. I'm curious what that quality is specifically. Both for my own personal advancement and out of a general belief that people are individuals not the labels that they are described by. I would think certainly there's both a subset of "frat bros" and tech workers that these women might find fulfilling long-term relationships with.
I mean, if it was something special about sex, we wouldn't need to qualify it as sexual (prostitution is not 'sexual prostitution' or even 'sexual slavery').
So what is it that is the problem with sexual objectification? It's not the objectification proper since nobody is lamenting the objectification of plumbers and painters or what not. And it's not like anybody cares about what their feelings are like. Everyone seems to understand that it's a job.
So really, the aspect of sexual objectification people don't like is that they believe no one should be allowed to sell sex. And my question is why? We sure are allowed to sell food, either at the grocery or the restaurant. We're are allowed to sell and rent living arrangements. Although it's uncommon, there's even places charging for access to toilets.
So why is sex so special?
If only Rusty would have restored kuro5hin.org by now, I would link to my diary titled "The difference between boys & girls"...
'Evolution' has decided that women get to choose who they have sex with. Women have to be picky, men tend to take what they can get. Some women are much more open to sex than others. Some women factor monetary considerations into their decision process.
I once picked a woman up in the taxi from a cheap motel, and took her south along I-17. When we drove past Cheetah's (a strip club), my passenger said, "I've bet you've picked up a lot of ho's there." I protested that strippers were just working. She'd had a lot more experience with strip clubs than I, and she said something like "all strippers are ho's". Which I guess might be true enough to be a truism.
I also had a stripper who'd been followed home and beaten up by some of the clubs' patrons, probably because she wasn't available for the services they wanted. (Edit: I had this woman a couple times. Sometimes she arranged for me to pick her up again for her trip home, instead of calling the taxi company for a random driver.)
I flinched when saw this headline, then cringed when I realized it wasn't just a terribly inappropriate reference to the "gig economy".
I wish we could restrict discussion about sex work to those who have been involved in it, or at least ensure their voices are included.
But I know this doesn't belong on hacker news. There's no tech, there's no engineering impact, and it's a dangerous topic given the delicacy of gender issues in a startup culture context.
Those are not the criteria for whether something belongs on Hacker News. The criterion is simply that a story be intellectually interesting.
This one is complex in that it has intellectually interesting aspects as well as other aspects. But that's not uncommon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this article, young people appear to have either large debt or expensive taste. They're encouraged to attend college, but increasingly find that the available jobs don't meet expectations. "Vanilla", low-paying employment.
The description of the young woman who learned how to present herself and even how to do an elevator pitch sound like the exception, rather than the norm. Not everyone is so ambitious. Instead, the article suggests that most young people start doing this out of desperation.
Desperation for paying off increasing debt, desperation for not having been taught or learned the skills necessary to have a non-vanilla, well-paying job, desperation for not being able to have the life that seems so accessible online today but only available to a few.
P.S. This sure feels like a PR piece: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
PS2: The article has lots of ads for luxury goods while describing women using prostitution to buy these products: "She became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods." I can't figure out if that is terrible ad placement or genius ad placement. And there's a strange circularity where the article creates demand for luxury goods (and sex), while simultaneously providing a solution for how to obtain the luxury goods (and sex).
Obvious Jane says: no, but I'm also not expected to screw them.