Sex work

[Slander and/or Libel]

Really, you guys have given me no reasons to support the legalization of prostitution.

As liberals, are you not concerned with the message it sends to legalize prostitution? It would be to say that it's okay to treat women as sexual instruments. It would send a message that it's okay to think of women as less than human. You guys have actually taken on conservative talking points to argue with me here. Do you not understand how devastating it would be the feminist movement and to leftism to declare in a single voice that women are just sex objects?

This isn't an issue where the libertarian stance of "just legalize it" should be taken, because this isn't an issue of freedom - the freedom to be a prostitute. This is an installment in the ongoing culture wars. This is about protecting the dignity of women, and protecting the right to be considered equally human.

If you have truly legitimate reasons for supporting this, then quit retreating to conservative talking points, like accusing me of "moralistic grandstanding."

Do you truly think this is an area where any woman engaged in sex work has no agency herself? You honestly can't see how sex-negativity can lead to seeing anything to do with sex as inherently degrading when in fact it may not be? Sure, sex work means that some women will engage in sex with men they wouldn't otherwise, for fun, but that doesn't inherently mean that they're being degraded, or that they're being coerced, or that they necessarily mind doing it.

Sex work is already going on in the black market, and all of the problems you're talking about are already there, except worse. I'm not sure I'm in favor of 100% legalization of prostitution, but you're straight up ignoring people's arguments, presumably because you can't hear them from your perch atop the soap box.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Really, you guys have given me no reasons to support the legalization of prostitution.

As liberals, are you not concerned with the message it sends to legalize prostitution? It would be to say that it's okay to treat women as sexual instruments. It would send a message that it's okay to think of women as less than human. You guys have actually taken on conservative talking points to argue with me here. Do you not understand how devastating it would be the feminist movement and to leftism to declare in a single voice that women are just sex objects?

This isn't an issue where the libertarian stance of "just legalize it" should be taken, because this isn't an issue of freedom - the freedom to be a prostitute. This is an installment in the ongoing culture wars. This is about protecting the dignity of women, and protecting the right to be considered equally human.

If you have truly legitimate reasons for supporting this, then quit retreating to conservative talking points, like accusing me of "moralistic grandstanding."

Do you truly think this is an area where any woman engaged in sex work has no agency herself? You honestly can't see how sex-negativity can lead to seeing anything to do with sex as inherently degrading when in fact it may not be?

I'm not sex-negative, my friend. But prostitution is literally the sale of women for sex. If you want to disown the feminist movement by supporting the legalization of prostitution, then be up front with it.

Sure, sex work means that some women will engage in sex with men they wouldn't otherwise, for fun, but that doesn't inherently mean that they're being degraded, or that they're being coerced, or that they necessarily mind doing it.

Yes, it does. They are being reduced to sex objects. They are being coerced by circumstance into the sex industry. The plain fact, which you fail to realize is that women at the bottom of the economic ladder are the ones who are prostitutes. If prostitution is a free choice, then why are women with the fewest choices the ones who are doing it?

Do you think it is sexual liberation for women to get f**ked by strangers for money? Are you kidding me?

Sex work is already going on in the black market, and all of the problems you're talking about are already there, except worse. I'm not sure I'm in favor of 100% legalization of prostitution, but you're straight up ignoring people's arguments, presumably because you can't hear them from your perch atop the soap box.

Arguments? Such things don't exist in this thread. I literally have heard no arguments as to why it should be legalized. I support decriminalization, that takes the argument of "they're afraid to go to the police" off the table. I'm still waiting for a reason why it should be legal outside of "just legalize it," which isn't even an argument at all.

Are you claiming that every female sex worker is at the bottom of the economic ladder and is coerced by circumstance into doing what she's doing for money? You're seriously making that claim?

[Slander and/or Libel]

I'm not at all saying that it's not the case that especially at present, with sex work being forced onto the black market, it's women with few economic options who go into the profession.

But it is emphatically not true of all sex workers, as DimpledChad keeps asserting. This is part of the problem. He's not dealing with facts, he's dealing with assertions. Sometimes those assertions are adjacent to the truth, but he's refusing to accept that there are cases that are exceptions to what he's asserting as received wisdom.

[Slander and/or Libel]

I'm not at all saying that it's not the case that especially at present, with sex work being forced onto the black market, it's women with few economic options who go into the profession.

But it is emphatically not true of all sex workers, as DimpledChad keeps asserting. This is part of the problem. He's not dealing with facts, he's dealing with assertions. Sometimes those assertions are adjacent to the truth, but he's refusing to accept that there are cases that are exceptions to what he's asserting as received wisdom.

Well I know people like to drag the hypothetical "middle class young Harvard law student becomes prostitute to find herself"; but she and her ilk are an irrelevance. When a business becomes legitimised (although the cooperative model is tempting, I wonder how long it would take in the real world to become a business in all but name, like most mutuals) it leads to a rise in demand, that will (not 'may') be filled with people who would rather not be in that job.

Consider this hypothetical to think about how ridiculous it all is. In my country (and probably yours) welfare has strings attached. You must prove you are attempting to get work and accepting what you can. If sex work is "just average work" can the government force benefit claimants into prostitution? Would you (regardless of your feelings on means-testing in general) recognise that is an order of magnitude worse than somebody who has to stack shelves?

I am not saying your argument is wrong. I'm saying it's at least an argument that accepts the reality that there are some shades of gray in here rather than asserting that things are the way it helps your argument to say they are.

I hadn't thought about the argument that one would have to accept a job offer as a prostitute to get government benefits, and I think that's somewhat compelling, though it would also imply that the job market is hard up enough that the person had no other options to keep receiving benefits than to apply for prostitution when they didn't want to do it. That is, in this scenario, every fast food joint, every retail store, etc., had filled all of its positions and the only firms hiring were brothels. It seems a little far-fetched to me.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Saying women should be just sex objects is indeed a horrible view. Luckily, no one is arguing for that here.

Everything DimpledChad says is in bad faith.

[Slander and/or Libel]

All the anti-sex work because are trying to argue that the pro-sex work people are "right-wing", rather than trying to argue that they're wrong. They can't argue they're wrong because they aren't wrong.

It's really pretty transparent, isn't it? Even if there's an issue on which, at least on a surface level, some people from the left and some people from the right arrive at the same position, though using different reasoning, it's disingenuous and petty to label that a "right-wing" position and tar your opponent with it.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Yeah, I think what evergreen said is what a lot of people are missing while talking past each other. The hand-wringers are acting like the pro-legalization side are in favor of changing nothing about society but making all sex work legal. That is not even close to true.

Personally, I'd advocate an approach that examined and understood the coercive factors that lead people to be pushed into sex work, and attacked those factors, while also making sex work legal in a generally regulated way. Saying that sex work is inherently exploitative and degrading to all women who engage in it is wrong in several ways (there are absolutely women who are empowered and fulfilled by sex work, though I concede that they are a small subset; also, there are men who engage in sex work who are absolutely ignored by the discussion in here). But it's exploitative for reasons. I'd rather attack those deeper inequities than use the American hangups about sex to put it all on prostitution and leave it at that.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Or that race is singled out as the ultimate example of why someone should be able to deny service to a client, rather than stipulating that maybe sex workers should have general right of refusal for clients that make them feel potentially unsafe.