If it was their free choice, they wouldn't need to be paid for it, and they could be as selective or as indiscriminate as they like with partner selection and frequency. It's not about anything sacred (unless you consider basic human rights sacred, I guess).

But don't take my word for it, take former sex workers' word for it: http://www.educating-voices.com

This is feminism 101 stuff; even if you want to take the "choice feminism" side of the debate, you need to learn the basics of radical feminist critiques and positions on the issue.

Your argument hinges on the idea that exchange is inherently coercive. I don't buy it.

No, my argument hinges on the idea that exchanges of money for sex are inherently coercive -- or at least almost always coercive in practice -- because they are. Other exchanges are not relevant.

To remind you, this is what you said: "If it was their free choice, they wouldn't need to be paid for it".

This means that monetary exchange precludes free choice. This is independent of what is being exchanged, as you say it.

No, it means that if sex were their free choice, they would not need to be paid for sex (they could have it as much or as little as they like).

Instead of trying to wordplay this in HN comments, why don't you take a look at https://www.demandabolition.org/resources/evidence-against-l... -- they've done a far better job than I ever could on lining up the different arguments -- and there are many! -- against blithely skipping into legalized or even decriminalized prostitution. If none stick, then certainly nothing I say in this discussion will have any effect.

If selling fruit was the shopkeeper's free choice, they would not need to be paid for fruit.

This sentence has structurally the same form. If you think it's ridiculous, it can only be because you think there is something special about sex - i.e. it is sacred in some way. And thus your position actually doesn't relate to free will.

I think you're very confused. Your statements aren't logically consistent and I have to make guesses and leaps of dodgy inference to make any sense of them at all.

I believe you have a prior position on the morality of prostitution and are using arguments you don't understand to defend the position. I think a different tack would be wiser.

> This sentence has structurally the same form. If you think it's ridiculous, it can only be because you think there is something special about sex

> As Dworkin wrote a long time ago, "in prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after."

I feel like the Dworkin quote is more the basis of their argument, that the human body itself is different to other external objects, and selling your own body is different to selling something external.

In that context, comparing selling fruit to selling your own body doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

That said, I know a couple of people in this industry, none of them are particularly fond of their work, but they don't seem any more unhappy than anyone else in a job they don't particularly like. shrug

Then replace selling fruit with backbreaking manual labor: coal mining, digging ditches, whatever. Something that causes real and permanent damage to one's body over time. Is selling your labor in such a way morally wrong?

No, but purchasing it might be. Employers can mitigate their culpability by including health and disability insurance, and workplace condition standards. They typically only do this when required by government regulation, though.

And in the end there's a qualitative difference between purchasing access to a person's time and labor, and purchasing access to their mouth, vagina, and anus.

Where would all the sex workers who disagree be without you to tell them how they really feel!

I don't know; I'm more concerned with the johns hiding behind their hypothetical skirts.

Maybe you can start purifying your soul (because clearly there's some sort of puritanical religious thing going on here) by abstaining from the use of electronic devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan_mining_and_ethics

I'm a materialist and an atheist. Being an atheist doesn't prevent me from seeing how abusive and immoral it is to purchase someone's body from a position of economic and social advantage. In fact, it clarifies the situation greatly; there is no soul separate from the body, so making someone's body the object of economic exchange is literally always participating in human trafficking.

The authors at http://www.feministcurrent.com/?s=prostitution would universally guffaw at your misdirection towards religion. This is about patriarchal oppression of women, all gussied up in the same neoliberal language that has proven itself unmeritorious in other public spheres.

Right, right of course. Your totally secular belief system is what led you to a moral viewpoint in which it is immoral to rent the mouth, vagina or anus, of another human being, but (one assumes) renting their penis is totally fine.

So as a gay man, it would be highly immoral for me to have sex with a prostitute whom is a bottom, but renting the services of a top for the night would be totally fine. Am I interpreting you correctly (not that I have, or plan on, engaging the services of sex workers. Not really my scene.)?

Just for clarification, your position is that the only class of services that are immoral to exchange currency for are sexualy oriented services. Is that correct?

I currently hold very different views from you on this issue, but some of your arguments are certainly giving me some things to think about. They all seem to assume the above point, which I have a really hard time accepting.

> Just for clarification, your position is that the only class of services that are immoral to exchange currency for are sexualy oriented services. Is that correct?

Not at all, it's also immoral to purchase assassinations and many other things both illegal and legal. They're not germane to the question of prostitution though.

Prostitution is qualitatively different than other "services" or even non-prostitution sex work (phone sex operator, erotic fiction writer, even some pornography) because it involves purchasing direct access to and use of the prostituted person's body. That is the problem with prostitution, not the fact that it's about sex per se.

It's simply a matter of the human condition that the (male) sex drive is the most common thing that, when left unexamined and unchecked, results in such a system where people's bodies are reduced to the objects of economic transaction.

I've probably burned enough internet points on this thread, but if you want to read far better-researched and better-stated writing on this subject than mine, http://www.feministcurrent.com/category/prostitution-2/ is a good place to start. It's a shame that religious and social conservative voices are often the only ones being represented and considered on this subject. It's a shame that men on the left and atheist men should feel deeply.

> If it was their free choice, they wouldn't need to be paid for it,

By this argument, paid work is slavery.