Myths about prostitution | Hacker News Reader

Myths about prostitution

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75 pointsjseliger64 comments

Prostitution is 100% legal here in Australia so long as a number of rules are followed. No soliciting near churches / residential areas.

It's safe, the workers are protected by law, they declare and pay their taxes. The brothels pay their taxes, local services are improved as a result.

It's a no-brainer, those who want the service can get it in a safe manner, those who do not still benefit from the taxes that are paid.

people trade all kinds of things for all kinds of things. We need to leave people be.

should prostitution be regulated at all? I think that should be left at the local level. And I mean very local. It should be possibile for neighborhoods to ban it when most people don't want it and keep it legal where people are ok with it, right in the same city.

I believe many people try to control things like prostitution, drugs and gambling because they do not wish to be around it or have it devaluing their property, not because they wish to control what everyone else is doing. We need to find ways to let them do this and still preserve the freedom of others.

I'm all for requiring sex workers to test themselves for STDs, and requiring them to disclose any that they do have. Kind of hard to dismiss that with "caveat emptor" - I know there are instant HIV tests, but what about everything else?

And I support the right of you and your neighbors to do exactly that in your neighborhood.

Wait - you're saying that a district could legalize prositution and claim to screen for STDs without centralized regulation and oversight? Caveat emptor indeed...

Wait - you're saying that a man should be able to pick up a random street-walker and be right to expect that congress has made sure she's properly tested for STDs? /sarcasm

Such schemes would likely come as "labels" that the district or individual sex workers buy into, provided that they comply with the regulations set up by the label. Some labels might gain a reputation for being stricter and cleaner then others, other might be cheaper and "good enough".

wrong. The United Nations is even more centralized, so it will do a better job. At least until the United Federation of Planets is formed. :-)

jk. You're right about labels or brands. It works for every other product.

True, but its not that simple. Don't forget about knock-offs. It may be hard to fake an iPhone, but its not too hard to fake clothing, and I can't imagine it will be too hard for a prostitute to fake a "clean" badge to increase her hourly rate, if its worth her while.

I think people know that and wouldn't rely solely on a prostitute's word, especially when there are other legal certification services.

Would you buy a electrical appliance that was not certified by Underwriter's Laboratories? Or buy a car that had no crash test rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety? Would you take the word of a car company that "oh, we don't need that stuff. we done tested it ourself."

It seems humans do know how to solve safety problems without coercion, at least when allowed to. There is no reason to believe prostitution is any different.

See: Public health. The federal government, and even 'world government' have been wildly successful in this area. As a result, the quality of human life has dramatically improved.

there are different ways of pursuing public health.

and just saying public health efforts were successful is not the same as proving that coercion improves health more than cooperation and at a reasonable cost

I can restrict everyone to their homes and stop all disease transmission. yeeaa, we found the correct approach. not

Requiring whores to register and be checked for STD's is not the moral equivalent of quarantining people in their homes. It's more similar to product safety regulations or building codes.

I didn't say they were equivalent. I am just saying that there are many considerations and the individual rights cannot be sacrificed just to achieve some health goal.

Individual rights aren't relevant. This is a public health issue that doesn't infringe on anyone's rights outside of some Libertarian wet dream. We license restaurants based on health inspections, does that infringe on your right to serve or eat filthy shit? I think not ;)

then you won't mind if the government makes you get tested periodically. its for the safety of others, so your rights are irrelevant

When I start selling my ass, you're right. I will not mind.

In many places where prostitution is legal, there are certain health-and-safety conditions associated with running a brothel (the same way there are certain health-and-safety conditions involved with running a restaurant) and they include mandatory STD tests.

It's too hard to regulate individual prostitutes, but quite easy to regulate brothels under the banner of existing local planning authorities. There will still be individual prostitutes working outside the legal brothels, but you're ensured much more safety if you go to one of the legit places.

/not from personal experience

I'm not saying that public health and safety couldn't do this - I'm not even saying they shouldn't. I just find it incredibly disingenuous to assume that only a public institution could conceivably perform this function.

Btw. regarding your argument that brothels could be regulated under local planning authorities - I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the OP was talking about. We just got side-tracked by the minor point of who gets to do the H&S.

can you imagine if businesses never tested their own products, instead relying solely on government to do all testing?

Prostitution is legal in my country (Uruguay) provided the sex worker is over 18 years of age.

And they ARE regulated, the Health Ministry does checks, and issues a license. So a "john" that purchases sexual services over here has a reasonable assumption that the sexual worker doesn't have diseases (and they're mandated to use condoms anyways)

Wait - you're saying that a man should be able to pick up a random piece of meat in a grocery store and be right to expect that congress has made sure it's properly tested for foot-and-mouth disease and other diseases and conditions?

no, I said its up to each district what they do. If they wish to avail themselves of some certifying authority they can certainly do that.

And yes its buyer beware. As it always is when you decide to have sex.

When things people want are illegal, they are LESS safe. There is no visibility, no legal liability, very little incentive to build and protect a brand name.

Alcohol was a lot less safe during prohibition. And the crime was very dangerous as well. Legalization is much safer and its rare that people die from the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol today.

Alcohol is strictly regulated by all levels of government.

centralized decision making is less effective anyway. Human intelligence is distributed for a reason. No central authority has even half the facts you do about your own situation and a tiny fraction of the self interest at stake that you do.

It's worth noting that this op-ed is by Sudhir Venkatesh, who is also mentioned prominently in a chapter of Freakonomics. So, given his background he probably actually does know what he's talking about!

Yeah -- his book Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor is pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Off-Books-Underground-Economy-Urban/dp... . He's a very interesting guy, and I'm not surprised that he's decided to look at prostitution more carefully because it's pretty hard to argue that high-end prostitutes are being exploited or whatever. When I say high-end, think Belle de Jour: http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/ , who is compulsively readable and hilarious.

The most interesting part of the Freakonomics chapter is that modern day prostitues suffer from the worst kind of competitor - one that gives away the product for free. The chapter points out that, 100 years ago, something like 20% of men lost their virginity to a prostitute, whereas now it is something like 2%, because most men are likely to find a woman who is willing to have sex with them without any sort of long term commitment.

As an anecdote prostitution is legal in Singapore - a country recognized as being very strict - and it works well.

People trade things for other things. Guys pay for dinner. That's not considered immoral.

In general, prostitution will happen anyways, so no matter what you believe you might as well make it regulated and as safe as possible - and taxed!

Interesting wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Singapore

Singapore gets a bad rap for being extremely strict. I grew up there and was aware of prostitution but never realized it was legal.

It definitely does, but I absolutely love it. A lot of people complain about ridiculous fines for things like littering, but really the fines are never going to effect you (you don't litter, right?! - at least in Singapore where trash cans are every five feet), so the higher the fine the less violations = awesome, safe, clean streets.

When I decided to get divorced, I had a number of women tell me I could not do that, I was too sick and I needed his money. I felt that said more about their lives than mine, but it also anecdotally agreed with a remark I read once that "there is more prostitution in marriage than outside of it". Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort, quite a lot of women will continue to trade sex for money on some level, whether it fits the legal definition of prostitution or not. To me, the attention prostitution gets really just misses the mark.

Even if there were as many women as men who were homeless or broke and conversely fantastically wealthy you're still going to have women trading sex for money. If there's a demand for something, someone, somewhere will figure out a way to monetize it.

Um, I don't quite understand. Is that supposed to be a rebuttal? I don't really care if people trade sex for money. I think if a woman freely chooses that route, so what? If a woman makes a conscious decision that she would rather take cash in hand from many men instead of a roof over her head and food on the table from one man, so what? As I said, I think that focus really misses the mark.

I read wheaties' reply as being a response to your comment that

> Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort, quite a lot of women will continue to trade sex for money on some level

which seems to suggest that a lack of financial parity is the driving force behind women choosing to trade sex for money. The response was that, even if financial parity were achieved (i.e, if there were as many homeless, and also hugely rich women as there are men), women would still trade sex for money.

See http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm which was linked on here recently for another viewpoint on the debate over financial disparity between the sexes, which you may find interesting.

With more financial parity, presumably you would also see more men trading sex for money. Discussions about prostitution generally revolve around a default assumption that women are selling themselves to heterosexual men. This isn't always the case but the assumption speaks volumes about certain large-scale general realities.

Thank you for the link. But having briefly perused it, it suggests an assumption that I think men are fundamentally better off than women, which is a) not true and b) irrelevant to the question of whether women would trade sex for money less if they had more financial parity. I took a class on homelessness and volunteered at a homeless shelter for a time. I am abundantly familiar with the fact that homeless men get fewer services than homeless women and, therefore, generally have a harder time of it. I am also a former military wife so I am abundantly familiar with how we send young men off to war to be maimed or killed but are much less likely to do so with young women, who, last I checked, were still barred from serving in combat positions.

Anyway, gotta go. :-)

>With more financial parity, presumably you would also see more men trading sex for money.

There was a study in Sweden a while ago that showed that there were more teenage boys that prostituted themselves than teenage girls, and most of these teenagers were middle class and presumable pretty well off, but they usually did it to get more disposable income to buy stuff to impress their peers.

Parity with men financially would mean the highs AND the lows. There are more broke, destitute men than women.

If your ideal was realized- parity financially- you'd still have PLENTY of women forced by their financial situation to 'prostitute' themselves into marriage. You'd also have plenty with livable wages who'd try to marry up and STILL 'prostitute' themselves into marriage.

The real difference as I see it is currently more men are willing to 'pay' for such services than women. The way to equalize things is more likely to equalize the demand.

Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism. They want to be CEOs and who wouldn't? But men are also the vast majority of the homeless, the prison population, the people doing dirty, dangerous jobs, the people getting killed at work. There are more men than women denied the right to see their kids, yet financially crippled supporting them - and their ex-wife - anyway.

Can't have it both ways.

There was another article recently that looked at gender issues and concluded that the differences weren't so much women being better or worse off, but the men being more extreme and greater risk takers. So men see more of both the highs and the lows. It isn't an inherent difference in ability at all, but there may be inherent behavioral differences partly accounted for by hormones and other genetic factors.

It's a very limited comparison, but look at the behavior differences between male cats that have been "fixed" and those that haven't.

Differences in testosterone and oxytocin levels vary and can have a large influence on behavior.

> Yes, this is the nasty little secret at the heart of feminism.

The straw man version of feminism you hold in your head is not the one that exists in real life. Google "patriarchy hurts men, too".

There's a big slice of the feminist segment outside the intelligentsia for whom feminism is pointing to a stat that says that X% of all Fortune 500 C-level execs or some such are men, and being outraged.

All -isms are an attempt to justify the self-interest of their sponsors.

Parity with men financially would mean the highs AND the lows. There are more broke, destitute men than women.

I am aware that men suffer more when it comes to homelessness, etc. But I don't think "parity" has to mean "Our goal is for women to live more similarly to the way men live currently". I think if we are to get there from here, the lives of both men and women would need to change. But, as I stated elsewhere, I'm really not well tonight. So not up to posting any kind of lengthy explanation.

Thanks.

>If there's a demand for something, someone, somewhere will figure out a way to monetize it.

That certainly seems to be true. What puzzles me is if it's the startup potential of such a business or perhaps one that develops web services to support it that makes this a relevant story here?

</halo off>

Unless/until society finds a way for men and women to have financial parity of some sort

Men and women don't have financial pairty? I see this claim all the time, but it only seems to be backed up by gross misuse of statistics. Care to provide evidence?

(edit: clarified)

Please clarify: Evidence of what specifically? That we do not have financial parity?

Thanks for clarifying. I'm really not well today, so the best I can do is give you a link to a long post I wrote (that probably almost no one saw) where I list some of what I have gleaned over the years:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1530791

I don't know about parity in terms of single women, but divorce law (at least in the US) is heavily tilted towards the aim of women achieving economic parity with their former husbands.

My understanding is this is not so, at least not in the US.

No, you are right. If anything, it is slanted towards allowing the ex-wife to EXCEED the financial situation of the ex-husband.

Interesting. Could you cite some specific examples?

Around 4% of alimony recipients in the US are male.

I've heard one definition of a wife being "a women who trades sex for money but to only one man."

I can't say I disagree with it entirely.

I think it's more along the lines of "a woman trading sex for stability"

Women, especially those with children, care a very great deal about stability ... and since men care a great deal about easily available sex the equation works out pretty well for both ends.

However, some women stop offering sex and still get stability via child support orders.

Financial parity may not be sufficient, even if it is possible. It may be the case that eons of natural selection have carved out the female homo sapien to be, on average, naturally hypergamous. (Purportedly this is why "DHVs" and "negs" give men leverage in the crimson art of "game".) I doubt that financial parity would have any hope of mitigating this; women might still find themselves disproportionately attracted towards the top of the linear dominance hierarchy - which money, for better or worse, helps to signal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

Wow that is sad. How would you describe these women?

I don't recall much. I think at least 3 women said something like that to me. I only remember details about 2 of them. They were both older and I think that was a factor in their reluctance to start over. I think they both had younger kids than mine, and that can be emotionally and logistically a lot harder to deal with. One had a life-threatening illness. I think the other also had health problems but I can't remember any specifics.

One of them had a history of very unhappy relationships and when I was getting divorced she spammed me with venomous divorce/relationship jokes. I ignored all such emails until she finally stopped. I felt it was clear she had serious baggage and I could not think of a good way to tell her that, sorry, I don't appreciate such "humor". I felt that would just be kind of like pouring salt in her wounds, so I just didn't respond at all. The other woman once said something to me along the lines of "One of the good things about growing older is how much more you get done. Young people spend too much time screwing." I don't think I really knew anything about her sex life but that remark didn't exactly paint a rosy picture in my mind. (From what I gather, some women hit menopause and go "Whoohoo! Party Time!!" because they are no longer living under the threat of unintended pregnancy.)

FWIW: In one case, I don't think it would be accurate to say she herself was trading sex for money. Her marriage was mostly sexless and, most of the time, she made more money than him. Yet here she was trying to talk me out of my divorce on the grounds that I needed his money. Go figure.

One myth I've heard a bunch of times from anti-prostitution campaigners is that something like two thirds of prostitutes enter the industry before the age of 14, or something equally ludicrous-sounding. I don't know where that number comes from, but it surely can't be right.

The problem with illegal prostitution and drugs for that matter is that since they are illegal a lot of other illegal activities come along with it. In the case of prostitution you have kidnapping, violence, and forcing people into underage sex (and from what I've read most prostitutes start very very early by being forced into it). If the girl is already doing something illegal and gets beat by her pimp what is she going to do? Pimps prey on this thought that there is nothing she can do.

Drugs are similar in that by making them illegal you bring in gangs, guns, and even move violence. If someones pot dealer screws them over what is their only recourse? Violence. You also have the violence of territory to sell on, etc...

IMHO, the illegality of things like drugs and prostitution actually causes the social effects to be worse then if they were legal.

I agree that social effects are probably worse, but making prostitution legal doesn't solve all of them - after all, underage prostitution will always be illegal (I hope) and probably rightly so, and that's one way into all those illegal activities.

Here in Uruguay, prostitution is legal, yet we do have problems with minors being pressed into prostitution, and also the sex export trade, where women are more or less kidnapped and sent to Europe (Italy and Spain mostly)

I doubt that it's true in America but the vast majority of prostitutes live elsewhere. For a poor person living in the 3rd world, you're probably not going to secondary school so you end up starting your "career" a little earlier. Also, consider differing ages of consent.

And none of these myths were about the economic side of that business, which is what I half-expected from that author.

But the author is a sociologist.

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