[jbrown]

I really like your story breakdown here. Those are three pretty clear contributors to the overall forced sex trade story. But I feel like there is one more story that is much less obvious. The three stories you identify reside on the supply side of the issue. On the demand side I feel there is a story about how our social expectations of monogamy contribute to the demand for prostitution. How men in sexless monogamous relationships are forced to go underground to get a basic human need met. How even when a marriage isn't sexless men still may feel the need to fulfill unsatisfied desires. They can't do this openly and honestly because monogamy won't let them. I can't help but feel that if monogamy was not the expectation, and violations of it were not perceived as a deplorable offense, sex would be rendered a much less scarce resource and the demand for sex slavery would be significantly reduced.

[kbenson]

Or perhaps if they are in a marriage that restricts a resource that isn't supplying enough of that resource, then the marriage should be reexamined. Marriage is a contract, if you don't like the terms you agreed to, attempt to change the contract, not to cheat it.

It's the same for sex as it is for anything else.

[jbrown]

> Or perhaps if they are in a marriage that restricts a resource that isn't supplying enough of that resource, then the marriage should be reexamined.

There's a lot of social pressure against this because of the stigma associated with divorce.

> Marriage is a contract, if you don't like the terms you agreed to, attempt to change the contract, not to cheat it.

This is pretty much what I'm saying. The problem is that people are usually woefully naive and uninformed when they enter a marriage contract. Maybe we need to re-examine the societal default for marriage contracts...specifically the portion about monogamy / sexual exclusivity.

[kbenson]

> specifically the portion about monogamy / sexual exclusivity

It feel like you are pushing a specific aspect to the detriment of the whole. I agree that if someone doesn't desire, or can't maintain monogamy in a marriage, that they should be upfront about this and make sure their partner is aware and accepting. While that this may require a bit of social change to make it more acceptable, I don't think that's a specific case that needs to be revisited for marriage in general (many people are happily monogamous). I think it's better overall for people to be upfront and and truthful overall. There are many things that can break up a marriage besides infidelity. I'm not even convinced infidelity is the main reason, it may more often be a symptom of some other underlying problem.

> There's a lot of social pressure against this because of the stigma associated with divorce.

Which ties into above, if people can't (or feel they can't) divorce, then they may act out in other ways. I also think this is highly location dependent. In the western US, I'm not sure I've observed much social stigma for divorce.

[jbrown]

> It feel like you are pushing a specific aspect to the detriment of the whole.

Maybe. What detriment are you thinking of?

I'm just observing that since monogamy restricts us to this 1:1 gender ratio, and since in some cases one of those 1s is taken off the table (either literally or if not literally, maybe effectively due to low quality) this drastically restricts society's ability to meet a basic human need one a wide scale. To make matters worse, situations like China's gender imbalance add to the challenges that already exist when the gender split is close to 50-50. Wouldn't you agree that these kinds of challenges might be reduced if a many-to-one structure was just as socially acceptable as a one-to-one structure? Could the pigeonhole principle have something to do with the demand for sex trafficking? If this is an unreasonable line of thought, I'd love to understand why.

[kbenson]

> Maybe. What detriment are you thinking of?

The marriage as a whole. I see accurate representation of expected monogamy/polygamy or fidelity/infidelity (WRT sex) as just one aspect of many that may cause marital problems. What about a husband that expects the wife to be a homemaker when she is unhappy in that role, or a wife that expects the husband to provide all financial support when the husband is unhappy with that. There are many reasons marriages fail, and I think focusing specifically on one of them may not help as much as making people more aware of marriage expectations altogether.

As for the rest of your comment, I would be happy if marriage as a whole was less strictly regimented by society, but I understand the reasons it is. Marriage is the building block of families, and families are the building blocks of our societies. We optimize for successful families that produce well adjusted offspring. The problem is that I'm not sure exactly how we are defining "well-adjusted". If it's primarily in relation so society and culture (it is, the question is how much), it may just be self selecting. That's not necessarily a way to make things better, just to perpetuate the status quo. I just don't know enough to make a call.

[jbrown]

> The marriage as a whole.

How precisely do you think the things I'm saying harm the marriage as a whole? I'm still not seeing your point. I'm not talking here about causes of marriage failure. I'm talking about the graph structure of society's sexual relationships.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have monogamous marriages. I'm asking if changing society's expectations to the point where both monogamy and all variations of non-monogamy were perceived to be equally legitimate (with a likely corresponding increase in the number of non-monogamous relationships) could have an impact on the demand for sex trafficking. I don't think making this change would eliminate sex trafficking, but I think it could plausibly help the situation.