Here's one: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-majority-of.... "In fact, when you ask sex workers about their job satisfaction and working conditions – as a study led by Leeds University just has – the majority of them are happy. When asked to describe their work, respondents typically selected positive or neutral words. 91 per cent of sex workers described their work as ‘flexible’, 66 per cent described it as ‘fun’ and over half find their job ‘rewarding’.".
That aside, have you heard many stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as coal miners? As Amazon warehouse workers? Lots of jobs suck, but we don't ban them.
>it is because prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/159/8/778/91471 found a standardised mortality rate of 1.9 for American prostitutes (almost twice that of the average member of the population), similar to what https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.54.5.... found for coal miners, but we don't ban coal mining. For prostitution, violence was one of the "predominant causes of death", a situation that would be significantly improved were prostitution legal, as prostitutes could then rely on police protection without fear of being arrested for their work.
In general - if somebody does a job, presumably the alternatives would be worse. That applies to prostitution as well.
Your perception would be wrong. The vast majority of sex workers are doing it for the money, same as any job.
> The illegality of prostitution
Prostitution is not illegal in many parts of the world, and even decriminalised is some parts.
> I hear of no stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as prostitutes.
That's because you aren't listening. There's plenty of sex workers who blog or who are on twitter that you can ask. Just follow some and see.
> prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.
The biggest risk to sex workers in parts of the world where it is illegal is rape and murder by law enforcement.
There's possibly a lower proportion on HN than elsewhere, but suggesting that most of the population works voluntarily, and not to avoid starvation and homelessness, is going to be a bit of a stretch.
Sex work just makes the dynamic more obvious. There will be some who do it because it's a talent and a calling, but the majority do it because they need to put food on the table.
And some of those will be posting how awesome it is on TW etc because it's free advertising.
I don't see how it's any more obvious. Our culture is replete with examples of people complaining about their jobs, their bosses, their stress, TGIF, hump Wednesday, hate Mondays, etc. There are far more of these than examples of exploitation in prostitution.
If all work is exploitation and pressure, then sex work is still just like any other job.
Nitpick: decriminalization means that something is still illegal, but it's not a crime.
In NSW (Aus) and New Zealand (both decriminalised), there are no laws restricting sex work. Local councils may have zoning laws restricting where brothels may operate, but sex work itself is fully legal.
Illegal actions go through a civil justice track, and typically result in fines and/or some sort of civil restitution for victims.
If you ignore building codes you're acting illegally. If you ignore building codes and people die you're a criminal.
Which is fine as far as it goes. But criminality is often defined politically, not empirically in terms of outcomes.
Sex work is complicated precisely because it's on the edge of consensus morality. It has so much moral and political baggage, and for those who care it's so difficult to manage in ways that minimise harm for all involved, that it's almost the definition of a political football.
It doesn't help that authoritarians are invariably utterly hypocritical about it. Sex workers know that business is going to boom whenever a convention of self-styled moral hawks hits town.
So there's always political pressure to keep that hypocrisy hidden, which makes the criminal/civil line even more of a hot-button issue than it would be anyway.
Legalisation means making it actually legal, as many US states have now made marijuana, or as NZ has made sex work. It can still be regulated or taxed, but in general its fine.
So, precisely exploitation and pressure, same as any other job.
I would be more interested in data than one person's subjecting perception.
> I hear of no stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as prostitutes
One of the major points of the article is that the voices of sex workers have been driven off the internet. You can't justify censorship by saying that none of the now-censored voices are complaining.
> The "women speaking truth" can only every have authentic voices if they are speaking from positions of power and security; I do not believe that this is the case for prostitutes anywhere.
That is either completely false, OR by your logic nobody can ever speak about what it's like to work a retail job. Some jobs suck; sometimes the people working them don't have a lot of power and security. So either your arguing that we shouldn't listen to anyone who isn't a millionaire, or you're not aware of the voices that exist.
> The illegality of prostitution is not because people are prudes, it is because prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.
Funny how that seems to only happen in places prostitution is illegal.
It's the same reason why e.g. we ban all new elephant ivory, period-- even ivory that supposedly does not come from poachers killing an endangered, wild elephant. Because if you try to allow "good, fair-trade ivory", the poachers will try their best to get their stuff in there. And when it comes to the balance between costs and benefits, it doesn't take many bad apples to spoil the whole barrel.
Luckily, we can check NZ, since they legalised sex work, and research has since been done to see what the answer was: http://www.gaatw.org/publications/SWorganising/NewZealand-we...
And actually, none of that is true! Actually it turns out that what really enables trafficking and the abuse of sex workers is situations where they can't go to the police, or where brothels have to hide their existence from the authorities entirely. Once you're legal and regulated, it's really easy for the immigration officials to show up and start checking paperwork.
> you'll still fail to have only the entirely above-board, willing sex work that the sex workers themselves would like.
Funny you should say that; again in the linked report it was noted that NZ does have an issue with that, but not from trafficked women, but rather from migrants. Due to anti-trafficking sentiment, the original law legalising prostitution banned people on temporary visas from working in the industry, which means people on temporary visas are the only sex workers in the country who can find themselves subjected to abusive work conditions while being unable to report it to the authorities.
It makes sense, of course; everywhere you ban sex work you create a shadow that victimisation can take place in.
In some places, it's not merely a theory.
Why the discrepancy? Maybe it's geographic as the other commenters suggests. The Netherlands is in the middle of somewhere while New Zealand is in the middle of nowhere. That sounds plausible to me. I think it might also be cultural. The Netherlands is known around the world for their sex industry, New Zealand is not. This makes the Netherlands a more rational destination for profit seeking predators.
I have not heard a single country that have managed to do this. For rather obvious reasons, it is not practical to make employment illegal where the employee is in need of money.
There are countries however that do treat the problems with prostitution as a labor rights issue and resolve it similarly. For example when people think of human trafficking they think of prostitution, but human trafficking in constructions is actually several times larger. Exploitation in construction is thus a very large problem and the common solution is to impose stricter regulations so the government can catch and punish those that earn money on human suffering.
When ever I turn off the filters on my search engines explicit content is served instantly. I think that the censorship that the author is referring to is either self imposed, imposed by commercial decisions (tumblr) or due to legal constraints (child porn, rape, worse things than that).
Consensual sex work is mentioned, my perception is that the vast majority of sex workers are not doing it because of free choice, but rather because of exploitation and pressure. Drug and alcohol addiction as well as a history of abuse are often cited as drivers, and I hear of no stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as prostitutes. The "women speaking truth" can only every have authentic voices if they are speaking from positions of power and security; I do not believe that this is the case for prostitutes anywhere. The illegality of prostitution is not because people are prudes, it is because prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.