It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it and start the work of reducing the stigma. Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history. I do not understand why people fight this battle.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.
There's a recent HN thread on truck driving, which is legal and regulated, and has relatively less stigma. Yet the industry has apparently also figured out every possible way to skirt the regulations and abuse drivers physically and financially if possible. Granted, that's not a statistical assessment, but it at least suggests to me that legalization and regulation are not enough by themselves to make an occupation safe and wholesome.
Of course it's not enough by itself, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Right now a lot of sex workers are afraid to even report crimes committed against them... hard to get much worse than that. Even a slight improvement is improvement.
Very few people (as a fraction of the population, spare me the wall of text about the edge cases) are negatively effected by trucking.
If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
>If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
In what way? has the population been negatively affected in places where it's already legal?
It is also dangerous for a man as well. Some report being robbed or have their picture take upon arrival and blackmailed. It would be beneficial to both sides if people didn’t have to hide what they do.
If you're paying $1200 for "company", in cash, I reckon it would be unusual to also carry much more than a tip. My guess is the people who got robbed were at the low-cost end of the trade. Or maybe the men that got robbed were rapey anyway, and not a good bet for future business.
They don't do that to ~25%(!!!!) of customers. You can't continuously run an above the table business involving card processors if even 1/10th of those people do a charge-back.
That 22% is a lifetime figure, not a per-occurrence figure. I've had my credit card info stolen several times, yet the fraud rate per transaction is way below 1%.
with an average number of escort per client at 26, and at least some of them being repeat customers (but possibly some of them being robbed multiple times), it doesn't look that much... Well below 1% per act.
> It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it.
Amen to that. As an ignorant outsider looking in, the first thing that comes to mind is the possible huge safety benefits gained by collective bargaining. Even if it's not certified and recognized by the NLRB, there's gotta be something.
Decriminalization, that's mostly what sex workers want. I'm pretty wary of regulation, which often is done in misguided ways by people out of touch with sex workers' actual needs.
How do you feel about the approach being taken in Victoria, Australia?
It's been legal in licensed settings for quite a while, but they're now changing to make it legal in more situations in response to requests from solo sex workers. I'm rather happy with the situation (and new improvements) as a client and my understanding is that workers are happy about it.
Decriminalization is implied. Necessary but not sufficient. That most certainly should (have) happen(ed by now). By regulation, I'm thinking the worker safety axis, not nec. the consumer protection one; agreed, if existent, it should be steered by those with understanding of actual needs, and not the peanut gallery.
Legalizing for protection of those involved is one thing, but it is completely orthogonal to 'reducing the stigma'. Frankly this is where these movements lose people, including the abortion movement.
Youre downvoted but have a good point. I agree its a victimless crime and so the govt has no business regulating it, but pushing for destigmitization is a different kind of social change. Why is that important?
I'd say it's because your primary base of support is going to come from people who are tired of the thing being stigmatized. Of course they're going to want to fight against that - it's only natural.
I know a lot of guys who dont wake up every day and say they want to sell their bodys for hard labor to the highest bidder, but it's decent work. Similar to how women can contract incurable, potentially-lethal venereal diseases as prostitutes, jobs like construction can really mess up a man's body. Doesn't mean we should ban them.
Many jobs are somewhat like that, but it's a matter of degree. Compare the market price of the job to the price that would lead people to want to take the job.
A lot of people would be willing to become a janitor at 3 times the market wages for janitors. A lot of people who are physically able to do construction work would take the job at 3 times the market rate for construction work. Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
This means that prostitution is much farther on the scale of "forced into by circumstances" than janitors or construction workers.
>Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that prostitution is immune to the same price based supply and demand forces that every other labor pool is.
The problem is that people who become prostitutes are often people who have no other choice. So you'll get a bifurcated distribution: people who will only take the job at some incredibly high multiple (because prostitution is really awful compared to other choices) and people who will take the job at any price because the janitors aren't hiring and they need to eat. The point of the comparison is to capture this problem.
True. Ultimately, the problem which requires a solution is not decriminalization of the prostitution but the origin of why people get into the situation where prostitution starts looking as a way out. But, since no one cares, decriminalization is a good thing to do - excluding people from the society for getting into the situation, which is a product of this society, is unfair
Yet, many men wake up with the desire to build things. That is not an atypical desire. Many men wake up with a desire to build things for money. Many women do as well.
Few people wake up wanting to sell their procreative parts to the highest bidder.
If you're okay with one of these things but not the other, then you are applying a double standard based on a moralisation of sex. Sex as labour is no different than any labour, and there is no criticism of sex work that is whole an complete that does not also criticise the very system you're defending.
If that is true, then a thought experiment would be: should refusing to enter prostitution be a grounds for losing jobseekers' welfare, eg. jobseekers allowance [1]?
It's comparable to working in a butcher that specialises in pork. Clearly, the job would be unsuitable for a Muslim or vegan jobseeker. That's why the government website specifies suitable jobs and has an exception for a good reason not to do the job.
I agree with the general principle that not all labour is the same, but I don't think prostitution is in a class of its own. If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
> If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
Maybe this means that you don't really like your job? If you had access to the same goods as everyone else around you, more or less, and liked what you are doing, then doing it for a week stops making sense, doesn't it?
For me it would've been ok to work 6/5(better 6/4) for the rest of my life if it actually was something meaningful for the society, and if I had an opportunity to occasionally switch to smth different, and if i got a stable life for it. Even if i didn't like the job with all my heart
Sex is very different. Last I checked, no matter how much construction work you do, you will never construct another person, even by accident.
Sex is not just another activity. Due to its effects of potentially creating a new human being, it is a category unto itself and deserves special treatment.
For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb?
The same is true of selling sex, which is not just some social interaction, but a social interaction that can literally make a new person
Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
> For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb? [...] Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
Speaking of lazy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison. Depriving yourself of a vital organ is not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
"Making a new person" is also a complete red herring. You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term, which is also paying to use someone else's genitals to actually make a new person. The only meaningful difference is the absence of "sex", so I think it's clear what you really have a problem with.
> You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term
In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described. Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
> not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
Given the genitals ability to produce life that can last many years beyond yourself, you're absolutely right. Renting out your genitals is much worse.
> In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described.
No it's not. The potential to make humans is not equal to the intentional act to create humans, just like the potential to commit murder is not the same as the intentional act to commit murder.
> Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
You definitely need to update your list, because more states are surrogate friendly than aren't.
Because the action under consideration is of a wholly different class than the others you mention.
For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life.
The same is true of prostitution. The action undertaken is of a wholly different nature. Namely it can create people, which is different than any other labor.
Tolerating homosexual prostitution is actually more akin to your other analogies in that the action undertaken is not special. Although anal intercourse in general ought to be discouraged due to its deleterious health effects.
> For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life. The same is true of prostitution.
No, we don't regulate it because it can create new life, we regulate it because it falls under healthcare for which doctors have a certain duty of care, and if IVF is done poorly it can cause all sorts of deleterious health effects for the mother and the implanted embryo. These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Nonsense, we directly regulate even that which is not about health care. For example, most countries limit the amount of children a man can sire via sperm donation.
> These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Whose burden falls solely on the women, and for which large portions of the population would object to the use of abortion as birth control. Even many pro-abortion people object to abortion's use as birth control, because they view abortion as justified murder, but murder nevertheless.
No, abortion is not murder because fetuses do not have personhood under the law. It's clear you don't really understand the legal precedents you're pontificating on so I don't really see this going anywhere.
It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime. It's hard to talk about an experience that will get you branded a criminal...
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
>It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
Drug gangs destroying South America, tens of thousands dying due to Fentanyl-laced pills, lost tax revenue, huge taxpayer expense, petty crime used to fund overpriced drugs, are all signficiantly worse things than what you are afraid of. It's a laugh to see all these right-leaning people who pretend to be libertarians (not sure if that's you, but in general) but are actually in favor of a large state and authoritarian government intervention on topics such as drugs.
I'm not a libertarian and I'm not a small government person.
I believe inimited government, not small government.
If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.
For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.
Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.
Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.
> Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
I'm not a libertarian, but libertarians -- unless they're of the high school variety -- are not carte blanche small government. They are certainly limited government. Perhaps you should begin by not arguing against high-school-level strawmen.
> The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
Almost certainly, but what happens in South America is not america's problem. America can build a wall and deport the illegal aliens back, as any sovereign country would.
> The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
Yes, unfortunately, we do not imprison enough whites for their drug habits, and instead jail mostly non-whites. The solution is to put more white drug users in jail for a very long time or institute pretty harsh rehabilitation programs (i.e., not released until you're sober for X amount of time, and then close follow-up monitoring).
> The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
That's fine. I'm not against taxation, as long as the taxes are being spent on worthwhile things that are the purview of government. For example, if you told me taxes had to be raised 1% for 'diversity training' I'd say no, because diversity training is not the purview of government. If you told me taxes had to be raised 20% due to an increase in crime and the need to imprison and incarcerate more criminals, that would be okay. WE all have to share society's burdens, I just don't want to share the burden of things I don't want.
> The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
Indeed. So we should institute harsher criminal sentencing.
> So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests.
Dude... you live in a bubble. There is no group of 'right-leaning' people who 'state' their interests in some centralized publication.
The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?
> how bad it is for the black community,
The black community was the initial force behind the drug war
> how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl
More doctors and pharmacists should frankly be in jail.
> how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack
Great, those dealers should be imprisoned too. We have too few prisons in this country, given the level of crime and drugs.
> how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal
Alcohol and cigarettes have a long cultural history. They are luxuries tolerated for the culture. Not something innate.
> how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime
The victim is the person doing the drugs. It is well within the purview of government to punish people for victimizing themselves, to discourage the behavior. For example, many countries used to criminalize attempted suicide. I'm not going to turn this into an argument on that... but that is well within the government's purview.
Your argument is that the cost and side effects don't matter, the war on drugs must be won no matter what. You hand wave away the negative consequences (illegal immigration can be magically dealt with with better enforcement!). If that's your perspective then I can't change your mind because it's coming from a place of ideology.
"The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?"
What? Illegal immigration, taxes, crime and the economy are among the top issues for conservatives, and your drug war is making all of those things worse. If you think these aren't concerns for conservatives you are just wrong. Polling of conservatives establishes this clearly as does the rhetoric of leading conservatives. The economy, crime and illegal immigration were all big parts of Trump's platform.
I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.
Assassination.
Burglary.
Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history.
Some might argue that assassination and burglary have a victim where prostitution does not.
There are arguments against prostitution as a victimless crime, but it is not straightforward in any argument to demonstrate victim and perpetrator like it is with assassination, burglary, assault, etc.
You're seriously out here comparing consensual sex between two consenting adults to murder for hire? You can at least try to make a point in good faith first.
I never voiced my attitude towards legalization of prostitution. I addressed very specific weak argument.
Sorry, if you found my comment rude, i assure you that this was not my goal.
You used abortion there. I don't think we could get a consent from fetus, law just assumes that female parent have a power over it's life until some development point.
People consensually participate at gambling, dueling, pyramid schemes, become criplled drugs and alcohol addicts, selling themselves and they family to slavery, do suicide.
Nor consent, nor something being an old and persistent part of the human culture are good reasoning.
I said sex work is an old profession to exemplify why banning it doesn't work. I certainly didn't present the age of the profession as the sole reason for legalizing it.
I don't think you consider assassination and prostitution equivilant crimes, yet you made the comparison. Why? What's the point of taking something out of context to invalidate it?
If you have reasons for opposing the legalization of sex work, they're completely lost on me. Maybe start there instead of pedantry.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.