Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

If selling fruit was the shopkeeper's free choice, they would not need to be paid for fruit.

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.

View on HN

> 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

> 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

Then replace selling fruit with backbreaking manual labor: coal mining, digging ditches, whatever. Something that causes real and permanent damage to one's body over time. Is selling your labor in such a way morally wrong?

No, but purchasing it might be. Employers can mitigate their culpability by including health and disability insurance, and workplace condition standards. They typically only do this when required by government regulation, though.

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.

Where would all the sex workers who disagree be without you to tell them how they really feel!

I don't know; I'm more concerned with the johns hiding behind their hypothetical skirts.

Maybe you can start purifying your soul (because clearly there's some sort of puritanical religious thing going on here) by abstaining from the use of electronic devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan_mining_and_ethics

I'm a materialist and an atheist. Being an atheist doesn't prevent me from seeing how abusive and immoral it is to purchase someone's body from a position of economic and social advantage. In fact, it clarifies the situation greatly; there is no soul separate from the body, so making someone's body the object of economic exchange is literally always participating in human trafficking.

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.

Right, right of course. Your totally secular belief system is what led you to a moral viewpoint in which it is immoral to rent the mouth, vagina or anus, of another human being, but (one assumes) renting their penis is totally fine.

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.)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com