Of course other women don't like it, but that has nothing to do with "trafficking" or "violence". They don't like it because it reduces the amount of power they have over men.

That's a bunch of hyperbolic crap too, though.

That's true, but why do you phrase it solely in terms of women? There are a lot of boys/men in the sex industry also.

My personal argument is the criminalisation of prostitution forces prostitutes to associate with criminals, which is where the abuses can happen.

In my country, where prostitution is legal, a prostitute recently took her boss (What do Americans call a man who runs a brothel?) to our Human Rights Tribunal for sexual harassment and won. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm

If you want to minimise harm, legalisation strikes me as the obvious move.

The problem with the Marxist approach to theory (which arguably the fault of Marx's followers as much as himself) is that it over-emphasizes class membership to the point of abrogating individuality. In theoretical discussions,t he experience of people whose experience is more nuanced or at odds with their apparent class status are often dismissed with the claim that the individual has a 'false consciousness' of his or her own situation; While capitalistic (and implicitly, patriarchal) social models do aim to be self-sustaining by promulgating ideology about 'the way things are' and domesticating or even commodifying dissent, the Marxist ideological system can be just as much of a straitjacket, which is one reason for the relatively recent rise of intersectionality theory, with women, ethnic minority groups, sexual minorities and so forth asserting their separate and distinct identities. This is a big reason that left politics seem so fragmented, because each new identity group often plays out similar social dynamics to the one that gave rise to it; so you could say that Marx identified working, middle, and upper economic classes, and that feminists later sought a distinct identity because Marxist theory described some of their issues but ignored a lot of others; in turn black feminists, lesbian feminists, and so on had to carve out their own identities because the main trunk of feminism seemed to be constructed out of white and heteronormative assumptions which ignored distinctly different aspects of their experiences, and so on. Intersectionality theory comes at things from the perspective that people can have membership in multiple classes and that the interests, assumptions, or structures of those classes don't necessarily align neatly.In the context of this discussion, I'm saying that sex work is a lot more complex than just something that negatively affects women as a class, and to to simplify it into such is to marginalize quite a lot of people within the class of sex workers by saying that their experiences and perspectives are irrelevant and should be ignored.

I can't tell whether you mean to reference blackface as just an example of a class issue or to draw an analogy with sex work. If the latter, I think it fails because blackface was about excluding capable performers from the white economic market for entertainment despite the demand for their output, whereas class-based objections to prostitution rest on the argument that any kind of commercial relations involving sexuality are fundamentally exploitative/oppressive and should be forbidden.

For blackface, I mean the former. Your last sentence misrepresents every feminist objection to the prostitution industries that I have ever come across. Maybe you are reading different feminists that I haven't heard of.

I have never actually heard of a male being coerced into prostitution. I know that some choose it. I've heard of plenty of females being coerced.

> What do Americans call a man who runs a brothel?

A pimp.

> If you want to minimise harm, legalisation strikes me as the obvious move.

Americans in aggregate aren't interested in minimizing harm. In aggregate, our concerns tend to be about morality, and "violence" tends to not get included as inherently immoral. We care more about the relative defenselessness of a victim than that there was a victim in the first place.

That's why we favor charity over systematic aid.

Does that mean it doesn't happen?

"[s]tructurally"? What does that mean? I agree forcing a woman into prostitution should be against the law, but if she see's it as the best of her options then that's her decision.

>That's a bunch of hyperbolic crap too, though.

No, not really. Almost all sex is transactional at some level. Women who don't sell it for cash don't want to compete with professionals in the same way manufacturers try to keep out low-priced imports.

No, not really. Almost all sex is transactional at some level. Women who don't sell it for cash don't want to compete with professionals in the same way manufacturers try to keep out low-priced imports.

I disagree, and think your view is overly reductionist and overly simplistic. Sex work involves a much more diverse set of situations than your stereotypical and rather cynical appraisal of gender-economic relations. It's not that the popular social structures like monogamy don't have any economic dimension, but the assumption that this is the only thing that motivates anyone is as much a denial of agency as the notion that all prostitutes are helpless victims of evil patriarchy.

I don't accept that as some form of coercion. Why is it men seem to be able to find alternatives, but women are somehow helpless victims of circumstance? I used to play poker with prostitutes. To a woman they were simply too lazy to avail themselves of other opportunities. Hooking is easy money.

In any event if she's so desperate this is the only way she can put food on the table, state interference with her trade puts her life in jeopardy, no?

>It's not that the popular social structures like monogamy don't have any economic dimension, but the assumption that this is the only thing that motivates anyone is as much a denial of agency as the notion that all prostitutes are helpless victims of evil patriarchy.

I made no such assumption. But you don't have to talk to too many men to realize their wives and girlfriends use sex as a means to control them.

Of course not all prostitutes are forced into that line of work by necessity (as I've said from the outset, and don't intend to repeat further). But it's a mistake to generalize form your experience and assume that none are. I could equally well infer that it's the sort of people who like to spend their leisure hours gambling who are lazy, since gambling by definition offers the possibility of a large quick score rather than the painstaking accumulation of wealth. Or I might infer that since poker is a game of bluffing as much as of luck, it suited at least some of your companions to present themselves to you as shiftless and lazy so as to tempt you into more reckless betting - after all, don't prostitutes specialize professionalize in pretending to be whatever others expect them to be?

Now really, I don't have any strong personal opinions about gambling, plus I for all I know you and your friends used to play for pennies and the primary payoff was the enjoyment of each others' social company; I'm just trying to point out pitfalls in generalizing too much from a limited sample. It's facile to say 'x just does y because s/he is lazy' - it might be that X has great difficulty getting any other kind of job due to having spent the last 10 years engaged in Y, which is not anything you can put on a resume.

In any event if she's so desperate this is the only way she can put food on the table, state interference with her trade puts her life in jeopardy, no?

It depends. In the case of Redbook, as discussed in the article, I think state interference is a bad thing because it seems to have functioned as a platform for women (and others, but mostly women) engaged in this line of work to organize themselves economically and reduce the harmful factors by spreading worthwhile information, from access to better STD-mitigation practices to screening out clients known to be dangerous or abusive. Indeed, one of the key features of Redbook (as I understand it) was that it reduced the traditional leverage of pimps over prostitutes.

On the other hand, if state social welfare agencies come across some cracked-out hooker turning tricks for $20 or someone who's been trafficked across borders for organized sex work and thus doesn't have any of the protections of citizenship or legal residency, it's not doing those persons any favor to say 'well, at least you're on the economic ladder, carry on I guess...' What they need is probably safe housing, maybe drug detox, counselling, education and a boatload of other resources - but that gets expensive, isn't a popular political expenditure (partly because of attitudes like yours), and involves a lot of bureaucratic/ administrative overhead both within state agencies and in the nonprofit sector.

I made no such assumption. But you don't have to talk to too many men to realize their wives and girlfriends use sex as a means to control them.

Maybe it's just that I'm confident and self-reliant enough not to feel dependent on anyone else for my sexual identity (for want of a better expression), but statements like that seem very biased to me. Men are only controlled by their sexuality to the extent that they find it burdensome to obtain consent for sexual activity, no? I mean, look at the not-inconsiderable number of married men who have affairs, long-term mistresses, or hire prostitutes; by definition they find outlets for their sexual drive outside of their marital/conjugal relationship, yet choose to remain within that relationship, so they must be motivated by other considerations besides access to sexual activity. I'm pretty skeptical whenever I hear claims about 'women having men by the balls,' so to speak.

You missed my point. There isn't much demand for men as sex workers and yet they still manage to avoid starving.

>But it's a mistake to generalize form your experience and assume that none are.

How many prostitutes do you think there are as a percentage of the total population? In the US, especially, women have other options.

>Or I might infer that since poker is a game of bluffing as much as of luck, it suited at least some of your companions to present themselves to you as shiftless and lazy so as to tempt you into more reckless betting - after all, don't prostitutes specialize professionalize in pretending to be whatever others expect them to be?

They weren't working - they were playing. Not very well, either. This was a card club in an area that wasn't great, and hookers and drug dealers tend to gamble a lot because they have a lot of undeclared cash.

>What they need is probably safe housing, maybe drug detox, counselling, education and a boatload of other resources...'

Well, okay, but that's a separate issue from whether or not making her trade illegal will benefit her. It won't.

>Men are only controlled by their sexuality to the extent that they find it burdensome to obtain consent for sexual activity, no?

Oh, it's not perfect control. If a wife withholds sex from her husband for long enough he's going to get it somewhere else, and most women are more deft than that. But using sex as a reward for painting the garage isn't fundamentally different than selling it.

By the way, if you're involved in activism in this area, could you drop me a line? I'm working on a somewhat related project and will be looking to get some well-informed input on the subject.

Illegality can make it harder for women who are vulnerable to such coercion to seek legal help. No one entirely sane relishes tangling with the law. I remember reading about a situation in Germany, where women using unemployment job seeking services were being pressured to go to prostitution job interviews.

Would this be a problem if there was no social stigma attached to the profession? Perhaps. I'd think it would be wise for the law to treat that particular a profession a little differently, however. (As in the German example.)

>> Of course other women don't like it, but that has nothing to do with "trafficking" or "violence". They don't like it because it reduces the amount of power they have over men.

> That's a bunch of hyperbolic crap too, though.

There's a world of difference between the fluffy and cheerful young woman in suburban Arizona who was interviewed on Penn & Teller's show and an often homeless urban street walker with a dependence on drugs. (Not to mention women trafficked across national borders.) Women who have very little socio-economic power may well be coerced or feel trapped by their circumstances in any line of work. So it's no wonder that a profession of illegal status carries extra complications.

As usual, what is one "issue" in name is actually a half dozen different issues, with socio-economic status as one of a number of differentiating factors.

There is such violence. There is such trafficking. There are also matters of gender politics and the economics of social structures influencing morality. The only hyperbola here is claiming each part is the whole. Blind men...elephant...blah de blah...

Except that's complete bullshit. There was one case where a job seeker got a suggestion to apply for a job serving drinks in a brothel and one where an escort job got into their database of open jobs. Both were considered a mistake and against policy which says that sex-related work is only to be offered on the initiative of the job seeker.

https://www.google.com/search?q=social+stigma+prostution+nor...

EDIT: "Social stigma" that looks like, sounds like, and feels like social stigma passes the "duck test." It essentially is social stigma. It doesn't matter so much for the question of its existence who in particular it originates with.

But yes, if we define "social stigma" so broadly that it includes legitimate concern for individuals and groups, there is also social stigma against pedophilia, I guess.

In most contexts "outside of my social circle", "sex" itself is generally seen as humorous/inappropriate topic, for reasons that I don't think are due to sex being seen as shameful or worthy of stigma, although many claim that this is the case. So if I did what you suggest, there would be confounding variables, would there not?

I think if my boss and I (he counts as outside my circle, no?) were both drunk in a bar, and I mentioned using a prostitute, his jaw would stay well off of the floor. I think this is true of most men, even the conservative Republicans ones who act otherwise in more "family" type situation. I will suggest that you try it, maybe I'm wrong.