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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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