In both cases it limits my ability to make personal choices, because we acknowledge that there are power dynamics that can affect/influence my actual freedom of choice. What's the difference here?
You mean like every other shitty job? If economic circumstances are the core problem, then address those rather than taking away people's agency.
I agree, worker protections for sex work is a great idea.
Is there though? Or is it really the circumstances around the sex work that cause these problems, like legislation that forces women to work with pimps for protection, who then get them hooked on hard drugs and physically abuse them.
Let alone what happens in case of pregnancy.
No line of work has exactly the same impact as every other line of work. Even within a line of work there are huge differences, ie. programming in Silicon Valley is very different than programming in a smaller city.
Furthermore, individual responses to stimuli are fairly unique. Some people don't respond well to hard physical labour and others relish it. The people who don't respond well just don't do hard labour.
Similarly, some people can have casual sex without issues and some people cannot. Sometimes the people who can't have casual sex can have sex in a therapeutic context, because the deeper meaning the concept of "therapy" holds makes it not casual in their mind. How we view things has an outsized effect on how they impact us.
Finally, I don't see how pregnancy is any riskier than work that can maim you for life.
Prostitution pregnancy is dangerous for the outside person. Having both loving and caring parents is quite important during the early years… It also gets important late in life to know family medical history.
Of course, there are many other ways society ends up with unloved kids that don’t know at least on of the parents. But those ways are generally shunned, and for a good reason.
Abortion is another alternative but that is not exactly risk-free either. Both for physical and mental health.
And yes, there are other dangerous jobs. But then we as a society take steps to reduce the danger to the minimum and pay accordingly to those who do take the risk. But in this case whole „profession“ does not bring any upsides to the society. Aside from very few people.
When I was 17, I was conscripted into the military in a shitty country. There, I was forced to kill and prepare chickens. I couldn't eat chicken for a year afterwards.
If my economic circumstances had forced me to take that as a paid job, my mental health would have gone to shit. Furthermore, if I had had to choose between doing that and prostituting myself, guess what hormonal me would have chosen?
Thankfully, I could go to college instead. I think education and choices in ways of making a living are the important bit.
Of course, there must be few people who have mental issues and a) won’t get normal hormone response to sex b) already addicted to sex. But I see it same as vast majority of homeless people. When a choice is made because of mental issues… Its not really a choice.
Similar to people putting in major overtime to run away from issues at home or inner daemons. Not as bad as alcohol or drug addicts and sometimes society even puts them on a pedestal as great achievers. But overall it’s a net loss to society. Because it normalizes and promotes behavior that is disadvantageous for majority of society. And underlining issues will bite back eventually. Both the person in question and society through his or her medical bills at old age.
The entire market is pushed into the unregulated black market as a side-effect of making buying illegal. This world is dominated by criminals and gangs.
Point in case - USSR where not working was a crime :)
Some people argue that prostitution is sickeningly anti-_women_ .
> It suggests women do not have agency and cannot make their own choices.
That's the "liberal" ideology, everything is a merchandise including people's body, as long as there is some form of "consent". Obviously consent can be fabricated (grooming, proxenetism, ...) before the prostitute realizes that they've been sexually exploited and abused. In Europe there is that grooming phenomenon where young girls, often minors are emotionally manipulated by their (older) boyfriend and then asked to prostitute themselves for "love" or just hooked to hard drugs to make them more docile. Obviously there is the question of emotional maturity when it comes to consent.
Liberals aren't concern by the psychological taul of prostitution, and its social consequences, only by perpetuating sex as a product like toothpaste or a bigmac ...
Sounds like you have a good handle on the actual problem, so why not criminalize that rather than restricting people's agency.
> only by perpetuating sex as a product like toothpaste or a bigmac ...
I'm not sure why you think denigrating the people who don't raise sex on some pedestal is supposed to be convincing. Some people have no problem offering sex as a transactional good like selling big macs, and you haven't actually presented an argument for why that should be universally considered wrong.
Sounds like I just wrote a counter argument to your idea of "consent". Where does it stop? "I consent to be murdered an eaten alive so that family gets one million"? In an ultra-liberal society, you'll always find somebody making the argument that if people consent to that, that "business transaction" should be legal.
The fact the parent claim that forbidding prostitution is "anti-woman" is laughable at best. It's anti-ultra-liberal, sure, but it isn't "anti-woman". What is anti-woman is men thinking of women as a mere commercial product.
I didn't mention consent, I mentioned agency. We regulate behaviour where there's a power dynamic, such as between parent and child, and employer and employee. If a personal relationship changes into this power dynamic and trade becomes involved, then that arguably entails regulation and additional protections. That does not entail we need to ban it. The only reason people seem to want to ban it is because sex is raised on a pedestal above other forms of human activity.
> Where does it stop? "I consent to be murdered an eaten alive so that family gets one million"? In an ultra-liberal society, you'll always find somebody making the argument that if people consent to that, that "business transaction" should be legal.
It's funny that you try to equate "the oldest profession" with behaviour that is incredibly rare, and likely even non-existent. Maybe these things are just not equivalent?
> What is anti-woman is men thinking of women as a mere commercial product.
That's just as ridiculous a take as the parent.
The nordic model is certainly anti-john and that's probably what triggers the parent. That only the client might go to jail. That's a good compromise.
This is a failure to separate the circumstances surrounding illegal prostitution (pimping, drugs, trafficking) from the act itself.
The reason prostitution can be empowering for women is because sex is widely desired, and something that is widely desired is a great financial opportunity. There are no shortage of stories about women paying for college by escorting rather than taking on huge student debt. Taking that opportunity away from women can be seen as just another patriarchal oppression, and the excuse given is that they can't have this opportunity because some other men want to use them to exploit that same opportunity. It's patriarchy all the way down.
It would be great if people didn't have to worry about money, but that's not the world we live in. Don't take away their opportunities to better their lives, how about you go after the people actually causing harm. That is the liberal position.
> That's a good compromise.
Not really, you're just endangering women again by driving it underground where they can't protect themselves.
Not really, that's a pure invention of yours. The Nordic model does protect prostitutes from pimps and johns.
Go educate yourself:
Funny, because we had a whole debate about it here in Canada, and guess what? All of the actual sex workers came out against it and said it would endanger them. But I'm sure your propaganda is more reliable or unbiased than the testimony of the people this would most affect.
There's a concerted effort to amplify only the voices that will continue to benefit pimps and punters and other vile men.
The Nordic model does not offer any real benefits to sex workers and still leaves their job dangerous, so why would they support it?
> There's a concerted effort to amplify only the voices that will continue to benefit pimps and punters and other vile men.
It's amazing how people willfully blind themselves when it suits their prejudice. The primary organizations pushing for reform of Canada's sex work laws are led by sex workers themselves [1]. But I suppose in your mind they're just brainwashed or coerced?
The author of this post selfishly wants to tear down women who safely practice the profession because of her own bad experiences.