I've never thought about this topic before, and from your comments it shows you have given it careful thought, so probably this is going to have some fundamental flaws, but I was just thinking:

We do seem to have found solutions, however imperfect, in other domains where workers were always vulnerable. How do you know your new tech gadget wasn't produced with child labour, or in some horrible sweatshop? There's a long list of things, probably including at least labour unions, investigative journalism, and a lot of legislation.

But for all those things to work, it has to all be a somewhat legal enterprise to begin with. You probably can't build a brand for a brothel-chain that's widely recognised to treat their workers well, if that's an illegal activity.

What strikes me as patronising about the nordic model, that you mention up in the thread, is this: if I'm legalising your job, but still go after your customers, that means I'm still not taking your job seriously, or?

I'm glad to see a comment on this issue raising honest points, which is uncommon to see. In 2015, using a lot of tech is far less optional than using pornography and sex workers, which is optional (as in, optional = bool(True)) in every case.

For the both the necessary and optional physical products, there should be more involvement in campaigns for favorable trade legislation and worker conditions, and I think we're all guilty of lack of participation in this, which is only made easier by the entrenched influence of the companies involved.

From reading a lot of different people, I don't think the feminist advocates for the Nordic model "don't take sex work seriously". I think they identify porn and prostitution as socially harmful to women as a class and physically and psychologically damaging to individaul women in a too-large amount of cases, and would rather see women exit en masse through programs that help them find support and work elsewhere, than anything else -- toward the eventual abolition of prostituion. (I think the opinion is split on whether prostitution is inherently harmful -- that is, in a post-gender world where there is no trance of social definition of women as stores of resources to be extracted for pleasure and service, would prostitution still be socially harmful? -- but I don't think it matters for the questions at hand.) Here are some links to introduce a camp of thought that is never given a chance in the mainstream:

http://antipornfeminists.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/qotd-the-p...

http://sarahditum.com/2014/02/24/who-do-you-listen-to/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbxBJf9UtWg

https://firewomon.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/is-choice-really-...

http://www.thepinkcross.org/pinkcross-articles/october-2011/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HvC_sEURXA

http://www.bad-housekeeping.com/2014/01/08/violence-teenager...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/24/pornogr...

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/pornographyisale...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/05/convers...

If any of these links are broken, I suggest trying the WayBack Machine.

> I think the opinion is split on whether prostitution is inherently harmful -- that is, in a post-gender world where there is no trance of social definition of women as stores of resources to be extracted for pleasure and service, would prostitution still be socially harmful? -- but I don't think it matters for the questions at hand.

I think it does matter - in fact this seems to be exactly the pain-point in this whole thread, that everyone differs on that particular point. If it isn't inherently harmful (and again, I haven't thought about it enough to decide), then your line of argument seems to conflate feminist causes with sex workers', and we'd be trampling over a non-harmful industry just to further the cause of feminism [^].

On the other hand, if it is inherently harmful, there's no need to entangle the two either, and we should legislate against it regardless of whether it damages women as a class or not.

Thanks for all the links.

[^] edit: which may be a legitimate reason, of course. But it would avoid most of the discussion in this subthread.

There are the three general grouping points of views:

1. Prostitution industries are non-harmful

2. Prostitution industries are harmful to women no matter what the social context and always will be

3. The industies are harmful to women as a class today and throughout history, under the system called "gender", where men assign to women the role of stores of resources to extract, which has existed as long as civilizations have.

Many people are, genuinely or otherwise, treating the original commentor like he was asserting #2, when he was asserting some variant of #3, which does not logically have #2 built-in. You don't have to agree with the latter part of #3 to understand that it is not the same as #2, and we can start talking about 1 vs 3 without having to resolve 2 immediately.

I mean, we already know this, don't we? We can talk about how to deal with racist institutions without always falling back into questions of "what is race? in a post-racism world, would races exist?" Maybe the analogy isn't perfect...

Porn may be just as "socially harmful" to men than it is to women, or even more-so, but obviously in a vastly different manor. My first network connection as a kid was a 1200 baud modem and a BBS, and I know what "trouble" I got in back then. I have no idea how kids are supposed to deal with the ocean of content that is literally at their fingertips, the siren song and peer pressure around watching it, and the difficulty of processing those images and comprehending the acts at the ages they are exposed to them.

Forget the "birds and the bees" talk, now it's more like, "so I noticed the pornhub DNS queries coming from your tablet..."