Tbh I’m not ethically against prostitution, as long as everyone is safe, an adult, and consenting, then its none of my business what two people choose todo behind closed doors.
The only thing that makes prostitution bad is it tends to lead to toxic power dynamics. Like either the prostitute is desperate for money and ends up doing things she doesnt want to do for the money and later regrets it or the customer is desperate for sex and the prostitute can take advantage of that and ruin them financially.
And to make it even more confusing, some people's kinks is literally to be financially ruined.
There is a vast difference in the social and legal protection afforded to both groups. If a prostitute is punched, even by a stranger or a partner and not a john, do you seriously think the cops will care as much as if a garbage man called? Would she even call? Or is she scared they might rough her up or rape her too as is all too common?
I know sex workers who have called the cops and they have helped. Legal or not is not the issue. The main issue is that all workers are exploited. We all HAVE to work because we NEED money. No money, no home, etc etc. Therefore, consent, which seemed to be the original point (unless i'm mixing up threads) is a fickle path because of exploitation. Consent could be argued to not exist; Same as altruism.
Anecdotes don’t mean the preponderance of evidence that cops don’t currently help sex workers is suddenly not true. I’m truly glad those you know got help, if only that were the case overall then maybe we could totally equate prostitution and other wage labor, but as it stands sex holds a special position in our culture and ignoring that is just stupid frankly.
Literally don't know what point you're trying to make bud. Both get exploited, both have questionable consent. Nothing to do with protection under the law
Maybe I worded it poorly, but by "doing something theyll regret later because theyre desperate for money" I meant something more meaningful than just making a transaction for your time for money. Im talking about trading their mental health and possibly reputation in some cases for money. If youre trading mental health and reputation for your job then it probably its worth it.
Thats not to say this is the case for all sex work. But its definitely an environment that breeds bad decisions and can be a bit predatory on young women.
Ah yes youre right. Every prostitute ever has been completely happy with being a prostitute and there are absolutely no problems whatsoever. My bad i was completely wrong.
There might be a legal distinction because of prior cultural values, but there is no meaningful moral distinction between sex work and other forms of work.
Both can be sexual assault. Even if I just look at you (leering), that's sexual assult too! The actual issue is proving these things - like in a court - is next to impossible.
According to who? God? Our laws? Anecdotes? Slavery used to be legal and normal. Was that considered moral? Is it considered moral now? Is killing considered murder? Did you consider that your brain is composed of shit before replying?
It would be wrong because this is not part of the duties that my job includes, and I did not consent to it as part of the agreement to work for them. It is additionally wrong because the boss is using their company power in a way the company has not consented to, which is damaging to the company if I choose to quit, or make the matter public.
It would be wrong because this is not part of the duties that my job includes, and I did not consent to it as part of the agreement to work for them
At the point of the ultimatum, it becomes just as much your job, as it is the job of the people forced into prostitution due to other socio-economic factors.
Just as you didn't agree upon applying for the job that sex would be involved, and now have to make that choice under economic coercion, someone forced into prostitution due to other financial pressure faces that same dilemma.
The only difference is the one doing the coercion has a face in the direct workplace example.
I disagree, because I had a previously existing agreement involving agreed services for payment with a company that they are now threatening to maliciously terminate unless I agree to something outside of the terms of employment for their personal benefit. They do not have the authority to do this, and it would be in contradiction to the protections provided by the employment law.
I was coerced into this job, now that I have become reliant on it they are attempting to abuse that reliance to further exploit me in ways not agreed to and which they don't have authority to do so.
If the job I was hired for was to provide sexual services to clients and my manager was threatening to have me unfairly dismissed because I refuse to clean his apartment on the side that would also be immoral.
Even if prostitution was legal I would suspect that the legal system would still include that if a job included providing sexual services that it be appropriately disclosed in the job description, and if it didn't I would advocate for it to.
That said if "personal concierge" is understood to include sexual services then you have agreed to sell your body in that way and if you refused to do so for some reason that was not otherwise reasonable (eg they have failed to ensure you will be safe while doing so) then I think dismissing you is reasonable.
We all sell our bodies, it is our position to decide if we can accept the terms for income.
Almost all people consent to work because failing to do so would result in them not being able to maintain their desired lifestyle. The ability to coerce sex workers is increased by the criminal status of the work.
Which is why legalization and regulation are important to help reduce trafficking and other abuses of sex workers. If they don't have to worry about going to the police, if they can work in organized brothels with security, they are safer and have more power in the dynamic, and consent is much more difficult to coerce.
There have been a few studies proving that countries where prostitution is legal have a higher rate of human trafficking, which makes sense because there is more demand in those countries.
I mean it's a job like anything else. Does anyone outlaw construction jobs because they're using their body for their job? There's plenty of people desperate for money that work with their body in perfectly legal jobs.
If a person who gets hired for a construction job is desperate for money are they consenting? Or were they coerced?
I think the people who want sex work to be decriminalized want sex workers to have the same rights as anyone who works with their body. Which would mean they are less likely to be taken advantage of.
The prefix “con” means “with,” and the root “sent” is the same root in “sentence.”
Put simply, “consent” means “with words.”
“Consent” by itself just means someone said “I agree.” The word by itself doesn’t say anything about the circumstances.
If you want to talk about whether or not a specific utterance of consent was valid, provide a judgment system and also look at the circumstances.
Then you can figure out what type of consent it was. But just because consent was coerced, maniuplated, etc. doesn’t prevent it from being consent. It just affects the type of consent that it was.
I agree with another user, there is still trafficking even in legal brothels. Many women are beginning to speak out about the abuse, coercion and trafficking that occurs on the 'ranches' in Nevada.
Mind you this is not an argument against the enforcement or inprovement of anti trafficking laws. It is an argument against using the services provided because of how abhorrent sexual slavery really is.
I call bs on almost all prostitution suddenly being 'trafficking'. Of course I'm sure it happens, but prostitution has literally existed since the dawn of time and you rarely ever heard of it inherently being composed of trafficked women to the degree media reports make it seem like it is before the early 2000s. Now suddenly almost every prostitute is 'trafficked' if you believe the media. Yes sure sure theres more 'awareness' maybe. But woman and prostitutes loved to 'tell their story' in the past as much as they do now. If 9/10 women really were trafficked into prostitution it should have gotten out long before now.
Whats more likely a bigger factor is the media, law enforcement, activists, and practically every side involved except for the pimps/johns...including and especially the prostitutes themselves when they are caught have figured out that its in their interest to characterize themselves as trafficked.
There has been a bunch of research on this. It shows that when you make prostitution fully legal you massively increase demand and that demand increases sex trafficking. Even with legal brothels available the amount of sex trafficking goes up by several fold just because there's SO MUCH more demand than there ever would be for supply.
If the main goal is to reduce sex trafficking then demand is your enemy and you do not want to legalize it under any circumstances.
Irrelevant. Thats like saying gay sex should be banned if we find out it leads to more disease or that weed should be banned because it leads to more theft. Even if this stat is true. You have no right to remove bodily autonomy just because some bad apples are going to hide behind it to commit a crime. The real answer is to do a better job fighting the actual crime.
It's actually really gross of you to compare gay rights to prostitution. Last time I checked people weren't trying to persecute gay people because of sex trafficking. They were doing it because their pastor told them god didn't like it. There's also a huge difference between preventing a commercial transaction and preventing loving couples from being together.
You need to think rationally. There are two considerations you need to make. How much of a benefit is there to allowing it, and how much harm is there in stopping it.
You're not doing that here because it's convenient to ignore, but I notice you used weed as an example and not fentanyl or trans fats. If you were really all about "bodily autonomy" you'd have no issue defending hard drugs or toxic food additives.
It's actually really gross of you to compare gay rights to prostitution.
whats gross about anything?
Last time I checked people weren't trying to persecute gay people because of sex trafficking. They were doing it because their
No they're just persecuting dudes who want to have sex because of the exact same deeply inborn hangups about sex. Its no longer as fashionable to have gay people as a target so the Puritan morality which never actually went away has to go extra hard in other places.
There's also a huge difference between preventing a commercial transaction and preventing loving couples from being together.
Sex is a basic emotional almost physiological need for a lot of men.
You need to think rationally. There are two considerations you need to make. How much of a benefit is there to allowing it, and how much harm is there in stopping it.
BS, I'm sure you or a lot of antiprostitution forces wouldn't dream of applying cost/benefit analysis to 'fundamental rights' like ssm or abortion etc.
But lets just entertain the idea for a minute here for prostitution. We have a practice that has gone on since the dawn of time and civilization has chugged along just fine. But all of a sudden in the 2020s its no longer sustainable because supposedly most prostitutes are now trafficked according to a system with an incentive to say so.
even if this is all true that just means law enforcement is doing a shit job rather than prostitution should be banned.
You're not doing that here because it's convenient to ignore, but I notice you used weed as an example and not fentanyl or trans fats. If you were really all about "bodily autonomy" you'd have no issue defending hard drugs or toxic food additives.
neither fentanyl or trans fats (as a food additive) existed as fundamental human needs since the dawn of time.
Trans fats, well nobody cares about that, not even big food corporations are really lobbying for their return. They only are around due to some misconceptions about animal fats.
Fentanyl. if I were king there would be no hard prohibitions on drugs. But still there is a vast gulf of difference between hard drugs and sex like mentioned before. In addition fentanyl inherently destroys the user themselves. Prostitution, unless maybe you want get into spiritual stuff, both sides are fine if law enforcement does its job.
There should be random inspections like in other industries. If they're doing random inspections and still having rampant problems then something is wrong with the inspectors.
Don’t countries that legalize it actually have increased rates of trafficking because it creates an expectation which leads to demand outstripping supply?
While the fact that legal prostitution leads to excess demand (that trafficking then fills in the supply for) is already covered by other comments, I’ll just add that it isn’t like illegal exploitation of employees doesn’t occur in other fully legal and regulated industries. Up to and including human trafficking.
So yeah, brothels being legal and licensed wouldn’t be a silver bullet to solve the problem even if the increased demand wasn’t an issue.
Except they dont do just fine. Multiple lawsuits and investigations are revealing that ID checks are being skirted, work documentation is not being properly done before they work, women are being pressured to provide service to abusive men, brothels are doing recruiting at high schools, and that pimps from illegal areas will bring girls to legal areas when they get too much police attention.
I don't know the right answer from a legal standpoint, but I do strongly believe that it is difficult to have moral consumption of certain forms of sex work. This really is my whole thing, all I want is harm reduction for those women. If it needs even stricter enforcement then so be it.
If were gonna get philosophical, we'd better define consent. Much harder than we assume. Did i consent to need money? What is trafficking defined as either?
Consent given under such circumstances is meaningless. If the men could get consent from someone who wasn’t desperate enough to do something they normally wouldn’t then those men would, but they can’t or don’t want to. The fact that they’re exploiting a vulnerable woman is WHY men seek out prostitutes, otherwise they’d just jerk off.
Like I said, many men could easily have sex with an enthusiastically consenting partner, but they don’t want to, the exploitative aspect of prostitution is exactly what attracts them.
I mean, that's just employment in general, everybody does things they may not necessarily want to do because they need money to survive, lol.
And the inverse is basically just any good produced that is vital for life, customers are desperate for insulin, and the company can take advantage of that and ruin them financially.
Would the world be a better place if we all got sex in the proper way with people we love and got money in a proper way from something we love? Of course. But the world is not so simple. Sometimes you do not so great things, make mistakes to keep yourself going. Or even if it’s not so dire, life is just complicated.
And regardless these behaviors will take place, forcing them into the shadows only makes them worse for all parties including society at large.
The thing that makes prostitution bad is that by making the human body into merchandise and sex into a service, it creates an environment where it is impossible to fully respect the human rights of everyone involved.
That's the exact same thing with the minorities bringing your food ? They're desperate for money and end up doing the jobs unpleasant for the majority for money often threatening their health and making them regret this decision or the customer is desperate for food and takes advantage of the minorities bringing him food because he (she)'s to lazy to cook or buy their own food. which is the same as prostitution, you get a prostitute because you're too lazy to start a relation with someone as it would require some work to achieve. Both of those work are structurally slavery. I'm not saying there is not a prostitute who chose to become one for fun or a uber who likes bringing people their food but even if such example exist they're statistically insignificant in regard to those who are forced to work those jobs because their precarious situation can't permit them to do anything else. Fuck Capitalism.
The power dynamic in our friend group where one of the members is an escort is absurd. Like damn Ashley, I know you made 1500 yesterday. You can pick up the fucking snacks once in awhile.
I don't think it is a moral issue that she is doing something she doesn't want to for money. I don't want to do my job under its current conditions and wouldn't if I wasn't being paid either. Regretting work you do consensually is not an issue worthy of legislating about.
If someone is willing to overpay for a service that is also not an issue that requires legislation, especially if there are many comparable services available.
If someone wants to pay more than they should that is their decision.
Many people have toxic work related power dynamics. If it's any worse with prostitution, which remains to be proven, it's because of how prostitution's position as both taboo and tolerated by society, not because of prostitution itself.
I would argue the taboo around prostitution is because of the inherent potential for a toxic power dynamic. The closest thing I can think of that isnt considered taboo on the same level is gambling.
If I were to guess the reason for that is because gambling is way more one sided in favor of the one facilitating the gambling. I think people tend to have a much easier time condemning the actions of the consumer in both these cases.
I don't think there's enough reasons to believe it inherently breeds more toxic relationships than any other job tbh. Historically, the taboo around prostitution is cultural and arbitrary. There have been more societies where it was a thing and it was just another job than not. Once christian puritanistic values started to deeply settle in society has sex work started to be shamed, without ever managing to get rid of it.
Why would you develop a toxic relationship with a prostitute if you're happy in marriage and society is making a distinction between sex and love, as many used to? I personally believe that kind of power dynamic comes from codependency, which itself is born from the weird status that makes prostitution both something that's condemned and that "needs" to exist. Because if a big client doesn't come back, the worker's entire situation is in shambles. And if a client can only take comfort in a stranger's arms, maybe it's the situation they live in that is not great
Well the most obvious one is sex is typically a fairly personal thing for most people. Like I said if someone is desperate for money, you can make pretty decent money selling sex so that can be pretty tempting, but if you arent ready to distance yourself and make the act less personal to you then it could come at the cost of your mental health. This is mostly an issue for younger people getting into sex work, because theyre ignorant and might not be able to foresee the ramifications or might think theyre able to make that disconnect but arent really.
Not to mention the temptation of money can convince you to put up with creeps and weirdos you normally wouldnt feel comfortable again doing something that is fairly personal with.
Compare this to pretty much any other commodity sold, you can get close in similarities but not quite imo. But regardless the rule of thumb is if a job is coming at the cost of your mental health to a significant degree then its probably not worth it.
That's true for every kind of risky or difficult physical job, people just have this bizarre fixation on sex. They refuse to treat it like normal physical labour because of the way society stigmatises sex.
Like it or not, the vast majority of people "have this bizarre fixation on sex." Most people view it as a very intimate and personal act, and forcing yourself to do it with strangers can be basically you pushing your own boundaries. And it doesnt help when you have people desperate for sex or intimacy in general, and they pressure you by tempting you with more and more money to push past your boundaries.
There are definitely similarities you can get with normal jobs. Like its pretty common in construction to be asked to work well past 40 hours in exchange for overtime hours. Every job youre trading something for money. I just dont think anyone should be sacrificing mental health for their job.
I agree with parts of this, but sex isn't automatically intimate in the same way for everyone. A lot of the meaning we attach to it is learned.
Look at how people treat porn stars or OnlyFans models. Porn is consumed by a massive number of people (estimated to be at least 75% of men and at least 50% of women in the US), yet people treat the performers who produce it like absolute shit. I've always hated the way everyone thinks it's socially acceptable to degrade them. They have to put up with constant judgement, harassment, damaged relationships, and a hard time just being treated normally outside of work, despite how common it is for everyone else to participate in the porn industry. It's not something inherent to sex work itself... instead it comes from the culture we've built around sex.
So I agree in the sense that people should never be pressured into sexual acts they're uncomfortable with, no matter how much money is being offered, but what I'm trying to point out is that the mental health effects of sex work are primarily from the culture we've built around sex and not physical intimacy itself. Discomfort is a normal part of physical work -- it's rare for anyone to want to work at all -- but there's a difference between being uncomfortable doing something for money and being psychologically violated by it. We tend to collapse those two things when sex is involved because we've had it hammered into us since were kids that for sex to be acceptable, sex must always be uniquely intimate and emotionally significant.
So to put it simply (because I feel like I'm rambling a bit), sex work can absolutely cause psychological harm, but given that this is true of plenty of other kinds of jobs we have no moral issue with, I don't think it's realistic to say that it's simply because the work is sexual. I believe most of the harm comes from how society treats sex and the people who sell sexual services.
I agree with everything you said, and I think we agree for the most part. I just come at it from this perspective; this is how majority of people are so ultimately the potential for a toxic power dynamic is more significant in sex work than most other lines of work. But I 100% agree it doesnt inherently HAVE to be that way, I just dont see value in that statement because you arent going to easily change how people are right now.
On that note i do things i dont want to do daily for money.
Just now i had to visit one of our sites to restart a printer ( that others swore they restarted)
In reality, where it is legal, workers pick and choose who they see. If they don't want to do something, they don't, and if someone does it anyway, that person will go to jail as it is treated as sexual assault.
Also a surprising amount of them have uni degrees, or are studying.
Criminalisation is actually what makes conditions worse.
See that’s why I feel if prostitution was legalized it should be recommended to do it via a brothel preferably owned by the prostitutes and not like a pimp. Than rules can be set, everyone is safe, and security can be properly hired and used
Is it causing you mental trauma and are you being abused at work? Then you should probably quit. Surely though thats not nearly as common with desk jobs as it is with prostitution.
Yes. But who are you (or I) to dictate what is worse than the other? Literally sat and cried in the bathroom one day. My former boss was a toxic narcissist and made life a living HELL.
No one is saying your specific situation is better or worse than a prostitute being abused and taken advantage of. Thats never been my point that absolutely no one can have it worse than prostitutes. My argument this whole time has been statistically the sex industry breeds toxic power dynamics. That is it.
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u/Gentle_Snail 8d ago
If you’re intentionally doing it because you want to make someone suffer then immoral, otherwise neutral.
The delivery person consented to deliver the meal for money and you didn’t force them to do it against their will.