> means a few sexual deviants get what's coming to them, who cares
Yeah, I too hate people who make different life choices than me. We should round all the gun owning, drug using, sex having deviants up, and put them in camps or something. Wouldn't the world be a better place if my vision for society was enforced by the government? /s
Seriously though, when did authoritarianism make such a strong comeback?
Edit:
The fact that people think they have a right to tell me what I put in my body, or how I use it, absolutely blows my mind. And then they wonder, "why are you so concerned about gun rights?". You, you are why I am concerned about gun rights.
This is the problem with using the government to enforce any kind of grey aria social issue. We all have different definitions for sexual deviants, or reasonable drug use, etc...
I'm sure the above comment has some sort of religious background, and genuinely believes people on those subs are deviants.
I take issue with prostitution in the US, but not for the moral reasons you’d think; it’s under the guise of free will, when someone shouldn’t have to prostitution themselves out of economic necessity (or in a lot of SugarBaby cases, to pay for college or student loans).
If we’re going to crack down on exploitation of children in the sex industry, when do we expand that to adults who have no other choice? It’s not free will if your only other option is homelessness or to starve.
TL:DR Exploitation must be protected against. Not against sex work in general.
There is something I find particularly revolting about sexual exploitation, having both your dignity and your agency taken from you.
My issue is not with wage labor (at least, not for this thread). My concern is where the sex work industry is contorted in certain ways into modern slavery with an unappealing twist.
I'd agree with you if people were forced into prostitution - and of course what you say does apply correctly to victims of human trafficking who are forced. But I don't think that's always the case.
Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.
I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.
But you present generalizations and assumptions specific to the scenarios that you describe without facts to back them up. The responder above presents a valid scenario that is no different than 15-20 years ago, college women with proper skills/looks/aptitude, might go work at the few strip clubs/bikini bars in the Bay Area while going to college.
I recall, while in college, being surprised by the roommate of a friend (who was a very good student) pulling in what was more than the highest CS grad made out of school when I graduated.
Exploitation is one thing, but this immediate jump to everything is exploitation is what leads to things like this particular law getting passed. Generalizations without facts.
As one sugar baby explained to me: I can either work crazy hours for minimum wage at Dairy Queen all month and barely cover rent and food. Or I can have an older guy take me to a Michelin star restaurant and hook up with him, and I'm set for the month in a span of a couple of hours. Have a couple of them on the hook and you're now in the luxury lifestyle territory which most people can only dream of.
It's an interesting conversation. We're ok with people doing extremely dangerous and abusive jobs for shitty pay. Miners, people roaming the sewers, people welding beams hundreds of feet in the air. Those are fine. But you give someone head for thousands of dollars so you don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's while you're in college, and suddenly you're a poor victim to stand up for.
My fuckfriend was an escort for about 3 years and I think most people have the same misconceptions that I had.
When I told her that she must have encountered some nasty customers, she said not that much because she didn't have a pimp and always chose her customers.
If the guy didn't look clean or she had a bad feeling, she would refuse to have sex with him.
Regulations like this are putting a strain on the "good" side of this work because it's making it harder for girls to operate independently since they can't post ads.
So they will have to operate with pimps that will feed them customers and make sure they are kept stoned enough to make them money hungry (and thus lowering their standards or at least make the choice harder for her).
Let's not kid ourselves, this bill has nothing to do with protecting sex workers or improving their lives.
Just like Cannabis, the problem will never go away, so you either regulate it or let the black market take care of it.
Belle du Jour made £300/hr. I remember her doing a Q&A for readers of the Sunday Times (for US people: an influential conservative newspaper in the UK). All anyone cared about was that she paid her taxes.
I've thought about this a whole lot. If I understand your various comments here correctly, I agree with you that it should be allowed while not being exploitation.
The problem as I see it is that most people who feel that way will do what you are doing here and speak out against women being exploited. Meanwhile, there are still huge practical barriers to women making good money via other avenues.
Due to my compromised immune system, sex work is out of the question. If this were not true, I might well have moved to Nevada where it is legal because trying to get taken seriously as a woman, trying to network and make business connections, trying to get business people (who are mostly men) to engage me substantively, help me figure this out, open doors for me has gone just so painfully slowly and I remain dirt poor.
And it frustrates me to see these kinds of remarks here because I feel like most of what I say falls on deaf ears. On top of that, I get a lot of ugly push back where I get literally called a liar (quickly edited to merely say not honest) and accused of having a political agenda and told I need to just shut up about my life for some reason or other. Rich men express similar opinions, though often not in an actionable way, and that's basically OK even if others don't agree. I try to talk about it and try to say in practical terms "Hey, if you sincerely want to see women not be exploited and pushed into such choices, then other doors need be opening for us." and that's often all kinds of ugly drama.
But, seriously, how else do you think that works? I have stayed the course due to extraordinary circumstances giving me no other viable options. I wish to hell and back every single day that I had an easier answer that would make my life work.
I am not asking for charity. I am asking for help to become successful at earning a middle class income.
That's the missing piece here. Women need other doors to open. And if that isn't happening, then decrying sex work, one of the few well paid things reliably available to women, is just cutting off options and making things worse.
I don't understand why that seems so extremely hard to get through to people.
If you want to get rid of a large chunk of coerced sex-work, just make other options easier to attain, or give those sex workers support. But the US has an annoying trend of implimenting solutions without looking into whether that solution is effective.
How do we get those doors open for women in order for them to have more opportunity? How do we make sure they have every opportunity available to them to experience a secure middle class lifestyle?
This issue strikes particularly close to home for me, as my mother took off for about a decade and worked odd jobs in Nevada while wrestling with mental health issues.
We need to get men and women engaging in conversation substantively with a default expectation that it is platonic. One of the problems is that men mostly don't really talk to women except to hit on them. I have run into this problem over and over that trying to engage men substantively often illicits romantic feelings on their part even though it's only a few replies in a public forum, never mind that I have been celibate 12.5+ years and I'm open about that.
My belief is that doors open for men based on two things: establishing trust and casually being exposed to a great deal more information pertinent to developing a career than women get exposed to. Both of these are rooted in the fact that most men can talk to other men a lot without sex interfering. Women can't really do that. Men either decide they aren't interested, and then barely speak to us, or they decide this is a negotiation for sex/romance if there is more than a tiny amount of conversation. It's a no win situation for a woman.
My experience has been that once a man is sexually or romantically interested in me, he's completely useless to me in terms of being a professional contact. I was romantically involved for a time with a man who had recently changed careers just a few months earlier. His previous career was the field I wanted to go into. No, he never read the paper I wrote that I asked him for feedback on.
Men who are romantically interested in me will not clue me, will not make vital introductions, will not give me meaningful feedback. Other men also mostly don't do those things for me because they barely know me, don't trust me (because they don't really know me), don't want to talk to me enough to get to know what I have to offer professionally, etc.
All of that boils down to I need men talking with me more with a strong assumption that it is platonic/professional, not romantic.
While I empathize with your situation, do you not seem to realize that the vast majority of men won't help other men in the way you want help either. Unless they're getting something they value in return. That's the key. When you ask for help, you have to provide the helper with the promise of something they want. Else why should they bother?
The problem I face is that the only thing men want in exchange is basically sex and there is a lot of value that I provide at times that people feel they can just get for free from me and to hell with me. I am very interested in figuring out how to make mutually beneficial exchanges. But you can't try to negotiate such if most business people will only really talk to you in hopes of getting laid.
As I tried to make very clear in my post, I have zero problem with sex work. I simply want it regulated in a way so it’s safe for sex workers, and they’re not coerced into the work.
I'm completely against sexual exploitation as well. But prostitution, i.e., sex between consenting adults in exchange for money, has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual exploitation or slavery.
Sexwork is work, just like any other type of work.
There will never a ideal society where everyone can eat and study for free. You're just removing one option for people ...
And when you re in trouble the more option you have the better.
First get an idealistic society where everyone can eat and have free education then we can discuss about removing this option ...
On the other hand, if we thought more critically, we'd realize both of those things are possible. In Europe people do have free education. We waste more food than we have hungry people. 1+1=2 ;)
Lots of people tell you not to dream big. It's ok to do it and to believe it's achievable.
The world is not black and white. Everything is shades of gray.
Some exploitation is more heinous than others.
If you’re chained to your 9 to 5, it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world.
If you’re a UN peacekeeper using candy to lure children into sexual relationships and then abandoning them and your resulting offspring (example taken from real world events), that is psycho/sociopath level exploitation.
If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?
>If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?
No one should be harassed. I would rather the woman have the option of selling sex in a clean work environment with healthcare and some say in who she sells to than having to choose between sleeping with her landlord or being homeless.
>If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?
People are in that situation where prostitution is illegal and they do it anyway. What's your alternative? To force the woman to do it in secret? To punish her and the John if they get caught? Should she be kicked out? The landlord made to accept no rent? The woman forced to spend another 20 hours at work away from her kids where she might've spent one or two?
It's a shame generally that people have to work for a living. I think that's one of the things "we" are racing to solve by improving technology and automation. I hope there'll be post-scarcity society with a basic income and nobody will be required to make any bad choices. We aren't there yet, so we should try to get there.
So men or women in the Congo, let's say someplace like Goma...
forced by warlords, let's say someone like Nkunda, to go into the mines... or die...
is less exploitative than a landlord asking a tenant for sex in your eyes?
Question was rhetorical. You obviously have a problem with the sexual dimension of the exploitation, and the people of eastern Congo don't face the choice of going into the mines or dying.
It's Nkunda... he offed them anyway, but they got to live a little longer if they went into the mines.
>>when do we expand that to adults who have no other choice? It’s not free will if your only other option is homelessness or to starve.
But depriving them of the option of providing sexual services for pay is not protecting them.
The alternative, as you point out, is homelessness or to starve, and they would only choose the option of prostitution when they perceive it as less undesirable than these outcomes.
So you'd be forcing people into circumstances that they perceive as worse than prostitution, since in every other case, they would not be choosing prostitution anyway.
theredpill promotes violence? I've lurked long enough to wonder why people say that. I'm sure you can cherry pick some comments but to say the sub promotes violence? It just doesn't stand up to real life. Most of the subs that people say horrible things about I go seek out to find out the real story and find out the mods might have their work cut out for them but they work hard to stay in the community guidelines. A thankless task for sure.
The worst examples of theredpill are very similar to the worst examples of modern radical feminism. The whole "men/white people must die" contingent you see on tumblr. If you can ignore them and still take feminism seriously, you can ignore the crazies on TRP as well. Let's relax with the double standard.
The reason why people don't take Tumblr seriously is because white males like myself are a socially dominant and often armed plurality of the country. It's also kind of farcical to think of women eliminating men, society would dissolve in a generation, so it's easy to regard this kind of talk as simply sublimated angst that is an exaggerated response to real concerns.
However, when this kind of talk comes from the socially dominant and aforementioned armed folk, it is much more of a serious matter simply because we have a history of actually doing the kinds of violent, enslaving, and oppressive things we claim we'll do.
I'm not clear what you're trying to get at. That a bunch of keyboard jockeys trying to figure out how to get a date through Internet forum advice will arm themselves, uprise and violently enslave and oppress the populace? What exactly are you afraid will happen?
The argument is a little more subtle than that though I didn't explicate it above. It's that the keyboard jockies provide a base and advocate for politicians that will.
Can you give me an example of redditors looking for dating advice being politically motivated to vote for politicians who are in favor of violence and oppressing women and minorities? Where are you getting this information and what exactly are the facts to back this conjecture?
You're drawing a very tenuous thread between all of these different concepts. It is FUD until there's evidence of this actually happening.
> It's also kind of farcical to think of women eliminating men
If you actually scratch beneath the surface of TRP you'll see that the concern is not "women eliminating men" but men elminating other men and women being complicit in that.
TRP on Reddit is a pickup forum (cough 'sexual strategy'). I don't know anyone saying 'this kind of talk' if you mean armed uprisings or similar. Are you thinking of a different sub?
Of course they did-- Prostitutes, johns and pimps are sex criminals, just like pedophiles. Providing a platform for sex criminals is harmful to Society.
Huh, are you really this dense? Yes, they're criminals, because sex work is currently illegal (in the US at least). If it were not illegal, they would no longer be criminals. So how about we legalize it, then they won't be "sex criminals", and then you can stop crying about how your ideal authoritarian "Society" is crumbling because people are free to engage in consensual sex.
That's PUA, not TRP. TRP is built around helping a man survive and get about in today's world. Sex is one part, often talked about, but one part. One of the differences is that PUA doesn't help men get over the NiceGuy mentality.
I disagree. That's seduction, by definition. After all, you are figuring out how to behave so that a member of the other sex wants to have intercourse with you.
Flagged. This comment is so awful, ignorant and offensive (especially to actual victims of sexual violence!). Wow, how on earth does someone come up with such a ludicrus, insane oppinion. Please learn what words (e.g. violence) mean before attempting to use them in conversation.
r/SexWorkers seems to have survived, thanks to its long-standing policies against advertising/transactions, so sex workers can still talk about sex work, in theory and practice, for now.
And the truth is that if this was hosted in almost any country other than the US, that would not be true. The US is extremely flexible in that regard.
If websites follow local laws these communities, whatever value they have, will disappear. In fact anything that reminds society of the existence of anything that they feel is shameful (e.g. sex workers in Saudi Arabia [1]). Right along with any discussion anything else that either the state itself or society considers shames them.
The net result: "Saudi Arabia is one of the largest consumers of domestic workers. Around 30% of Saudi's population of 27.3 million are immigrants from other countries. The Law requires that all of the expatriates in Saudi Arabia should have a employment contract while they are in the country. [6] But with some unfair work practices such as sexual harassment, extreme working conditions, and other human rights violations, many try to escape their employers. Runaways are often kidnapped and forced into prostitution [7] Prostitutes tend to be mostly from Nigeria, Ethiopia,[8] Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tajikistan .[9] As of right now, there are no strict laws in force pertaining to human trafficking. In 2013, the government did not report any prosecutions or convictions of alleged human traffickers.[7] Foreign prostitutes who are arrested by the Saudi vice police face deportation.[8]"
>And the truth is that if this was hosted in almost any country other than the US, that would not be true. The US is extremely flexible in that regard.
What? In a large part of Europe prostitution is fully legal[1]. For example, in Poland we have very popular websites solely dedicated for sexual services advertisements[2], with photos and price lists.
It's much larger than just "casual encounters". Craigslist has shut down every single one of their personal categories. w4w, m4m, w4m, m4w are all gone. Even "strictly platonic" is gone.
I don't have a solution, I'm just ranting here. Sorry.
This is just an extension of conservatism being scared of sex and women going their own way.
Like it or not, prostitution has helped many people rise out of poverty and even make societies (the "west" back in the early US days) around their business.
Laws like this are very hard to vote against because of TV ads opponents of politicians could run demonizing them.
It seems that very few political meanings are accurate when it comes to US politics. The terms liberal and conservative have pretty much lost all their original meaning.
but the far right still falls under the umbrella of Classical Liberalism, they're reactionary liberals, but still liberals. If you 'believe' in the market and private ownership of capital a` la Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, then you fall into that political purview. it's the dominant ideology of the developed world.
What Americans call liberals is "right" in the rest of the world. Versus "far-right" which is what Americans call conservatives. When Americans talk about "far-left" the rest of the world reads "center" .. there's no such thing as real "far-left" in American politics.
I don't agree with this particular law, but "money exchanges hands, so it's okay" isn't an excuse for prostitution. We can build a society where women prosper without being subjected to institutional rape.
Rape is just yet another coerced and forced work for subsistence. Aside being 'sex', there's not much difference between other types of work that one is required to do to make money and eat and live in a shelter.
At the end, you're mentally and physically tired. And you used a good chunk of your day being productive for someone else so they can make even more money on that.
If somebody wouldn't have sex with you of their own volition, but is coerced into doing so for need of food and shelter, then how can it be consensual?
Why exactly? There's different degrees of slavery and independence, it's not black and white. Poor people don't really have a choice with their lives, they do whatever people command to them so they can just to get enough to get food.
Some black slaves in the US South got to live in the house, eat and drink with their masters, whip other slaves, and maybe even got an education. They lived in luxury compared to the field workers.
Can someone making just enough to get by quit their job? Technically, sure. But they lose their home, they lose their insurance, they lose their car, their children get taken from them. And now they can't find another job because they have no house and no car, and they can't get another car because they have no job and no credit. So they stay, no matter what, because quitting is a death sentence.
This is so easy to type, but I imagine it would be much harder for you to devise any kind of system wherein I get to maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work for a living.
My employers tell me what to do, yes; but have you ever thought that perhaps I like the exchange, and find it valuable to have someone who tells me what to do to get to an end result where I get a decent, reliable wage for doing so?
And how under socialism am I going to be freed from having to labour? If nobody labours, nothing will get done. Conversely, if I labour and see a massively reduced benefit from doing so personally, I will hardly be inspired to work hard.
These are earnest questions seemingly asked in good faith so Ill try to respond in kind (although my comments are all dead for some reason, so I hope you can see this).
socialism is not about 'ending work', it's about the relationship the worker has to his output. "but who will clean the toilets?" probably the same people that do it now, but they will be paid the full value of their labor instead of having most of it skimmed off the top in the name of "profit". Corporate Profit doesn't really exist in socialism, because profit by definition is surplus value. This value needs to ends up in the hands of the people who produce it. under this, toilet cleaning (sanitation) becomes a more lucrative job prospect because the compensation would be higher.
"but how can businesses be run without a single private entity handing down orders from the top" same as they are now, with people working together. It may seem like a stretch to think of a society where the population is empowered enough that employees can self administrate, but ome needs to look no farther than the open source community for good examples of it being possible. "but software developers are smart people! they aren't like the mindless drones doing my laundry" arguments for why that is textbook classism aside, we got ourselves into this position because that's the society we've cultivated, it's not some fundamental aspect of our species that 'most of us are dumb that's why we need rich people to tell us what to do' on some level that's true, we are but animals. However it applies to economic elites too: they are also just animals, and despite the smoke and mirrors still deal with the limitations of our biology. being smart or good at something should be it's own reward. having more money than they can reasonably spend ends up becoming a self preserving entity on it's own, rent seeking and legalized bribery and so on. if you want to learn more about this phenomena, I recommend reading Marx's Das Kapital.
it's easy to think we have a "high standard of living" under capitalism when that's all we've known, especially in the last bastion of the middle class that is the tech sector. but look at our (non)prescription drug use, depression rates, access to healthcare and living necessities for the most vulnerable (children, special needs, elderly minorities), our unemployment rate, our incarceration rate, our impact on the environment, the international conflicts and affairs we're involved in and you'll find a _very_ different picture being painted. If it wasn't for empty calories like McDonald's and Coke we'd probably have a food crisis too, but instead we just make the poor fat with sugar and other junk.
Socialism isn't the abolition of labor. That would be silly. It's a redirection of our energy towards meeting society's needs. Compare that to our current system, where a large portion of a day's work is spent enriching the holder of capital. Those who have nothing to sell but their own labor (they lack the capital necessary to acquire means of production) are forced to accept "voluntary" contracts where they are compensated at less than the value their work produces. This alienation is something akin to slavery, except that we can choose our plantation.
I won't drag this thread deeply off course with a rundown of Marxist thought, but if you're interested in some light reading (~60 pages) "An Introduction to Marxist Theory" by Ernest Mandel elaborates upon this in a digestible manner. There's also Paul Cockshott's "Towards a New Socialism", which explores the implementation details of proposed alternatives to capitalism. He writes about how me might "maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work [for a privileged few] for a living."
Its not uncommon to hear rhetoric that calls the military a form of institutional murder, the police for institutional violence, and employment for institutional slavery. They all hold some truth, but is also miles alway from the crime that they propose to hold similarities for.
The is a tangible difference in the type of coercion that exist in forced labour compared to wage slavery, just like there is a difference between the coercion in rape compared to prostitution.
> If somebody wouldn't have sex with you of their own volition, but is coerced into doing so for need of food and shelter, then how can it be consensual?
By that argument, wage labor is slavery just as much as prostitution is rape.
So, yeah, if you're that kind of socialist, there's a coherent argument for that point. But if you aren't, you may have trouble justifying why economic coercion overrides consent in one case but not the other.
Myself, I'm somewhere in the social democratic (US-style “democratic socialist”, perhaps, but not what that label would apply to outside of the US) range, and I agree that there is in fact an element of economic coercion in many but not all cases of work-for-pay in a capitalist economy (including, but not uniquely so, prostitution) which makes consent unclear in the general case and clearly absent in some specific cases, but that the best corrective is alleviating the fundamentally coercive nature of the system by improving the social safety net, not trying to ban the kind of work people are more likely to do only if economically coerced (which just leaves people either coerced into some other kind of work or, stuck in the conditions that they sought to escape by accepting distasteful work under duress, or—often—still coerced into exactly the same undesirable work, but without effective legal recourse for additional abuses in the working relationship.)
I don't apply the same logic other places. But banning places from having conversations about how to do it safely is a stupid idea and is going to end with more people hurt. This law benefits no one.
If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
There's definitely value in an Erowid type site that contains legal/health info related to prostitution without serving as a venue for the practice itself.
> If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
That's why I'm generally in favor of what has been called the "Nordic Model," which decriminalizes selling sex and keeps workers in touch with public services, but makes it illegal to operate a brothel and purchase sex.
> Laws like this are very hard to vote against because of TV ads opponents of politicians could run demonizing them.
I've never understood this argument. Many bills are a thousand pages long and involve dozens of completely unrelated subject matters.
If you vote for the bill your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are unpopular. If you vote against it your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are popular.
So how is that an argument to vote for it? If anything it's an argument to vote against it. If you vote against it you can at least provide a defensible reason -- you were voting against the bad parts of the bill, not the good parts of the bill.
By contrast, voting for a bill with poison in it is completely indefensible because the alternative exists to hold out for a bill with only the good parts.
People understand that doing nothing is better than doing something bad.
Most western countries have legalized sex work in some way simply because it's pragmatic, realistic, and harm-reducing. Even the countries where buying sex is illegal, but selling isn't, recognize this. Although that's still a shitty, moral-driven standpoint IMO, at least such a policy acknowledges basic human decency at some level. In fact, most western countries strive for policies that don't actively cheapen human life, regardless of political alignment.
I'd be interested to see who it's helped most. The prostitutes, their pimps and brothels or the global network of human traffickers who indenture these people who just want a better life.
The ideals and realities of prostitution, like many things, can be very different.
I'd point out that merely operating an interactive service provider with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution is criminalized... if you work at a company that might get sued, you probably want to start looking for a new job.
Conspiring or attempting as well... if you talk about with intent or try to figure out a way to facilitate prostitution, that's ostensibly illegal too.
That said, the chilling effect of removing immunity under 230 is the greater concern, as it's more likely to withstand the first amendment challenge, from what I can tell. Of course that assumes that there would be such a challenge, from someone.
This strategy doesn't work in the long run. The ban hammer came down swift on purpose. Only a fraction of Sugar Daddy's users will find their way to Sugar Baby and when the hammer comes down there as well, only a fraction of the community will move to the next one.
Someone on HN has a link to a real nice data guy that is hosting JSON of every Reddit (and HN!) comment ever made (or retrievable at least). If it was important enough to you, you could verify this with the recent fatpeoplehate fiasco.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadYeah, I too hate people who make different life choices than me. We should round all the gun owning, drug using, sex having deviants up, and put them in camps or something. Wouldn't the world be a better place if my vision for society was enforced by the government? /s
Seriously though, when did authoritarianism make such a strong comeback?
Edit:
The fact that people think they have a right to tell me what I put in my body, or how I use it, absolutely blows my mind. And then they wonder, "why are you so concerned about gun rights?". You, you are why I am concerned about gun rights.
However braincels and theredpill do but they are still around. Both promote violence.
This is the problem with using the government to enforce any kind of grey aria social issue. We all have different definitions for sexual deviants, or reasonable drug use, etc...
I'm sure the above comment has some sort of religious background, and genuinely believes people on those subs are deviants.
If we’re going to crack down on exploitation of children in the sex industry, when do we expand that to adults who have no other choice? It’s not free will if your only other option is homelessness or to starve.
TL:DR Exploitation must be protected against. Not against sex work in general.
My issue is not with wage labor (at least, not for this thread). My concern is where the sex work industry is contorted in certain ways into modern slavery with an unappealing twist.
Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.
I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.
I recall, while in college, being surprised by the roommate of a friend (who was a very good student) pulling in what was more than the highest CS grad made out of school when I graduated.
Exploitation is one thing, but this immediate jump to everything is exploitation is what leads to things like this particular law getting passed. Generalizations without facts.
It's an interesting conversation. We're ok with people doing extremely dangerous and abusive jobs for shitty pay. Miners, people roaming the sewers, people welding beams hundreds of feet in the air. Those are fine. But you give someone head for thousands of dollars so you don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's while you're in college, and suddenly you're a poor victim to stand up for.
When I told her that she must have encountered some nasty customers, she said not that much because she didn't have a pimp and always chose her customers.
If the guy didn't look clean or she had a bad feeling, she would refuse to have sex with him.
Regulations like this are putting a strain on the "good" side of this work because it's making it harder for girls to operate independently since they can't post ads.
So they will have to operate with pimps that will feed them customers and make sure they are kept stoned enough to make them money hungry (and thus lowering their standards or at least make the choice harder for her).
Let's not kid ourselves, this bill has nothing to do with protecting sex workers or improving their lives.
Just like Cannabis, the problem will never go away, so you either regulate it or let the black market take care of it.
The problem as I see it is that most people who feel that way will do what you are doing here and speak out against women being exploited. Meanwhile, there are still huge practical barriers to women making good money via other avenues.
Due to my compromised immune system, sex work is out of the question. If this were not true, I might well have moved to Nevada where it is legal because trying to get taken seriously as a woman, trying to network and make business connections, trying to get business people (who are mostly men) to engage me substantively, help me figure this out, open doors for me has gone just so painfully slowly and I remain dirt poor.
And it frustrates me to see these kinds of remarks here because I feel like most of what I say falls on deaf ears. On top of that, I get a lot of ugly push back where I get literally called a liar (quickly edited to merely say not honest) and accused of having a political agenda and told I need to just shut up about my life for some reason or other. Rich men express similar opinions, though often not in an actionable way, and that's basically OK even if others don't agree. I try to talk about it and try to say in practical terms "Hey, if you sincerely want to see women not be exploited and pushed into such choices, then other doors need be opening for us." and that's often all kinds of ugly drama.
But, seriously, how else do you think that works? I have stayed the course due to extraordinary circumstances giving me no other viable options. I wish to hell and back every single day that I had an easier answer that would make my life work.
I am not asking for charity. I am asking for help to become successful at earning a middle class income.
That's the missing piece here. Women need other doors to open. And if that isn't happening, then decrying sex work, one of the few well paid things reliably available to women, is just cutting off options and making things worse.
I don't understand why that seems so extremely hard to get through to people.
This issue strikes particularly close to home for me, as my mother took off for about a decade and worked odd jobs in Nevada while wrestling with mental health issues.
My belief is that doors open for men based on two things: establishing trust and casually being exposed to a great deal more information pertinent to developing a career than women get exposed to. Both of these are rooted in the fact that most men can talk to other men a lot without sex interfering. Women can't really do that. Men either decide they aren't interested, and then barely speak to us, or they decide this is a negotiation for sex/romance if there is more than a tiny amount of conversation. It's a no win situation for a woman.
My experience has been that once a man is sexually or romantically interested in me, he's completely useless to me in terms of being a professional contact. I was romantically involved for a time with a man who had recently changed careers just a few months earlier. His previous career was the field I wanted to go into. No, he never read the paper I wrote that I asked him for feedback on.
Men who are romantically interested in me will not clue me, will not make vital introductions, will not give me meaningful feedback. Other men also mostly don't do those things for me because they barely know me, don't trust me (because they don't really know me), don't want to talk to me enough to get to know what I have to offer professionally, etc.
All of that boils down to I need men talking with me more with a strong assumption that it is platonic/professional, not romantic.
The problem I face is that the only thing men want in exchange is basically sex and there is a lot of value that I provide at times that people feel they can just get for free from me and to hell with me. I am very interested in figuring out how to make mutually beneficial exchanges. But you can't try to negotiate such if most business people will only really talk to you in hopes of getting laid.
To me, this sounds like the classic moral concerns one would think of regarding the legality of prostitution.
Sexwork is work, just like any other type of work.
First get an idealistic society where everyone can eat and have free education then we can discuss about removing this option ...
It 's like putting the cart before the horse
Lots of people tell you not to dream big. It's ok to do it and to believe it's achievable.
What about mining, or Walmart third shift stock work by "...adults who have no other choice..."?
Do you oppose them?
Some exploitation is more heinous than others.
If you’re chained to your 9 to 5, it sucks, but it’s not the end of the world.
If you’re a UN peacekeeper using candy to lure children into sexual relationships and then abandoning them and your resulting offspring (example taken from real world events), that is psycho/sociopath level exploitation.
If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?
No one should be harassed. I would rather the woman have the option of selling sex in a clean work environment with healthcare and some say in who she sells to than having to choose between sleeping with her landlord or being homeless.
People are in that situation where prostitution is illegal and they do it anyway. What's your alternative? To force the woman to do it in secret? To punish her and the John if they get caught? Should she be kicked out? The landlord made to accept no rent? The woman forced to spend another 20 hours at work away from her kids where she might've spent one or two?
It's a shame generally that people have to work for a living. I think that's one of the things "we" are racing to solve by improving technology and automation. I hope there'll be post-scarcity society with a basic income and nobody will be required to make any bad choices. We aren't there yet, so we should try to get there.
So men or women in the Congo, let's say someplace like Goma...
forced by warlords, let's say someone like Nkunda, to go into the mines... or die...
is less exploitative than a landlord asking a tenant for sex in your eyes?
Question was rhetorical. You obviously have a problem with the sexual dimension of the exploitation, and the people of eastern Congo don't face the choice of going into the mines or dying.
It's Nkunda... he offed them anyway, but they got to live a little longer if they went into the mines.
But depriving them of the option of providing sexual services for pay is not protecting them.
The alternative, as you point out, is homelessness or to starve, and they would only choose the option of prostitution when they perceive it as less undesirable than these outcomes.
So you'd be forcing people into circumstances that they perceive as worse than prostitution, since in every other case, they would not be choosing prostitution anyway.
However, when this kind of talk comes from the socially dominant and aforementioned armed folk, it is much more of a serious matter simply because we have a history of actually doing the kinds of violent, enslaving, and oppressive things we claim we'll do.
There's the asymmetry.
You're drawing a very tenuous thread between all of these different concepts. It is FUD until there's evidence of this actually happening.
If you actually scratch beneath the surface of TRP you'll see that the concern is not "women eliminating men" but men elminating other men and women being complicit in that.
But if you want to be pedantic, sure..
I don't know what braincels is but saying TRP promotes violence is a straight up lie.
If websites follow local laws these communities, whatever value they have, will disappear. In fact anything that reminds society of the existence of anything that they feel is shameful (e.g. sex workers in Saudi Arabia [1]). Right along with any discussion anything else that either the state itself or society considers shames them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Saudi_Arabia
The net result: "Saudi Arabia is one of the largest consumers of domestic workers. Around 30% of Saudi's population of 27.3 million are immigrants from other countries. The Law requires that all of the expatriates in Saudi Arabia should have a employment contract while they are in the country. [6] But with some unfair work practices such as sexual harassment, extreme working conditions, and other human rights violations, many try to escape their employers. Runaways are often kidnapped and forced into prostitution [7] Prostitutes tend to be mostly from Nigeria, Ethiopia,[8] Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Tajikistan .[9] As of right now, there are no strict laws in force pertaining to human trafficking. In 2013, the government did not report any prosecutions or convictions of alleged human traffickers.[7] Foreign prostitutes who are arrested by the Saudi vice police face deportation.[8]"
What? In a large part of Europe prostitution is fully legal[1]. For example, in Poland we have very popular websites solely dedicated for sexual services advertisements[2], with photos and price lists.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law#/media/File:P...
[2] - like roksa.pl or odloty.pl
gives example of Saudi Arabia.
As it was a jumping spot for hookers since they shuttered the sex services section years ago (and most went to backpages and other sites)
Wonder what backpages will do, that's their whole business (google city + backpages = first hit is escort listing on backpages)
Imagine if a similar liability were created around regulating job postings or apartment rentals, where Craigslist derives its revenue.
anonymous: no
Retroshare, Freenet, and I2P are all decentralized and anonymous, but they're all somewhat difficult to use, and often very slow.
http://retroshare.net/
https://freenetproject.org/
https://geti2p.net/en/
This is just an extension of conservatism being scared of sex and women going their own way.
Like it or not, prostitution has helped many people rise out of poverty and even make societies (the "west" back in the early US days) around their business.
Laws like this are very hard to vote against because of TV ads opponents of politicians could run demonizing them.
Voting against it:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)
Toxicity towards women taking control of their sexuality runs deep within our society.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/the-ori...
At the end, you're mentally and physically tired. And you used a good chunk of your day being productive for someone else so they can make even more money on that.
They were still slaves.
My employers tell me what to do, yes; but have you ever thought that perhaps I like the exchange, and find it valuable to have someone who tells me what to do to get to an end result where I get a decent, reliable wage for doing so?
And how under socialism am I going to be freed from having to labour? If nobody labours, nothing will get done. Conversely, if I labour and see a massively reduced benefit from doing so personally, I will hardly be inspired to work hard.
socialism is not about 'ending work', it's about the relationship the worker has to his output. "but who will clean the toilets?" probably the same people that do it now, but they will be paid the full value of their labor instead of having most of it skimmed off the top in the name of "profit". Corporate Profit doesn't really exist in socialism, because profit by definition is surplus value. This value needs to ends up in the hands of the people who produce it. under this, toilet cleaning (sanitation) becomes a more lucrative job prospect because the compensation would be higher.
"but how can businesses be run without a single private entity handing down orders from the top" same as they are now, with people working together. It may seem like a stretch to think of a society where the population is empowered enough that employees can self administrate, but ome needs to look no farther than the open source community for good examples of it being possible. "but software developers are smart people! they aren't like the mindless drones doing my laundry" arguments for why that is textbook classism aside, we got ourselves into this position because that's the society we've cultivated, it's not some fundamental aspect of our species that 'most of us are dumb that's why we need rich people to tell us what to do' on some level that's true, we are but animals. However it applies to economic elites too: they are also just animals, and despite the smoke and mirrors still deal with the limitations of our biology. being smart or good at something should be it's own reward. having more money than they can reasonably spend ends up becoming a self preserving entity on it's own, rent seeking and legalized bribery and so on. if you want to learn more about this phenomena, I recommend reading Marx's Das Kapital.
it's easy to think we have a "high standard of living" under capitalism when that's all we've known, especially in the last bastion of the middle class that is the tech sector. but look at our (non)prescription drug use, depression rates, access to healthcare and living necessities for the most vulnerable (children, special needs, elderly minorities), our unemployment rate, our incarceration rate, our impact on the environment, the international conflicts and affairs we're involved in and you'll find a _very_ different picture being painted. If it wasn't for empty calories like McDonald's and Coke we'd probably have a food crisis too, but instead we just make the poor fat with sugar and other junk.
I won't drag this thread deeply off course with a rundown of Marxist thought, but if you're interested in some light reading (~60 pages) "An Introduction to Marxist Theory" by Ernest Mandel elaborates upon this in a digestible manner. There's also Paul Cockshott's "Towards a New Socialism", which explores the implementation details of proposed alternatives to capitalism. He writes about how me might "maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work [for a privileged few] for a living."
The is a tangible difference in the type of coercion that exist in forced labour compared to wage slavery, just like there is a difference between the coercion in rape compared to prostitution.
By that argument, wage labor is slavery just as much as prostitution is rape.
So, yeah, if you're that kind of socialist, there's a coherent argument for that point. But if you aren't, you may have trouble justifying why economic coercion overrides consent in one case but not the other.
Myself, I'm somewhere in the social democratic (US-style “democratic socialist”, perhaps, but not what that label would apply to outside of the US) range, and I agree that there is in fact an element of economic coercion in many but not all cases of work-for-pay in a capitalist economy (including, but not uniquely so, prostitution) which makes consent unclear in the general case and clearly absent in some specific cases, but that the best corrective is alleviating the fundamentally coercive nature of the system by improving the social safety net, not trying to ban the kind of work people are more likely to do only if economically coerced (which just leaves people either coerced into some other kind of work or, stuck in the conditions that they sought to escape by accepting distasteful work under duress, or—often—still coerced into exactly the same undesirable work, but without effective legal recourse for additional abuses in the working relationship.)
If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
> If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
That's why I'm generally in favor of what has been called the "Nordic Model," which decriminalizes selling sex and keeps workers in touch with public services, but makes it illegal to operate a brothel and purchase sex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden
I've never understood this argument. Many bills are a thousand pages long and involve dozens of completely unrelated subject matters.
If you vote for the bill your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are unpopular. If you vote against it your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are popular.
So how is that an argument to vote for it? If anything it's an argument to vote against it. If you vote against it you can at least provide a defensible reason -- you were voting against the bad parts of the bill, not the good parts of the bill.
By contrast, voting for a bill with poison in it is completely indefensible because the alternative exists to hold out for a bill with only the good parts.
People understand that doing nothing is better than doing something bad.
We've had this happen with a lot of "child pornography" laws in the past.
I'm waiting for ACLU to take this to the courts.
I'd be interested to see who it's helped most. The prostitutes, their pimps and brothels or the global network of human traffickers who indenture these people who just want a better life.
The ideals and realities of prostitution, like many things, can be very different.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/03/why-fostas-res...
I'd point out that merely operating an interactive service provider with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution is criminalized... if you work at a company that might get sued, you probably want to start looking for a new job.
Conspiring or attempting as well... if you talk about with intent or try to figure out a way to facilitate prostitution, that's ostensibly illegal too.
That said, the chilling effect of removing immunity under 230 is the greater concern, as it's more likely to withstand the first amendment challenge, from what I can tell. Of course that assumes that there would be such a challenge, from someone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SugarBaby/
In a way, I'm not really surprised.
Someone on HN has a link to a real nice data guy that is hosting JSON of every Reddit (and HN!) comment ever made (or retrievable at least). If it was important enough to you, you could verify this with the recent fatpeoplehate fiasco.
Anyways, does anyone know if blockchaim based forums like steemit are affected by FOSTA?