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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

This is the real story:

"While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking."

Too many laws in America are stalking horses for restricting, not just commercial sexual activity, but all unapproved sexual activity. And the people who'd be doing the approving don't look like people I want in charge of my or my kid's sex life.

Child pornography and sex trafficking are both real, serious, problems. We should deal with them, not work to make it harder for sex workers and horny teenagers. But for a lot of the pressure groups in this area, the second thing is _their actual goal_.

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In more sane high income countries, New Zealand, parts of Australia, the UK, et. al, prostitution is legal and regulated. If sex workers get into trouble, there are places and people they can go to get help. It at least attempts to be a legitimate industry.

In America, we have parts of Nevada and that's it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it's why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that's another issue entirely...)

The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex/their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work.

This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we're fighting the same bullshit.

I'm wasn't aware of the UK having legal and/or regulated sex workers.

The closest I'm aware of is that Leeds has the first (and only?) "official" red light district, and my understanding was that that's more a case of the police not asking or prosecuting rather than it actually being allowed or legal.

(There's plenty of discussion to be had over whether we should or not, this reply is more of a "oh really, do we?" sorta comment).

Sex work is perfectly legal in the UK, subject to certain restrictive conditions.

You cannot work in a "brothel" (i.e. not under the same roof as another sex worker), you cannot have a paid "pimp" (arguably not even to do the accounts or to make sure you are safe), you cannot solicit in a public place.

As you say, sometimes police will not enforce these rules, but other times they may use the threat of criminalisation to coerce sex workers.

Sex workers typically advocate for the "New Zealand model" of full decriminalisation - which is understood to be safer for sex workers.

As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well). This is one of those areas where the rubber of libertarianism meets the road of reality. If you really want to curb sex trafficking, the best way to do it is to go after the demand side: decriminalize prostitutes, but punish pimps and johns severely.

> As it turns out, countries with legalized prostitution have higher levels of illegal sex trafficking (the real kind, where people are forced into it as well).

The extremely small numbers of countries involved and the methods that exist of estimating the actual magnitude make it very hard to do any of (1) control for potential confounding factors, (2) be confident in the correlation even assuming no confounding factors and accuracy in the figures, (3) be sure there are not systematic measurement biases (resulting in higher count to actual number ratios with legalized prostitution) distorting the results, or (4) be sure that the measured differences are real even absent systematic bias.

(3) is perhaps especially important because a central thesis of the advocacy of legalization as a means to fight trafficking is that it makes trafficking more detectable by breaking the apparent or actual shared interest of perpetrators and victims in concealing sex trafficking when prostitution is illegal. (One sided decriminalization also aims to do this, but arguably stigmatizes and marginalizes all participants in prostitution of any kind in much the same way as criminalization, even though it only penalizes one side.)

How does "punishing pimps and johns" help prostitutes? It still forces them to fight the law every time they work, because no prostitute is going to get clients if they don't conceal them.

It transfers power from the pimps to prostitutes by radically shifting the terms of trade in cases of conflict.

Note that this is policy being tried in India to fight corruption--don't penalize giving bribes, just taking them. Now every bribe taker is at risk of being reported and the reporter is not at risk.

And why lump Johns in with pimps? Because nobody will defend a John and it will help the prison industry the same way drug users do.

If a pimp or client beats or threatens a prostitute, she can go to the cops with no fear because her work doesn't warrant criminal prosecution. As it is, prostitutes are kept in line because they have no one to turn to when they are abused by their clients or pimps.

One should look at the history behind why certain currently banned obscenity is banned, and what the goals of the groups were who originally pushed the ban.

>Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet

This is one of their main goals.

>blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking

I think this has largely been achieved.

> I think this has largely been achieved.

Indeed, “combating sex trafficking” seems to already be a euphemism for cracking down on sex work of all kinds.

“Combating sex trafficking” is also a euphemism for cracking down on free speech on the internet, privacy, and small competitors to the big two internet firms. In the same week, we’ve also gotten the cloud act, and widely expanded censorship on youtube.

The big two seem to welcome these changes: google lobbied in support of at least some of this, while zuckerberg says he’s ok with expanded regulation of facebook.

Reglatory capture is being used to lock down our industry (and, maybe democracy) before our very eyes.

> I think this has largely been achieved.

Definitely true, and it's worth noting that crackdowns on 'trafficking' and 'abetting' sex work in the US consistently undermine not sex work but safe sex work.

- Acts like "renting an apartment out for a sex worker" become abetting, which drives sex work to happen on the street and at client's residences - the places where serious violence are most likely.

- Any attempt at collaboration, like sex workers sharing the cost of private security or hygienic supplies, can be reclassified as a form of trafficking. (The tortured legal logic is that "you give me $10 and I buy paper towels for us both" constitutes taking money from a sex worker and enabling their business, and therefore trafficking.)

- When Washington, D.C. attempted to crack down on sex work, women carrying condoms were arrested or forced to throw them away - a move which did nothing to prevent trading sex for money, but effectively undermined safety and disease prevention.

- When the government moved against Backpage, quite a lot of sex workers were deeply upset. Because the website didn't make sex work happen, it helped it happen safely, allowing workers to choose their clients before meeting them in person.

Over and over again, we see that anti-trafficking laws are actually used to marginalize sex work and destroy any possibility of a safe, healthy, or voluntary environment for the workers. At a certain point, it looks like the scenario of vulnerable sex workers who face constant violence is actually being driven by these laws that punish any worker who tries to live a better life.

Right but you have to address the solution which is proposed by the authors of these laws -- don't be a sex worker. It's not exactly a secret that the goal is to outlaw any kind of sex work but you don't get anywhere punishing the victims so you go after people trying to legitimize it.

They view sex work as fundamentally abusive and degrading, something that no one should even consider as an option, and therefore needs to be illegal so that police can intervene -- just like organ harvesting, suicide, and a lot of drug laws. Then you make the punishment for facilitating it in any way steep as a deterrent.

I agree, and I didn't mean to downplay that.

My concern is that even within a framework where all sex work is objectionable, these are bad laws. If they made voluntary sex work harder, they'd be successes within that frame. But they don't - they leave the basic transaction untouched, and only undermine worker safety from disease and assault.

The situation is actually very similar with drugs. A law that reduced voluntary, non-addictive use would upset some people and please others. But the laws we actually have aren't a success even if you think all drug use is immoral. Crackdowns on supply haven't reduced use, but have increased prices and violence while lowering purity. Crackdowns on drug trafficking haven't reduced use, but have, though the iron law of prohibition, driven a shift to harder and deadlier drugs. And restriction of paraphernalia hasn't reduced use, but has pushed users to unsafe practices like sharing and reusing needles.

Deterrent effects are real, though they're exceptionally weak in these cases; sex and drugs have some of the most inelastic demand outside of food and water. But my concern is that these laws aren't actually deterrents against any step essential for the transaction. They're entirely deterrents against incidental features that make the transaction safer or healthier, and so rather than reducing the behavior they simply reduce safety.

>>blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking

>I think this has largely been achieved.

The text of the bill makes this obvious; whatever the public rhetoric, the legal text talks about prostitution, period. No qualifications regarding consent or exploitation.

That's nothing unique to legislation surrounding sex. Rebranding creationism to "intelligent design" and "teach the controversy" are great examples of disingenuous legislation attempting to create precedent and chip away at at issues in the background. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that things like literacy tests and poll taxes were such examples. It's standard fare for the course in politics. Law is one of those areas where the "slippery slope" argument does actually reflect reality.

I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa. It might sound silly and not modern, but the history and its established norms can point out an "algorithm" that preserved continuation of humanity, despite how horrible it might seem and how taxing it always was. A question is if our technological advancements are sufficient to sustain artificial rules that would be otherwise eliminated by evolution in natural environment, or if it falls apart like all previous attempts to deviate from a known "stable" model passed by traditions of what worked before. Not sure I want to be a guinea pig for social engineers either.

See what Tinder did to dating; nobody can have any illusion they are getting a "premium" faithful partner and it pushes the attractiveness/transaction narrative and quick disposability to most intimate relationships. Not a way to build a stable civilization, rather a hyper-competitive cruel society where nothing is ever enough.

Unless these warts are addressed by a proper patch, our civilization has no future (IMO). I can wonder about motivations of those groups, whether it is really continuation of civilization, or just taking advantage of usual biological idealistic attitude of males to work hard for carrot-and-stick motivations in a form of a woman they desire, and harvesting that energy for their own selfish reasons, painting it white as necessary for everybody.

You can say the same about most things that happen currently. historically, civilizations that survived did not use computers, for instance. Thus, if you want to avoid socital collapse, you should enforce that nobody uses computers.

Yes, I think it's an experiment. I am more-less certain without technology this approach would fall apart in 1-2 generations due to human nature; the question for me is if current/future tech is sufficient or we will mess it all up. Warning signs are there - you have plenty of males that decided it's no longer worth it to be involved with society as they are denied females due to their low attractiveness, so if this continues, we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything).

It's easier if you restrict access to sex to males, make rules that almost everybody can get it at some point in a committed relationship, instead of having only the most attractive males having it all with most females and the rest waiting for leftovers, and to drive any aberrations from this ideal underground, out of sight. I believe that's how past civilizations worked and in general people didn't talk openly about their side affairs and society built guilt/shaming wall to publicly scorn anyone that was doing it outside private sphere and didn't keep secrecy/discretion. We call it repression now, though it likely had its evolutionary reason as those rules survived and attempts to get rid of them vanished.

> we might be already past the peak of civilization as more and more potentially productive elements of society no longer see any point (as sex is one of primary motivations for most men to do anything)

Men aren't the only potentially productive elements of society, though. "Females" are real people, not abstract objects which exist only to provide sex and motivation for men. (And if sex really is the primary motivation for men to do anything, maybe we ought to have more women running things…)

You are saying that they don't have girlfriends because they are ugly and therefore we should limit access to porn (which is mostly targeted on men instead of on women)? How will his low access to paid or causual tinder sex make her consider him more attractive?

Also I am very strongly agains paradigm where "everybody can get sex in commited relationship". It is wrong, because it would punish good people who end up with abusive, cruel, overly controlling, violent ot simply very difficult people. (Of both genders of course).

There is no and should not be entitlement to have partner.

I wrote that previous functioning civilizations purposefully restricted male sexuality, enabled utilizing energy that would be otherwise evaporated by sex into building society and its civilization structures instead. So that might be intent of some groups pushing these changes. Other groups might be pushing it for moral reasons, but those rarely had any tangible effects.

Whether you like it or not, it is politically incorrect or going against the Zeitgeist, males still do most of the difficult, manual work that keeps the world running and is invisible to most women. There is a very little hope females would step up to the challenge as what we see so far is cherry picking high-income jobs isolated from crushing challenges of manual work and heavy robotics is not there yet. So if you tell those males they aren't desirable, they can't be entitled to have a partner, you allow them free access to cheap sex/sensory satisfaction, gaming etc. what you'll get is they just wouldn't care about work anymore, live minimalist lifestyles, working only to pay their immediate expenses, your society will be on a path to decline. By removing this "carrot" of a desirable woman, you neutered one of primary motivations of males to do anything at all. As they see 5% top guys getting all the girls and girls being fine with it during their desirable ages, and being interested in them only when their desirability wanes, and that only for financial reasons, why would they even bother being involved with society? So they simply drop out, do whatever they like, don't contribute to taxes, don't do any menial work, refuse to be slaves and disengage from society. I see it on my cousin, who was a top graduate of the most prestigious university of my country, and since graduation he is not working (a few years already), disgusted by women, and playing some stupid online games all day, without any way to poke him to do anything at all as it all seems pointless to him.

So please keep closing your eyes, let's have another completely lost generation and see how our civilization tanks in front of our eyes.

I would suggest you to study reinforcement learning, which even if using really stupid models, could show you how small changes in rewards can completely reshape environments, not mentioning complete removal of rewards, as is happening these days.

Wtf are you about with worker class men? They are not ugly or something, plenty of them are attractive. That would be first thing. It is great that they have tons of jobs as you claim and if you are right, their salaries will go up which would be great. But economically, there is lack of those jobs currently. It is not worker class men fault obviously, it is economy. They play games because they don't have jobs. Not because they are too lazy without perspective of sex.

I cant believe your opinion of men is so low. And if you see your existence as a slave, but with sex then it is ok to be slave? Men in history did a lot of things, good and bad, for their own purposes, not just in exchange for a sex. By all statistics, Americans spend more time in work then ever and men on average more then women.

No being entitled to partner is not same as not being desirable. It primary means that world does not own you a partner and the potential partner has right to not be in relationship with you. You might be desirable to someone else. (And some guys are really too dangerous or sociopathic to be dated.)

Your cousin is not working class men looking for hard labor job, his issue is not that women don't want working class men. University men don't do physically demanding work. But his parents should either find him counseling for depression or alternatively stop enabling his lifestyle (depending on what is cause of his passivity). By your definition should be among top percent - majority of population does not have degree. Besides, it sounds like you want girlfriend for him so that girlfriend partly becomes his mom to force him to work and partly uses sex to blackmail him into work. Wtf for both of them.

Choosing mate for a girl purely on how much he earns and whether he is hard worker is receipt for disaster for her. It just does not even sound as if women were humans from your analysis, you treat them like a chocolate prize cake.

You don't care at all about what she can achieve (and she is significantly less likely to spend all her time playing games), she is literally just piece of meat for him to have sex between wold of warcraft raids - in the hope that he will work afterwards.

> she is literally just piece of meat

Huh? Wow, I am speechless... Are you sure you wanted to type that?

Imagine an artist with a muse. She occupies his mind, drives his creativity, unreachability of her perfection inspires hard work and progress, creating works of wonder. Now that artist finally gets intimate with his muse, faces the reality and brutal disappoinment with the illusion that was driving him, making him incapacitated for a while. So the carrot in the form of an ideal woman was responsible for some outstanding work that wouldn't happen otherwise; the moment the goal he hoped for was reached, the illusion was gone, and the well of artistic inspiration in the form of this muse was dry. Yet, something remained from this - a work of art, something the whole society benefits from.

Try to apply this throughout the society to understand how great works were completed; this was one of a few main motivations (of course there were other ones for different works).

Yes, I wanted to type that. Women are not muses nor perfect, they are people and artist will be shocked that they fart, get angry, sweat and disagree with him. The artist made mistake when he lost contact with reality and replaced real human by unreal vision. This story has nothing with how women are like and everything with young man being lied to.

I care less about his painting then about women who will become target of his wrath when he gets confronted with reality. And even he would be happier if he never went the illusion way.

Plenty of productive men are not like the artist in that story.

I agree with you in the broad sense. Social experimentation is dangerous and despite our rapid technological progress over the last 100 years, people are still governed by biological, not technological, forces. Many in society have lost sight of that today -- not uncommon when luxury and wealth abounds and people come disconnected from the hard realities they're forced to recognize when they're fighting for daily survival.

I have a few nits. Due to some lesser social sicknesses, polygamy gets a bad rap in the West. It's not always the right course and like everything else, there is the potential for abuse, but it is a normal and functional component in most pre-Roman/non-Christian social structures.

Also, national law is the wrong place to codify such intimate issues. Self-sufficiency is important along all axes, including moral and social ones. The community needs to be empowered and entrusted with the ability to make these standards on its own. Federal law is a very dangerous place for such things to wind up.

Anyway, this isn't really the right venue for this type of discussion, but I thought I'd lend some moral support since I expect you'll get eviscerated for this.

> I think if you want to have a classical non-dying civilization as is known from history, you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa.

If we're talking about what's known from history, this is total nonsense. Polygamy was permitted in China into the 20th century. China was the best place in the world by a whole host of metrics up to about the 17th century. It is still known now for the cultural stability it's displayed for the past couple millennia.

What did you mean by "classical non-dying civilization"?

Polygamy has issues with excess males that aren't able to mate due to high-status males having their "harems", leading to very violent outbursts as those disadvantaged males don't have any outlet for their energy and society basically doesn't care about them beyond slaving away. China was also pretty much decaying society, which was perfectly utilized by British during Opium Wars. The typical mindset in China was to keep their old, dysfunctional ways, and add western technological advancements without replicating the conditions which allowed these to be created first, a meta-algorithm that killed Qing dynasty and that lasts until today. These days the effects of unoccupied males can be seen in the Middle East. Is that a model for your perfect stable and just civilization?

OT.

WRT Opium Wars I always found the casualty figures astonishing:

UK: 69

China: 18,000-20,0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

Polygamy and proximity to the end of a civilization would be a interesting scatter plot.

How to get enough data though? :( I don't want to simulate miserable universes just to get that data and I certainly hope we don't live in one...

How do you think that would work? Whatever you mean by "end of a civilization", it's going to have nearly zero effect on polygamy. Polygamy is a marriage practice that people will do, or not do, according to their culture; changes of government / technology / etc. don't change it.

Going back up to my original example, you see polygamy practiced in China in the warring states period (ca. 500 - 200 BC), in the early Han (ca. 200 BC - 0), and the later Han (ca. 0 - 200 AD), and the three kingdoms period (ca. 200 - 300), and the Tang dynasty (ca. 600 - 900), and the Song dynasty (960 - 1279), and the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368; wasn't even a Chinese government), and the Ming dynasty (ca. 1368-1644), and the Qing dynasty (1644-1912; also not a Chinese government. The Qing actually outlawed foot binding, though this was not effective.), as well as through all the other intermediate periods not mentioned in that list.

However you want to count the end of a civilization, there won't be any relationship at all to polygamy practice; one changes and the other doesn't.

This is ludicrous.

Traditions, as myths, are stories we tell ourselves. That is, social engineered stuff that stick around, because people care to keep them around, for various reasons (some, only for the ludicrous reason that "people told it that way before, we shall not change a bit of it").

Your civilization, our civilization, _has_ no future. Not one civilization on earth has had a future that spanned more than a few millennia. History is full of only that: civilization, as people, appear, grow, and die into something else.

They all evolved, changed, disappeared, what have you.

There are so many things wrong with this.

But ok, if you assumed that "survival of our civilization" equals the survival of certain biological lineages, wouldn't the most efficient solution be to increase research into in-vitro fertilisation and synthetic sperm and remove men from the equation completely?

+ artificial uterus and 0-day support systems, and we are living in a dystopia with baby factories and nameless masses.

If you are into optimization algorithms, what we observe in the nature might be one of those. Messing with this optimization might get us to states we never wanted.

Ah, but

> ...you have to restrict sexuality and force desirable men to keep a single wife and vice versa.

is not a dystopia but just a necessary evil.

It's a subtle difference. I understand.

What exactly is the flaw in the system described in the book 'Sex At Dawn' that likely flourished prior to the introduction of agriculture? In a modern incarnation it would basically boil down to shared parenting of children and fluid relationship statuses. The point of monogamy was to establish certainty over bloodline in a situation where a male would be significantly disadvantaged by expending resources raising another mans child. That's irrelevant now. We're not bouncing from famine to famine, racked with plagues and wars, etc. Things are quite a bit better than they were at the advent of agriculture (which nearly ended the species but also brought many advances - monogamy among the former rather than latter).

The main issue IMO will be that there will be undesirable males (70%) and desperate females (>35 age) without any chance for a stable partner (look at Japan, it's in full swing there; put your otaku into researching this ;-) ). Also, the system in that book is just a fantasy, a speculation how it could have been, not a historical fact. Biologically males are still naturally inclined to seek faithful, young and pretty virgins they don't share (despite cuckoo "education" trying to change that), and females seek the highest status/income/excitement males they can capture. This might be result of evolutionary algorithm at play over a very long period of time and it's unlikely this would change anytime soon, unless we have means to directly reprogram our brains for different rewards.

> blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking.

It seems like they are succeeding already: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-go...

Perhaps the anti-sex crowd would stop being the vanguard of the anti-trafficking movement, if anyone else took up the cause with more fervor.

> the groups behind SESTA

Which groups are you referring to?

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