[EdwardDiego]

> 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.

[anigbrowl]

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.

[_bfhp]

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.

[anigbrowl]

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).

[_bfhp]

I don't know much about Marxism, I use "class" in the intuitive way that means a group of people with interests. I don't think anyone actually disagrees that the world has groups of people with interests. Everyone understands that blackface is detrimental to black people "as a class", and was/is symtomatic of certain things about the "class" of white people out of which blackface performers come.

[anigbrowl]

Using terms 'intuitively' usually means (often unconsciously) including a whole lot of ideological baggage. I actually do disagree with your model of the world; I don't think groups have interests as such, but that individuals have interests, many of which overlap to some degree with similarly situated people who could be said to be part of the same class.

The problem with the Marxist approach to theory (which arguably the fault of Marx's followers as much as himself) is that it over-emphasizes class membership to the point of abrogating individuality. In theoretical discussions,t he experience of people whose experience is more nuanced or at odds with their apparent class status are often dismissed with the claim that the individual has a 'false consciousness' of his or her own situation; While capitalistic (and implicitly, patriarchal) social models do aim to be self-sustaining by promulgating ideology about 'the way things are' and domesticating or even commodifying dissent, the Marxist ideological system can be just as much of a straitjacket, which is one reason for the relatively recent rise of intersectionality theory, with women, ethnic minority groups, sexual minorities and so forth asserting their separate and distinct identities. This is a big reason that left politics seem so fragmented, because each new identity group often plays out similar social dynamics to the one that gave rise to it; so you could say that Marx identified working, middle, and upper economic classes, and that feminists later sought a distinct identity because Marxist theory described some of their issues but ignored a lot of others; in turn black feminists, lesbian feminists, and so on had to carve out their own identities because the main trunk of feminism seemed to be constructed out of white and heteronormative assumptions which ignored distinctly different aspects of their experiences, and so on. Intersectionality theory comes at things from the perspective that people can have membership in multiple classes and that the interests, assumptions, or structures of those classes don't necessarily align neatly.In the context of this discussion, I'm saying that sex work is a lot more complex than just something that negatively affects women as a class, and to to simplify it into such is to marginalize quite a lot of people within the class of sex workers by saying that their experiences and perspectives are irrelevant and should be ignored.

I can't tell whether you mean to reference blackface as just an example of a class issue or to draw an analogy with sex work. If the latter, I think it fails because blackface was about excluding capable performers from the white economic market for entertainment despite the demand for their output, whereas class-based objections to prostitution rest on the argument that any kind of commercial relations involving sexuality are fundamentally exploitative/oppressive and should be forbidden.

[_bfhp]

You set up the "listen to the sex workers" talking point very elaborately, when I and feminists have already listened to them quite enough to understand what the sex industry is to women ( http://sarahditum.com/2014/02/24/who-do-you-listen-to/ ).

For blackface, I mean the former. Your last sentence misrepresents every feminist objection to the prostitution industries that I have ever come across. Maybe you are reading different feminists that I haven't heard of.

[brazzy]

No, it is not in any way or shape obvious, quite the opposite. Gail Dines is a crusader with no regard for reality (or women).

[_bfhp]

Do you mean to intentionally betray a lack of an argument by restricting your comment to pure rhetoric?

[saraid216]

> 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.

That's why we favor charity over systematic aid.

[EdwardDiego]

> I have never actually heard of a male being coerced into prostitution.

Does that mean it doesn't happen?

[saraid216]

You're welcome to provide an example, rather than trying to pit your wit against mine in an effort to get absolutely nowhere.