Not all consent is created equal. Momentary consent does not justify a lifetime of oppression and discrimination. Prostitution is an act of violence against all women and should be prosecuted as such.
You can find the people forced into prostitution sympathetic and deserving of support to find a different occupation, yet simultaneously support legalization as a harm reduction measure. Prostitution, much like drugs that get you high, isn't going away. As Bill Hicks said, we had a war on drugs, and the people on drugs won. The minimal net harm position appears to be legalization, std testing, and severe penalties for abusing or coercing prostitutes.
The Swedish/Nordic Model just means that women in the industry aren't directly criminalised for having sex for money (so long as they have the legal right to work in the country). It still makes it illegal for women to take safety measures like hiring a bouncer or driver to protect them from violent clients, or working together with another woman for the same reason. It also makes it a criminal offence to knowingly rent a flat to a prostitute. It's almost exactly the opposite of harm reduction - it makes it legal to sell sex, but only in ways that are high risk. Hell, I've seen activists in the UK who see this as a positive, because the added danger will encourage women to leave the industry.
Stop treating religious people like children. Did you know that they can choose their own religion just like atheists? It's not like they were raised from infancy on their ideologies and beliefs, and subject to social pressure if they thought or spoke out of line.
Your second line is non-sensical. There are white people in Ferguson, so we should ignore the federal report that finds the police department running debtor's prisons for county revenue. Right? "Women" refers to the group of biologically female [1] human beings, which is about half the world's population.
None of that has any relevance to my comment? My sole point in the second paragraph was that prostitution is not solely a woman's domain. So is prostitution violence against all genders? If so, why specify women?
If not, why not?
The existence of people in the sex industry (yes, it's in fact an industry) who are not women doesn't disqualify the relevance of women's social position in the world to the industries (they are industries, sorry) of prostitution and mainstream pornography, which are primarily oriented toward straight male customers.
I don't know what to tell you if you can't parse the first paragraph of my comment.
Weirdly, while certain feminist positions started with insisting that women and men be treated the same, other positions by self-styled "feminists" are simply the insistence that women must be treated differently. ("False equivalence")
Being part of a sexually dimorphic sentient species with strong instincts for the social "outgrouping" of different "others" is an awesomely weird experience. At other times, it really, genuinely sucks.
The basic problem with humans, is that we are wired up so we can't always recognize everyone else as fully "human." When it comes to this, it definitely "takes two hands to clap." Were it to be truly otherwise, many of the problems of the human condition would be solved. (Consider the above a reference to you and the gp commenter.)
Women occupy a different social position then men, so we must think about them differently, thus treating them differently. This old talking point about "equal treatment" is a "strawman".
I think if you do a sufficient amount of reading about the history of feminist movements (there are good books, like Lorber's "Gender Inequality") you'll find that "insisting that women and men be treated the same" is explicitly not the prioritized framing of all feminists or feminist movements. There are other framings.
Can you explain how a man buying sex from a male prostitute is an act of violence against all women? Or a women paying either a man or a women for sex?
Forcing or coercing someone to have sex, whether for money or not, is wrong, and I doubt you'll find anyone on here who disagrees with that. But there are, in fact, people who actually freely choose to have sex for money, and even enjoy it, and enjoy the relationship they have with their clients. Should these people really be treated as criminals and prevented from doing the job they like and can earn a living by doing?
I think there are pros and cons to legal prostitution, and if you're against it, then come up with real reasons to argue against it. Don't try to shut down the debate with a clearly false statement that prostitution is an act of violence against an entire gender.
craigsmitham meant straight male johns using the prostitution industry. You know this, and yet act like you don't. This is called "intellectual dishonesty".
craigsmitham seems to endorse the Nordic model, where prostitutes are not in fact "treated as criminals". It's useful to read the material that people link, even if you disagree with them.
For an extreme example, it's generally considered a bad idea to let people get paid for 'donating' organs. In addition to the practical problem (paid donors are more likely to lie about the condition of the donation), there is an ethical problem - the rich can buy health at the expense of the poor. The actual cost to the donor is related to the chance they might need that lung or kidney in 30 years, and is nearly impossible to quantify or for the donor to give informed consent.
Of course, we do let 18 year olds pose naked for magazines without considering the cost of not being able to run for political office in 30 years. In that case the long term cost is lower and easier to anticipate.
Prostitution is somewhere between those examples. It attracts those without other options, who might not be able to rationally weigh the risks of future medical or psychological harm against a current financial gain.
If a starving or addicted person does X for $Y, is that true consent? While you're not literally raping the person, it's closer to rape than consent imo.
If we go down this logical path, I'd say society already has lower-than-minimum-wage and/or dangerous jobs being done by people who have no feasible alternative... so we've kinda already accepted that this situation will occur for some people. Not saying this is okay, just saying that legalized prostitution as a profession would just be another dangerous job in a long list of other extremely hazardous jobs people probably shouldn't do, but end up doing anyway.
Continuing down that logical path, it's impossible to have a truly consensual business transaction of any sort because the involvement of currency makes it coercive.
I think the implied part of this discussion is "captive". The person must at least feel that there is no other choice.
We see that in prostitution, in illegal immigrants working in horrible conditions, Dubai laborers[1], etc. In contrast, a Software Developer in the Bay area can hardly claim such conditions.
I think the implied part of this discussion is that there are transactions taking place with a power imbalance between the parties. If that is not acceptable, most of capitalism will promptly fall apart.
While I tend to agree that many (though not necessarily all) transactions exhibit a power imbalance, I disagree strongly that it's currency (or money, or other forms of exchange) which make it so.
Though if you'd care to expand, I'd be interested in your argument.
Possibly. If their personal situation is sufficiently bleak, and there are mechanisms that are arbitrary and unfair helping to keep them in that situation. However, it's almost universally true that any given person has far more choice than they are aware of.
Sure, then working and prostitution is the same thing. You give your time and services so that you receive payment. Both could be coerced in a bad way like slavery, or being forced into prostitution.
Then the argument is if a person is not forced into prostitution but chooses it as their livelihood, shouldn't it be acceptable?
I'm completely sympathetic to that view, but if the person has the choice of prostituting her/himself or starve, and you ban the first option, what so you think will happen?
If you want to prevent these situation you're describing, you need to give people a third option, that enables them to avoid the first two. Criminalizing prostitution will just harm those you want to help.
EDIT: from your other post, it seems we're in agreement.
I think a large swath of the working population would disagree. Give up a 30% of my life to do something I would rather not do so that I don't starve? I guess I'll take that deal.
You suggest they aren't capable of making rational decisions as an adult in their own interests, and consequently implicitly comparing them to mentally-ill people who are wards of the state.
"...an act of violence against all women"? What a load of hyperbolic crap. How does the act of two people making a mutually beneficial transaction amount to "violence" against anyone?
Of course other women don't like it, but that has nothing to do with "trafficking" or "violence". They don't like it because it reduces the amount of power they have over men.
EDIT: Incidentally, there's no reason to hold up Sweden's infantilization of women as an example for anyone else. There's no reason to believe women aren't capable of making their own decisions, but if that's the case they shouldn't be participating in public life.
There are lots of women who are coerced into prostitution, either directly or structurally. But I agree that the existence and frequency of problems is not inherent, ie that it doesn't preclude some women from taking up such work as a free choice.
Of course other women don't like it, but that has nothing to do with "trafficking" or "violence". They don't like it because it reduces the amount of power they have over men.
> There are lots of women who are coerced into prostitution, either directly or structurally.
That's true, but why do you phrase it solely in terms of women? There are a lot of boys/men in the sex industry also.
My personal argument is the criminalisation of prostitution forces prostitutes to associate with criminals, which is where the abuses can happen.
In my country, where prostitution is legal, a prostitute recently took her boss (What do Americans call a man who runs a brothel?) to our Human Rights Tribunal for sexual harassment and won. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm
If you want to minimise harm, legalisation strikes me as the obvious move.
Only because of the comment a few levels above that characterized prostitution as fundamentally violent towards women. I agree sex work as a whole is much more diverse and complex than can be summed up in a simple stereotype.
I think craigsmitham meant women as a class, not individual women. Prostitution (which includes porn) is fundamentally harmful to women as a class. I think this should be obvious, but those to whom it is not can see the work of Gail Dines and related feminists.
Perhaps so, but I disagree with this thesis. (mainly because I don't subscribe to Marxist assumptions about the nature of class conflict and find them overly simplistic).
> That's true, but why do you phrase it solely in terms of women? There are a lot of boys/men in the sex industry also.
I have never actually heard of a male being coerced into prostitution. I know that some choose it. I've heard of plenty of females being coerced.
> What do Americans call a man who runs a brothel?
A pimp.
> If you want to minimise harm, legalisation strikes me as the obvious move.
Americans in aggregate aren't interested in minimizing harm. In aggregate, our concerns tend to be about morality, and "violence" tends to not get included as inherently immoral. We care more about the relative defenselessness of a victim than that there was a victim in the first place.
>There are lots of women who are coerced into prostitution, either directly or structurally.
"[s]tructurally"? What does that mean? I agree forcing a woman into prostitution should be against the law, but if she see's it as the best of her options then that's her decision.
>That's a bunch of hyperbolic crap too, though.
No, not really. Almost all sex is transactional at some level. Women who don't sell it for cash don't want to compete with professionals in the same way manufacturers try to keep out low-priced imports.
By structurally, I mean due to economic or social structures that leave some people with little alternative to this type of informal economic transaction (the downsides of informality being a lack of access to legal and financial resources that support workers in other sectors, albeit imperfectly or in untimely fashion). If it's the best option because of some lack of educational opportunities or social policy that puts people at a disadvantage (eg by creating a ghetto) then that's a problem.
No, not really. Almost all sex is transactional at some level. Women who don't sell it for cash don't want to compete with professionals in the same way manufacturers try to keep out low-priced imports.
I disagree, and think your view is overly reductionist and overly simplistic. Sex work involves a much more diverse set of situations than your stereotypical and rather cynical appraisal of gender-economic relations. It's not that the popular social structures like monogamy don't have any economic dimension, but the assumption that this is the only thing that motivates anyone is as much a denial of agency as the notion that all prostitutes are helpless victims of evil patriarchy.
>If it's the best option because of some lack of educational opportunities or social policy that puts people at a disadvantage (eg by creating a ghetto) then that's a problem.
I don't accept that as some form of coercion. Why is it men seem to be able to find alternatives, but women are somehow helpless victims of circumstance? I used to play poker with prostitutes. To a woman they were simply too lazy to avail themselves of other opportunities. Hooking is easy money.
In any event if she's so desperate this is the only way she can put food on the table, state interference with her trade puts her life in jeopardy, no?
>It's not that the popular social structures like monogamy don't have any economic dimension, but the assumption that this is the only thing that motivates anyone is as much a denial of agency as the notion that all prostitutes are helpless victims of evil patriarchy.
I made no such assumption. But you don't have to talk to too many men to realize their wives and girlfriends use sex as a means to control them.
I don't accept your premise. Men don't go into sex work to the same degree because there isn't enough economic demand for their services. On the other hand, lots of men in bad economic circumstances end working as small-time drug dealers, another line of work that involves willing economic participation (and could thus be called victimless crime), measurable social externalities (which is why it gets criminalized), the possibility of easy money but also a serious risk of violence and exploitation, and a lack of access to other work-related social institutions (labor standards authorities, financial services, dispute resolution through the legal system etc.).
Of course not all prostitutes are forced into that line of work by necessity (as I've said from the outset, and don't intend to repeat further). But it's a mistake to generalize form your experience and assume that none are. I could equally well infer that it's the sort of people who like to spend their leisure hours gambling who are lazy, since gambling by definition offers the possibility of a large quick score rather than the painstaking accumulation of wealth. Or I might infer that since poker is a game of bluffing as much as of luck, it suited at least some of your companions to present themselves to you as shiftless and lazy so as to tempt you into more reckless betting - after all, don't prostitutes specialize professionalize in pretending to be whatever others expect them to be?
Now really, I don't have any strong personal opinions about gambling, plus I for all I know you and your friends used to play for pennies and the primary payoff was the enjoyment of each others' social company; I'm just trying to point out pitfalls in generalizing too much from a limited sample. It's facile to say 'x just does y because s/he is lazy' - it might be that X has great difficulty getting any other kind of job due to having spent the last 10 years engaged in Y, which is not anything you can put on a resume.
In any event if she's so desperate this is the only way she can put food on the table, state interference with her trade puts her life in jeopardy, no?
It depends. In the case of Redbook, as discussed in the article, I think state interference is a bad thing because it seems to have functioned as a platform for women (and others, but mostly women) engaged in this line of work to organize themselves economically and reduce the harmful factors by spreading worthwhile information, from access to better STD-mitigation practices to screening out clients known to be dangerous or abusive. Indeed, one of the key features of Redbook (as I understand it) was that it reduced the traditional leverage of pimps over prostitutes.
On the other hand, if state social welfare agencies come across some cracked-out hooker turning tricks for $20 or someone who's been trafficked across borders for organized sex work and thus doesn't have any of the protections of citizenship or legal residency, it's not doing those persons any favor to say 'well, at least you're on the economic ladder, carry on I guess...' What they need is probably safe housing, maybe drug detox, counselling, education and a boatload of other resources - but that gets expensive, isn't a popular political expenditure (partly because of attitudes like yours), and involves a lot of bureaucratic/ administrative overhead both within state agencies and in the nonprofit sector.
I made no such assumption. But you don't have to talk to too many men to realize their wives and girlfriends use sex as a means to control them.
Maybe it's just that I'm confident and self-reliant enough not to feel dependent on anyone else for my sexual identity (for want of a better expression), but statements like that seem very biased to me. Men are only controlled by their sexuality to the extent that they find it burdensome to obtain consent for sexual activity, no? I mean, look at the not-inconsiderable number of married men who have affairs, long-term mistresses, or hire prostitutes; by definition they find outlets for their sexual drive outside of their marital/conjugal relationship, yet choose to remain within that relationship, so they must be motivated by other considerations besides access to sexual activity. I'm pretty skeptical whenever I hear claims about 'women having men by the balls,' so to speak.
Yeah, some of these women could certainly use better options. The main problem I and sex worker activists have with the whole structural coercion argument is that the solutions to it almost always involve taking the option of sex work away from these vulnerable women and forcing them into options they consider worse, rather than opening better opportunities for them and letting them choose them freely. Whether they involve making it difficult and dangerous to earn money that way through "end demand" laws, or forcing them into re-education and labour programs through the threat of imprisonment, or outright criminalization of them and everyone around them, or literal imprisonment in sweatshops in some cases, the solutions always involve coercing them into situations that they find worse but that outsiders are more comfortable with.
That's an excellent point - as I was arguing elsewhere in the thread, the approach you describe can end up being dismissive or even destructive of individual autonomy. I'm very struck by the collision here between colliding ideologies, with the myth of a perfectly free market and equal economic opportunity on one side and an evil patriarchy which has the socioeconomic subjugation of women as its primary goal on the other, with many people on both sides seeming to have little respect for the actual individuals in the middle.
By the way, if you're involved in activism in this area, could you drop me a line? I'm working on a somewhat related project and will be looking to get some well-informed input on the subject.
> There are lots of women who are coerced into prostitution, either directly or structurally.
Illegality can make it harder for women who are vulnerable to such coercion to seek legal help. No one entirely sane relishes tangling with the law. I remember reading about a situation in Germany, where women using unemployment job seeking services were being pressured to go to prostitution job interviews.
Would this be a problem if there was no social stigma attached to the profession? Perhaps. I'd think it would be wise for the law to treat that particular a profession a little differently, however. (As in the German example.)
>> Of course other women don't like it, but that has nothing to do with "trafficking" or "violence". They don't like it because it reduces the amount of power they have over men.
> That's a bunch of hyperbolic crap too, though.
There's a world of difference between the fluffy and cheerful young woman in suburban Arizona who was interviewed on Penn & Teller's show and an often homeless urban street walker with a dependence on drugs. (Not to mention women trafficked across national borders.) Women who have very little socio-economic power may well be coerced or feel trapped by their circumstances in any line of work. So it's no wonder that a profession of illegal status carries extra complications.
As usual, what is one "issue" in name is actually a half dozen different issues, with socio-economic status as one of a number of differentiating factors.
There is such violence. There is such trafficking. There are also matters of gender politics and the economics of social structures influencing morality. The only hyperbola here is claiming each part is the whole. Blind men...elephant...blah de blah...
> I remember reading about a situation in Germany, where women using unemployment job seeking services were being pressured to go to prostitution job interviews.
Except that's complete bullshit. There was one case where a job seeker got a suggestion to apply for a job serving drinks in a brothel and one where an escort job got into their database of open jobs. Both were considered a mistake and against policy which says that sex-related work is only to be offered on the initiative of the job seeker.
There is no "social stigma" to prostitution afaik. I keep seeing people (mostly men) assert this as gospel truth, but it's an extremely common phenomenon around the world. I'm going to need sources on the claim that there is some stigma.
EDIT: "Social stigma" that looks like, sounds like, and feels like social stigma passes the "duck test." It essentially is social stigma. It doesn't matter so much for the question of its existence who in particular it originates with.
You could also say that adultery has a social stigma, but you see it everywhere, even from the most conservative of men. I would argue that this is not "social stigma", but rather a different conception of controlling women. To the aging, minority group of conservative men who are supposedly "against" prostitution, women are supposed to be private property, not public property.
The problem is that when you hire the services of a prostitute, you will probably have no idea about the situation of that person. Maybe this person is in charge of his/her life and is making a well-informed choice. But maybe this person is coerced into prostitution. In that case you will be financially supporting a very wrong thing, and you have no way of knowing. I think the question whether prostitution should be legal is much less important than the conclusion that being a customer is morally indefensible.
Exactly, johns should be penalized. We sanction entire countries because of the conditions of the workers in manufacturing industries, don't we? But we simply can't touch the sex industry because that would be restricting "free choice"...
Farming in California is built on trafficked, essentially slave, labor, but I guess the much smaller problems in prostitution are a more romantic target.
Frequency of piecework? I bet there are a lot more instances of "picking a fruit" per year by trafficked farm worker than there are instances of sex by a trafficked sex worker.
By this logic prostitution is no different than any economic transaction. Goods are made by people who are virtually, if not in fact, slaves. Does that mean you refuse to buy anything you didn't make with your own hands?
It's not realistic, though. You can't possibly research the povenance of every garment, food item, piece of electronics, drop of oil, shelter, and building material you buy. It's impossible.
The question that always gets me: You have stories of women being threatened with injury or death to perform or to service johns. How do you know that the women in the porn you watch or the prostitutes or strippers you use are _not_ being coerced? How can you be certain?
Thanks for making the important point. I'm glad you're downvoted into invisibility, it only exemplifies the nature of the sex-positivity movement -- to silence any criticism. There is no hope for honest debate because the ideology is intellectually dishonest from the start, it's a means to an end. The work of Gail Dines is probably a better source than BuzzFeed though.
I've never thought about this topic before, and from your comments it shows you have given it careful thought, so probably this is going to have some fundamental flaws, but I was just thinking:
We do seem to have found solutions, however imperfect, in other domains where workers were always vulnerable. How do you know your new tech gadget wasn't produced with child labour, or in some horrible sweatshop? There's a long list of things, probably including at least labour unions, investigative journalism, and a lot of legislation.
But for all those things to work, it has to all be a somewhat legal enterprise to begin with. You probably can't build a brand for a brothel-chain that's widely recognised to treat their workers well, if that's an illegal activity.
What strikes me as patronising about the nordic model, that you mention up in the thread, is this: if I'm legalising your job, but still go after your customers, that means I'm still not taking your job seriously, or?
I'm glad to see a comment on this issue raising honest points, which is uncommon to see. In 2015, using a lot of tech is far less optional than using pornography and sex workers, which is optional (as in, optional = bool(True)) in every case.
For the both the necessary and optional physical products, there should be more involvement in campaigns for favorable trade legislation and worker conditions, and I think we're all guilty of lack of participation in this, which is only made easier by the entrenched influence of the companies involved.
From reading a lot of different people, I don't think the feminist advocates for the Nordic model "don't take sex work seriously". I think they identify porn and prostitution as socially harmful to women as a class and physically and psychologically damaging to individaul women in a too-large amount of cases, and would rather see women exit en masse through programs that help them find support and work elsewhere, than anything else -- toward the eventual abolition of prostituion. (I think the opinion is split on whether prostitution is inherently harmful -- that is, in a post-gender world where there is no trance of social definition of women as stores of resources to be extracted for pleasure and service, would prostitution still be socially harmful? -- but I don't think it matters for the questions at hand.) Here are some links to introduce a camp of thought that is never given a chance in the mainstream:
> I think the opinion is split on whether prostitution is inherently harmful -- that is, in a post-gender world where there is no trance of social definition of women as stores of resources to be extracted for pleasure and service, would prostitution still be socially harmful? -- but I don't think it matters for the questions at hand.
I think it does matter - in fact this seems to be exactly the pain-point in this whole thread, that everyone differs on that particular point. If it isn't inherently harmful (and again, I haven't thought about it enough to decide), then your line of argument seems to conflate feminist causes with sex workers', and we'd be trampling over a non-harmful industry just to further the cause of feminism [^].
On the other hand, if it is inherently harmful, there's no need to entangle the two either, and we should legislate against it regardless of whether it damages women as a class or not.
Thanks for all the links.
[^] edit: which may be a legitimate reason, of course. But it would avoid most of the discussion in this subthread.
There are the three general grouping points of views:
1. Prostitution industries are non-harmful
2. Prostitution industries are harmful to women no matter what the social context and always will be
3. The industies are harmful to women as a class today and throughout history, under the system called "gender", where men assign to women the role of stores of resources to extract, which has existed as long as civilizations have.
Many people are, genuinely or otherwise, treating the original commentor like he was asserting #2, when he was asserting some variant of #3, which does not logically have #2 built-in. You don't have to agree with the latter part of #3 to understand that it is not the same as #2, and we can start talking about 1 vs 3 without having to resolve 2 immediately.
I mean, we already know this, don't we? We can talk about how to deal with racist institutions without always falling back into questions of "what is race? in a post-racism world, would races exist?" Maybe the analogy isn't perfect...
Porn may be just as "socially harmful" to men than it is to women, or even more-so, but obviously in a vastly different manor. My first network connection as a kid was a 1200 baud modem and a BBS, and I know what "trouble" I got in back then. I have no idea how kids are supposed to deal with the ocean of content that is literally at their fingertips, the siren song and peer pressure around watching it, and the difficulty of processing those images and comprehending the acts at the ages they are exposed to them.
Forget the "birds and the bees" talk, now it's more like, "so I noticed the pornhub DNS queries coming from your tablet..."