It doesn't seem to me that this result should have been difficult to predict. Some people did, of course, but neither politicians nor the mainstream press seemed to give the argument much consideration.
There's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias):
What is sad is that there are a lot of real-size social experiments in various countries that have a variety of legislation and situation and a ton of literature to guide policy there.
I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking.
These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.
Then put everyone under 24 hour surveillance. That is the only logical choice given your goals. If you allow someone any amount of freedom, you can't be sure they won't used it this try and enslave someone else.
Balancing between freedom and safety is one thing.
But if we have a bill that chips away from freedoms guaranteed by section 230, and it also doesn't make the people it's trying to help any safer...
can't we agree that bill in specific should get thrown out? This isn't a problem of balancing freedom with protecting sex workers. This bill makes the Internet less free and makes sex workers less safe. Everyone loses with this bill, except a few Congresspeople who get to look good for cameras.
That's clearly not what the comment you're replying to was saying.
It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence.
It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.
The "higher moral principle of fundamental liberty" is choosing the more free/less restrictive path even when that leads to worse outcomes.
That's literally the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) even if giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, it's still not what should be done.
That's a silly argument. You could equally rightly say that we should just execute everybody because if they are breathing they can enslave someone. Clearly parent didn't mean trivial solutions are the "best" because they achieve the goal 100% but require destroying everything else.
It seems reasonable to claim (and seems to be backed up by authorities on the issue) that most genuine sex trafficking originates from two sources: 1) visa fraud and/or human smuggling across the border and 2) domestically, broken homes. Trying to fix either of these root causes requires stepping on some political landmines.
Human trafficking is not the only consideration. There is health and safety of sex workers, issue of tying public resources to police voluntary victimless acts as well as just freedom to make choices about your life.
Prohibition makes all the above significantly worse. You would need a lot of compelling evidence it helps reducing trafficking to even get into a reasonable debate on it.
I highly doubt it was ever about trafficking to begin with. It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.
> It's about various groups (on both right and left) wanting to tell people what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.
Exactly. That's what makes me bitter about these questions.
Legalization of prositution is actually an interesting question as you can find left-wing and right-wing arguments for and against. It has a potential of being very divisive or unifying across party lines.
And about health issues, I agree it is an important one, but sorry, if the workers we are talking about are free of their career choices, I think it comes after the question of people who do not have a choice.
There are many other things you can do to reduce trafficking though. You can be more aggressive setting up honey pots and going after traffickers or make borders more secure or invest in social services to help people in rough life situation to name a few.
I don't want the kind of thinking that sacrifices freedom and moral principles so the bad guys have less avenues to profit to dominate our world. For all we know if they can't do trafficking they will switch to other criminal activity and hurt people there. They are the problem not the people who exchange sex for money so let's go after the actual problem.
"Human trafficking" is a problem created by immigration law. Like the 39 dead Vietnamese in the UK recently, the "system" would prefer that they are dead than allow them to work in the UK.
The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
> My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking.
"Any chance" is an absurd standard. Consider what a country would look like if you said that personal preferences should be dismissed if it had any chance of increasing murder. Get comfortable eating your steak with your teeth since the presence of knives has a non-zero chance of increasing murder!
“The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures.
We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.
Why shouldn't opiods be legal? Sure, they are bad. But so is tobacco. Most overdoses happen precisely because of unstable dosages or unexpected fentanyl.
I think you need to balance the risks of addiction and negative health consequences against the cost of having gangs/cartels profiting off of the fact that the substance is controlled. With marijuana, it is neither very addictive nor are the health consequences of using marijuana very severe, at least in the short term. Legalization is a bit of a no brainer for marijuana.
Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.
Decriminalisation (as opposed to legalisation) is a good step, though. Remove the jeopardy from seeking help from healthcare professionals and the state.
Keep the supply of the substances illegal, but provide safe places - staffed with medics - where people can have their drugs tested, take the drugs in as safe a way as possible and be signposted to rehab and recovery services, including mental health services.
There is enormous money in fleecing government programs, particularly medicade / medicare, and it's a lot easier if you control many touchpoints (ambulance, urgent care, specialists, etc.). The book Overcharged describes many of the common scams https://www.amazon.com/Overcharged-Americans-Much-Health-Car...
Organized crime has moved out of overtly sleezy industries like gambling into much more profitable ones.
The only part of this article that can be considered "news" is that two presidential candidates support doing a study on the bill's effects. Everything else is the same as the articles written before it passed.
What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?
Where prostitution has been completely legalized there’s been a huge increase in demand, and the market has responded not with an increase in wages for sex workers but with an increase in slavery. In practice the least-bad policy seems to be legal/decriminalized to sell but illegal to buy.
Their contention is that legal sex work creates a market that incentivises sex trafficking, in which case it should be illegal to protect women from being victimized.
Noooooo! When I ehard about backpage being shut down because it was the biggest place for child sex trafficking, I said it was the dumbest move they could make. You have a website with the vast majority of illegal sex traffickers COMING TO YOU, and you close it? Why? Make BP a deal, give the FBI an office to scan everything so they can go after child sex traffickers, and you can stay open. We'd have arrested thousands of them by now.
If I recall correctly, the owners of Backpage we're charged with taking money and working with the traffickers. It may not have been a matter of Backpage accidentally being an exploited market place.
I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.
The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.
There's a federal statute regarding trafficking persons across state lines as I recall. It's not specifically "prostitution" but meets the general description if there's an interstate nexus, which of course can be easily shown for an internet site in many cases.
The Mann Act, a federal law, forbids transport for the purposes of illegal sexual activity. If prostitution is illegal in your state, and you arrange to meet a prostitute online and provide her with a taxicab or Uber, then you have committed a federal crime and are a human trafficker in the eyes of the law. (Though federal LE will probably not get involved unless it crosses state lines.)
Fun fact: Originally the Mann Act was passed to give the government the power to prosecute interracial couples. Kinda like how sex-offender registries were first implemented to allow police in California to track gays.
Those memos are pretty damning and run directly counter to what has been pushed in the media. Worse yet, it suggests that cooperation itself is what damned the organization when someone had to do something.
This adds significantly to the mindset of "do not cooperate with the legal system even if you're trying to help, no good can come of it." And my already ebbing faith in the media has slipped even further.
Sure, except we just watched our freaking PRESIDENT get impeached for "contempt of Congress" which doesn't even have a law covering it, there is no such thing--not only do all Americans supposedly enjoy due process, we also can safely ignore a Congressional subpoena because it carries no legal requirement to show or act unlike the judicial version. So unless a court sends one out, you can choose to do as you please.
I swear I live in Clown World.
Also, the FBI really, really sucks.
So what difference does it make whether you cooperate or not? Either we have rights or we don't. I need to know because my daughter is learning the US Constitution in History class in 9th grade and I keep having to explain all the cognitive dissonance to her between what is clearly written and what is actually going on! It sucks!
Reasonable mistake, must happen all the time when people have sex with someone with no breasts, hairless in the pertinent areas, and don't talk at all with them.
I prefer Germany, Austria and Switzerland's model.
Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome.
The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns.
I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.
As far as I know the problem here in Germany is legalization.
They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex-workers harder.
"Just decriminalized" means there is no confidence or way to assume that the sex workers are routinely tested. Pass.
As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.
There is a debate as to whether or not legalizing prostitution exacerbates sex slavery by creating a market for prostitution that willing market participants are unable to fill. This author[1] points out that studies on this question use the term "sex trafficking" which can mean either illegal immigration of willing sex workers or sex slavery. That distinction seems important, but is often not clarified by investigators.
I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate.
FOR: Men.
Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Women.
Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution.
FOR: Sex workers.
Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Religious groups.
They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one.
AGAINST: Feminists.
Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2]
Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery.
This is a big simplification: There are male sex workers and female sex worker customers even if most of each population is the other way around. Additionally, voluntary sex workers themselves generally oppose the forced labour market (i.e. sex slavery) as much as the prohibitionists, even if they're understandably focusing more on decriminalizing themselves.
And I don't think the sex-worker-exclusionary feminists are representative of most feminists, even if the overlap between their views on this topic and those of conservative and religious groups gives them a big megaphone.
Regarding legal presence, many sex workers are in a country legally aside from their choice to do sex work, sometimes even with work permission for most jobs. (Canada has some relevant exclusions in their standard open work permit, for example.)
Empirically, the vast majority of those who hire sex workers are men. But yes, as I said, it's a gross over-simplification.
I would hope everyone opposes sex slavery.
In the progressive circles I'm familiar with in my midwestern city (Columbus, Ohio), I've never seen anyone make a feminist case for decriminalization or legalization. The consensus among progressives here is that sex work is bad for women. The voices I hear in the national media do tend to be ambivalent if not outright pro-sex-work, though, so I agree it's not simple.
I've heard the argument that criminalization fundamentally deprives a woman of the right to choose what to do with her body, which I'd consider a feminist argument.
Indeed. I'm curious: Do the sex workers you speak with claim that decriminalization and legalization are two different concepts as applied to themselves, or do they reject the label of legalization as dehumanizing because it implies that a human can be illegal?
(Yes, technically no anti-sex-worker laws claim any category of human is inherently illegal, instead defining some of them as criminals through outlawing certain activities, but you wouldn't know it from how much stigma is attached to public discourse about sex workers.)
I've head opinions and personal life stories directly from current and past sex workers, though I've never been one or been a client of one. I even know of one example who chooses to do sex work despite having lots of privilege and being simultaneously in training for a professional career, simply out of happiness and self-confidence with being desirable and desired physically/sexually without denying their own more intellectual skills and talents. (Not giving more details to avoid outing anyone.)
I'm not an expert on exactly what proportion of progressives or feminists are hostile to sex workers. A confluence of societal factors (some but not all of which I mentioned in my previous comment) makes me believe that the subset that's hostile to them is better connected to the media, better funded, better organized, more privileged, and for all of these reasons easier to find and notice and hear on this topic.
I don't think that says anything about the broader question of how common different views are or what different credible views have a significant number of adherents, merely something about our current Overton window.
> A confluence of societal factors (some but not all of which I mentioned in my previous comment) makes me believe that the subset that's hostile to them is better connected to the media, better funded, better organized, more privileged, and for all of these reasons easier to find and notice and hear on this topic.
That may be. There is certainly a powerful stigma around sex work that prevents people like your friend from advocating for themselves.
I suppose it depends on whether you're more concerned with your partner's character in an abstract way or you're more concerned about actual infidelity.
You've missed a fairly large FOR - people who support freedom & liberty. The arguments against prostitution centre around its second order effects on greater society and is a crime with hypothetical rather than actual victims.
The argument that there should be a victim of some sort before criminalising something is compelling. It is difficult to argue that the prostitutes feel they are victims of prostitution without discovering that other crimes are already being committed without criminalising prostitution.
I have a much easier times justifying criminalising alcohol from principles than it is to argue against criminalising prostitutes, so I don't see why the one with obviously terrible second order effects is considered to be OK and not the other. We have to accept that we already tolerate a level of background things-slipping-through-the-cracks for the sake of liberty and general comfort.
It isn't a particularly hard-core position. They aren't a major force in the debate but there will be a very substantial demographic who don't care one way or the other but are in principle happy to leave well enough alone. They'd probably have a mild preference for not arresting people for no reason.
Prostitution has been legal in Australia since around the 90s. Nobody particularly cares^. The only people who it has implications for are people who choose to be involved.
^ Ie, it doesn't crop up in politics as an issue. Lots of people care. Nobody is making a big deal about it.
I agree it's not a hard core libertarian position. I guess I just meant I don't think there are that many people who consult their libertarian principles to decide their views on an issue.
One might speculate that libertarian principles are only held by a small number of people, but why would such principles not play just as important role in decision-making as other principles, like e.g. judgmental moralism? Do freedom lovers feel less deeply than freedom haters?
They will be outnumbered and shouted down by conservative Christians on one side and radical feminists on the other, who will raise a panic that legalizing prostitution will lead to sin and debauchery/women being exploited, respectively.
This is a MUCH bigger problem in the US than in Australia.
Maybe you can check the feminist movement history. For example, many were against abortion for various reasons, one of them was that it allowed men to pressure them to get one.
You can read prostitution legalization as a right to choose to use your own body for profit or you can read prostitution banning as the right for not being used for profit from your body.
Many imagine is a simple thing but all the other values come into play.
Some people think a embryon is more important that a women choice. Some think that right to sell your body is more important than to legally allow women oppression through sex work.
As someone who spent over a decade in the adult industry BackPage was extremely responsible. They had a staff of 70 people dedicated to reporting suspicious ads to police. They were the #1 source of trafficking tips.
Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.
> Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.
Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.
It seems to me that the legal trouble would have come from continuing to operate the site, and by selling the site instead of deleting the database and shutting it down, she sold out those women.
But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.
A person in the situation described above is dealing with corrupt and capricious police and prosecutors. Honest cops would have just charged her and asked the courts to shut her down, if they really felt she had broken laws.
the reason, backpage was shut down is that the gvt couldn't get a cut. and like all activities that are morally, grey. once the gvt stops getting their cut, they will scoop in. it's just the same, way the mafia is allowed to operate unions etc and once they ruffle feathers and stop contributing to politicians then all of a sudden the mafia is running a racket. Yet the gvt runs the biggest racket, protection scheme. so yeah, now all the SW are back on the streets or in the hands of pimps. Also the backpage era, due to supply and demand markets efficiencies, seems SW had become a safe sustainable, decent livelihood for many.
I believe it was shutdown not because they didn't get a cut, but because they were the perfect boogeyman to create a large cut of other pies.
From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it..
from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money.
Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers.
It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing.
The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?
The reason Backpage got shut down is because the owners pissed off Cindy and John McCain with negative reporting in the Phoenix New Times and large donations against them. Everything else is just excuses.
You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking?
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists.
Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view.
Why?
When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where the product / service carries less legal risk and societal stigmas than before. Thus, men are far less likely to pay large premiums for sex with non-prostitutes including 'courting', dating, marriage, etc.
You don’t need complex market forces. It is fairly common for people to disallow other people from doing things:
* for their own good
* for perceived externalities
This is common enough for drugs, heavy metal, child employment, and contracting that it doesn’t surprise me they would apply it to prostitution. In fact, I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
1. Drugs should all be legal as Portugal's legalization of all drugs has shown us the war on drugs is a massive boondoggle. [1] So has Canada's legalization of marijuana.
2. Child employment is legislated on the basis that children aren't able to make their own decisions, and that sounds ok.
3. Heavy metals, I assume you don't mean the music, is regulated to protect the welfare of the entire population.
4. Contracting?
> I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
I can't think of a single reason to legislate consenting adults exchanging money for sex. It's not for me, but as with the war on drugs, the medicine is so much worse than the cure it's time we dropped it. The only thing harmed by regulated, clean and safe prostitution is property value and puritanical sensibilities.
Especially when scientists taught monkeys the value of money and they first thing they did was exchange it for sex. [2] That might be the most fitting epitaph for humanity yet, actually haha.
Yeah, I'm sure you have these opinions, but lots of people with a high care index (in the Moral Foundations Theory sense) and low liberty index believe that we can't let people do things because they're going to harm themselves and they're incapable of making the tradeoffs. I meant heavy metal, as in the music. Contracting, like in AB5 in California. Etc. etc.
It doesn't really matter. It is common among those on the left who conform to that high-care/low-liberty set (of which there are many) to infantilize people, remove any agency they have, and then claim to be protecting them. You don't need to invent this twisted "women want to corner the market for sex" crap to justify it. You just need people who think "oh no, those prostitutes must be doing it because they're forced; let's ban that"
There are always outliers with strange opinions in any sufficiently large movement, but a much more common feminist position is to be strongly in support of sex workers rights and safety.
You're very wrong - it is not just a few outliers.
You can Google it easily enough, and that will show you many feminists are against it. But to truly understand the issue, see which groups, along with religious right, are the biggest lobbyists against any state bills that attempt to decriminalize prostitution. You will find that it's many women's groups, not just the evangelicals.
My partner works as a government policy officer, researching and formulating sex work legislation, which means engaging with all stakeholder and advocacy groups in the community.
Her experience indicates that feminist groups who oppose legalised prostitution are a very small minority, at least in our Australian state.
Yeah I mean she is a pathological liar, she stated publicly twice that she had an abortion and admitted decades later that in fact she didn't. She also evaded taxes by keeping a bank account in Switzerland and paid employees of EMMA far worse than the common market price, all while renting a huge publicly owned property in cologne for the magazine for almost nothing.
I can just point to Sweden. The meaning of prostitution has change in the public discussed to be the same as rape, regardless of consent. Being pro-prostitution here is the same as being pro-rape which is very anti-feminist in eye of the Swedish public and people with such views are seen as far-right.
The two arguments that people here use is that a person that do sex for money would not had done so voluntary, thus there no consent. The second argument is that paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery.
>paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery
Just make a law so that persons must do something with payers bodies, not vice versa. It solves two problems with one shot: it’s no slavery anymore and finally you get some service.
> I can just point to Sweden. The meaning of prostitution has change in the public discussed to be the same as rape
is this really representative of how the public thinks or just a small pocket within a pocket of politically correct snowflakes? Knowing plenty of Swedes (most are much closer to the far left than to the far right). I'm familiar with Sweden's (strange) view of what constitutes rape (see Assange), and personally think that is a step forward. But I never met anyone argue that "all prostitution is sex slavery" or "anti-feminist".
> paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery.
This seems like a gross simplification. If I offer my body in exchange for money without a middle-man/pimp then it is still my choice. Consider an individual with below avg IQ unable to find meaningful work using his head but equipped with an unusually strong body/frame. Is it slavery if I freelance myself out to a moving company and lug around boxes and furniture all day? What about a male gay prostitute who voluntarily makes money on the side. It is even besides the point if the person is supporting a drug-habit or not.
You can't pretend to be pro choice and feminist if at the same time the system under which you think socially outcasts everyone who thinks differently.
I don't think it is representative of the public's view. See my other comment.
I think the problem with many feminists in Sweden are that they are a rather theoretical kind, centered around gender studies at the universities. And they think that they know better than the poor uneducated women who sell sex what they want and need themselves.
How do either of the arguments not apply to every single job or task that anyone does for renumeration? I would not do my job without being paid, therefore I am being forced to work against my will?
I have seen multiple feminists make the argument that the phrase "selling their bodies" also applies to football players, chemical workers[1], coal miners. I find it fairly persuasive.
> The meaning of prostitution has change in the public discussed to be the same as rape, regardless of consent.
As a Swede, I say that that is an exageration. But it is true that very few, if any, public figure dare to speak up for legalizing prostitution. On the other hand, it's not a crime that the police prioritize, and last time I heard, no one have been more than fined for paying a sex-worker.
When the RFSL and Amnesty made their announcement to work for legalization there was a lot of media focus on the question. There was a lot of anger from people and articles about people leaving Amnesty and the Swedish branch making statement against the decision.
It was also not many months ago that V (the most left leaning party) suggested that the punishment for paying a sex-worker should be increased to similar levels as rape, with jail time as minimum.
We could say that V views are a fringe part of the feminist movement in Sweden, but I am not sure that is actually a correct assessment. As you say, few, if any, public figure dare to speak up with opposing views on the topic. It is hard to estimate popular opinion outside of political polls.
It seems like neither outliers nor the consensus. Rather, it seems like lots of people call themselves feminists but there are passionate disagreements among those people about
Some feminists surely do, but conflating some with all is a fallacy of composition that hinders discussion. Your reasoning in the rest of the comment seems rather questionable and veers into seeming even more like a generalization.
However GP didn't say "all feminists", only "feminists".
If I say "Germans eat bread for breakfast" that's generally understood to mean "In general Germans eat bread for breakfast" or "A majority of Germans eat bread for breakfast". Treating it as if I said "Every German eats bread for every breakfast" would be constructing a straw man. People generally understand that there is variation in every group, even if they don't explicitly put that disclaimer on every sentence.
It is not exactly comparable. Prostitution is an important issue in feminism. Statement "environmentalists support nuclear power" would be a better analogy, because many environmentalists are for nuclear power and many are against.
There's even a well known shorthand for the subset of feminists that carve out exceptions for sex workers: SWERF. Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
You're treating feminism as a simplistic monolith rather than a multifaceted movement across different cultural groups and sects. There are plenty of differing opinions and trends within the umbrella of feminism that don't always agree with one another, often the divisions seem to fall across generational and national boundaries. It seems to me though that feminists, and the left in general, in the US are very much in favor of the decriminalization of sex work.
But the real gap was between the genders. Women were 14% more likely to say sex work should be illegal than men. They were also 18% more likely to say it's immoral.
Now what "feminists" think is another question, I doubt that has been studied, and that term means a lot of things to a lot of people. But according to the polls the majority of the opposition in the US to legalizing and tolerating sex work comes from women, regardless of their political orientation.
One can extrapolate that electing more women would lead to harsher laws about sex work and indeed both have happened in the past decade.
Your numbers confirm rather than refute parent's hypothesis. Prostitutes sell what men want more cheaply than other women sell it. Some other women disapprove. Some portion of those other women are feminists.
YouGov's numbers neither confirm nor refute the parent's hypothesis because women and feminists are not the same thing.
No evidence has been presented to support the parent's anecdotal belief about what feminists think. I have spoken to plenty of feminists over the years and have found them to be split pretty evenly over this issue. My point was that the opposition to legalizing sex work is mostly from females, and may or may not be from feminists (whatever that word even means in 2020).
Some self-described feminists think prostitution should be legal, and some don’t. There’s not one uniform “feminist opinion” on the subject.
As for those who are against it, sure, maybe some reason in the cynical way you describe. But I think the lion’s share are motivated by other reasons. Typically they argue that prostitution is coercive, as you can’t call something “consensual” that someone needs to do to survive.
Personally I think prostitution should be just as legal as any other kind of work; but that’s not a license to grossly misinterpret the arguments of those who disagree.
There’s definitely a cross section of highly biased and partisan supporters that could have swung either direction at some point in their life if they had hung out with different people.
Almost every person on earth could have swung in any direction if they had hung out with different people. If you or I hung out with Ancient Egyptians our whole lives we would have thought burying kings with living slaves was about as normal as surfing Hacker News.
which holds the implication that people as an abstract between now and ancient Egypt are not actually that different. They're just responding to different stimuli in their respective environments.
That's an implication a lot of people will do a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid because it means you can't just ignore the misadventures of various societies throughout history by saying "we're smarter now" or something like that.
yes, on biological basis it is true that Republicans and Democrats are pretty similar. They are in fact the same species. Even if Democrats in 2019 might be statistically more likely to have genes for sickle-cell Anemia... is that relevant?
I think the relevant questions are:
- "What are the mindsets they've actually absorbed over their lives?"
- "How do they evaluate evidence?"
- "How do they evaluate the competence and character of judicial and executive appointees?"
- "Whom do they rely on for expertise?"
- "How do they reason about the role of government?"
- "How do they design policies?"
- "How do they spot potential unintended consequences?"
- "How do they communicate with constituents?"
- "Whose perspectives do they believe it is important to consider?"
Why do you think that the... Democratic Party... doesn’t want to “legislate morality.” That is the essence of what all politicians do. Bernie Sanders talking about the 1% and 99% is trying to legislate morality.
Do you think murder is immoral? Well guess what? There's a law for that. Just because you disagree with the morality being legislated, you can't pretend that "legislating morality" is the problem.
Well it depends if you like it's moral for people to use social media for prostitution. If your code of morals thinks that shouldn't be allowed, then these laws make sense. If you disagree - and that's fine - you can't blame "legislating morality".
My guess is "legislating morality" refers to pushing legislation based solely on moral concerns. There are other reasons to outlaw murder than just morality.
Not so. There are considerations of tangible consequences for some unconsenting third party. That's the difference. Outlawing something "because it's wrong" is different than outlawing something because it wrongs someone.
There is no definition of "because it's wrong" where no one is wronged, unless you bring in religion.
Still, someone can be wronged with their consent. Consent is not binary. That's why there are minimum salary laws for instance : so that there's not a competition to the bottom.
When it comes to prostitution, the fact that huge numbers of prostitutes are former victims of abuse, for instance, should tell you that something is wrong. And even then, I would say that the minority who could be unambiguously considered to be doing it voluntarily is doing a disservice to women and society in general, by promoting the idea that bodies and what is most intimate can be for sale.
We're off on a tangent now, but you don't need religion to believe a victimless act to be immoral. All I was getting at is laws are not made strictly on moral grounds (rightfully so) and perhaps that's what "legislating morality" was referring to.
Making murder illegal should be mainly about preventing people from being the victim of murder. Whether or not murder is moral or not shouldn't really be relevant. We've decided that people have a right to not be murdered for whatever reason. The only thing the law should then be concerned about is how to prevent murder.
Using the same reasoning to outlaw prostitution is harder. Sure you could argue people have a right to not be a prostitute -- and I heartily agree with that -- but then the job of the law is to prevent people from being prostitutes against their will. All outlawing prostitution outright does is hide it from view. It doesn't help people get the rights they deserve. In fact it takes away the right to be a prostitute if you want to. The only line of arguing that prostitution should be illegal is either because we should outlaw anything we deem immoral, or because somehow concocted a right that prevents people from doing what they want to do.
In my opinion the basis for any system of law ought to be that people can do what they want to. The only exceptions being when doing so infringes on the right of others. I should be free to be a prostitute. I should not be free to force other people to be prostitutes against their will. I should be free to wildly swing my arms. I should not be free to punch someone in the face.
Of course everyone has their own opinion of what the law should be and so we end up with a patchwork of intentions -- let alone how the law actually gets applied. That's fine. People are free to have opinions.
Either laws are written based on morality, or laws are written based on rights. You can't have both without being inconsistent.
Do those factors have the same meaning when someone would rather not be e.g. a cleaner or an orderly at a nursing home? Those jobs are physical and not so pleasant. They pay much less than prostitution. Yet, many people are so employed.
Coal miners sell their body for their job too. There are plenty of jobs that will destroy your body but pay better than average for your skill level.
At the end of the day when an adult makes the decision to do a particular job because it pays better than the alternative we can't automatically count them as a "victim". It robs people of their agency and infantilizes them.
Worker unions constantly pushing laws to improve working conditions of workers, so they will not need to sell their health. BTW: will you suck me for $50? I'm looking for a contractor.
A lot of people argue that "consensual murder" (a.k.a. euthanasia) should be legal (with the appropriate safeguards to prevent abuse).
Edit: Actually I retract this comment. You bring an interesting point, and shouldn't be downvoted. I guess the argument "to prevent abuse" includes "to prevent people from exchanging their lives for money". And you could say the same for sex - people should be able to choose to have sex / be murdered / donate their organs, but shouldn't be able to exchange that for money.
I guess the counterargument would be, that the exact definition of "exchange" depends on whether you're actually giving something - arguably, you're giving up your life / kidney (and most people aren't willing to give that up, regardless of whether they're being paid or not), but not necessarily giving up sex (and many people are giving it up pretty often... the only difference is, are they also getting paid for it, or not).
Freezing of patient for far future is medical procedure (with very little chance of success). Euthanasia is suicide done because of necessity. Result is same in both cases — patient is dead and suffering no pain, but they are very different procedures because freezing leaves room for hope, while euthanasia doesn't.
Let's not forget the idea that it could be possible for a female sex worker to consensually engage in her job.
Not in the sense of "They'll murder my family if I don't" but just choosing to do it out of her own free will.
I chatted to a prostitute in Thailand, she came from the poor North to work as a sex worker in Bangkok and she was fairly proud of the fact she was sending so much money home to her parents, living in a village where pretty much the only thing you can do is farm.
She showed me a picture of the car her dad was able to buy and kept stressing "it's a 4 door!". She was a genuinely happy and fun loving girl.
To me the shocking thing in this story is a man driving around in a car paid for by his daughter by fellating 300+ men per year, but not the fact this girl decided to do this for a living.
> Do you think murder is immoral?
The story of Armin Meiwes comes to mind, who killed and ate a man who volunteered to have done that to him. There's also the concept of consensual homicide
It seems to be a universal phenomenon (I see similar trends in many European countries, including mine) and I wouldn't use the word "played". The left seems to be as keen on legislating morality as the right.
Oh very much so. For different stated reasons, but "government" (sometimes wearing the mask of religion) has always wanted to control behavior, and as a subset, morality.
> It has also been reported that 12,5 % of men used to solicit prostitutes before the implementation of the law in 1999 whereas in 2014 only 7,7 % of men purchased sexual services.[5]
As the top comment said, this was never about actually decreasing prostitution, but about victimizing and outcasting women.
Except that there's no universal definition of the left, what you're thinking about is usually the "center-left", who use social issues to avoid addressing economics and smear these to their own left, who usually oppose their policies.
Right/left axis is becoming useless, except as a branding system. It's much more useful to find out if someone is outcome/negotiation oriented vs. thinks in absolutes.
While I think that your distinction is interesting, I find that even people who say they are absolutists are willing to negotiate based on some criteria.
I don't know anyone that self defines as "absolutist", but many that simply are that way.
My elementary school was a religious one. There was something that deeply annoyed me about how they reasoned. I couldn't put my finger on it then, but I got a knee-jerk reaction as soon as I heard it. It was just that: love is better than hate, virtue is better than sin, etc. so you must comply with what God/they/your parents said because they loved you vs. your bad instincts, inspired by the devil that is Bad.
By the time I started high scholl in a public school, the dictator had died and we transitioned to democracy. Tolerance was the magic word. We can now speak our minds, accept others' opinions, discuss frankly any idea.
But then the left was the forbidden set of ideas making itself a space. Forty years later they're hegemonic and "zero tolerance" (I hate that expression) and beware of what you say are back.
They're exactly the same as their parents (that they consider troglodites) just with a different set of dogmas. Ideas change easily with the fads, but mindsets not so fast.
The trick is to present an idea that's absolutely good on paper like: "don't you think that everybody should have what they need to live?" But ignoring all the practical details of implementation: if it's at all possible, if the proposed measures are useful to reach that goal, etc.
No one of them would call themselves "absolutists", that sounds like ancient regime, or fascists, nazis. But they reason in absolutes and there's no way to touch them with words. They won't negotiate because they just vote for politicians that promise to magically implement that wishful thinking. The politicians will negotiate to reach power, though, they know better.
That is super interesting! I recognize I tend to think in absolutes an try to adjust for it. I also am tempted by elegant solutions over practical ones. I get stuck on consistency as a value. Not that consistency or elegance are bad, if they work.
I'll add that Haidt's analysis that the value placed on compassion relative to loyalty or fairness is a good predictor of party rings true. Compassion > fairness -> democrat
Compassion = fairness -> republican
Compassion < fairness -> libertarian
That works until globalization takes your job to Singapur and the left wing party that you vote for starts saying that we should let all the poor inmigrants in because it isn't fair to let them die in Libya. Then the left becomes a high-income urban professionals ideology while the blue collar workers start voting Trump or Johnson... Hillary said just as much a few months ago.
First - every country legislates morality in a variety of ways, and making/keeping prostitution illegal is not merely a religious issue.
The majority of people oppose decriminalisation [1] even in fairly progressive Ontario, Canada, 6 in 10 oppose it [2]
Second - it's a very reasonable course of action to make an activity which is deemed harmful - actually illegal.
"Smoking is bad" -> "Let's make it widely available" is generally not the first order course of action.
Ergo - your assumptions about 'moralising and not caring' is starting to inch into anti-religious bigotry territory.
Now - obviously this is a nuanced issue - and it's possible more permissive laws might lessen harm, but this is by no means obvious.
We saw this with vaping: once something becomes socially normative, behaviours can grow rapidly. There is a black market for almost everything, legal or not.
A large, wide open, legalised & regulated sex trade may simply provide more customers for nefarious sex-traders who can take all the profit & provide underage girls (which will surely remain illegal).
The cigarette industry provides good parallel example, although it's surely not perfect. [3]
In short - increased taxes (i.e. supply curve shift) and overall changes in social norms away from smoking have not caused an increase in illicit consumption - just the opposite. Illicit consumption is down. This might imply that creating more barriers to the sex trade (law), and also reducing demand (social norms), would likely have the overall effect of reducing black market for sex-slavery.
Of course, it's not nearly a perfect analogy, and it's a complicated subject and of course there are individuals and groups who are probably more concerned about morality than justice, but it's still not fair to castigate a policy as being one way or the other.
Personally, I don't see how normalising the sex trade and providing vast online services decreases frequency of transactions, but I'm open minded about the right way to do this. Though I personally think it should be 'decriminalised' (not illegal, but sex workers not allowed to go to 'job fairs' at high school!), I would put the wellbeing of those being trafficked ahead of any of that.
Sure, I think we actually mostly agree. My issue with SESTA/FOSTA is that if trafficking is truly the issue, it's far from clear to me that this was the right approach -- there have been credible pleas, including from law enforcement, that shutting down online solicitation would make it harder to fight actual trafficking because it drives it underground.
Meanwhile, SESTA/FOSTA effectively puts such a burden on web operators that even legitimate sites (like Craiglist personals) have been shut down out of fear that they will be liable if someone misuses them. This is even true in states and municipalities that choose to legalize prostitution. The effect of SESTA/FOSTA is to usurp states' ability to decide for themselves how they want to regulate the sex trade, at least as far as it comes to the communication platforms they can use. If the intent of SESTA/FOSTA was to inhibit prostitution that didn't involve trafficking, fine, but that's not how it was sold by elected Democrats.
I wouldn't be so cynical about this, except that there is a long history in the US of using moral panic around trafficking to enforce moral preferences -- look at how the Mann act was used against interracial couples, for example. I'm all for helping actual victims of trafficking, but using outrage about trafficking for other political purposes upsets me.
> A large, wide open, legalised & regulated sex trade may simply provide more customers for nefarious sex-traders who can take all the profit & provide underage girls (which will surely remain illegal).
Alternately, decriminalizing sex work means law enforcement would stop wasting their time their pursuing adult sex workers doing legit business, and actually focus on the trafficking of those actually being exploited.
Stormy Daniels may have some insight, but she's not exactly a scientist.
From Harvard Law School:
"Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization."
It seems there's ample data indicating that increasing the market for the sex trade increases the black market for it.
FYI - smoking, same. When less people smoke, there's a smaller black market. [2]
I have friends and ex-partners who are sex workers and seeing this stuff come into action, seeing them get denied at borders, seeing their lives become ever more dangerous has been utterly soul crushing.
Sex worker rights is a huge frontier that we need to fight harder on, sex trafficking and sex work are two different things, and spiting workers because you find them unsavoury or want to be their saviour under the veil of fighting sex trafficking is utterly abhorrent.
Fuck SESTA/FOSTA, fuck the Nordic model, and fuck any "feminist" that doesn't listen to sex workers and fight their corner as opposed to trying to rid the world of them.
I'm always puzzled by all the Americans who travel to Asia for all the local markets: everything from food, to personal care, to sex markets, to even medical care. My dental care in Taiwan has been extraordinarily cheap and very good. And yet then I come back to America and see the same people ostensibly support the same authoritarian politicians, police and bureaucrats who spend taxpayer money on authoritarian policing of voluntary markets: everything from outright criminalizing markets, to creating so much red tape and regulatory laws that small business owners find it hard to compete. This is not to say there is not a place for sane and reasonable regulations. In all of Korea, Taiwan, Japan you can find street foods and sex markets and God Forbid outdoor jungle gyms and even full weight lifting sets at popular parks hiking trails. Even though those things can be technically illegal they are tolerated due to common sense, and I just can't see how our decisions to head down the path of authoritarianism in America is not just worse for all of: human dignity, prosperity, and freedom.
Americans are not good at taking care of each other, in my American opinion. We don't naturally think about what would be good for everyone, and so we don't push for changes that would benefit us all in the long term, but costs us all in the short term.
As someone who has lived here (US) for close to 15 years, what I find baffling is that some of the voting isn't even that myopic. It is so strongly ideology based that a poor coal miner would vote for a politician who would gut his healthcare and scream "socialism is bad" at any alternative which might actually be beneficial to them in the short term.
I was going by the PP's premise of choosing one's one good over the greater good of society. What I observed was actually the opposite since that poor coal miner is against "higher taxes" & "socialism" even though it is directly benefiting him. That level of adherence to an ideology is what I found baffling (which has nothing to do with my own ideology).
Wall Street is getting another half trillion in cash injection from the Fed.
People who work for a living see it like this: they want a voluntary economy. That's why they vote against "socialism." Most welfare we have goes to the rich.
Exactly! No one or very few would question the wealthy when they vote against their self interest. It’s somewhat condescending to accept wealthy people voting against their immediate self interest and at the same time condemning the poor for voting against their perceived self interest from the POV of non poor people.
The cost of a rich person vs a poor person of voting against their own self interests is not the same. And I am not condemning anyone. To me, it is just contrary to the PP's statement of Americans thinking about themselves and not about others.
I'd say it slightly differently: Americans hate other Americans. We will gladly pay $10 to prevent $1 from going to someone else. We think of each other as competition first and foremost.
I read through your comment twice and am still confused why it’s puzzling that Americans would travel to Asia for the local markets. If it’s cheaper, and the same or similar quality, why wouldn’t they?
But, how do you know that the same Americans traveling to Asia are also tolerating said policies/politicians? I've had the same next door neighbors for 15+ years, and I have no idea what policies/politicians they tolerate/support. Much less the random person walking down the street.
I'm speaking from personal experience. I have travelled a lot, and I've noticed this as a pattern over what must be hundreds of people I've talked to at this point. I don't really know if my sample is indicative of the US population--I'm just puzzled by what I've seen.
Of the 60% who have, there are surely many of us who weren’t doing it to travel to Thailand for prostitutes. I suspect the number of people who are doing that are a small fraction of the population (of the people I know who have traveled abroad, that percentage is 0%)
My comment is not specifically about travelling to Thailand for prostitutes, and occurrence of that event could be ommitted from existence and my comment would have the same meaning, albeit a less apparent connection to the topic.
> You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking?
Yes, exactly like that, except it's inaccurate to say that "nobody" listened to them. Many people expressed outrage at the time. We just failed to get big tech and its lobbyists on our side, so Congress was deaf to it.
It's extremely hard to find a voice in government when your position is pro-hooker. These people don't want their opponent to be running the "Your Representative is for the sexual exploitation of women!" ads.
I think the most unmentioned facet regarding prostitution is that for many men, prostitution may be the only way for them to obtain sex, which I feel is just as much of a "right" as is the right for women to obtain an abortion.
No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions.
But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too.
There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying).
I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it.
Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
Your fourth paragraph is insightful. Prostitution, however, worsens the situation.
The detrimental aspect of harem-based societies is not bunches of horny men unable to get laid... rather, it's bunches of single men -- horny or not -- that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive.
Prostitution lessens the desirability of men and decreases somewhat their desire to marry. This causes further declines in monogamy rates and hastens the societal damage you allude to.
People like Andrew Yang are telling us that massive layoffs are coming anyway, because robots. Maybe you disapprove of lives of video-gaming and regular custom with prostitutes, but if it's inevitable maybe we should try to deal with it rather than grinding people up in our efforts to prevent it. Human lives can have meaning that is not related to work.
> it's bunches of single men ... that are not part of a family, and who have no need to be productive
That's actually argument for prostitution. You have to earn money for prostitutes. Granted not as much as for the family but still. Also I think there's way less colateral damage for everybody if less desirable men can just buy what they crave directly instead of attempting to compete with better men over women that don't want less desirable men and if they settle for them they'll regret it.
> and some version of polygamy becoming more normal
Polygamy arises spontaneously in societies where lots of men get killed off by wars. As soon as the M/F ratio normalizes polygamy goes away.
Fake-polygamy is like early Mormonism, where the proselytizers actively sought large numbers of women to rapidly increase the size of their group. Mormon polygamy mostly went away because of the numbers problem: it is unsustainable if you don't have a way to bring in extra girls or get rid of extra boys (the offshoot mormon cult in Colorado City sent boys away as soon as they hit 18 [2]).
> with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
Some men get more action than others, but this is mostly because they've learned how to not be obnoxious [3] about their interests, and go after the women who also aren't so interested in a relationship, or are good at tricking women into thinking they're long term when their intentions are otherwise.
Women generally are selective about who they get with, whereas men generally will get with whomever happens to be interested in them. With that said, many women don't get hordes of men lusting after them, and some men have learned how to mesmerize women into their bedroom, then move on to their next target without second thoughts.
I posted previously about my friend who advertised on backpage for clients [0]. She was not full-service, yet was sort of traumatized by the experience anyways. She doesn't have problem with her catalogue of former boyfriends (entirely her choice), but she was bothered by the men who just wanted to pay for the privilege of putting their anatomy inside her anatomy without her being reciprocally interested.
Then there was the stripper I saw a few times... The last time I saw her, she told of how she gotten beaten up by strip club patrons who'd followed her home. She didn't feel safe at home anymore [0]. She was okay with getting random men aroused, but wasn't interested in sex.
Offering prostitution as a service works for women who are flexible about who they'll get with; engaging prostitution as a client works for men who haven't figured out how to be interesting to women, or for men who are not interested in a relationship, or not capable of a relationship, or have other motivations (ex: I read about an Australian mom taking her disabled son for a monthly appointment with a sex worker).
With all this talk about legalizing prostitution, I think it appropriate to point out that lots of women are engaged in legal prostitution already, it's usually just called "acting". Some women pretend they're interested in a man, but they're more interested in their wallet ('trophy girlfriend/wife'). The other common not-exactly-prostitution work for women is pornography. The main difference between pornography and prostitution is men in porn get paid a token amount too. I'm sure many of the online porn producers were set up by men who just wanted to increase the number of women they boink without having to pretend to be interested in a relationship.
Some women do sex work because of economic pressure [1]. IMHO, a basic income of some sort would be an important part of any legalization of prostitution, so that the women who'd rather do anything else don&#x...
> With all this talk about legalizing prostitution, I think it appropriate to point out that lots of women are engaged in legal prostitution already, it's usually just called "acting". Some women pretend they're interested in a man, but they're more interested in their wallet ('trophy girlfriend/wife').
Haha, as I've gotten older, this seems more and more accurate. I'm not saying it's all about money, but more like women are interested in one set of benefits a man provides, and men are interested in another set, and they're not necessarily inclusive.
I've traveled and lived in several different countries. Some of them seem less interested in pretending it's all about Disney, partners forever, and are more relaxed about relationships being mutually beneficial without all the pretense (i.e. women that are essentially offering sex and companionship in exchange for financial support, and the amounts wanted are openly negotiated. I almost prefer that to the courtship rituals we use in the West.
No, it isn't the only way for many men to do so. The issue is that they don't want to put in the time or effort to be the kind of man that can, and they have radically unrealistic expectation of sex itself. No, you cannot bang a supermodel, but you can find a woman who loves you and will be with you.
No, men don't have a right to sex, because it involves a woman surrendering herself; its not something innate to the man that is being denied. It's dark to make it so that women need to surrender themselves to strangers on demand for cash because men have a right to the act, and that's just part of it. Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment; without it there is a huge lack of protection for the woman and it becomes a banal experience for the man, because he cannot have love or intimacy from it, just the act that becomes more and more extreme over time precisely because its divorced from human sentiment.
honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism; there's no "intellectual curiosity" about this, just sort of a repetition of a specific set of views with very little attempt to challenge or provide the unpopular side.
on one hand feminists claim men and woman are exactly the same , on the other hand you say here that a woman having sex with a man is "surrendering herself". So which one it is, just so we can start the discussion on the same page.
I don't know whether anybody have a right to anything, but what I do know is that the government enforce me to pay taxes to support a growing number of single mums who never had sex with me, they had sex with other people but from some reason I need to finance them instead of investing this money in my own children.
So I wonder, if you can force me to pay for female sexual escapades and their spawns and the exciting guys they had sex with because I "didn't put the effort and have unrealistic expectations", why can't I have an agreed upon transaction, where i pay directly the woman who have sex with me? It seems that the effort I put into generating enough taxes is happily taken by all those women via the government and law enforcement, for that I am attractive enough.
To be honest, I don't have much hope, today being an average white man who just go to work, share custody of his children and do all the regular duties is like being the worst criminal in the world, a person to be ridiculed and abused by all kind of interest groups.
So I have learned the lesson, I just move my business and money to second world countries where the western feminist/racist/agist cancer didn't hit yet. Nobody is going to get my tax money if they don't want to give anything back, just extorting me and then spitting in my face. I'd rather give my money to south east asian hookers for having a drink with me than to taxes falling into the hands of all those blood sucking critters. I vote for the most extreme right wing parties I can, not because I support their agenda but in spite, because I feel like I am being screwed up by everyone.
I am not even a boomer.
Do you also apply this argument to economic inequality? No, you can't be the CEO, but if you "put in the time or effort to be the kind of man that can" make a living wage, then you don't need to demand socialism. Do low skill workers have an unrealistic expectation of wages? There's a job out there for everybody, you either have to improve yourself to get the wages you desire, or lower your standards. Who's the "inhuman libertarian"? I agree sex workers and their customers should be shunned, but by the same logic, so must socialism.
I would say men have a moral right to sex as much as women have a moral right to not be physically and sexually abused by men, at least in an advanced human society that we want.
Naturally, evolution has left the sexes in an unpleasant predicament - look at higher mammals like chimps or great apes for the state we'd fall into without our societal boundaries.
We're long past the point where we've 'artificially' propped up women to a pedestal that wouldn't be obtainable without men raising them up - the freedom to earn money regardless of actual production, safety against physical / sexual violence which is only enforced by other men, reproduction rights, etc.
If this system is to sustain itself, a large amount of men will also need to provided for, and that means sex (or maybe in a sci-fi future some sort of drug or simulation that mimics it in the brain, and releases the 'pressure'). Otherwise, one side of our artificial society is no longer balanced.
>Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment;
Sex itself is the goal for most men, at least primitively. The rest is just a bonus.
> honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism;
Typical. You've been able to express you opinions. I've been able to express mine. Censoring / banning speech is ridiculous, and should never be even considered by a company like YC who owes quite a bit of debt to the US system, which believes in free speech. If they want to start banning more and more speech, they can go set up shop in China or the UK.
It's important to note that whenever trafficking is discussed , in 95% of cases it's going to be about consensual prostitution between adults. Anti-sex activists have been successful at attacking the vocabulary.
"But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.” "
95% seems like an awfully wrong guess. There is a lot of forced prostitution, then a huge great area of those that for various reasons have no other option (from abusive boyfriend to immigration status to economic factors) and then a very small crust of voluntary sex workers, mostly at the high-end of the market. The ratio between these three will vary massively between country/region/city but in any case it is often difficult to identify who is victim and who is voluntary because the world is complex. (Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?)
The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know.
You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities.
I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.
As someone who spent 10 years in the business trafficking is indeed rare. In my experience it is mostly through organized crime in LA, SF, and NYC.
Almost all Asian AAMPs are trafficked women. They are snuck in on ships and forced to work to pay their “debt”.
Outside of this women work in prostitution because they need money. A lot of people demonize this work saying how terrible it is, but the reality is an hours work is a days wages at a normal job. That’s very tempting.
Internet ads and online advertising got women off the streets and made things incredibly safer. Women could focus on screening clients instead of attracting them, increasing safety.
Yes, the world is complex, but OPs argument is pretty specific: That anti-trafficking rhetoric and anti-prostitution activism is largely overlapping, that it denies, by and large, the very gray areas you refer to, that it conflates the idea of consensual sex work with trafficking, and in the process has little regard for either consensual sex workers or sex trafficking victims.
> Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?
The first case is distinct because it's a real case of illicit external force. For the other two, it's worth pointing out that in the US, the baseline is still "arrest", "criminal charges", and "publishing your name and picture online". This happens with the silent consent of both the US public as well as anti-trafficking activists, who neither speak out against this kind of policing, nor stop cooperating with police departments.
The life of a woman needing to pay for diabetes medication for her daughter does not not improve by being arrested, nor does she welcome her source of income disappearing because of restrictive laws.
Have a look at local news reports of "anti-trafficking stings". It's always the same story. Dozens unnamed woman arrested, rarely even a claim that a victim was identified; and OP is right; the definition of what counts as trafficking is wide enough that even in those cases where it is claimed that a victim was found, it needs to be questioned whether the person actually welcomed the rescue.
Well when you have an admittedly small but significant bunch of radical feminists who claim any PIV sex is a form of rape, it's not hard to see how more "moderate" radical feminists would see any form of sex work as a form of abuse.
Fuck the lot of them. I am a feminist and that means sticking up for the rights of all women, whatever their chosen career. You want people to stop doing sex work? Give them a better option.
Hah! No shit. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of steet prostitution. One night I was smoking a cigarette on my porch when a girl who was working that night popped out from behind a car, walked over and asked if I had a smoke, and I obliged her.
Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it.
I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.
FOSTA didn't actually take down Backpage, it's a common myth they were connected. The investigation into Backpage stated well before FOSTA ever existed and they just used the timing of taking down Backpage to announce the release of FOSTA, which resulted in the public perception they were related.
Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market.
95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities.
The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls.
There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole.
Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away.
The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria.
One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.
“Stamping out” anything moves it underground. The transaction volume almost always goes down and the risk for those remaining in the market almost always goes up.
In the same way the war on drugs had a lot of casualties (and collateral damage) and did absolutely nothing to reduce drug usage.
Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc.
IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.
As an occasional consumer of sex work, here is the reality: yes, It’s more dangerous now for both parties, but much more so for the women. The labor supply has gone down sharply because the economics went upside down. If you can’t count on as many clients per day the fixed cost of the hotel room becomes harder to risk so many girls exited the market. Prices have gone up sharply. The kind of girls that were charging $250-300 are now charging $400-500. “Trafficking” is an almost nonexistent issue at these price points where I dabble but as I understand is depressingly common on the low end of the market where people are picking up girls on the street for $20 blow jobs. Those girls are now more vulnerable than ever because with the smaller size of the marketplace they need pimps, madams, agencies, etc. to help them get enough work.
Just to satisfy my own curiosity, what is your use case for paying for sex? Married? High powered executive? I can't imagine paying for something that is easily free on a million different dating apps.
Not to be too mean here, but perhaps the OP doesn't have an easy time finding willing partners in the traditional dating scene. Maybe they have the kind of look that makes women swipe left.
Or maybe they prefer to pay to not have to spend their time going through the whole pain to find someone, make them interested, etc etc all with the risk of being for nothing. If you have the money, it is a good way to cut on time spent.
It's possible, but in my experience, there is someone for everyone. I suppose if the goal is to hit way above your weight, paying makes sense. Money does seem to have that effect on women. But if you have that much, you should be able to pull it easily without prostitution?
Please take this as friendly. It sounds like maybe you're setting your expectations too high, and not giving other women a chance. In my experience women take what you write in your profile seriously. Spend what you would consider an inordinate amount of time perfecting it, like you would a resume for big job prospect. Get great photos taken of yourself, this doesn't require money or a professional service. Find good light, take lots, use the best of them. Grainy, poorly lit, unflattering photos will be dismissed quickly. Don't make them all selfies. You want to show off your best features, and what makes you, well you.
But seriously, work on what you say in your profile. Nearly every response I get from a woman, is about how well my profile is written.
Luckily for me the Catholic Church banned cousin marriages and arranged marriages centuries ago. But, yeah, I suppose for people outside of the occident applying for sex on a website as if you are applying for a coding job might be an improvement.
Not really a serious advice but there it is: if you can fix some of it with some light photoshopping, do it.
Plenty of women do it too and for many of them it's not at all light.
Think of it as polishing your CV by omitting some embarrassing stuff and putting forwards the things you want. Your goal shouldn't be to be 100% honest when writing your profile/CV. Just to make it enticing enough to get your foot in the door.
I met my wife on a dating app. She was my girlfriend in junior high and just happened to have gotten a divorce, and was starting to date again. So it worked for me :) Just try to find someone you've already had a relationship with.
Seriously though, I feel your pain. I had let the account lapse for months before I happened to get back on there and see that she had written me. Dating apps become a joke exponentially as you get older.
That really sucks. I moved and have spent some time working on my profiles, so I'll share my advice if you want it. I usually get 7 or 8 likes per week, usually 1-2 that I'm interested in talking to, and usually go on a date with a new person every couple of weeks.
First advice, pay for the premium service on the apps. I know it's not cheap, but being able to see who liked you is a huge gain. I've had very little success getting matches otherwise unless I was going to spend way too much time swiping. And it's still drastically cheaper than a match maker.
Secondly, when writing your profile and choosing pictures, you want to make choices based on the women looking at your profile's perspective. Does he look good? Does he seem interesting? Do we have things to talk about? Share some interesting bits about your life that women might find interesting and want to ask you about. Have you gone anywhere cool lately? Have you picked up any interesting hobbies? (But stay away from esoteric stuff. Database design is cool, but very few people will get it). Maybe you cooked something really cool and exotic for dinner the other day.
Don't try to be overly impressive. If you want to look fancy, have selfies of yourself before you went to an event in a suit, or maybe at the event. Make sure the focus is on you, instead of the event/car/house/whatever. But it can always be in the background. Trying to be overly impressive comes off one dimensional, like you aren't interesting other than puffing yourself up. Showing that you're doing well and are a well adjusted, successful person is good, you just have to make sure it's a facet of your profile instead of a focus.
Make sure you keep your standards reasonable. We would all love to date a neuroscientist who's a lingerie model in her spare time. Those women are exceedingly rare, and even rarer on dating apps. They probably don't need a dating app to keep a full dance card. Swiping really screws up your perspective of what the dating pool looks like. Your feed is always full of absurdly attractive women, but keep in mind that a lot of those are fake profiles.
Lastly, make sure you iterate. Take the dates you can get, even if they're not perfect to you. Maybe they're better than you thought; if not, use it as a learning experience. What did they like about you? What didn't they? You can use that feedback to adjust your profile and how you communicate to make yourself more appealing. Plus, going on dates is pretty much universally fun, so there isn't much to lose!
What about in Asian countries that due to excessive abortion have a skewed male to female ratio? In those countries, there literally is not someone for everyone. That doesn't justify legalizing sex work, however. "Wow, we aborted all the women! I know, lets turn the few that are left into prostitutes!" No, that is sick.
I'm too old for dating apps, so I've never used one, but don't nearly all women swipe left (that is, reject) something like 80-85% of men on these apps?
It's hard not to. The average actor you see on TV is >8. If you show someone a subset of a population to represent the majority them you'll cause them to expect that. Which is my hypothesis behind why 80% of women are vying for 20% of men. I think, in general, men are more willingto compromise on appearance than women.
Often overlooked, but also no one thinks about the guy in a wheel chair or with some random disease. They too have sexual needs, perhaps a once a month bj would lift the mood and with it improve the well being of the guy.
> A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.”
In my experience, I had better luck than he did, though not by orders of magnitude. 3,000 swipes per date seems high. I'd guess it's closer to 1,000.
But he makes it sound like deathly drudgery, and I think that's missing the point. It's "gamified" to give you bits of positive feedback. Matching feels good, like a little compliment. One doesn't have to enjoy that; not every game is for everybody.
And the process itself should be interesting: the swiping process is a lot of momentary life stories. A picture really is a thousand words. If you're not interested in it, then the app isn't for you, but it is for some people.
So I suspect "horrible" is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, I invested a fair bit of time per date, but it was reasonably rewarding time. I met a lot of great people, including some relationships that lasted years.
The main lesson I wish I'd knew going in: the population is densest in cities. It's less effective in the burbs. Duh, of course, but I spent a lot more time traveling into the city than I'd bargained for. That's the only time I really regret about it.
The fact of the matter in Tinder for men is: if you aren't a 9.5 or 10, your chances quickly approach zero. Let a sister or female friend swipe for you sometime and watch how literally any small and random thing is an excuse to swipe left. Women have the freedom to be picky on dating apps, and they absolutely are.
I assure you, I am not a 9.5, and I did very, very well on Tinder. I'm not actively ugly, but there are plenty of small things a woman being picky would reject.
I swear, I should make a career in fixing people's dating profiles. Though the hard part is fixing their attitudes about women, which is the real thing holding them back. If I could fix that, they'd know how to fix their profiles.
Tim Ferris did an episode with a lady named Alice Little who was referenced to as the highest paid sex worker. It explained a lot of reasons why couples or individuals hire her.
You talk about this in such a way that makes me think you're a virgin. In the odd event you're telling the truth, I'm guessing you're rife with STDs.
I can see lots of benefits with just paying for it. They show up, do the thing, and leave. You get to determine when and where (mostly). You get an enthusiastic partner regardless of the effort you yourself put in, and exactly the sort of sex you want.
If I had the money for it, I'd probably do it too.
This was really uncalled for. Nothing I wrote, has anything to do with what you wrote in the first two sentences. I was asking a question, because I was curious as to the reason.
> I can't imagine paying for something that is easily free on a million different dating apps.
I have enough friends who use dating apps to know they're only "easy" if you're young, conventionally attractive, and (preferably) female. A typical middle-aged American guy can swipe through hundreds or thousands of profiles without even getting an response, let alone sex.
I'm not defending it, but just to educate you: "easily free" is as far from the truth as it could be. The reality is:
Spend hours picking photos and putting together a profile. Now for each person you have sex with, imagine you spent another 5 hours swiping, yet another 5 hours getting maybe 20 conversations going, which turn into 5 actual first dates (budget 5 hours each for prep, transportation, cancelling and rescheduling, etc.), assume 3 of them have zero chemistry, the other 2 are cool but the chances that someone will sleep with you on a first date is very rare, you go on a second date with them both but again no sex this time just for practical reasons (it's a weeknight, they work early, it takes an hour to get home), it fizzles out with one (no third date), the second one has a vacation planned, but three weeks later you finally have a third date and sleep together.
Mission accomplished. Probably a total investment of 40-60 hours across 2 months. And this assumes you even live in an urban area in the first place where there are 10,000's of people your age to swipe through. You still call that "easily free"?
Contrary to what you might think, dating apps are not full of girls looking for a quick first-date hookup. Sure, they're out there, but it's extremely rare that you'll a) find one at all, b) that she wants to hook up with you, c) that you actually meet and it actually happens. Just the reality of things.
By the way, this is also why the narrative of dating apps killing relationships is false. By the time you've put in 60 hours finding someone you're compatible with, you hope to god you can keep going out with them, instead of going back to square one and doing it all over again. Dating apps are work.
Yeah, commenter you're responding to is basically saying "to get a coding job, you'll need to look through dozens of job sites, prepare for interviews, fail a bunch, keep up-to-date on your skills, take informational interviews, and heavily work personal connections."
Unless you're a standout prodigy, in which case people will message your LinkedIn begging you to consider interviewing for six-figure positions.
The problem is you want a coding job, which requires lots of preparation and perhaps talent. Getting a job flipping burgers is much easier - you just have to show up. but everyone wants the coding jobs ;-)
My understanding from reddit comments on posts that show up in /r/all, almost all the NSFW photos not from pornography that make it to the front page are from escorts, and the /r/tinder success percentage for males is less than one percent for all but the super hot so I could see how some might give up on the time investment in online hookup culture for a sure thing.
I am GP. I’d liken it to the difference between cooking and going to a restaurant. There are benefits to both. I do date and I do enjoy it. But sometimes I want something specific, just the way I like it. If I just want a 5’7” redhead with larger than C cup breasts tonight, I can have it. That’s not what dating is like. Recently after hearing a lot about “eating ass” I wanted to know what it felt like. I texted an agency owner I know and asked her if she had someone willing, and was literally having my ass eaten the next day. Try texting a girl on Tinder “will you lick my asshole?” (Don’t.)
And just like there’s something great about finishing a meal and knowing there is no cleanup to do, it’s great sometimes to have a hot girl open her door, set your eyes on her for the first time, and know that with 100% certainty you’ll be having sex with her in ten minutes. The cost is high, so I can’t indulge every week, but I end up doing about once a month.
This is all with women over 30 years old, totally consensual, so there are no ethical concerns for me. Sure they wouldn’t be doing it for free, but that’s true of anyone in any job.
Thank you for the honest response, this is exactly what I was looking for. It makes sense now for those type of use cases. My train of thought was going only down the avenue of desperation.
Those sad souls on the avenues of desperation probably aren't frequenting 4-500 ladies. They're picking up broken, abused, and now more likely to trafficked, girls for a $20 5 minute blower in a McDonald's parking lot.
"Easily free" is a gross overstatement. If you are a guy, and you don't have good social skills or intuition, and you don't pay attention to your looks, you will have zero luck. Those apps are heavily skewed towards female choice due to the safety and a much higher demand for sex on the male side for a number of reasons.
And before you say that anyone should be able to do that, not everyone has the same supply of emotional energy for self betterment, which is an extra on top of what is required to live life day to day
Libertarians were way ahead of the curve on drug legalization, criminal justice reform, school choice, and police brutality to name recent victories. We have been banging the drum on legalizing sex work for decades, and I'm optimistic that true freedom for consenting adults will continue to win over the 'Controllers of Lives' that want to ban freedom.
There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can potentially have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.
Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting.
Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...
There is no federal prohibition against prostitution like there is against marijuana. This can be effectively accomplished at the State or even local level. Talk to your representatives, start ballot initiatives.
Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
> There is no federal prohibition against prostitution like there is against marijuana.
Not directly,at least applicable to the states, but there are a variety of federal prohibitions around the sex trade which complicate it, and there'd probably be federal will for a direct ban if most states didn't prohibit it entirely and the fee remaining didn't prohibit it in most of their territory. Neither major party broadly supports legalized prostitution, for superficially different reasons.
> Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
Not possible without changes to federal law, federal law prohibits prostitution on tribal land, while casinos are regulated by federal law which allows them with tribal-state gaming compacts.
Sex trafficking is not consenting adults. There is a significant difference between a sex worker who voluntarily engages in their profession vs. people who are forced into it.
If you legalize it you can arrest the human traffickers while enabling professional sex workers to be professionals just look at the enlightened approach to the problem taken by Australia. No brothels allowed and no pimps but independent sex work is legal.
so you're advocating for regulatory capture? That'll go just like the legal pot industry; prohibitively expensive licensing that only goes to the already big players in the game.
Wow, if prostitution is legal that means we can have prostitution startups, and prostitution IPOs! Corporate prostitution backed by SoftBank and Saudi sovereign wealth! What a world we're making!
Any evidence of that being true? Some sex worker is going to helpfully point out how Alex is bringing in East European “models” or how Miguel just brought some girls up? And what’s going to happen to the legal sex workers when they start snitching on the Rudaj or Zetas?
Current laws make no distinction between the two. The State calls all prostitution 'sex trafficking'. So yes.. by the government's definition consenting adults is sex trafficking.
There's also a significant difference between a grocery store worker or a maid who voluntarily engages in their profession vs. people who are forced into it. That's why forced labor (slavery) is illegal and you go to jail for engaging in it.
The FBI treats all prostitution as trafficking. If it crosses state lines, they will get involved and treat it as a trafficking case, irrespective of consent or adulthood of the parties involved.
> In the United Kingdom, the term vice is commonly used in law and law enforcement to refer to criminal offences related to prostitution and pornography. In the United States, the term is also used to refer to crimes related to drugs, alcohol, and gambling.
If you look at what gets called "sex trafficking" in the media, by politicians, by police and prosecutors, and in some cases, by the legal system, this is not true. One common definition is anyone who travelled across state (or country) lines has been trafficked, which is a bit like saying anyone who moves to SF for a tech job is a victim of human slavery.
It's not uncommon for a crackdown on sex trafficking to not find a single victim of sex trafficking (or anything else), but still result in a lot of arrests (overwhelmingly of women) and self-congratulatory press releases. The mind boggles.
In any case, the fight against "sex trafficking" (aka, consensual sex between adults) absolutely harms many victims of actual real trafficking. And bluntly, people who haven't yet got the memo yet and think the phrase is still only being used against actual unethical behaviour are making this worse.
I don't like the term "trafficking" for this reason. We have better terms, and criminal charges available for people who force or pressure someone into sex work against their will, including slavery, rape, and coercion.
The article paints a sad picture ...although your conclusion seems far fetched. Even marriage can be made into paid rape by the wordings of that article.
AFAIK ... decriminalization allows for
1. The sex worker to approach authorities without any fear of prosecution.
2. To set up freelance sex work without pimps and brothels.
There shouldn't be a debate about this. Criminalization makes things worse at the expense of moral tidiness.
Regulated sex work allows for
1. Brothels
2. Strip clubs
3. Massage parlors
4. Sex Therapists
If the regulators are corrupt or weak or there are no strong checks ... then the model will be as bad as an unregulated market and will actually be worse as it allows trafficked victims to work under quasi-legal protection. That's what the article implies.
From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to and helps sex-workers unionise.
> From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to.
Interesting. Do they have social services for those that wish to quit computer programming? Or quit hair dressing?
The fact that there needs to be a social service around this particular profession is indicative that this particular profession is probably harmful to the service provider and it probably also means that this isn’t a profession that a girl willingly accepts and perhaps there is value to not promoting this industry.
Personally I see plenty of reasons why independent of industry value.
It is also a more physically oriented job that carries some risk of disease exposure, really shouldn't be worked sick, and some accounts mention an emotional toll and an emphasis on appearance. Individually all aspects aren't unique and some have more severe magnitudes.
Given the income is higher than many other available jobs it could be easy to become dependent upon it for income. A good ethical reason for support is that consent is an ongoing process.
Maybe they should have for jobs that are physically dangerous/have a high incidence of workplace physical or mental harm. Like, say, working on a mine.
The argument goes like this:
Person A is in such a bad situation that A will accept a job that is terrible!
Prohibiting the job has a good chance of making A worse off (usually, A will accept the job if A thinks it is an improvement over the current situation)
However, we can let A accept the job, and then try to offer A even better alternatives!
Nothing you said is a rebuttal to my previous comment. Please argue with sources or it's just your opinion, and it's irrelevant as it doesn't answer the question of whether "legalizing" sex work decreases sex trafficking. It clearly does not according to my sources.
For real though, in my world, the other America, ‘online sex trafficking’ is alive and well. Apps are blowing up with whores, they literally offering subscription services now.
E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadThere's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias):
https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking.
These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.
But if we have a bill that chips away from freedoms guaranteed by section 230, and it also doesn't make the people it's trying to help any safer...
can't we agree that bill in specific should get thrown out? This isn't a problem of balancing freedom with protecting sex workers. This bill makes the Internet less free and makes sex workers less safe. Everyone loses with this bill, except a few Congresspeople who get to look good for cameras.
It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence.
It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.
That's literally the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) even if giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, it's still not what should be done.
Exactly. That's what makes me bitter about these questions.
Legalization of prositution is actually an interesting question as you can find left-wing and right-wing arguments for and against. It has a potential of being very divisive or unifying across party lines.
And about health issues, I agree it is an important one, but sorry, if the workers we are talking about are free of their career choices, I think it comes after the question of people who do not have a choice.
I don't want the kind of thinking that sacrifices freedom and moral principles so the bad guys have less avenues to profit to dominate our world. For all we know if they can't do trafficking they will switch to other criminal activity and hurt people there. They are the problem not the people who exchange sex for money so let's go after the actual problem.
The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
"Any chance" is an absurd standard. Consider what a country would look like if you said that personal preferences should be dismissed if it had any chance of increasing murder. Get comfortable eating your steak with your teeth since the presence of knives has a non-zero chance of increasing murder!
“The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures.
We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.
Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.
Keep the supply of the substances illegal, but provide safe places - staffed with medics - where people can have their drugs tested, take the drugs in as safe a way as possible and be signposted to rehab and recovery services, including mental health services.
Organized crime has moved out of overtly sleezy industries like gambling into much more profitable ones.
What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?
That was not the case in NSW (Australia) or in New Zealand, where decriminalisation led to NO increase in the size of the sex industry.
I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.
The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.
Fun fact: Originally the Mann Act was passed to give the government the power to prosecute interracial couples. Kinda like how sex-offender registries were first implemented to allow police in California to track gays.
Source:
https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
This adds significantly to the mindset of "do not cooperate with the legal system even if you're trying to help, no good can come of it." And my already ebbing faith in the media has slipped even further.
I swear I live in Clown World.
Also, the FBI really, really sucks.
So what difference does it make whether you cooperate or not? Either we have rights or we don't. I need to know because my daughter is learning the US Constitution in History class in 9th grade and I keep having to explain all the cognitive dissonance to her between what is clearly written and what is actually going on! It sucks!
"child sex traffickers"
I don't know where you get that from.
Not so dumb when the goal is to look tough and win votes...
Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome.
The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns.
I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.
They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex-workers harder.
If prostitution was just decriminalized, their work would just have been easier, it would have been a normal job like every other job.
As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.
I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate.
FOR: Men. Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution.
FOR: Sex workers. Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Religious groups. They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one.
AGAINST: Feminists. Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2]
Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-pr...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution
And I don't think the sex-worker-exclusionary feminists are representative of most feminists, even if the overlap between their views on this topic and those of conservative and religious groups gives them a big megaphone.
Regarding legal presence, many sex workers are in a country legally aside from their choice to do sex work, sometimes even with work permission for most jobs. (Canada has some relevant exclusions in their standard open work permit, for example.)
I would hope everyone opposes sex slavery.
In the progressive circles I'm familiar with in my midwestern city (Columbus, Ohio), I've never seen anyone make a feminist case for decriminalization or legalization. The consensus among progressives here is that sex work is bad for women. The voices I hear in the national media do tend to be ambivalent if not outright pro-sex-work, though, so I agree it's not simple.
Well there's plenty of sex workers online you could ask. They almost universally argue for decriminalisation (not legalisation) on feminist grounds.
(Yes, technically no anti-sex-worker laws claim any category of human is inherently illegal, instead defining some of them as criminals through outlawing certain activities, but you wouldn't know it from how much stigma is attached to public discourse about sex workers.)
I'm not an expert on exactly what proportion of progressives or feminists are hostile to sex workers. A confluence of societal factors (some but not all of which I mentioned in my previous comment) makes me believe that the subset that's hostile to them is better connected to the media, better funded, better organized, more privileged, and for all of these reasons easier to find and notice and hear on this topic.
I don't think that says anything about the broader question of how common different views are or what different credible views have a significant number of adherents, merely something about our current Overton window.
That may be. There is certainly a powerful stigma around sex work that prevents people like your friend from advocating for themselves.
Men “lose” too if their partners are “tempted” by legal prostitution (what are we “losing” here by the way?)
If someone's partner is gonna be tempted away simply by legal prostitution, maybe they aren't the most faithful to begin with.
"Inevitable either way" doesn't mean that the needle stands still.
The argument that there should be a victim of some sort before criminalising something is compelling. It is difficult to argue that the prostitutes feel they are victims of prostitution without discovering that other crimes are already being committed without criminalising prostitution.
I have a much easier times justifying criminalising alcohol from principles than it is to argue against criminalising prostitutes, so I don't see why the one with obviously terrible second order effects is considered to be OK and not the other. We have to accept that we already tolerate a level of background things-slipping-through-the-cracks for the sake of liberty and general comfort.
Prostitution has been legal in Australia since around the 90s. Nobody particularly cares^. The only people who it has implications for are people who choose to be involved.
^ Ie, it doesn't crop up in politics as an issue. Lots of people care. Nobody is making a big deal about it.
This is a MUCH bigger problem in the US than in Australia.
You can read prostitution legalization as a right to choose to use your own body for profit or you can read prostitution banning as the right for not being used for profit from your body.
Many imagine is a simple thing but all the other values come into play.
Some people think a embryon is more important that a women choice. Some think that right to sell your body is more important than to legally allow women oppression through sex work.
Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.
Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.
But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.
Only after the sale was complete did she realize who she dealt with. It was done through lawyers.
The site sold for 8 figures.
From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it..
from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money.
Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers.
It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing.
The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?
What is with this bizarre spelling?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_...
https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...
Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view.
Why?
When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where the product / service carries less legal risk and societal stigmas than before. Thus, men are far less likely to pay large premiums for sex with non-prostitutes including 'courting', dating, marriage, etc.
* for their own good
* for perceived externalities
This is common enough for drugs, heavy metal, child employment, and contracting that it doesn’t surprise me they would apply it to prostitution. In fact, I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
1. Drugs should all be legal as Portugal's legalization of all drugs has shown us the war on drugs is a massive boondoggle. [1] So has Canada's legalization of marijuana.
2. Child employment is legislated on the basis that children aren't able to make their own decisions, and that sounds ok.
3. Heavy metals, I assume you don't mean the music, is regulated to protect the welfare of the entire population.
4. Contracting?
> I think the probability of women wanting to corner the market for sex is low.
I can't think of a single reason to legislate consenting adults exchanging money for sex. It's not for me, but as with the war on drugs, the medicine is so much worse than the cure it's time we dropped it. The only thing harmed by regulated, clean and safe prostitution is property value and puritanical sensibilities.
Especially when scientists taught monkeys the value of money and they first thing they did was exchange it for sex. [2] That might be the most fitting epitaph for humanity yet, actually haha.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
[2] https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-mon...
It doesn't really matter. It is common among those on the left who conform to that high-care/low-liberty set (of which there are many) to infantilize people, remove any agency they have, and then claim to be protecting them. You don't need to invent this twisted "women want to corner the market for sex" crap to justify it. You just need people who think "oh no, those prostitutes must be doing it because they're forced; let's ban that"
Here in Portugal drug use is what we call ”decriminalized”. It's forbidden but not persecutted/punishable.
But I agree that going after drug users is a waste of effort, and more contries should do like us and just go after dealers and distributors.
The only way you could go after users is if you use an extreme islam way, death penalty. Not very ethical.
You can Google it easily enough, and that will show you many feminists are against it. But to truly understand the issue, see which groups, along with religious right, are the biggest lobbyists against any state bills that attempt to decriminalize prostitution. You will find that it's many women's groups, not just the evangelicals.
https://now.org/media-center/press-release/decriminalize-pro...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_feminism
Her experience indicates that feminist groups who oppose legalised prostitution are a very small minority, at least in our Australian state.
She's really not very likeable.
The two arguments that people here use is that a person that do sex for money would not had done so voluntary, thus there no consent. The second argument is that paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery.
Just make a law so that persons must do something with payers bodies, not vice versa. It solves two problems with one shot: it’s no slavery anymore and finally you get some service.
is this really representative of how the public thinks or just a small pocket within a pocket of politically correct snowflakes? Knowing plenty of Swedes (most are much closer to the far left than to the far right). I'm familiar with Sweden's (strange) view of what constitutes rape (see Assange), and personally think that is a step forward. But I never met anyone argue that "all prostitution is sex slavery" or "anti-feminist".
> paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery.
This seems like a gross simplification. If I offer my body in exchange for money without a middle-man/pimp then it is still my choice. Consider an individual with below avg IQ unable to find meaningful work using his head but equipped with an unusually strong body/frame. Is it slavery if I freelance myself out to a moving company and lug around boxes and furniture all day? What about a male gay prostitute who voluntarily makes money on the side. It is even besides the point if the person is supporting a drug-habit or not.
You can't pretend to be pro choice and feminist if at the same time the system under which you think socially outcasts everyone who thinks differently.
I think the problem with many feminists in Sweden are that they are a rather theoretical kind, centered around gender studies at the universities. And they think that they know better than the poor uneducated women who sell sex what they want and need themselves.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edAxujKev1I
Views are formed in the gut, not the brain.
People are against prostitution because they find it disgusting. Their justifications are all ex post facto.
And this applies to most views, including ones I hold (although that's difficult to admit).
As a Swede, I say that that is an exageration. But it is true that very few, if any, public figure dare to speak up for legalizing prostitution. On the other hand, it's not a crime that the police prioritize, and last time I heard, no one have been more than fined for paying a sex-worker.
It was also not many months ago that V (the most left leaning party) suggested that the punishment for paying a sex-worker should be increased to similar levels as rape, with jail time as minimum.
We could say that V views are a fringe part of the feminist movement in Sweden, but I am not sure that is actually a correct assessment. As you say, few, if any, public figure dare to speak up with opposing views on the topic. It is hard to estimate popular opinion outside of political polls.
Being compensated for your work is the extreme opposite of slavery.
- the rights of sex workers
- the status of trans people
and a bunch of other things.
If I say "Germans eat bread for breakfast" that's generally understood to mean "In general Germans eat bread for breakfast" or "A majority of Germans eat bread for breakfast". Treating it as if I said "Every German eats bread for every breakfast" would be constructing a straw man. People generally understand that there is variation in every group, even if they don't explicitly put that disclaimer on every sentence.
This is not a new issue.
A poll by YouGov in 2016 found that Republicans were 7% more likely than Democrats to believe sex work should remain illegal: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me...
But the real gap was between the genders. Women were 14% more likely to say sex work should be illegal than men. They were also 18% more likely to say it's immoral.
Now what "feminists" think is another question, I doubt that has been studied, and that term means a lot of things to a lot of people. But according to the polls the majority of the opposition in the US to legalizing and tolerating sex work comes from women, regardless of their political orientation.
One can extrapolate that electing more women would lead to harsher laws about sex work and indeed both have happened in the past decade.
You poor incel.
No evidence has been presented to support the parent's anecdotal belief about what feminists think. I have spoken to plenty of feminists over the years and have found them to be split pretty evenly over this issue. My point was that the opposition to legalizing sex work is mostly from females, and may or may not be from feminists (whatever that word even means in 2020).
As for those who are against it, sure, maybe some reason in the cynical way you describe. But I think the lion’s share are motivated by other reasons. Typically they argue that prostitution is coercive, as you can’t call something “consensual” that someone needs to do to survive.
Personally I think prostitution should be just as legal as any other kind of work; but that’s not a license to grossly misinterpret the arguments of those who disagree.
I think the relevant questions are:
- "What are the mindsets they've actually absorbed over their lives?"
- "How do they evaluate evidence?"
- "How do they evaluate the competence and character of judicial and executive appointees?"
- "Whom do they rely on for expertise?"
- "How do they reason about the role of government?"
- "How do they design policies?"
- "How do they spot potential unintended consequences?"
- "How do they communicate with constituents?"
- "Whose perspectives do they believe it is important to consider?"
- "Whom do they consider key to re-election?"
Like... almost all other laws?
Do you think murder is immoral? Well guess what? There's a law for that. Just because you disagree with the morality being legislated, you can't pretend that "legislating morality" is the problem.
Pushing this underground will hurt nothing but victims in the long run. Is that moral? Of course not.
Much legislation is technocratic and hides its moralism, but it’s all questions of right and wrong, good and bad, at the end of the day.
Still, someone can be wronged with their consent. Consent is not binary. That's why there are minimum salary laws for instance : so that there's not a competition to the bottom.
When it comes to prostitution, the fact that huge numbers of prostitutes are former victims of abuse, for instance, should tell you that something is wrong. And even then, I would say that the minority who could be unambiguously considered to be doing it voluntarily is doing a disservice to women and society in general, by promoting the idea that bodies and what is most intimate can be for sale.
Using the same reasoning to outlaw prostitution is harder. Sure you could argue people have a right to not be a prostitute -- and I heartily agree with that -- but then the job of the law is to prevent people from being prostitutes against their will. All outlawing prostitution outright does is hide it from view. It doesn't help people get the rights they deserve. In fact it takes away the right to be a prostitute if you want to. The only line of arguing that prostitution should be illegal is either because we should outlaw anything we deem immoral, or because somehow concocted a right that prevents people from doing what they want to do.
In my opinion the basis for any system of law ought to be that people can do what they want to. The only exceptions being when doing so infringes on the right of others. I should be free to be a prostitute. I should not be free to force other people to be prostitutes against their will. I should be free to wildly swing my arms. I should not be free to punch someone in the face.
Of course everyone has their own opinion of what the law should be and so we end up with a patchwork of intentions -- let alone how the law actually gets applied. That's fine. People are free to have opinions.
Either laws are written based on morality, or laws are written based on rights. You can't have both without being inconsistent.
The important part here is if you include economic factors into "against their will" or not.
Also, how are we supposed to reach gender equality if one gender's body is for sale as a matter of routine ?
Note that I still agree with your point on being a cleaner, that's why I think universal income is a good idea.
At the end of the day when an adult makes the decision to do a particular job because it pays better than the alternative we can't automatically count them as a "victim". It robs people of their agency and infantilizes them.
Edit: Actually I retract this comment. You bring an interesting point, and shouldn't be downvoted. I guess the argument "to prevent abuse" includes "to prevent people from exchanging their lives for money". And you could say the same for sex - people should be able to choose to have sex / be murdered / donate their organs, but shouldn't be able to exchange that for money.
I guess the counterargument would be, that the exact definition of "exchange" depends on whether you're actually giving something - arguably, you're giving up your life / kidney (and most people aren't willing to give that up, regardless of whether they're being paid or not), but not necessarily giving up sex (and many people are giving it up pretty often... the only difference is, are they also getting paid for it, or not).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensual_homicide
Not in the sense of "They'll murder my family if I don't" but just choosing to do it out of her own free will.
I chatted to a prostitute in Thailand, she came from the poor North to work as a sex worker in Bangkok and she was fairly proud of the fact she was sending so much money home to her parents, living in a village where pretty much the only thing you can do is farm.
She showed me a picture of the car her dad was able to buy and kept stressing "it's a 4 door!". She was a genuinely happy and fun loving girl.
To me the shocking thing in this story is a man driving around in a car paid for by his daughter by fellating 300+ men per year, but not the fact this girl decided to do this for a living.
> Do you think murder is immoral?
The story of Armin Meiwes comes to mind, who killed and ate a man who volunteered to have done that to him. There's also the concept of consensual homicide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensual_homicide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Model_approach_to_prost...
> It has also been reported that 12,5 % of men used to solicit prostitutes before the implementation of the law in 1999 whereas in 2014 only 7,7 % of men purchased sexual services.[5]
As the top comment said, this was never about actually decreasing prostitution, but about victimizing and outcasting women.
My elementary school was a religious one. There was something that deeply annoyed me about how they reasoned. I couldn't put my finger on it then, but I got a knee-jerk reaction as soon as I heard it. It was just that: love is better than hate, virtue is better than sin, etc. so you must comply with what God/they/your parents said because they loved you vs. your bad instincts, inspired by the devil that is Bad.
By the time I started high scholl in a public school, the dictator had died and we transitioned to democracy. Tolerance was the magic word. We can now speak our minds, accept others' opinions, discuss frankly any idea.
But then the left was the forbidden set of ideas making itself a space. Forty years later they're hegemonic and "zero tolerance" (I hate that expression) and beware of what you say are back.
They're exactly the same as their parents (that they consider troglodites) just with a different set of dogmas. Ideas change easily with the fads, but mindsets not so fast.
The trick is to present an idea that's absolutely good on paper like: "don't you think that everybody should have what they need to live?" But ignoring all the practical details of implementation: if it's at all possible, if the proposed measures are useful to reach that goal, etc.
No one of them would call themselves "absolutists", that sounds like ancient regime, or fascists, nazis. But they reason in absolutes and there's no way to touch them with words. They won't negotiate because they just vote for politicians that promise to magically implement that wishful thinking. The politicians will negotiate to reach power, though, they know better.
I'll add that Haidt's analysis that the value placed on compassion relative to loyalty or fairness is a good predictor of party rings true. Compassion > fairness -> democrat Compassion = fairness -> republican Compassion < fairness -> libertarian
The majority of people oppose decriminalisation [1] even in fairly progressive Ontario, Canada, 6 in 10 oppose it [2]
Second - it's a very reasonable course of action to make an activity which is deemed harmful - actually illegal.
"Smoking is bad" -> "Let's make it widely available" is generally not the first order course of action.
Ergo - your assumptions about 'moralising and not caring' is starting to inch into anti-religious bigotry territory.
Now - obviously this is a nuanced issue - and it's possible more permissive laws might lessen harm, but this is by no means obvious.
We saw this with vaping: once something becomes socially normative, behaviours can grow rapidly. There is a black market for almost everything, legal or not.
A large, wide open, legalised & regulated sex trade may simply provide more customers for nefarious sex-traders who can take all the profit & provide underage girls (which will surely remain illegal).
The cigarette industry provides good parallel example, although it's surely not perfect. [3]
In short - increased taxes (i.e. supply curve shift) and overall changes in social norms away from smoking have not caused an increase in illicit consumption - just the opposite. Illicit consumption is down. This might imply that creating more barriers to the sex trade (law), and also reducing demand (social norms), would likely have the overall effect of reducing black market for sex-slavery.
Of course, it's not nearly a perfect analogy, and it's a complicated subject and of course there are individuals and groups who are probably more concerned about morality than justice, but it's still not fair to castigate a policy as being one way or the other.
Personally, I don't see how normalising the sex trade and providing vast online services decreases frequency of transactions, but I'm open minded about the right way to do this. Though I personally think it should be 'decriminalised' (not illegal, but sex workers not allowed to go to 'job fairs' at high school!), I would put the wellbeing of those being trafficked ahead of any of that.
[1] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID...
[2] https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/LAWC-and-CATW-Prostit...
[3] https://tobaccoatlas.org/topic/illicit-trade/
Meanwhile, SESTA/FOSTA effectively puts such a burden on web operators that even legitimate sites (like Craiglist personals) have been shut down out of fear that they will be liable if someone misuses them. This is even true in states and municipalities that choose to legalize prostitution. The effect of SESTA/FOSTA is to usurp states' ability to decide for themselves how they want to regulate the sex trade, at least as far as it comes to the communication platforms they can use. If the intent of SESTA/FOSTA was to inhibit prostitution that didn't involve trafficking, fine, but that's not how it was sold by elected Democrats.
I wouldn't be so cynical about this, except that there is a long history in the US of using moral panic around trafficking to enforce moral preferences -- look at how the Mann act was used against interracial couples, for example. I'm all for helping actual victims of trafficking, but using outrage about trafficking for other political purposes upsets me.
Alternately, decriminalizing sex work means law enforcement would stop wasting their time their pursuing adult sex workers doing legit business, and actually focus on the trafficking of those actually being exploited.
From Harvard Law School:
"Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization."
It seems there's ample data indicating that increasing the market for the sex trade increases the black market for it.
FYI - smoking, same. When less people smoke, there's a smaller black market. [2]
[1] https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
[2] https://tobaccoatlas.org/topic/illicit-trade/
Sex worker rights is a huge frontier that we need to fight harder on, sex trafficking and sex work are two different things, and spiting workers because you find them unsavoury or want to be their saviour under the veil of fighting sex trafficking is utterly abhorrent.
Fuck SESTA/FOSTA, fuck the Nordic model, and fuck any "feminist" that doesn't listen to sex workers and fight their corner as opposed to trying to rid the world of them.
Maybe, just maybe, that poor coal miner knows exactly what he’s voting for because that’s what he wants?
People who work for a living see it like this: they want a voluntary economy. That's why they vote against "socialism." Most welfare we have goes to the rich.
Of the 60% who have, there are surely many of us who weren’t doing it to travel to Thailand for prostitutes. I suspect the number of people who are doing that are a small fraction of the population (of the people I know who have traveled abroad, that percentage is 0%)
Yes, exactly like that, except it's inaccurate to say that "nobody" listened to them. Many people expressed outrage at the time. We just failed to get big tech and its lobbyists on our side, so Congress was deaf to it.
No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions.
But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too.
There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying).
I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it.
Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
That's actually argument for prostitution. You have to earn money for prostitutes. Granted not as much as for the family but still. Also I think there's way less colateral damage for everybody if less desirable men can just buy what they crave directly instead of attempting to compete with better men over women that don't want less desirable men and if they settle for them they'll regret it.
Polygamy arises spontaneously in societies where lots of men get killed off by wars. As soon as the M/F ratio normalizes polygamy goes away.
Fake-polygamy is like early Mormonism, where the proselytizers actively sought large numbers of women to rapidly increase the size of their group. Mormon polygamy mostly went away because of the numbers problem: it is unsustainable if you don't have a way to bring in extra girls or get rid of extra boys (the offshoot mormon cult in Colorado City sent boys away as soon as they hit 18 [2]).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_City,_Arizona#History - Dateline or some other news shows had stories about teenage boys getting expelled from Colorado city, so that the girls could be plural-wed.
> with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
Some men get more action than others, but this is mostly because they've learned how to not be obnoxious [3] about their interests, and go after the women who also aren't so interested in a relationship, or are good at tricking women into thinking they're long term when their intentions are otherwise.
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503
Women generally are selective about who they get with, whereas men generally will get with whomever happens to be interested in them. With that said, many women don't get hordes of men lusting after them, and some men have learned how to mesmerize women into their bedroom, then move on to their next target without second thoughts.
I posted previously about my friend who advertised on backpage for clients [0]. She was not full-service, yet was sort of traumatized by the experience anyways. She doesn't have problem with her catalogue of former boyfriends (entirely her choice), but she was bothered by the men who just wanted to pay for the privilege of putting their anatomy inside her anatomy without her being reciprocally interested.
Then there was the stripper I saw a few times... The last time I saw her, she told of how she gotten beaten up by strip club patrons who'd followed her home. She didn't feel safe at home anymore [0]. She was okay with getting random men aroused, but wasn't interested in sex.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906
Offering prostitution as a service works for women who are flexible about who they'll get with; engaging prostitution as a client works for men who haven't figured out how to be interesting to women, or for men who are not interested in a relationship, or not capable of a relationship, or have other motivations (ex: I read about an Australian mom taking her disabled son for a monthly appointment with a sex worker).
With all this talk about legalizing prostitution, I think it appropriate to point out that lots of women are engaged in legal prostitution already, it's usually just called "acting". Some women pretend they're interested in a man, but they're more interested in their wallet ('trophy girlfriend/wife'). The other common not-exactly-prostitution work for women is pornography. The main difference between pornography and prostitution is men in porn get paid a token amount too. I'm sure many of the online porn producers were set up by men who just wanted to increase the number of women they boink without having to pretend to be interested in a relationship.
Some women do sex work because of economic pressure [1]. IMHO, a basic income of some sort would be an important part of any legalization of prostitution, so that the women who'd rather do anything else don&#x...
Haha, as I've gotten older, this seems more and more accurate. I'm not saying it's all about money, but more like women are interested in one set of benefits a man provides, and men are interested in another set, and they're not necessarily inclusive.
I've traveled and lived in several different countries. Some of them seem less interested in pretending it's all about Disney, partners forever, and are more relaxed about relationships being mutually beneficial without all the pretense (i.e. women that are essentially offering sex and companionship in exchange for financial support, and the amounts wanted are openly negotiated. I almost prefer that to the courtship rituals we use in the West.
Andrew Gurza writes about this as a disabled person. Here’s one of his articles about it: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disability-sex-workers_n_5ca2...
No, men don't have a right to sex, because it involves a woman surrendering herself; its not something innate to the man that is being denied. It's dark to make it so that women need to surrender themselves to strangers on demand for cash because men have a right to the act, and that's just part of it. Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment; without it there is a huge lack of protection for the woman and it becomes a banal experience for the man, because he cannot have love or intimacy from it, just the act that becomes more and more extreme over time precisely because its divorced from human sentiment.
honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism; there's no "intellectual curiosity" about this, just sort of a repetition of a specific set of views with very little attempt to challenge or provide the unpopular side.
I don't know whether anybody have a right to anything, but what I do know is that the government enforce me to pay taxes to support a growing number of single mums who never had sex with me, they had sex with other people but from some reason I need to finance them instead of investing this money in my own children.
So I wonder, if you can force me to pay for female sexual escapades and their spawns and the exciting guys they had sex with because I "didn't put the effort and have unrealistic expectations", why can't I have an agreed upon transaction, where i pay directly the woman who have sex with me? It seems that the effort I put into generating enough taxes is happily taken by all those women via the government and law enforcement, for that I am attractive enough.
To be honest, I don't have much hope, today being an average white man who just go to work, share custody of his children and do all the regular duties is like being the worst criminal in the world, a person to be ridiculed and abused by all kind of interest groups.
So I have learned the lesson, I just move my business and money to second world countries where the western feminist/racist/agist cancer didn't hit yet. Nobody is going to get my tax money if they don't want to give anything back, just extorting me and then spitting in my face. I'd rather give my money to south east asian hookers for having a drink with me than to taxes falling into the hands of all those blood sucking critters. I vote for the most extreme right wing parties I can, not because I support their agenda but in spite, because I feel like I am being screwed up by everyone. I am not even a boomer.
I would say men have a moral right to sex as much as women have a moral right to not be physically and sexually abused by men, at least in an advanced human society that we want.
Naturally, evolution has left the sexes in an unpleasant predicament - look at higher mammals like chimps or great apes for the state we'd fall into without our societal boundaries.
We're long past the point where we've 'artificially' propped up women to a pedestal that wouldn't be obtainable without men raising them up - the freedom to earn money regardless of actual production, safety against physical / sexual violence which is only enforced by other men, reproduction rights, etc.
If this system is to sustain itself, a large amount of men will also need to provided for, and that means sex (or maybe in a sci-fi future some sort of drug or simulation that mimics it in the brain, and releases the 'pressure'). Otherwise, one side of our artificial society is no longer balanced.
>Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment;
Sex itself is the goal for most men, at least primitively. The rest is just a bonus.
> honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism;
Typical. You've been able to express you opinions. I've been able to express mine. Censoring / banning speech is ridiculous, and should never be even considered by a company like YC who owes quite a bit of debt to the US system, which believes in free speech. If they want to start banning more and more speech, they can go set up shop in China or the UK.
Okay, and how is that a bad thing?
"But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.” "
https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has...
The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know.
You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities.
I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.
Almost all Asian AAMPs are trafficked women. They are snuck in on ships and forced to work to pay their “debt”.
Outside of this women work in prostitution because they need money. A lot of people demonize this work saying how terrible it is, but the reality is an hours work is a days wages at a normal job. That’s very tempting.
Internet ads and online advertising got women off the streets and made things incredibly safer. Women could focus on screening clients instead of attracting them, increasing safety.
> Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?
The first case is distinct because it's a real case of illicit external force. For the other two, it's worth pointing out that in the US, the baseline is still "arrest", "criminal charges", and "publishing your name and picture online". This happens with the silent consent of both the US public as well as anti-trafficking activists, who neither speak out against this kind of policing, nor stop cooperating with police departments.
The life of a woman needing to pay for diabetes medication for her daughter does not not improve by being arrested, nor does she welcome her source of income disappearing because of restrictive laws.
Have a look at local news reports of "anti-trafficking stings". It's always the same story. Dozens unnamed woman arrested, rarely even a claim that a victim was identified; and OP is right; the definition of what counts as trafficking is wide enough that even in those cases where it is claimed that a victim was found, it needs to be questioned whether the person actually welcomed the rescue.
Fuck the lot of them. I am a feminist and that means sticking up for the rights of all women, whatever their chosen career. You want people to stop doing sex work? Give them a better option.
Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it.
I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.
Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market.
95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities.
The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls.
There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole.
Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away.
The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria.
One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.
I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law.
https://librapp.com
Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc.
IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.
lol citation needed.
I've used dating apps for the last four years. I've gotten maybe 3-4 dates per year, and 0 relationships out of it.
But seriously, work on what you say in your profile. Nearly every response I get from a woman, is about how well my profile is written.
Modernity is awful. The only good thing is improved medical care and food security. Everything is else is just bad.
Plenty of women do it too and for many of them it's not at all light.
Think of it as polishing your CV by omitting some embarrassing stuff and putting forwards the things you want. Your goal shouldn't be to be 100% honest when writing your profile/CV. Just to make it enticing enough to get your foot in the door.
Seriously though, I feel your pain. I had let the account lapse for months before I happened to get back on there and see that she had written me. Dating apps become a joke exponentially as you get older.
First advice, pay for the premium service on the apps. I know it's not cheap, but being able to see who liked you is a huge gain. I've had very little success getting matches otherwise unless I was going to spend way too much time swiping. And it's still drastically cheaper than a match maker.
Secondly, when writing your profile and choosing pictures, you want to make choices based on the women looking at your profile's perspective. Does he look good? Does he seem interesting? Do we have things to talk about? Share some interesting bits about your life that women might find interesting and want to ask you about. Have you gone anywhere cool lately? Have you picked up any interesting hobbies? (But stay away from esoteric stuff. Database design is cool, but very few people will get it). Maybe you cooked something really cool and exotic for dinner the other day.
Don't try to be overly impressive. If you want to look fancy, have selfies of yourself before you went to an event in a suit, or maybe at the event. Make sure the focus is on you, instead of the event/car/house/whatever. But it can always be in the background. Trying to be overly impressive comes off one dimensional, like you aren't interesting other than puffing yourself up. Showing that you're doing well and are a well adjusted, successful person is good, you just have to make sure it's a facet of your profile instead of a focus.
Make sure you keep your standards reasonable. We would all love to date a neuroscientist who's a lingerie model in her spare time. Those women are exceedingly rare, and even rarer on dating apps. They probably don't need a dating app to keep a full dance card. Swiping really screws up your perspective of what the dating pool looks like. Your feed is always full of absurdly attractive women, but keep in mind that a lot of those are fake profiles.
Lastly, make sure you iterate. Take the dates you can get, even if they're not perfect to you. Maybe they're better than you thought; if not, use it as a learning experience. What did they like about you? What didn't they? You can use that feedback to adjust your profile and how you communicate to make yourself more appealing. Plus, going on dates is pretty much universally fun, so there isn't much to lose!
I'm too old for dating apps, so I've never used one, but don't nearly all women swipe left (that is, reject) something like 80-85% of men on these apps?
The original blog post has long since been deleting (https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...), but according to one of the OKCupid founders:
> [Women] rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’.
You can imagine that people aren't swiping for "average", so the selected percentage would be even less.
Link: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
http://freakonomics.com/2009/02/06/i-pay-them-to-leave/
> A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.”
[1] https://theoutline.com/post/3402/tinder-is-not-actually-for-... [2] https://theoutline.com/post/3711/the-tinder-struggle-visuali...
But he makes it sound like deathly drudgery, and I think that's missing the point. It's "gamified" to give you bits of positive feedback. Matching feels good, like a little compliment. One doesn't have to enjoy that; not every game is for everybody.
And the process itself should be interesting: the swiping process is a lot of momentary life stories. A picture really is a thousand words. If you're not interested in it, then the app isn't for you, but it is for some people.
So I suspect "horrible" is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, I invested a fair bit of time per date, but it was reasonably rewarding time. I met a lot of great people, including some relationships that lasted years.
The main lesson I wish I'd knew going in: the population is densest in cities. It's less effective in the burbs. Duh, of course, but I spent a lot more time traveling into the city than I'd bargained for. That's the only time I really regret about it.
I swear, I should make a career in fixing people's dating profiles. Though the hard part is fixing their attitudes about women, which is the real thing holding them back. If I could fix that, they'd know how to fix their profiles.
https://tim.blog/2017/11/17/alice-little/
I can see lots of benefits with just paying for it. They show up, do the thing, and leave. You get to determine when and where (mostly). You get an enthusiastic partner regardless of the effort you yourself put in, and exactly the sort of sex you want.
If I had the money for it, I'd probably do it too.
Nothing wrong with it. It's just the way you're talking about sex doesn't match up with any reality I've ever heard of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have enough friends who use dating apps to know they're only "easy" if you're young, conventionally attractive, and (preferably) female. A typical middle-aged American guy can swipe through hundreds or thousands of profiles without even getting an response, let alone sex.
Spend hours picking photos and putting together a profile. Now for each person you have sex with, imagine you spent another 5 hours swiping, yet another 5 hours getting maybe 20 conversations going, which turn into 5 actual first dates (budget 5 hours each for prep, transportation, cancelling and rescheduling, etc.), assume 3 of them have zero chemistry, the other 2 are cool but the chances that someone will sleep with you on a first date is very rare, you go on a second date with them both but again no sex this time just for practical reasons (it's a weeknight, they work early, it takes an hour to get home), it fizzles out with one (no third date), the second one has a vacation planned, but three weeks later you finally have a third date and sleep together.
Mission accomplished. Probably a total investment of 40-60 hours across 2 months. And this assumes you even live in an urban area in the first place where there are 10,000's of people your age to swipe through. You still call that "easily free"?
Contrary to what you might think, dating apps are not full of girls looking for a quick first-date hookup. Sure, they're out there, but it's extremely rare that you'll a) find one at all, b) that she wants to hook up with you, c) that you actually meet and it actually happens. Just the reality of things.
By the way, this is also why the narrative of dating apps killing relationships is false. By the time you've put in 60 hours finding someone you're compatible with, you hope to god you can keep going out with them, instead of going back to square one and doing it all over again. Dating apps are work.
Unless you're a standout prodigy, in which case people will message your LinkedIn begging you to consider interviewing for six-figure positions.
You can pay for sex with women that look like Victoria’s Secret models or Playboy Playmates.
If you are just looking for casual sex, the amount of time, effort, and definitely luck to match with someone like that is rare.
For people that aren’t born handsome, tall, or physically attractive, the ability to earn money is a great equalizer.
Of course this is for casual sex. It’s different if you are actually looking for a long term relationship.
And just like there’s something great about finishing a meal and knowing there is no cleanup to do, it’s great sometimes to have a hot girl open her door, set your eyes on her for the first time, and know that with 100% certainty you’ll be having sex with her in ten minutes. The cost is high, so I can’t indulge every week, but I end up doing about once a month.
This is all with women over 30 years old, totally consensual, so there are no ethical concerns for me. Sure they wouldn’t be doing it for free, but that’s true of anyone in any job.
And before you say that anyone should be able to do that, not everyone has the same supply of emotional energy for self betterment, which is an extra on top of what is required to live life day to day
There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can potentially have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.
Legalize it!
Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting.
Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...
Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
(yes accidentally) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/17/when-...
Not directly,at least applicable to the states, but there are a variety of federal prohibitions around the sex trade which complicate it, and there'd probably be federal will for a direct ban if most states didn't prohibit it entirely and the fee remaining didn't prohibit it in most of their territory. Neither major party broadly supports legalized prostitution, for superficially different reasons.
> Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
Not possible without changes to federal law, federal law prohibits prostitution on tribal land, while casinos are regulated by federal law which allows them with tribal-state gaming compacts.
Plus, the cost of entry is pretty low, I hear.
1. https://www-macleans-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.macleans....
That law didn't just affect sex traffickers, it affected ALL sex workers. Craigslist famously shut down its personals as a result of it.
> In the United Kingdom, the term vice is commonly used in law and law enforcement to refer to criminal offences related to prostitution and pornography. In the United States, the term is also used to refer to crimes related to drugs, alcohol, and gambling.
By the dictionary defintion, this is true.
If you look at what gets called "sex trafficking" in the media, by politicians, by police and prosecutors, and in some cases, by the legal system, this is not true. One common definition is anyone who travelled across state (or country) lines has been trafficked, which is a bit like saying anyone who moves to SF for a tech job is a victim of human slavery.
It's not uncommon for a crackdown on sex trafficking to not find a single victim of sex trafficking (or anything else), but still result in a lot of arrests (overwhelmingly of women) and self-congratulatory press releases. The mind boggles.
In any case, the fight against "sex trafficking" (aka, consensual sex between adults) absolutely harms many victims of actual real trafficking. And bluntly, people who haven't yet got the memo yet and think the phrase is still only being used against actual unethical behaviour are making this worse.
too real :(
Because "legalizing it" doesn't stop sex trafficking or sexual exploitation, in fact all evidences point to the contrary, it increases sex slavery.
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse...?
AFAIK ... decriminalization allows for
1. The sex worker to approach authorities without any fear of prosecution.
2. To set up freelance sex work without pimps and brothels.
There shouldn't be a debate about this. Criminalization makes things worse at the expense of moral tidiness.
Regulated sex work allows for
1. Brothels
2. Strip clubs
3. Massage parlors
4. Sex Therapists
If the regulators are corrupt or weak or there are no strong checks ... then the model will be as bad as an unregulated market and will actually be worse as it allows trafficked victims to work under quasi-legal protection. That's what the article implies.
From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to and helps sex-workers unionise.
Interesting. Do they have social services for those that wish to quit computer programming? Or quit hair dressing?
The fact that there needs to be a social service around this particular profession is indicative that this particular profession is probably harmful to the service provider and it probably also means that this isn’t a profession that a girl willingly accepts and perhaps there is value to not promoting this industry.
It is also a more physically oriented job that carries some risk of disease exposure, really shouldn't be worked sick, and some accounts mention an emotional toll and an emphasis on appearance. Individually all aspects aren't unique and some have more severe magnitudes.
Given the income is higher than many other available jobs it could be easy to become dependent upon it for income. A good ethical reason for support is that consent is an ongoing process.
The argument goes like this:
Person A is in such a bad situation that A will accept a job that is terrible!
Prohibiting the job has a good chance of making A worse off (usually, A will accept the job if A thinks it is an improvement over the current situation)
However, we can let A accept the job, and then try to offer A even better alternatives!
My views are largely shaped by the sex worker in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DZfUzxZ2VU
Criminalizing doesn't even offer protection for the sex worker. I'd rather argue about that than having some debate on numbers.
E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.