To remind you, this is what you said: "If it was their free choice, they wouldn't need to be paid for it".
This means that monetary exchange precludes free choice. This is independent of what is being exchanged, as you say it.
This means that monetary exchange precludes free choice. This is independent of what is being exchanged, as you say it.
Instead of trying to wordplay this in HN comments, why don't you take a look at https://www.demandabolition.org/resources/evidence-against-l... -- they've done a far better job than I ever could on lining up the different arguments -- and there are many! -- against blithely skipping into legalized or even decriminalized prostitution. If none stick, then certainly nothing I say in this discussion will have any effect.
This sentence has structurally the same form. If you think it's ridiculous, it can only be because you think there is something special about sex - i.e. it is sacred in some way. And thus your position actually doesn't relate to free will.
I think you're very confused. Your statements aren't logically consistent and I have to make guesses and leaps of dodgy inference to make any sense of them at all.
I believe you have a prior position on the morality of prostitution and are using arguments you don't understand to defend the position. I think a different tack would be wiser.
> As Dworkin wrote a long time ago, "in prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after."
I feel like the Dworkin quote is more the basis of their argument, that the human body itself is different to other external objects, and selling your own body is different to selling something external.
In that context, comparing selling fruit to selling your own body doesn't seem like a fair comparison.
That said, I know a couple of people in this industry, none of them are particularly fond of their work, but they don't seem any more unhappy than anyone else in a job they don't particularly like. shrug
And in the end there's a qualitative difference between purchasing access to a person's time and labor, and purchasing access to their mouth, vagina, and anus.
The authors at http://www.feministcurrent.com/?s=prostitution would universally guffaw at your misdirection towards religion. This is about patriarchal oppression of women, all gussied up in the same neoliberal language that has proven itself unmeritorious in other public spheres.
So as a gay man, it would be highly immoral for me to have sex with a prostitute whom is a bottom, but renting the services of a top for the night would be totally fine. Am I interpreting you correctly (not that I have, or plan on, engaging the services of sex workers. Not really my scene.)?
I currently hold very different views from you on this issue, but some of your arguments are certainly giving me some things to think about. They all seem to assume the above point, which I have a really hard time accepting.
Not at all, it's also immoral to purchase assassinations and many other things both illegal and legal. They're not germane to the question of prostitution though.
Prostitution is qualitatively different than other "services" or even non-prostitution sex work (phone sex operator, erotic fiction writer, even some pornography) because it involves purchasing direct access to and use of the prostituted person's body. That is the problem with prostitution, not the fact that it's about sex per se.
It's simply a matter of the human condition that the (male) sex drive is the most common thing that, when left unexamined and unchecked, results in such a system where people's bodies are reduced to the objects of economic transaction.
I've probably burned enough internet points on this thread, but if you want to read far better-researched and better-stated writing on this subject than mine, http://www.feministcurrent.com/category/prostitution-2/ is a good place to start. It's a shame that religious and social conservative voices are often the only ones being represented and considered on this subject. It's a shame that men on the left and atheist men should feel deeply.