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Comment by RomanBob | Hacker News Reader

This is an absolute butchering of free will.

A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.

This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.

A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.

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A better analogy might be:

Suppose you wander into the desert and get lost. Suppose you're on the verge of dying from thirst when another person shows up. He says "I'll take you back to civilization, but only if you agree to be my slave forever".

You're not any worse off than if the slaver didn't exist, because you can always choose to reject the slaver's offer. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Yet I think that most people would consider that a very unconvincing argument for permitting slavery: that a would-be slaver would simply not show up if slavery were illegal.

Arguing in favor of free will, you could say that all other things being the same, a world where you get lost in the desert and the slaver shows up is no worse than one where you get lost in the desert and nobody shows up.

Arguments in favor of control thus rely on all else not being the same, that making something illegal changes the wider society, not just any single individual's ability to do that thing.

If you have the idea of the "independent entrepreneur", that adult woman who is proud to use sex as a creative expression, it's true that she's making her life better. If it's a scared 15-year-old whose mom kicked her out because boyfriend was starting to make comments about her ass, and she has no idea where to go or what to do but a guy say she can have a place to sleep if she has sex with him (and then he starts pimping her out to his friends), that's a very different situation. Or if you're an LGBT teen and you're kicked out by your parents for being gay and fall into a similar situation.

The article is pretty nuanced.

"So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates."

The whole economic system we're in is coercive to many.

> A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better

It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma? What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker? What about your wife or your mother?

> Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma?

Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.

The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.

In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.

They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of value.

It's an entirely different perspective.

> Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.

While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring on an any different set of self worth problems.

> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.

I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange, especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman "decides" to let you have sex with her.

As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my rent".

I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.

You can also be coerced by the lack if money

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