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Prostitution

rickc said:
Obviously when faced with the reality of a $5 an hour waitress job or $500 a night with some disgusting hairy man a lot of women choose the latter.

Now if you are really interested in protecting those women then the sex trade should be brought into the light. Licensed brothels with licensed prostitutes closely regulated.
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How does licensing the worker solve the disgusting harry man problem?
 
Rich2018 said:
Prostitution is illegal in most US states but:


Is there any valid argument against prostitution ?
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I think there are valid arguments against one's favoring or disfavoring prostitution and prostitutes, but I do not find that there is a valid reason for objecting to the existence of prostitution as a career or activity in which individuals might freely opt to engage.
 
Xelor said:
I think there are valid arguments against one's favoring or disfavoring prostitution and prostitutes, but I do not find that there is a valid reason for objecting to the existence of prostitution as a career or activity in which individuals might freely opt to engage.
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Free to infect people with STDs for profit. :roll:
 
Xelor said:
I think there are valid arguments against one's favoring or disfavoring prostitution and prostitutes, but I do not find that there is a valid reason for objecting to the existence of prostitution as a career or activity in which individuals might freely opt to engage.
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It also preys upon the mentally and psychologically disturbed who hire them - noting the EXTREMELY high percentage who have HIV/AIDS and other STDs, plus how many Johns are rolled by hookers.
 
joko104 said:
Free to infect people with STDs for profit. :roll:
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Well, yes, anything can be risky if, when doing it, one behaves irresponsibly.

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Xelor said:
Well, yes, anything can be risky if, when doing it, one behaves irresponsibly.

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That's as rational is having yourself shot in the chest over and over and over relying upon a bullet proof vest. Hope the shooter doesn't miss. Hope the vest holds up. Anyone who claims condoms are a surety against contracting an STD with extremely high risk sex is a fool.

Where is your photo of a face mask to avoid TB?​
 
soylentgreen said:
As long as you do understand that you are giving an emotional plea. Which is fine as far as your own personal opinion goes. But in order to legalise prostitution or say it must stay illegal it is far better to use evidence based reasoning.

The opinion may be shared but that is irrelevant. If you both shared the opinion that jumping of a cliff is a good thing that would still not make it so. This is about your own personal shame. You find prostitution degrading. That does not mean others must also do so. There are women who quite like the job and whose only real problem is the stigma attached to it by people who force the idea of stigma.

As for why a man's view you were responsible for that in your very first post to which i replied. Post 109# to quote you.
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It's ALL opinion, yours, mine and anyone else. There is evidence on both sides of this argument. The public is pretty evenly divided. So quit with the holier than thou BS. And it's not about anybody's "shame"; where do you get that kind of crap" ? Projection? Btw; I stand by that post; what kind of loser are you if you have to pay for sex? It ain't that hard to get a woman of your own. I might add; there are plenty of women out there willing to give it up for free.
 
Waddy said:
It's ALL opinion, yours, mine and anyone else. There is evidence on both sides of this argument. The public is pretty evenly divided. So quit with the holier than thou BS. And it's not about anybody's "shame"; where do you get that kind of crap" ? Projection? Btw; I stand by that post; what kind of loser are you if you have to pay for sex? It ain't that hard to get a woman of your own. I might add; there are plenty of women out there willing to give it up for free.
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Losers who want to degrade and exhibit power over women.
 
joko104 said:
Losers who want to degrade and exhibit power over women.
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They say rape is about power and control. Paying for sex is like rape but paying for the power and control, instead of just taking it.
 
ThoughtIsFree said:
True story about a twenty yr old college student who went missing.

A young college student goes missing after leaving work at a strip club and her parents think she was a waitress at the club. The 20 yr old is an only child and had left the city she grew up in to attend college and start her new life. To help will bills and college tuition this young woman gets involved in the sex industry. She's stripping, prostituting, doing web cams, sending nude photos for money, dealing drugs etc. During the investigation to find her the parents learn of their only daughters secret life. Also this young woman had started using cocaine, meth, prescription uppers all through high school and was illegally drinking at the club. The strip club was ran by the mafia and there were so many people involved in this young woman's life they decide she must have been kidnapped for sex trafficking. Two months after she went missing a private organization offers to search water ways near where this gal was last seen, they find her and her car at the bottom of a lake at a City park. It's decided she was high on drugs and alcohol and drove into the lake off a boat ramp by mistake. A life lost due to deciding to be involved in the sex industry to make money. Also when you read her social media accounts she talked about her work and you could tell the men pretty much nauseated her. The people she was involving herself with did not care about her age and drug use. To this day nobody really knows why this young woman lost her life, living that kind of lifestyle left so many possibilities as to why she ended up with the fishes. When you get involved in prostitution you can end up getting involved with very sleazy people who do not give a hoot about your well being.
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To me a meth head is 100 times worse than a prostitute.
 
dirtpoorchris said:
To me a meth head is 100 times worse than a prostitute.
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Often they're one and the same. At least until the meth destroys their looks, along with their teeth.
 
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joko104 said:
It also preys upon the mentally and psychologically disturbed who hire them - noting the EXTREMELY high percentage who have HIV/AIDS and other STDs, plus how many Johns are rolled by hookers.
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Are there anymore lies, hyperbole, fabrications, soldiers habits, plain old fiction, union contracts, winter savings programs to support the nonsense you spew?. [
 
Pretty good Ted Talk led by a sex worker who makes some excellent points about how criminalization of prostitution actually make life more dangerous for sex workers and clients alike:

 
I have a valid argument against legalizing it.

Where prostitution is legal, the prices are astronomical.
Where it is illegal, it is only about $40 average.
Where it is legal, the sex industry is all over the place and do everything they can to give you less for your money and charge you through the roof for nothing.
Where it is illegal, you actually get whatever it is you paid for.
Where it is legal there is no quality.
Where it is illegal you get more "bang" for your buck, so to speak, and the quality is usually much better.

The sex industry ruins professional sex.
It is better where it is illegal.
 
Man... I am so conflicted on this issue. On one hand this perfectly describes my position:

The Mark said:
Put the pimps out of business by making legal prostitution a better option.
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MovingPictures said:
Nope, there are no valid arguments for jailing people for their personal choices.
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I firmly believe nobody should ever be imprisoned for a non-violent crime, especially one without a direct 3rd party victim. People have a fundamental right to their own bodies. However, at the same time, Felis Leo is also completely correct:

Felis Leo said:
I would argue that prostitution should remain illegal on the basis that selling one's own organs should remain illegal: However regulated it may be, it creates perverse incentives that leaves the most vulnerable people open to legalized exploitation by the very worst people in society. To give one's body freely and consensually is one thing, in the same way that to give one's organs or blood to another person. To sell one's body and to commodify one's humanity is a dangerous road to go down.
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The very nature of the situation makes it very susceptible to oppression, because is a desperate person really making that decision of free will or of pure necessity or nebulous coercion?

I feel like the best way is somewhere in between, but I have no idea what that'd look like.
 
DH Kirkwood said:
In that first line, you admit to being an atheist, but then critisize atheists for forgoing morality. Clearly you have your own sense of morality, as do I. On what basis do you proclaim that atheists forgo morality? What is the percentage of atheists who do this?
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I have no idea what percentage of atheists are morally neutral when it comes to matters of public import, but I have seen many in this thread do it. Many claim that individuals have no right to impose our personal moral values on one another...because freedom. That one’s personal morality should, in essence, be treated like one’s personal sexual kinks and predilections: kept to yourself behind closed doors. I find this attitude to be utter nonsense because our secular criminal laws are based on a moral framework, and the ideas that certain things (such as the violation of one's person or property) are wrong, but not others (for example, the violation of honor). I think those atheists who do this do a great disservice to their fellow human beings because, in essence, they want an atomized society in which no one has any responsibility towards anyone else and any act no matter how horrible is permissible irrespective of the circumstances so long as consent is not violated. Hence, why I am a conservative and not a libertarian. Because freedom is an open road that has to have a destination in mind. While freedom is the best route to achieve our destination, freedom itself cannot be the destination.

DH Kirkwood said:
I do reject traditional morality. I like to consider myself a fan of Cartesian scepticism. I don't accept anything on the basis of 'just because', or 'because this is how we have always thought', and I'm constantly reavulating things that I hold as truths. This does cause me to shift wildly in my views from time to time . . . err, advocating for the harrassment of public figures would be a good example of that. (Oh, by the way, if I never get back to that thread, then know that I concede.)
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Well, I accept certain portions of traditional morality, but certainly not "Just because" they are traditional. Rather, because they are tried and true methods of making a better, more socially cohesive and coherent society in which social capital is strong and we are not given to fear our neighbors.
 
DH Kirkwood said:
I don't view the trafficking of human organs as a good example of why prostitution is wrong AND should be illegal. You seem to be selling this general 'Selling your body is bad, mmkay?'' angle. "This seems similar to this other thing, so both are wrong!" First of all, why do we consider selling our organs to be wrong? Well, obviously there are certain organs that we can't live without, and if we can find those organs on the black market, then it probably means that somebody died to 'donate' those organs. There's also the fact that people have to endure a waiting list to receive live-saving organs, and circumventing this process can be considered to be unfair to those individuals who are abiding by the law.

Prostitution doesn't raise the same moral questions for me that black-market organ profiteering does. 'But they're both examples of body-selling!' doesn't work for me, because you still need to prove to me that 'body-selling' is wrong, and it what context. I'm not going to abide by some absolutist 'just because' line. The similarity between the two is only skin-deep, and only relavant to anyone who stops at their primal emotions.
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I do not dispute you taking exception to this. While I would call prostitution analogous to selling one's organs in kind (if not degree) to selling one's own body, I actually consider prostitution worse than selling one's own organs. The reason I consider it worse as a moral issue is the source of the demand. When it comes to the organ trade, you are right: the people to whom the organs eventually go to have generally done nothing fundamentally wrong (usually) by being placed in a position where they need an organ transplant to survive. And unless they take a direct part in the organ harvesting (such as directly paying the harvester or kidnapping an unwilling victim), they bear little moral culpability for the ugly trade beyond merely being the recipient of the transplant.

Prostitution on the other hand is an occurrence that is created by a far more sinister demand. Unlike organs, men do not need sexual release from women immediately available to them; they simply want it. I argue that prostitution is driven, at heart, by a fundamental belief held by many men that women's bodies* are fundamentally commodities which they should be allowed to buy, sell and lease for their pleasure with the only limit being how much they can afford at any given time. The fact that this insatiable demand leads to the victimization of countless young women is a fundamental evil fueled by the desire of fundamentally evil men. And when I say "fundamentally evil," I argue that if one seeks out pleasure with the full knowledge that someone is being harmed in the supplying of that pleasure, that person is evil. If you or I were to seek out a prostitute, and we did not know whether that young woman was a "free" and "empowered" young lady, or was the victim of trafficking, or we knew she was trafficked but purchased her services anyway, we would be utterly evil men for doing so. What is more, even if she wasn't trafficked, by purchasing her services, we would be contributing overall to a system in which women are trafficked like commodities in order to undercut competition and lower costs in order to allow men to buy the prettiest girls at the lowest prices. The only possible way to be moral is to not put one's money into the system at all, and to seek a willing partner who will freely offer you her affection after you have earned it.

Further, by decriminalizing prostitution, we are implicitly (if not explicitly) telling men and our sons and our future sons that it is perfectly alright to objectify women and their bodies as commodities of pleasure which they can freely lease or purchase. If one's personal goal is to create a community in which men respect women and women do not have cause to fear men, I cannot think of a worse avenue to go down, short of re-enshrining the right of men to own women as slaves.

*Note: I should include young men, but it is mainly young girls and women who are the victims of sex-trafficking and exploitation, and it is by far and away men who are the vast majority of victimizers.
 
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DH Kirkwood said:
That's not to say that I don't see a problem with selling one's body for sex. You really can't get past the envitablity that, at the very least, this sort of thing can be emotionally devastating, especially over time. My stance on it's legality, however, is similar to my stance on drugs: making it illegal doesn't actually stop anything; it just makes things worse. I don't want to see anyone I know or love have to resort to prostitution to survive, but the truth of the matter is, is that people selling sex out of necessity is as old as time, and so is the demand for it.
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Well, could not the same be said of any crime? Leave aside supposed "sin" or "vice" crimes, like illegal prostitution, drug-use and gambling. Even when considering crimes against persons and property, such as murder and theft, no society with any form of criminal justice system, whether highly punitive (like the United States) or highly permissive (like Norway) can stop them entirely. The law punishes, the law restrains, the law rehabilitates, and the law hopefully deters, but it cannot in any way prevent crime from occurring entirely. But depending on what we choose to target, the occurrence of crime can certainly be reduced to some degree. We whenever a society chooses to staunch the occurrence of a particular social ill, it does very little to punish those supplying the vice. In other words, punishing the prostitute does little good. However, the same cannot be said of punishing the John who creates the demand and forces young women to compete for his money in the sale of their bodies. As the laws passed in Sweden show, the only way to lower the crime rate of a particular vice is to punish the demand.

DH Kirkwood said:
If we legalize it, then we get to run the pimps out of business, enforce age requirements, ensure the saftey of prostitutes, control the passage of STDs, and even curb hard drug-use. Not to mention that if this was an industry that we were actually taxing, we'd be able to invest more in schools and other public services.
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I do not think the government should legalize industries that revolve around human exploitation for the purposes of increasing its revenue, even under the auspices of helping prevent harm and "getting people out of the industry we are taxing", because there is no limiting principle. Think of some of the worst crimes that I imagine would make your stomach turn just as they do mine, like child prostitution and the production, selling and distribution of child pornography. These are huge underground black market industries that generate massive amounts of money for the evil people who victimize the children. Many of the same arguments that are being used to legalize prostitution can be used to legalize, regulate and tax these exploitation industries. As I said to lurchadams, society and government should have no part of that blood money.

DH Kirkwood said:
I'm not going to ask anyone to like prostitution. My arguement is that it's illegal status does nothing to curb it's popularity, and everything to ensure that it's so much worse than it has to be.
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I agree to a point. That is why, as I told lurchadams, I am perfectly willing to decriminalize the selling of sex, but completely criminalize the purchase of sex. We must leave the victimized women alone, and instead go after the victimizers.
 
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How many women are willing to give their husbands a hand job and an enema?Our needs have to be had somewhere.
 
lurchadams said:
I understand the above social changes are difficult for people. It's what society wants. Whether you punish the "johns" or the sex workers, people are going to be paying for sex until the world ends, which I understand you might think is going to happen pretty soon :)
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Well, and that is the first question is it not, in that is it what society wants? But the second part of the question should be, even if it is what society wants overall, does that make it correct? Remember when gay marriage was banned in California in 2008 for several years due to popular referendum because the people of California voted to overturn the legislature and stripped gay people of their right to marry? Do you think that was the correct decision at the time? Clearly gay marriage was not something that California society wanted. Is what a majority society wants at any given time a barometer of the rightness of what is desired?

Because clearly there are a lot of men who wish to buy women's bodies. It is what creates that demand for prostitution, and if few to no men wanted to purchase sex (whatever the reason), there would be no prostitution. So what in your opinion makes the desire to purchase women's bodies right? What makes it something to which the government should grant its assent through law?

Should we care about the welfare of women who sell their bodies, or the welfare of men to purchase women's bodies? Because I do not believe you can honestly serve these two masters equally.
 
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Felis Leo said:
Well, and that is the first question is it not, in that is it what society wants? But the second part of the question should be, even if it is what society wants overall, does that make it correct? Remember when gay marriage was banned in California in 2008 for several years due to popular referendum because the people of California voted to overturn the legislature and stripped gay people of their right to marry? Do you think that was the correct decision at the time? Clearly gay marriage was not something that California society wanted. Is what a majority society wants at any given time a barometer of the rightness of what is desired?

Because clearly there are a lot of men who wish to buy women's bodies. But what makes that desire right? What makes it something to which the law should grant its assent?
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Dude you know as well as I do that prop 8 in CA brought in all kinds of "carpetbaggers" like the Mormon church who heavily financed anti-prop 8 legislation to defeat it. It's not what the people of CA really wanted. But that's all moot now because thank goodness, due to enlightened thinkers, you can now marry whomever you love in the United States of America.

Something to be celebrated, IMO.
 
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