And there are thousands of former sex workers that will give you an earful about what you think you know about prostitution and what prostitutes think.
They also have a tendency to wish that people who didn't want to be in their line of work didn't have to be in their line of work. So why not actually try to solve that problem - reach out to individuals, listen to them, and help them achieve their goals - instead of trying to tell people what they want and don't want? The only reason I can think of is that that doesn't allow you to force your morality on people.
I do. I reach out to would-be purchasers of sex and those who would defend them, and point out the dire consequences of their approach. Economic transfer doesn't suddenly make rape something one should aspire to or tolerate.
Edit: Specifically, if the goal is to help sex workers who want help, the solution is... to help sex workers who want help. It's to perform research into the barriers to seeking help, and try to remove those barriers. It's not to prevent consensual trade between a person who has few issues with their job, and someone seeking their services.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to eradicate sex work against the wishes of those sex workers for reasons of morality, punishing people who participate in it is a wonderful idea.
Which rights does consensual sex work curtail?
This isn't really an opt-out right; surely there are people who would "consent" to situations of slavery or apartheid. This doesn't mean we should make those things legal.
If you want to disambiguate it from sex, consider whether someone should be able to sell (and thus another person to buy) an organ.
Then consider that the demand for purchasing sex massively outstrips the demand for purchasing organs.
Selling sex doesn't imply the loss of anything.
Literally thousands upon thousands of current and former prostitutes disagree.
The solution is not to make sex work illegal, or to make seeking it illegal. It's to help the people who don't want to be performing sex work. It's to give them food, and shelter, and training to re-enter the job market. But that's expensive, and it's difficult to explain to people with Christian moralities about sex why you'd allow people to perform sex work if they wanted to.
A while ago I spent quite some time researching the prostitution thing, trying to make up my mind about it. I remember the UN report on global trafficking[1] being specially enlightening. The conclusions I took from it:
-Prohibition doesn't work. It just drives the prostitution underground, and as the pimps are already doing something illegal they don't mind going the extra mile, make it straightforward slavery and abuse the women so much than they are too terrified to escape. A small country (like Sweden) can offload the prostitution to nearby countries, but if all Europe were to do that the consequences would probably be really dire for a lot of women.
-Full legality increases human trafficking. As there is a lot of legal prostitution going on, it's easier to get away with the trafficking. In Europe usually takes the shape of organized crime importing awful lot of women from western Europe to Holland and Germany. Long term, it's thought to increase the well being of prostitutes, both imported and local, but we still have to grok how to do it without make it without the traffic.
-Not legal nor illegal. This is the situation in most countries, and the implementations vary wildly. In some countries the police does not intervene at all and it's a cesspool of mafias fighting for control, others make it a tourist attraction, while others haven't made it legal but don't prosecute the prostitutes. Curiously enough, this last approach is the one that gets the best results at stopping exploitative human trafficking as long as pimping is really prosecuted, don't remember anyone really explaining why. My guess is that in this situation large scale trafficking operations stand out much more, but who knows.
TL;DR; It's hard. Swedes are a tiny bit hypocrites in this one.
[1] http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-repor...
Yes, because people who purchase sex are a scourge to women everywhere.
It's extremely difficult to stop gangsters from trafficking because they operate in the trafficked persons home country as well, so if you run to the police in Germany or Canada they can seek retribution on your family members back home in Ukraine, Vietnam ect. Thus the not legal nor illegal does a good balance of preventing super brothels opening up full of imported sex workers while at the same time being able to arrest pimps without relying on the testimony of the sex workers.
Defending pimps and johns while calling anti-prostitution activists "sleazy slimeballs." I love it.
That is basically making things up.
Don't go thinking there is a silver bullet here, all solutions somewhat suck.
Sorry to break the news to you: all clients are ugly clients, since they're all just fine with the idea that people's bodies are something to be bought and sold.
Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
This isn't germane to the issue, which is that purchasing sex is a reprehensible act. However, there is indeed a strong strain of anti-capitalist thought in radical feminism; it surprises me that you don't know this.
> Also, I assume you don't actually mean bodies, as that would imply you're similarly against non-sexual modelling, acting, etc etc, where people employ people directly for their bodies, to varying degrees.
I meant literally their bodies, not images of their bodies, or actions that their bodies perform. I meant direct access to their mouths, rectums, vaginas for the purpose of sexual gratification. I suppose if purchasing that kind of access had other purposes besides sexual gratification, "sex" wouldn't seem like such a special case.
I moderate a handful of self-titled "social justice warrior" chatrooms, which are full of everyone from libertarian socialists to anarcho-communists. I'm reasonably aware of various strands of feminism. I've been having a discussion on the morality of sex work for much of today.
Sex work is immoral for the same reasons other work is immoral. It's not a special case, and shouldn't really be treated much differently. If you want to protect the sex worker from the necessity of performing their work, you should be similarly protecting the minimum wage retail clerk from the necessity of performing their work. Neither is worse than the other, and they have similar solutions.
Even under capitalism, purchasing e.g. food for your family that was somehow acquired under coercive circumstances is still less shameful than purchasing e.g. diamonds that were somehow acquired under coercive circumstances. What you're purchasing matters; it's not all the same.
The solution is to get rid of the system which is coercive. It's not to tell everybody who ever wanted to buy a television not to within the context of capitalism.
The purchase of sex inherently demeans and degrades another human being because it places one's own sexual gratification over another person's bodily autonomy.
I'm a contractor, and I get to choose my clients. If I don't want to work with someone, I don't. Why would it be "inherently" demeaning in sex work, if they got to choose their clients and there were better protection and regulation?
Why is it an implementation issue with your TV purchase, and an inherent issue with sex work? I don't follow the logic.
TL;DR no prostitute can "choose" a john that isn't going to sexually exploit her (and thus violate her human rights) because that's the nature of purchasing sex.
A direct quote TL;DR
Does the 'right to prostitute' exist?' Clearly prostitution cannot exist as a right because it usurps and negates already established human rights of the prostitute woman to human dignity, bodily integrity, physical and mental well-being...Human rights are universal and inalienable. They cannot be reduced to the instrumentality of individual choice alone because individual choice can and does include the right to harm or propagate harm on others or inflict harm on oneself.
There are people in the sex industry who enjoy their industry. There were no people on the receiving end of the holocaust who enjoyed that.
If you can't grasp the difference you should not try to discuss anything.
You think prostitution is not a violation of human rights. I do. It's pretty much that simple. But clearly what specific individuals used to think about freedom from slavery, or the right of Jewish people to exist, or the right to basic dignity and access to food and livelihood, has no bearing on whether or not these things are human rights. They just are.
It's morally acceptable to sell a service but not to purchase it? That's asinine.
The "economic transaction" model is in almost all cases a fig leaf for the abuse of women, even in jurisdictions where prostitution has been legalized or decriminalized.
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/i-clutche...
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/pdf/Prostitutionin9Count...
"Just-so stories," k bud. Tell yourself whatever lies you need to in order to condone johns and pimps; I can't stop you.