This is just an extension of conservatism being scared of sex and women going their own way.
Like it or not, prostitution has helped many people rise out of poverty and even make societies (the "west" back in the early US days) around their business.
Laws like this are very hard to vote against because of TV ads opponents of politicians could run demonizing them.
I've never understood this argument. Many bills are a thousand pages long and involve dozens of completely unrelated subject matters.
If you vote for the bill your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are unpopular. If you vote against it your opponents will be able to use it against you because some parts of it are popular.
So how is that an argument to vote for it? If anything it's an argument to vote against it. If you vote against it you can at least provide a defensible reason -- you were voting against the bad parts of the bill, not the good parts of the bill.
By contrast, voting for a bill with poison in it is completely indefensible because the alternative exists to hold out for a bill with only the good parts.
People understand that doing nothing is better than doing something bad.
We've had this happen with a lot of "child pornography" laws in the past.
I'm waiting for ACLU to take this to the courts.
Voting against it:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon)
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)
Toxicity towards women taking control of their sexuality runs deep within our society.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/the-ori...
At the end, you're mentally and physically tired. And you used a good chunk of your day being productive for someone else so they can make even more money on that.
They were still slaves.
My employers tell me what to do, yes; but have you ever thought that perhaps I like the exchange, and find it valuable to have someone who tells me what to do to get to an end result where I get a decent, reliable wage for doing so?
And how under socialism am I going to be freed from having to labour? If nobody labours, nothing will get done. Conversely, if I labour and see a massively reduced benefit from doing so personally, I will hardly be inspired to work hard.
I won't drag this thread deeply off course with a rundown of Marxist thought, but if you're interested in some light reading (~60 pages) "An Introduction to Marxist Theory" by Ernest Mandel elaborates upon this in a digestible manner. There's also Paul Cockshott's "Towards a New Socialism", which explores the implementation details of proposed alternatives to capitalism. He writes about how me might "maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work [for a privileged few] for a living."
The is a tangible difference in the type of coercion that exist in forced labour compared to wage slavery, just like there is a difference between the coercion in rape compared to prostitution.
By that argument, wage labor is slavery just as much as prostitution is rape.
So, yeah, if you're that kind of socialist, there's a coherent argument for that point. But if you aren't, you may have trouble justifying why economic coercion overrides consent in one case but not the other.
Myself, I'm somewhere in the social democratic (US-style “democratic socialist”, perhaps, but not what that label would apply to outside of the US) range, and I agree that there is in fact an element of economic coercion in many but not all cases of work-for-pay in a capitalist economy (including, but not uniquely so, prostitution) which makes consent unclear in the general case and clearly absent in some specific cases, but that the best corrective is alleviating the fundamentally coercive nature of the system by improving the social safety net, not trying to ban the kind of work people are more likely to do only if economically coerced (which just leaves people either coerced into some other kind of work or, stuck in the conditions that they sought to escape by accepting distasteful work under duress, or—often—still coerced into exactly the same undesirable work, but without effective legal recourse for additional abuses in the working relationship.)
If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
> If someone is having to resort to prostitution they will, just without the support network they need.
That's why I'm generally in favor of what has been called the "Nordic Model," which decriminalizes selling sex and keeps workers in touch with public services, but makes it illegal to operate a brothel and purchase sex.
I'd be interested to see who it's helped most. The prostitutes, their pimps and brothels or the global network of human traffickers who indenture these people who just want a better life.
The ideals and realities of prostitution, like many things, can be very different.