In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.
I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_ choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz. housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2) does society provide these basic needs to all its members.
From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through college. But not everyone is middle class.
What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of an individuals creativity.
A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.
This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.
A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.
Suppose you wander into the desert and get lost. Suppose you're on the verge of dying from thirst when another person shows up. He says "I'll take you back to civilization, but only if you agree to be my slave forever".
You're not any worse off than if the slaver didn't exist, because you can always choose to reject the slaver's offer. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Yet I think that most people would consider that a very unconvincing argument for permitting slavery: that a would-be slaver would simply not show up if slavery were illegal.
Arguing in favor of free will, you could say that all other things being the same, a world where you get lost in the desert and the slaver shows up is no worse than one where you get lost in the desert and nobody shows up.
Arguments in favor of control thus rely on all else not being the same, that making something illegal changes the wider society, not just any single individual's ability to do that thing.
The article is pretty nuanced.
"So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates."
The whole economic system we're in is coercive to many.
It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma? What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker? What about your wife or your mother?
Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.
The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.
In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of value.
It's an entirely different perspective.
While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring on an any different set of self worth problems.
> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange, especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman "decides" to let you have sex with her.
As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my rent".
I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.
Why is that particular act singled out? Humans need to do lots of things both to ensure individual survival and the survival of the species. Why is "the human reproductive act" morally different from, say, paying someone money to cook food for you? Why is genuinely immoral work (such as advertising) given a free pass?
Now, we could help children by helping people and providing social services -- but it's easier to just make prostitution illegal.
Uh, that's totally deniable.
Ten years ago, Germany legalized prostitution in an attempt to reduce crime and improve sex workers rights, standing, etc. Curiously at the same time, Sweden made prostitution illegal (incl. soliciting), for the exact same reasons.
Ten years later, the outcome is pretty clear. Germany is seeing exploitation and trafficking on a much larger scale, mostly because the criminals can more easily hide behind a screen of legality. Sweden sees less trafficking and exploitation.
I have no idea what Germany did, but if all they did was one day say "hey, it's legal to be a sex worker now, go nuts!" ... then the outcome they got is not surprising at all. Even if they did more than that, it's a complex issue, and you need a comprehensive legal framework in place in order to ensure that exploited sex workers have a path to justice.
If the response from exploiters is "well, sex work is legal", and the law buys that and looks the other way, then the law was not made particularly well.
Doesn't that put a negative stigma around sex work? It makes it sound like sex workers should/would only get into sex work if they had no other options available.
They had other options. They chose sex work knowing the risks, knowing they could quit if they wanted to, and knowing their alternatives.
I'm aware that not every sex worker enters sex work that way, but it's equally wrong to say that all sex workers do sex work because they have no other options.
What are you advocating here? There are many transactions in which modern states interfere that are between consenting adults. In countries with minimal wage you could consent to being paid below it, but it would remain illegal. You can consent to being scammed in a transaction, but it remains illegal. Etc. These interference are meant to protect citizens. Just because the transaction would involve a sexual exchange doesn’t mean it’s any different.
A lot of the dangers to sex workers is because of these protections forcing them to go underground and work with shady exploitative dealers and trafficking.
This is the older viewpoint. The newer one is that no one would consensually agree to sex work unless they were coerced. I am not in a position to opine on that viewpoint, but if it's true, then every sex worker is being exploited regardless of any laws or regulations.
"No one would consensually agree to [insert other menial job here] unless they were coerced."
I can't speak for everyone or everywhere, but we definitely have documentries in the UK where women claim to do sex work because it afford them a specific lifestyle and they'd rather be there than a supermarket.
In fact, I've met such woman and the suger baby approach is fairly popular with students nowadays. They're not doing it for basic food and warth, they're doing it for chanel and gucci.
I'm not sure that moralising their ability to consent away from them is the right thing to do, but it's also probably true that cost of living rises and advertising budgets have contributed to this.
Making children work in a factory, forcing slaves to work under threat of violence, or even paying consenting adults to work grueling hours in dangerous jobs without medical recourse is bad. Paying employees to do something that's menial or boring is not.
The standards of what is acceptable or not certainly change over time, but conflating coercion and acceptable remuneration is a silly equivocation.
Edited to add that this is discussed explicitly in the article, as it mentions for instance the migrant sex worker collective Red Canary Song.
Also 'trafficking' is a term that needs a precise definition as it means different things to different people.
That is hardly an improvement.
Obviously if you raise the minimum wage high enough then it's going to hurt employment. But it seems like it has to be quite high before it hurts employment much, and in particular it seems that "everyone who would otherwise have been paid less than the minimum wage just loses their job" is a really inaccurate model.
Because that is fundamentally the purpose of government. Roughly, to intrude in the decisions of individuals in order to generate a safer and more prosperous life for everyone in general. A civilization is more than a collection of individuals.
Consent can be coerced, scammed, misinterpreted, hard to prove afterwards, etc. And individual actions have consequences beyond the individual because of human traits like envy and greed. So, government attempts (should attempt) to take all these factors and many more into consideration while creating regulation and enforcement structures that work around those problems.
Seatbelts, speed limits, health regulations, heck even labour laws are about utilitarian outcomes - generally keeping people from dying prematurely or going to the hospital.
The state generally interferes with transaction that are harmful between the two parties. You can't write whatever you want in a contract, even if it only pertains to first parties.
As for alcohol prohibition: That's not a principle stance regarding the freedom to take harmful substance. It is an exception to the prohibition of access to harmful substances. We still want something that's bad for us, so alcohol is the exception for historical reasons, but for (probably misguided) utilitarian reasons, we don't allow all sorts of drugs.
Our reasons for prohibition of certain drugs over others are far from utilitarian. If anything, they're anti-utilitarian. Compare the motivations for the 18th and for the 21st amendment.
"(We still want something that's bad for us, so alcohol is the exception for historical reasons), but (for probably misguided utilitarian reasons, we don't allow all sorts of drugs)."
or
"We still want something that's bad for us, so (alcohol is the exception for historical reasons, but for probably misguided utilitarian reasons). We don't allow all sorts of drugs."
The former suggests we prohibit drugs for utilitarian reasons, misguided but utilitarian nonetheless, the latter seems odd by itself?
That is a bit glib, but so is your bald assertion that states ought to be concerned only with principle. It is neither part of our legal tradition nor even a plausible interpretation of the foundational ideas of most currently constituted governments.
I see where you are coming from, but I don't know that, as humans currently understand things, your argument really has traction on reality.
Because most real world value systems amount, in practice, to rule-bounded utilitarianism, rather than purely non-utilitarian deontology.
> Legislation, by and large and particularly in the United States, is driven first and foremost by principle, rather than utilitarian objectives.
Utilitarian objectives are a set of principles, and while they are usually qualified rather than pure, they are very widespread set of principles and virtually every advocacy campaign appeals to them for that reason.
You are simply wrong if you think most public support for or opposition to legislation, in general or in the US specifically, is based on moral principles that are completely divorced from perception of utilitarian consequences.
Is that true? There are still many dry counties in the US, and full scale prohibition was an utter and total desaster. Seems more that people learned that alcohol prohibition doesn't work which lead to its abolishment, not a principled position.
You don't have to be that conservative to find it at least a little uncomfortable or grimy. I'm not saying that should be the basis of law, but you must understand there's generally stigma associated.
You have to look at who does it serve to establish this moral standard, and it serves a patriarchal society that overemphasizes the value of purity in women.
Somehow if the issue focused on gigolos I doubt it would have as much moral opposition.
I guess, legalized prostitution would bring enough money to be respected. (Like dentists, digging rotten teeth)
To clarify, I personally favor the Swedish model, which outlaws pimping, brothels, and buying sex but does not make it illegal to be a prostitute.
> Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who considers the purchase of sex an act of violence against women... holds a very different opinion on who the victims of prostitution are: "The acceptance of prostitution makes all women potential prostitutes in the public view since there are only two requirements for a woman to work in a brothel: one is that circumstance has placed her so […] and the other is that she has a vagina, and all women are born meeting at least one of these requirements."
I can't help but be reminded of how people cast Jewish pro-human-rights criticism of the Israeli government as "self-hating Jews..."
Ah, there it is.
Even if legal prostitution led to higher crime, more violence, death and disease (none of which is true, of course), the issue is still fundamentally one of principle. Why does the state have a role to play in a transaction between two consenting adults? The only sensible argument would be that the state has a role only insofar as consent is in question, and therefore maybe assists in some capacity in terms of ensuring consent. Beyond that, we simply should not be legislating in search of outcomes.
In much the same way that alcohol prohibition might lead to lower rates of violence, rape, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unemployment, unwanted pregnancy, etc...we oppose prohibition from a principled position. Just as you might argue that putting a security camera in every room in every house would vastly remove unresolved criminality, false imprisonment, domestic violence, etc...we oppose such an invasion of privacy from a principled position.
It really doesn't matter how sex work is actually affected by the legality of it, the state simply has no right to interfere in a consensual transaction which does not produce negative third party externalities, period.