The sex workers don't care about your morals. They have different morals than you and care about different things. Stop telling them and other people what morals they should have.
Regulated prostitution may be bad in your eyes but unregulated prostitution is even worse for those who are already in this industry.
The heart of the matter is simple: if you buy the services of a prostitute, you have little means of knowing his/her backstory. She may be doing this willingly, or she may have been coerced. So you are willingly taking the risk that you're raping somebody.
The conclusion is that it is an immoral act to visit a prostitute. And that's all you need to know really.
Oh and here's another dirty little secret for you: a good percentage of the customers do it exactly because they LIKE the rapey aspect of it. The world is a darker place than you may prefer to believe.
I don't think so. I have 2 close friends who used to be prostitutes, and I'm pretty sure both of them would eye-roll hard at this. All you're doing is willfully choosing the focus on the dark instances, regardless of their actual prevalence, and try to claim that the whole picture is like that across the board.
Only because it's all illegal. If prostitution was legal, you could go to a well-reputed bordello where the managers are known, and know that everyone in there is doing it consensually.
I'm sure the owners would be happy to provide background checks for all employees, if it gets the police out of their business.
We have a perfectly good approach already; it's called the Nordic model. Arrest johns, not prostitutes.
And there are thousands of former sex workers that will give you an earful about what you think you know about prostitution and what prostitutes think.
I know several sex workers personally, and regularly sit on the sidelines of their discussions when they talk about their work in sex-positive spaces. I can assure you that all of them would prefer that it were a lot easier to perform their job without fear of the police, or of losing their home, or of the stigma from friends and family.
They also have a tendency to wish that people who didn't want to be in their line of work didn't have to be in their line of work. So why not actually try to solve that problem - reach out to individuals, listen to them, and help them achieve their goals - instead of trying to tell people what they want and don't want? The only reason I can think of is that that doesn't allow you to force your morality on people.
> So why not actually try to solve that problem - reach out to individuals, listen to them, and help them achieve their goals
I do. I reach out to would-be purchasers of sex and those who would defend them, and point out the dire consequences of their approach. Economic transfer doesn't suddenly make rape something one should aspire to or tolerate.
I was talking about sex workers. The ones you're not listening to.
Edit: Specifically, if the goal is to help sex workers who want help, the solution is... to help sex workers who want help. It's to perform research into the barriers to seeking help, and try to remove those barriers. It's not to prevent consensual trade between a person who has few issues with their job, and someone seeking their services.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to eradicate sex work against the wishes of those sex workers for reasons of morality, punishing people who participate in it is a wonderful idea.
OK. Exactly what about sex work is immoral, when the sex worker can choose their clients? Is it that sex is inherently something special that other work isn't?
The sex workers aren't the ones whose moral choice is in question here; the sex purchasers are the ones who should feel shame and whose behavior is for society to condone or to curtail. Slaves weren't the bad actors in that peculiar institution, either.
The right of a person to not have sexual access to their body be reduced to the object of purchase with the purpose to gratify a person who holds economic power over them. Purchasing sex is an abuse of power.
This isn't really an opt-out right; surely there are people who would "consent" to situations of slavery or apartheid. This doesn't mean we should make those things legal.
That's a very specific right, and very very based in a specific morality, isn't it? There's certainly a good many people who don't think sex is as magical or special a thing as you obviously do. Many think of sex work as nothing more special than being expected to perform labour for several hours a day for a pittance.
Selling an organ implies the loss of something necessary for a full life. Not having an organ results in shortened lifespan and lower quality of life. If you could grow back the organ in a matter of seconds, we wouldn't have an issue with it. It'd be sore and likely physically demanding, but so's a lot of work.
And literally thousands and thousands of current and former sex workers agree. They have conferences, and industry groups, they lobby Governments, they have systems by which they can ensure the safety of themselves and each other and pick out their own clients. This isn't the situation of somebody who was trafficked half-way across the world and forced into sex slavery.
The solution is not to make sex work illegal, or to make seeking it illegal. It's to help the people who don't want to be performing sex work. It's to give them food, and shelter, and training to re-enter the job market. But that's expensive, and it's difficult to explain to people with Christian moralities about sex why you'd allow people to perform sex work if they wanted to.
Which is to say, it's about imposing morality. You want to force these people into options they've already decided are worse than having sex for money because you're more comfortable with them earning money that way, and your moral judgement is more important than their freedom.
No, I want men to stop thinking that exploiting the economic and social disadvantages of women is an acceptable way to get sex. Because I'm a decent human being and would like other men to be decent human beings.
WTF, you're so ridiculously one-sided about this in both thought and action. It seems you dont know what decent means either. Stop thinking you know better for the entire industry.
Ah, the Nordic model... The country in the middle bans prostitution and offloads it to the neighboring countries. I have yet to see any macro advantage on it, besides a little reduction and a lot of smug people feeling better about themselves.
A while ago I spent quite some time researching the prostitution thing, trying to make up my mind about it. I remember the UN report on global trafficking[1] being specially enlightening. The conclusions I took from it:
-Prohibition doesn't work. It just drives the prostitution underground, and as the pimps are already doing something illegal they don't mind going the extra mile, make it straightforward slavery and abuse the women so much than they are too terrified to escape. A small country (like Sweden) can offload the prostitution to nearby countries, but if all Europe were to do that the consequences would probably be really dire for a lot of women.
-Full legality increases human trafficking. As there is a lot of legal prostitution going on, it's easier to get away with the trafficking. In Europe usually takes the shape of organized crime importing awful lot of women from western Europe to Holland and Germany. Long term, it's thought to increase the well being of prostitutes, both imported and local, but we still have to grok how to do it without make it without the traffic.
-Not legal nor illegal. This is the situation in most countries, and the implementations vary wildly. In some countries the police does not intervene at all and it's a cesspool of mafias fighting for control, others make it a tourist attraction, while others haven't made it legal but don't prosecute the prostitutes. Curiously enough, this last approach is the one that gets the best results at stopping exploitative human trafficking as long as pimping is really prosecuted, don't remember anyone really explaining why. My guess is that in this situation large scale trafficking operations stand out much more, but who knows.
TL;DR; It's hard. Swedes are a tiny bit hypocrites in this one.
Indeed just having one region legalize skyrockets trafficking. Prices also go down, so prostitution becomes less attractive to locals as a way to make money which means foreigners in poor countries have to be imported, which leads to trafficking rings. Vice claims of the 500k prostitutes in Germany two-third's are foreign http://www.vice.com/read/a-visit-to-one-of-germanys-all-you-...
It's extremely difficult to stop gangsters from trafficking because they operate in the trafficked persons home country as well, so if you run to the police in Germany or Canada they can seek retribution on your family members back home in Ukraine, Vietnam ect. Thus the not legal nor illegal does a good balance of preventing super brothels opening up full of imported sex workers while at the same time being able to arrest pimps without relying on the testimony of the sex workers.
Ah, the Nordic model... That's the one where they criminalized landlords who knowingly rented to sex workers, then used that law to kick sex workers out of their homes for reporting their rapes to the police, right? The best part is that when Amnesty International took a stance against this, the sleazy slimeballs in the anti-trafficking movement accused them of making it up because those countries didn't criminalize sex workers (which technically they didn't - just everyone around them).
Am I correct in interpreting that as you suggesting that anti-prostitution activists did not, in fact, claim that Amnesty International were making things up when they pointed out the negative outcomes of "the Nordic model" for sex workers, the people you're claiming it was supposed to protect?
Amnesty International relied on a flawed and now-retracted study that initially said violence against women had increased in Norway since banning the purchasing of sex, when in reality it had not.
Every model has trade-offs, the trade-off of the Nordic model is that clients are less willing to disclose information which makes it more difficult for sex workers to weed out violent troublemakers. Implementing the Nordic model would in some cases undo some recent advances in identifying and blocking these ugly clients and result in some workers being violently abused or even possibly killed.
Don't go thinking there is a silver bullet here, all solutions somewhat suck.
> Implementing the Nordic model would in some cases undo some recent advances in identifying and blocking these ugly clients and result in some workers being violently abused or even possibly killed.
Sorry to break the news to you: all clients are ugly clients, since they're all just fine with the idea that people's bodies are something to be bought and sold.
So's all of capitalism - what is employment but the buying of somebody's body and mind? But I don't see people like you arguing towards the end of that, or the reduction of the circumstances which cause people to perform sex work - only reducing people's options within the framework we've already forced them to live in. I know people who have chosen sex work over a minimum wage job at McDonald's - apparently they think the sex work is less degrading, and it's much better paying.
Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
> So's all of capitalism - what is employment but the buying of somebody's body and mind? But I don't see people like you arguing towards the end of that
This isn't germane to the issue, which is that purchasing sex is a reprehensible act. However, there is indeed a strong strain of anti-capitalist thought in radical feminism; it surprises me that you don't know this.
> Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
I meant literally their bodies, not images of their bodies, or actions that their bodies perform. I meant direct access to their mouths, rectums, vaginas for the purpose of sexual gratification. I suppose if purchasing that kind of access had other purposes besides sexual gratification, "sex" wouldn't seem like such a special case.
> However, there is indeed a strong strain of anti-capitalist thought in radical feminism; it surprises me that you don't know this.
I moderate a handful of self-titled "social justice warrior" chatrooms, which are full of everyone from libertarian socialists to anarcho-communists. I'm reasonably aware of various strands of feminism. I've been having a discussion on the morality of sex work for much of today.
Sex work is immoral for the same reasons other work is immoral. It's not a special case, and shouldn't really be treated much differently. If you want to protect the sex worker from the necessity of performing their work, you should be similarly protecting the minimum wage retail clerk from the necessity of performing their work. Neither is worse than the other, and they have similar solutions.
Again you are misrepresenting my position; it's not that "sex work" is somehow more immoral than other work, it's that the purchase of sex is immoral, shameful, and frankly, pathetic. It has nothing to do with capitalism vs. anarchism or anything else.
Even under capitalism, purchasing e.g. food for your family that was somehow acquired under coercive circumstances is still less shameful than purchasing e.g. diamonds that were somehow acquired under coercive circumstances. What you're purchasing matters; it's not all the same.
Assuming you own a TV - the purchase of your television was immoral, shameful, and pathetic - you bought into the incredibly poor working conditions of various mines in developing countries, coercive labour in China, and more. And yet you bought it for entertainment. If you don't own a TV, I'm reasonably sure I could pick out something else you've done that involved coerced labour that you didn't need to.
The solution is to get rid of the system which is coercive. It's not to tell everybody who ever wanted to buy a television not to within the context of capitalism.
No, the purchase of a television is less immoral, shameful, and pathetic than the purchase of sex. It is qualitatively different. There is nothing inherent in my possession of a television that demeans or degrades another human being; it's simple circumstance that makes working conditions more or less morally acceptable.
The purchase of sex inherently demeans and degrades another human being because it places one's own sexual gratification over another person's bodily autonomy.
> The purchase of sex inherently demeans and degrades another human being because it places one's own sexual gratification over another person's bodily autonomy.
I'm a contractor, and I get to choose my clients. If I don't want to work with someone, I don't. Why would it be "inherently" demeaning in sex work, if they got to choose their clients and there were better protection and regulation?
Why is it an implementation issue with your TV purchase, and an inherent issue with sex work? I don't follow the logic.
TL;DR no prostitute can "choose" a john that isn't going to sexually exploit her (and thus violate her human rights) because that's the nature of purchasing sex.
A direct quote TL;DR
Does the 'right to prostitute' exist?' Clearly prostitution cannot exist as a right because it usurps and negates already established human rights of the prostitute woman to human dignity, bodily integrity, physical and mental well-being...Human rights are universal and inalienable. They cannot be reduced to the instrumentality of individual choice alone because individual choice can and does include the right to harm or propagate harm on others or inflict harm on oneself.
The question was whether to "dictate someone elses values on human rights" consists a worse violation than the human rights violation itself; it's pretty obvious the answer is "no." In fact the entire concept of human rights relies on there being some possibility of an objective standard of "human rights" that does not depend on an individual's choice or opinion, even if that individual's choice or opinion biases them to permit the violation of their own human rights.
You think prostitution is not a violation of human rights. I do. It's pretty much that simple. But clearly what specific individuals used to think about freedom from slavery, or the right of Jewish people to exist, or the right to basic dignity and access to food and livelihood, has no bearing on whether or not these things are human rights. They just are.
"It's morally acceptable to be a slave but not to own one? That's asinine."
The "economic transaction" model is in almost all cases a fig leaf for the abuse of women, even in jurisdictions where prostitution has been legalized or decriminalized.
You aren't purchasing the person and agency of a person when you engage the services of a sex worker, and it isn't yet established that sex work is inherently abusive. Miles of digital ink wasted on just-so stories do not suffice for evidence.
The vast majority of your posts in this thread are variants on "You hate women, you cryptofascist". When presented with a lengthy rebuttal of your claims that cited a UN report on white slavery, your only rejoinder was to continue in this vein. Methinks you care less about the dignity and safety of women and more about feeling like a martyr.
That's the Nordic model where the police tell a landlord that if they don't evict their whore tenants they're profiting from prostitution, which is a crime, right?
