Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushed It Underground
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Another socially responsible escort ad site was owned by a woman (former sex worker) and was forced to sell to a very shady eastern european gentlemen who is referred to as the trafficking king of europe. She sold because she didn’t want to go to jail.
Was shutting it down somehow not an option? Better to shut it down than to give it to a gangster.
But supposing she was being threatened with imprisonment unless she sold it, biting that bullet would have been the honorable thing to do. She owed that much to the people who trusted her with data of that nature.
Only after the sale was complete did she realize who she dealt with. It was done through lawyers.
The site sold for 8 figures.
I suspect that changed their willingness to host agents within their walls.
The fed's argument is that there was so much illegal prostitution activity on Backpage that the owners must have been supporting it. The defense is currently occupied with getting access to the servers, presumably to show that the frequency of illegal postings was small compared to the rest of the site and that all reported postings were acted on immediately.
Fun fact: Originally the Mann Act was passed to give the government the power to prosecute interracial couples. Kinda like how sex-offender registries were first implemented to allow police in California to track gays.
Source:
https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
This adds significantly to the mindset of "do not cooperate with the legal system even if you're trying to help, no good can come of it." And my already ebbing faith in the media has slipped even further.
"child sex traffickers"
I don't know where you get that from.
Not so dumb when the goal is to look tough and win votes...
Legalize it!
Why are we concerning ourselves with how people pleasure themselves in private? It's disgusting.
Of course, have law enforcement root out the kiddie stuff, and have a legal framework to ensure safety (STI testing, etc) but my goodness, the efforts we currently go through to catch consenting adults in mutual benefit...
Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
(yes accidentally) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/07/17/when-...
Not directly,at least applicable to the states, but there are a variety of federal prohibitions around the sex trade which complicate it, and there'd probably be federal will for a direct ban if most states didn't prohibit it entirely and the fee remaining didn't prohibit it in most of their territory. Neither major party broadly supports legalized prostitution, for superficially different reasons.
> Another avenue that may be worth exploring is opening brothels on reservations, similar to casinos.
Not possible without changes to federal law, federal law prohibits prostitution on tribal land, while casinos are regulated by federal law which allows them with tribal-state gaming compacts.
Plus, the cost of entry is pretty low, I hear.
1. https://www-macleans-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.macleans....
That law didn't just affect sex traffickers, it affected ALL sex workers. Craigslist famously shut down its personals as a result of it.
> In the United Kingdom, the term vice is commonly used in law and law enforcement to refer to criminal offences related to prostitution and pornography. In the United States, the term is also used to refer to crimes related to drugs, alcohol, and gambling.
By the dictionary defintion, this is true.
If you look at what gets called "sex trafficking" in the media, by politicians, by police and prosecutors, and in some cases, by the legal system, this is not true. One common definition is anyone who travelled across state (or country) lines has been trafficked, which is a bit like saying anyone who moves to SF for a tech job is a victim of human slavery.
It's not uncommon for a crackdown on sex trafficking to not find a single victim of sex trafficking (or anything else), but still result in a lot of arrests (overwhelmingly of women) and self-congratulatory press releases. The mind boggles.
In any case, the fight against "sex trafficking" (aka, consensual sex between adults) absolutely harms many victims of actual real trafficking. And bluntly, people who haven't yet got the memo yet and think the phrase is still only being used against actual unethical behaviour are making this worse.
too real :(
Because "legalizing it" doesn't stop sex trafficking or sexual exploitation, in fact all evidences point to the contrary, it increases sex slavery.
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/12/17/the-child-sexual-abuse...?
AFAIK ... decriminalization allows for
1. The sex worker to approach authorities without any fear of prosecution.
2. To set up freelance sex work without pimps and brothels.
There shouldn't be a debate about this. Criminalization makes things worse at the expense of moral tidiness.
Regulated sex work allows for
1. Brothels
2. Strip clubs
3. Massage parlors
4. Sex Therapists
If the regulators are corrupt or weak or there are no strong checks ... then the model will be as bad as an unregulated market and will actually be worse as it allows trafficked victims to work under quasi-legal protection. That's what the article implies.
From what I know the nordic model has a large number of social services that help sex-workers quit the profession if they wish to and helps sex-workers unionise.
Interesting. Do they have social services for those that wish to quit computer programming? Or quit hair dressing?
The fact that there needs to be a social service around this particular profession is indicative that this particular profession is probably harmful to the service provider and it probably also means that this isn’t a profession that a girl willingly accepts and perhaps there is value to not promoting this industry.
It is also a more physically oriented job that carries some risk of disease exposure, really shouldn't be worked sick, and some accounts mention an emotional toll and an emphasis on appearance. Individually all aspects aren't unique and some have more severe magnitudes.
Given the income is higher than many other available jobs it could be easy to become dependent upon it for income. A good ethical reason for support is that consent is an ongoing process.
The argument goes like this:
Person A is in such a bad situation that A will accept a job that is terrible!
Prohibiting the job has a good chance of making A worse off (usually, A will accept the job if A thinks it is an improvement over the current situation)
However, we can let A accept the job, and then try to offer A even better alternatives!
My views are largely shaped by the sex worker in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DZfUzxZ2VU
Criminalizing doesn't even offer protection for the sex worker. I'd rather argue about that than having some debate on numbers.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_...
https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...
Like... almost all other laws?
Do you think murder is immoral? Well guess what? There's a law for that. Just because you disagree with the morality being legislated, you can't pretend that "legislating morality" is the problem.
Pushing this underground will hurt nothing but victims in the long run. Is that moral? Of course not.
Much legislation is technocratic and hides its moralism, but it’s all questions of right and wrong, good and bad, at the end of the day.
Still, someone can be wronged with their consent. Consent is not binary. That's why there are minimum salary laws for instance : so that there's not a competition to the bottom.
When it comes to prostitution, the fact that huge numbers of prostitutes are former victims of abuse, for instance, should tell you that something is wrong. And even then, I would say that the minority who could be unambiguously considered to be doing it voluntarily is doing a disservice to women and society in general, by promoting the idea that bodies and what is most intimate can be for sale.
Using the same reasoning to outlaw prostitution is harder. Sure you could argue people have a right to not be a prostitute -- and I heartily agree with that -- but then the job of the law is to prevent people from being prostitutes against their will. All outlawing prostitution outright does is hide it from view. It doesn't help people get the rights they deserve. In fact it takes away the right to be a prostitute if you want to. The only line of arguing that prostitution should be illegal is either because we should outlaw anything we deem immoral, or because somehow concocted a right that prevents people from doing what they want to do.
In my opinion the basis for any system of law ought to be that people can do what they want to. The only exceptions being when doing so infringes on the right of others. I should be free to be a prostitute. I should not be free to force other people to be prostitutes against their will. I should be free to wildly swing my arms. I should not be free to punch someone in the face.
Of course everyone has their own opinion of what the law should be and so we end up with a patchwork of intentions -- let alone how the law actually gets applied. That's fine. People are free to have opinions.
Either laws are written based on morality, or laws are written based on rights. You can't have both without being inconsistent.
The important part here is if you include economic factors into "against their will" or not.
Also, how are we supposed to reach gender equality if one gender's body is for sale as a matter of routine ?
Note that I still agree with your point on being a cleaner, that's why I think universal income is a good idea.
At the end of the day when an adult makes the decision to do a particular job because it pays better than the alternative we can't automatically count them as a "victim". It robs people of their agency and infantilizes them.
Edit: Actually I retract this comment. You bring an interesting point, and shouldn't be downvoted. I guess the argument "to prevent abuse" includes "to prevent people from exchanging their lives for money". And you could say the same for sex - people should be able to choose to have sex / be murdered / donate their organs, but shouldn't be able to exchange that for money.
I guess the counterargument would be, that the exact definition of "exchange" depends on whether you're actually giving something - arguably, you're giving up your life / kidney (and most people aren't willing to give that up, regardless of whether they're being paid or not), but not necessarily giving up sex (and many people are giving it up pretty often... the only difference is, are they also getting paid for it, or not).
Not in the sense of "They'll murder my family if I don't" but just choosing to do it out of her own free will.
I chatted to a prostitute in Thailand, she came from the poor North to work as a sex worker in Bangkok and she was fairly proud of the fact she was sending so much money home to her parents, living in a village where pretty much the only thing you can do is farm.
She showed me a picture of the car her dad was able to buy and kept stressing "it's a 4 door!". She was a genuinely happy and fun loving girl.
To me the shocking thing in this story is a man driving around in a car paid for by his daughter by fellating 300+ men per year, but not the fact this girl decided to do this for a living.
> Do you think murder is immoral?
The story of Armin Meiwes comes to mind, who killed and ate a man who volunteered to have done that to him. There's also the concept of consensual homicide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Model_approach_to_prost...
> It has also been reported that 12,5 % of men used to solicit prostitutes before the implementation of the law in 1999 whereas in 2014 only 7,7 % of men purchased sexual services.[5]
As the top comment said, this was never about actually decreasing prostitution, but about victimizing and outcasting women.
My elementary school was a religious one. There was something that deeply annoyed me about how they reasoned. I couldn't put my finger on it then, but I got a knee-jerk reaction as soon as I heard it. It was just that: love is better than hate, virtue is better than sin, etc. so you must comply with what God/they/your parents said because they loved you vs. your bad instincts, inspired by the devil that is Bad.
By the time I started high scholl in a public school, the dictator had died and we transitioned to democracy. Tolerance was the magic word. We can now speak our minds, accept others' opinions, discuss frankly any idea.
But then the left was the forbidden set of ideas making itself a space. Forty years later they're hegemonic and "zero tolerance" (I hate that expression) and beware of what you say are back.
They're exactly the same as their parents (that they consider troglodites) just with a different set of dogmas. Ideas change easily with the fads, but mindsets not so fast.
The trick is to present an idea that's absolutely good on paper like: "don't you think that everybody should have what they need to live?" But ignoring all the practical details of implementation: if it's at all possible, if the proposed measures are useful to reach that goal, etc.
No one of them would call themselves "absolutists", that sounds like ancient regime, or fascists, nazis. But they reason in absolutes and there's no way to touch them with words. They won't negotiate because they just vote for politicians that promise to magically implement that wishful thinking. The politicians will negotiate to reach power, though, they know better.
I'll add that Haidt's analysis that the value placed on compassion relative to loyalty or fairness is a good predictor of party rings true. Compassion > fairness -> democrat Compassion = fairness -> republican Compassion < fairness -> libertarian
The majority of people oppose decriminalisation [1] even in fairly progressive Ontario, Canada, 6 in 10 oppose it [2]
Second - it's a very reasonable course of action to make an activity which is deemed harmful - actually illegal.
"Smoking is bad" -> "Let's make it widely available" is generally not the first order course of action.
Ergo - your assumptions about 'moralising and not caring' is starting to inch into anti-religious bigotry territory.
Now - obviously this is a nuanced issue - and it's possible more permissive laws might lessen harm, but this is by no means obvious.
We saw this with vaping: once something becomes socially normative, behaviours can grow rapidly. There is a black market for almost everything, legal or not.
A large, wide open, legalised & regulated sex trade may simply provide more customers for nefarious sex-traders who can take all the profit & provide underage girls (which will surely remain illegal).
The cigarette industry provides good parallel example, although it's surely not perfect. [3]
In short - increased taxes (i.e. supply curve shift) and overall changes in social norms away from smoking have not caused an increase in illicit consumption - just the opposite. Illicit consumption is down. This might imply that creating more barriers to the sex trade (law), and also reducing demand (social norms), would likely have the overall effect of reducing black market for sex-slavery.
Of course, it's not nearly a perfect analogy, and it's a complicated subject and of course there are individuals and groups who are probably more concerned about morality than justice, but it's still not fair to castigate a policy as being one way or the other.
Personally, I don't see how normalising the sex trade and providing vast online services decreases frequency of transactions, but I'm open minded about the right way to do this. Though I personally think it should be 'decriminalised' (not illegal, but sex workers not allowed to go to 'job fairs' at high school!), I would put the wellbeing of those being trafficked ahead of any of that.
[1] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID...
[2] https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/LAWC-and-CATW-Prostit...
Meanwhile, SESTA/FOSTA effectively puts such a burden on web operators that even legitimate sites (like Craiglist personals) have been shut down out of fear that they will be liable if someone misuses them. This is even true in states and municipalities that choose to legalize prostitution. The effect of SESTA/FOSTA is to usurp states' ability to decide for themselves how they want to regulate the sex trade, at least as far as it comes to the communication platforms they can use. If the intent of SESTA/FOSTA was to inhibit prostitution that didn't involve trafficking, fine, but that's not how it was sold by elected Democrats.
I wouldn't be so cynical about this, except that there is a long history in the US of using moral panic around trafficking to enforce moral preferences -- look at how the Mann act was used against interracial couples, for example. I'm all for helping actual victims of trafficking, but using outrage about trafficking for other political purposes upsets me.
Alternately, decriminalizing sex work means law enforcement would stop wasting their time their pursuing adult sex workers doing legit business, and actually focus on the trafficking of those actually being exploited.
From Harvard Law School:
"Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization."
It seems there's ample data indicating that increasing the market for the sex trade increases the black market for it.
FYI - smoking, same. When less people smoke, there's a smaller black market. [2]
[1] https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
Sex worker rights is a huge frontier that we need to fight harder on, sex trafficking and sex work are two different things, and spiting workers because you find them unsavoury or want to be their saviour under the veil of fighting sex trafficking is utterly abhorrent.
Fuck SESTA/FOSTA, fuck the Nordic model, and fuck any "feminist" that doesn't listen to sex workers and fight their corner as opposed to trying to rid the world of them.
Maybe, just maybe, that poor coal miner knows exactly what he’s voting for because that’s what he wants?
People who work for a living see it like this: they want a voluntary economy. That's why they vote against "socialism." Most welfare we have goes to the rich.
Of the 60% who have, there are surely many of us who weren’t doing it to travel to Thailand for prostitutes. I suspect the number of people who are doing that are a small fraction of the population (of the people I know who have traveled abroad, that percentage is 0%)
Yes, exactly like that, except it's inaccurate to say that "nobody" listened to them. Many people expressed outrage at the time. We just failed to get big tech and its lobbyists on our side, so Congress was deaf to it.
“The lonesome Irishman.” On the movie The Irishman; the essay almost makes me want to watch it, but not quite enough, because I feel like I’ve seen enough mob movies. After The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and probably some more, plus reading Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, I think that universe is pretty played out. Killing people is also bad. Many of the things that thrive in the underworld should be legalized, like gambling has been and marijuana is being. If gambling, prostitution, and most non-opioid drugs are legal, there’s not much left for the mob to do, and it will be starved of revenue, because most activities are best done using conventional means and corporate or legal structures.
We've seen gambling move from being illegal to being conducted by the state (lottos) or sanctioned and taxed by it. Marijuana is moving in the same direction. Certain other things, we should probably be seeing move that way too.
Opioids are at the other end of the spectrum - they are highly addictive and aside from the possibility of accidental overdose, even just using them at the correct dosage carries a lot of negative health consequences. It is not clear that you get a net win for society by legalizing opioids.
Keep the supply of the substances illegal, but provide safe places - staffed with medics - where people can have their drugs tested, take the drugs in as safe a way as possible and be signposted to rehab and recovery services, including mental health services.
Organized crime has moved out of overtly sleezy industries like gambling into much more profitable ones.
I think this issue is vexing because there are so many groups with different compelling reasons to favor or oppose prohibition. The below list is obviously a gross over-simplification, but I think it captures the largest forces in the debate.
FOR: Men. Men would benefit from legalization in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Women. Women stand to lose if their partners are tempted by legal prostitution.
FOR: Sex workers. Sex workers would benefit in the obvious way.
AGAINST: Religious groups. They lost the battle against pornography, but they're winning this one.
AGAINST: Feminists. Not all feminists, but many feminists believe sex work is exploitation by definition. [2]
Each group has powerful motivations completely independent from the effect of legalization on sex slavery.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/15/legal-pr...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_prostitution
And I don't think the sex-worker-exclusionary feminists are representative of most feminists, even if the overlap between their views on this topic and those of conservative and religious groups gives them a big megaphone.
Regarding legal presence, many sex workers are in a country legally aside from their choice to do sex work, sometimes even with work permission for most jobs. (Canada has some relevant exclusions in their standard open work permit, for example.)
I would hope everyone opposes sex slavery.
In the progressive circles I'm familiar with in my midwestern city (Columbus, Ohio), I've never seen anyone make a feminist case for decriminalization or legalization. The consensus among progressives here is that sex work is bad for women. The voices I hear in the national media do tend to be ambivalent if not outright pro-sex-work, though, so I agree it's not simple.
Well there's plenty of sex workers online you could ask. They almost universally argue for decriminalisation (not legalisation) on feminist grounds.
(Yes, technically no anti-sex-worker laws claim any category of human is inherently illegal, instead defining some of them as criminals through outlawing certain activities, but you wouldn't know it from how much stigma is attached to public discourse about sex workers.)
I'm not an expert on exactly what proportion of progressives or feminists are hostile to sex workers. A confluence of societal factors (some but not all of which I mentioned in my previous comment) makes me believe that the subset that's hostile to them is better connected to the media, better funded, better organized, more privileged, and for all of these reasons easier to find and notice and hear on this topic.
I don't think that says anything about the broader question of how common different views are or what different credible views have a significant number of adherents, merely something about our current Overton window.
That may be. There is certainly a powerful stigma around sex work that prevents people like your friend from advocating for themselves.
Men “lose” too if their partners are “tempted” by legal prostitution (what are we “losing” here by the way?)
If someone's partner is gonna be tempted away simply by legal prostitution, maybe they aren't the most faithful to begin with.
"Inevitable either way" doesn't mean that the needle stands still.
The argument that there should be a victim of some sort before criminalising something is compelling. It is difficult to argue that the prostitutes feel they are victims of prostitution without discovering that other crimes are already being committed without criminalising prostitution.
I have a much easier times justifying criminalising alcohol from principles than it is to argue against criminalising prostitutes, so I don't see why the one with obviously terrible second order effects is considered to be OK and not the other. We have to accept that we already tolerate a level of background things-slipping-through-the-cracks for the sake of liberty and general comfort.
Prostitution has been legal in Australia since around the 90s. Nobody particularly cares^. The only people who it has implications for are people who choose to be involved.
^ Ie, it doesn't crop up in politics as an issue. Lots of people care. Nobody is making a big deal about it.
This is a MUCH bigger problem in the US than in Australia.
You can read prostitution legalization as a right to choose to use your own body for profit or you can read prostitution banning as the right for not being used for profit from your body.
Many imagine is a simple thing but all the other values come into play.
Some people think a embryon is more important that a women choice. Some think that right to sell your body is more important than to legally allow women oppression through sex work.
"But anti-prostitution activists like Hughes often use “sexual exploitation” to include any kind of prostitution or sex work—in fact, Hughes insists in her article that "trafficking occurs even if the woman consents.” "
https://newrepublic.com/article/123302/human-trafficking-has...
The numbers I've seen are opposite to what you claim, and seemed to indicate that a lot of the "trafficking" is actually people traveling to another country for a while to earn (relatively) easy money without risking getting stigmatized by people they know.
You can see sort of the same thing play out without the stigmatization with carpenters and similar coming from low-wage countries. They'll generally have worse working conditions than local carpenters (if for nothing else being away from their families), but still come for the opportunities.
I do think the stigmatization makes it a difficult subject.
Almost all Asian AAMPs are trafficked women. They are snuck in on ships and forced to work to pay their “debt”.
Outside of this women work in prostitution because they need money. A lot of people demonize this work saying how terrible it is, but the reality is an hours work is a days wages at a normal job. That’s very tempting.
Internet ads and online advertising got women off the streets and made things incredibly safer. Women could focus on screening clients instead of attracting them, increasing safety.
> Are the African ladies prostituting themselves in Italy doing so voluntarily when they are afraid of voodoo curses? Is the meth addict doing it voluntarily? Is the girl that can't afford her daughter's diabetes medication by any other 'job' doing so voluntarily?
The first case is distinct because it's a real case of illicit external force. For the other two, it's worth pointing out that in the US, the baseline is still "arrest", "criminal charges", and "publishing your name and picture online". This happens with the silent consent of both the US public as well as anti-trafficking activists, who neither speak out against this kind of policing, nor stop cooperating with police departments.
The life of a woman needing to pay for diabetes medication for her daughter does not not improve by being arrested, nor does she welcome her source of income disappearing because of restrictive laws.
Have a look at local news reports of "anti-trafficking stings". It's always the same story. Dozens unnamed woman arrested, rarely even a claim that a victim was identified; and OP is right; the definition of what counts as trafficking is wide enough that even in those cases where it is claimed that a victim was found, it needs to be questioned whether the person actually welcomed the rescue.
Fuck the lot of them. I am a feminist and that means sticking up for the rights of all women, whatever their chosen career. You want people to stop doing sex work? Give them a better option.
I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law.
Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reached for something, and she booked it.
I asked her if she had seen changes since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, which she wasn't aware of. She did tell me that the neighbors on the main drag wanted Backpage and the like back, because there had been a significant uptick in street prostitution.
Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market.
95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities.
The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls.
There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole.
Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away.
The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria.
One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.
I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human trafficking.
These policies should have a single, fact-based, evidence-based goal: fight sex slavery and human trafficking. If it leads to a system I don't like, so be it. Fighting slavery is the #1 goal there.
But if we have a bill that chips away from freedoms guaranteed by section 230, and it also doesn't make the people it's trying to help any safer...
can't we agree that bill in specific should get thrown out? This isn't a problem of balancing freedom with protecting sex workers. This bill makes the Internet less free and makes sex workers less safe. Everyone loses with this bill, except a few Congresspeople who get to look good for cameras.
It was saying, I might have my moral opinions in a vacuum about whether prostitution is good or bad, but the moral principle of trafficking being bad overrides that, and we should follow what the evidence says. If the evidence says that decriminalizing sex work reduces trafficking, then a moral opinion against sex work doesn't outweigh the evidence.
It was clearly not about higher moral principle of fundamental liberty.
That's literally the idea behind the entire liberty vs freedom discussion - that (for instance) even if giving the government access to all our communications would make us safer, it's still not what should be done.
Exactly. That's what makes me bitter about these questions.
Legalization of prositution is actually an interesting question as you can find left-wing and right-wing arguments for and against. It has a potential of being very divisive or unifying across party lines.
And about health issues, I agree it is an important one, but sorry, if the workers we are talking about are free of their career choices, I think it comes after the question of people who do not have a choice.
I don't want the kind of thinking that sacrifices freedom and moral principles so the bad guys have less avenues to profit to dominate our world. For all we know if they can't do trafficking they will switch to other criminal activity and hurt people there. They are the problem not the people who exchange sex for money so let's go after the actual problem.
The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
"Any chance" is an absurd standard. Consider what a country would look like if you said that personal preferences should be dismissed if it had any chance of increasing murder. Get comfortable eating your steak with your teeth since the presence of knives has a non-zero chance of increasing murder!
There's even evidence suggesting that backpage.com was effectively railroaded, and actively aided law enforcement in identifying and prosecuting pimps and child abusers (this source has a known libertarian political bias):
https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
What prompted reprinting this article without actually doing any investigation into the ramifications?
People have to work to survive. Some people make so little at work that if they lost that job, they'd be homeless or suffer other harm. And, most people would rather not be at work. Companies often provide this work.
Are workers slaves? Are companies exploiting workers?
If that type of worker-company relationship is morally permissible, then on some level prostitution has to be as well.
I don't consent to murder, rape, or kidnapping of myself, nor do I consent to do those to others.
Because if she is so desperate as to do do it solely to avoid starvation she would do it regardless of whether or not it was legal
On the wider issue of prostitution, there is a fundamental difference between it and the crimes you mentioned: murder, rape and kidnapping are always wrong, regardless of whether money is involved. On the other hand, most people don't have a problem with sex between consenting adults; they only have a problem with it if there is payment involved. This of course raises the question why an otherwise acceptable act becomes immoral when it is in exchange for money...
From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it..
from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money.
Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers.
It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing.
The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?
What is with this bizarre spelling?
There is nothing wrong with two consenting adults choosing to have sexual relations for monetary exchange, and I care nothing about "downsides" that come from legalization. It's morally imperative that we allow freedom, then deal with the consequences. Otherwise, we should just ban alcohol, driving, having kids, or anything that can potentially have negative effects when we allow people to be free and make their own decisions.
lol citation needed.
I've used dating apps for the last four years. I've gotten maybe 3-4 dates per year, and 0 relationships out of it.
But seriously, work on what you say in your profile. Nearly every response I get from a woman, is about how well my profile is written.
Modernity is awful. The only good thing is improved medical care and food security. Everything is else is just bad.
Plenty of women do it too and for many of them it's not at all light.
Think of it as polishing your CV by omitting some embarrassing stuff and putting forwards the things you want. Your goal shouldn't be to be 100% honest when writing your profile/CV. Just to make it enticing enough to get your foot in the door.
Seriously though, I feel your pain. I had let the account lapse for months before I happened to get back on there and see that she had written me. Dating apps become a joke exponentially as you get older.
First advice, pay for the premium service on the apps. I know it's not cheap, but being able to see who liked you is a huge gain. I've had very little success getting matches otherwise unless I was going to spend way too much time swiping. And it's still drastically cheaper than a match maker.
Secondly, when writing your profile and choosing pictures, you want to make choices based on the women looking at your profile's perspective. Does he look good? Does he seem interesting? Do we have things to talk about? Share some interesting bits about your life that women might find interesting and want to ask you about. Have you gone anywhere cool lately? Have you picked up any interesting hobbies? (But stay away from esoteric stuff. Database design is cool, but very few people will get it). Maybe you cooked something really cool and exotic for dinner the other day.
Don't try to be overly impressive. If you want to look fancy, have selfies of yourself before you went to an event in a suit, or maybe at the event. Make sure the focus is on you, instead of the event/car/house/whatever. But it can always be in the background. Trying to be overly impressive comes off one dimensional, like you aren't interesting other than puffing yourself up. Showing that you're doing well and are a well adjusted, successful person is good, you just have to make sure it's a facet of your profile instead of a focus.
Make sure you keep your standards reasonable. We would all love to date a neuroscientist who's a lingerie model in her spare time. Those women are exceedingly rare, and even rarer on dating apps. They probably don't need a dating app to keep a full dance card. Swiping really screws up your perspective of what the dating pool looks like. Your feed is always full of absurdly attractive women, but keep in mind that a lot of those are fake profiles.
Lastly, make sure you iterate. Take the dates you can get, even if they're not perfect to you. Maybe they're better than you thought; if not, use it as a learning experience. What did they like about you? What didn't they? You can use that feedback to adjust your profile and how you communicate to make yourself more appealing. Plus, going on dates is pretty much universally fun, so there isn't much to lose!
I'm too old for dating apps, so I've never used one, but don't nearly all women swipe left (that is, reject) something like 80-85% of men on these apps?
The original blog post has long since been deleting (https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...), but according to one of the OKCupid founders:
> [Women] rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’.
You can imagine that people aren't swiping for "average", so the selected percentage would be even less.
Link: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
http://freakonomics.com/2009/02/06/i-pay-them-to-leave/
> A business exec told me that he thinks of consulting firms a bit like Charlie Sheen thinks about prostitutes. When I asked him to explain, he said that when Sheen was being sentenced for using a prostitute, the judge asked him why a man like him would have to pay for sex. And Sheen reportedly replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.”
[1] https://theoutline.com/post/3402/tinder-is-not-actually-for-... [2] https://theoutline.com/post/3711/the-tinder-struggle-visuali...
But he makes it sound like deathly drudgery, and I think that's missing the point. It's "gamified" to give you bits of positive feedback. Matching feels good, like a little compliment. One doesn't have to enjoy that; not every game is for everybody.
And the process itself should be interesting: the swiping process is a lot of momentary life stories. A picture really is a thousand words. If you're not interested in it, then the app isn't for you, but it is for some people.
So I suspect "horrible" is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, I invested a fair bit of time per date, but it was reasonably rewarding time. I met a lot of great people, including some relationships that lasted years.
The main lesson I wish I'd knew going in: the population is densest in cities. It's less effective in the burbs. Duh, of course, but I spent a lot more time traveling into the city than I'd bargained for. That's the only time I really regret about it.
I swear, I should make a career in fixing people's dating profiles. Though the hard part is fixing their attitudes about women, which is the real thing holding them back. If I could fix that, they'd know how to fix their profiles.
I have enough friends who use dating apps to know they're only "easy" if you're young, conventionally attractive, and (preferably) female. A typical middle-aged American guy can swipe through hundreds or thousands of profiles without even getting an response, let alone sex.
Spend hours picking photos and putting together a profile. Now for each person you have sex with, imagine you spent another 5 hours swiping, yet another 5 hours getting maybe 20 conversations going, which turn into 5 actual first dates (budget 5 hours each for prep, transportation, cancelling and rescheduling, etc.), assume 3 of them have zero chemistry, the other 2 are cool but the chances that someone will sleep with you on a first date is very rare, you go on a second date with them both but again no sex this time just for practical reasons (it's a weeknight, they work early, it takes an hour to get home), it fizzles out with one (no third date), the second one has a vacation planned, but three weeks later you finally have a third date and sleep together.
Mission accomplished. Probably a total investment of 40-60 hours across 2 months. And this assumes you even live in an urban area in the first place where there are 10,000's of people your age to swipe through. You still call that "easily free"?
Contrary to what you might think, dating apps are not full of girls looking for a quick first-date hookup. Sure, they're out there, but it's extremely rare that you'll a) find one at all, b) that she wants to hook up with you, c) that you actually meet and it actually happens. Just the reality of things.
By the way, this is also why the narrative of dating apps killing relationships is false. By the time you've put in 60 hours finding someone you're compatible with, you hope to god you can keep going out with them, instead of going back to square one and doing it all over again. Dating apps are work.
Unless you're a standout prodigy, in which case people will message your LinkedIn begging you to consider interviewing for six-figure positions.
You can pay for sex with women that look like Victoria’s Secret models or Playboy Playmates.
If you are just looking for casual sex, the amount of time, effort, and definitely luck to match with someone like that is rare.
For people that aren’t born handsome, tall, or physically attractive, the ability to earn money is a great equalizer.
Of course this is for casual sex. It’s different if you are actually looking for a long term relationship.
And just like there’s something great about finishing a meal and knowing there is no cleanup to do, it’s great sometimes to have a hot girl open her door, set your eyes on her for the first time, and know that with 100% certainty you’ll be having sex with her in ten minutes. The cost is high, so I can’t indulge every week, but I end up doing about once a month.
This is all with women over 30 years old, totally consensual, so there are no ethical concerns for me. Sure they wouldn’t be doing it for free, but that’s true of anyone in any job.
And before you say that anyone should be able to do that, not everyone has the same supply of emotional energy for self betterment, which is an extra on top of what is required to live life day to day
Its not a panacea in preventing trafficking but for the workers that want to be there it doesn't criminalize them, and the market for establishments are pretty competitive and great for patrons. Game of Thrones can't even compare, while many tourists corral themselves over to one street in Amsterdam due to its marketing campaign even though there are whole countries that are way more awesome.
The std testing is the most attractive part of these systems. "Tolerant" and "Decriminalized" places do not have the capability of offering that. Let alone everywhere that outrights criminalizes workers and/or Johns.
I think the population health should be a prong that is weighed heavier. Regulated systems do that. If there is any coercion of the sex workers then spend resources enforcing that and providing avenues just like anybody else in a domestic abuse relationship.
They could simply have decriminalized prostitution and leave procuration illegal, but no, they had to throw around with laws to make the live of sex-workers harder.
If prostitution was just decriminalized, their work would just have been easier, it would have been a normal job like every other job.
As a sidenote, this reminds me of another reason why criminalization is a waste of time as it only ensnares the poor or impatient, while an even distribution of the more privileged ones of us engage in the exact same behaviors but where it is legal, remaining upstanding citizens by every metric.
Prostitution is called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. It has always existed, in all countries, cultures, etc.
IMHO legalized prostitution with some sane policies for health and safety combined with a threat of prosecution for 'customers' of victims of human trafficking (e.g. for rape, because that's what that is) would do wonders to clean that business up. A blanket ban just drives women in the hands of criminals.
Okay, and how is that a bad thing?
E-Thot is the word of the year, all these money sending apps that came out recently are capitalizing on a new thriving market with blurred lines as to what is legal.
That was not the case in NSW (Australia) or in New Zealand, where decriminalisation led to NO increase in the size of the sex industry.
No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions.
But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too.
There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying).
I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it.
Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
That's actually argument for prostitution. You have to earn money for prostitutes. Granted not as much as for the family but still. Also I think there's way less colateral damage for everybody if less desirable men can just buy what they crave directly instead of attempting to compete with better men over women that don't want less desirable men and if they settle for them they'll regret it.
Polygamy arises spontaneously in societies where lots of men get killed off by wars. As soon as the M/F ratio normalizes polygamy goes away.
Fake-polygamy is like early Mormonism, where the proselytizers actively sought large numbers of women to rapidly increase the size of their group. Mormon polygamy mostly went away because of the numbers problem: it is unsustainable if you don't have a way to bring in extra girls or get rid of extra boys (the offshoot mormon cult in Colorado City sent boys away as soon as they hit 18 [2]).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_City,_Arizona#History - Dateline or some other news shows had stories about teenage boys getting expelled from Colorado city, so that the girls could be plural-wed.
> with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online).
Some men get more action than others, but this is mostly because they've learned how to not be obnoxious [3] about their interests, and go after the women who also aren't so interested in a relationship, or are good at tricking women into thinking they're long term when their intentions are otherwise.
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503
Women generally are selective about who they get with, whereas men generally will get with whomever happens to be interested in them. With that said, many women don't get hordes of men lusting after them, and some men have learned how to mesmerize women into their bedroom, then move on to their next target without second thoughts.
I posted previously about my friend who advertised on backpage for clients [0]. She was not full-service, yet was sort of traumatized by the experience anyways. She doesn't have problem with her catalogue of former boyfriends (entirely her choice), but she was bothered by the men who just wanted to pay for the privilege of putting their anatomy inside her anatomy without her being reciprocally interested.
Then there was the stripper I saw a few times... The last time I saw her, she told of how she gotten beaten up by strip club patrons who'd followed her home. She didn't feel safe at home anymore [0]. She was okay with getting random men aroused, but wasn't interested in sex.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906
Offering prostitution as a service works for women who are flexible about who they'll get with; engaging prostitution as a client works for men who haven't figured out how to be interesting to women, or for men who are not interested in a relationship, or not capable of a relationship, or have other motivations (ex: I read about an Australian mom taking her disabled son for a monthly appointment with a sex worker).
With all this talk about legalizing prostitution, I think it appropriate to point out that lots of women are engaged in legal prostitution already, it's usually just called "acting". Some women pretend they're interested in a man, but they're more interested in their wallet ('trophy girlfriend/wife'). The other common not-exactly-prostitution work for women is pornography. The main difference between pornography and prostitution is men in porn get paid a token amount too. I'm sure many of the online porn producers were set up by men who just wanted to increase the number of women they boink without having to pretend to be interested in a relationship.
Some women do sex work because of economic pressure [1]. IMHO, a basic income of some sort would be an important part of any legalization of prostitution, so that the women who'd rather do anything else don't have to go into the sex industry to survive.
[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/03/day-12-working-girl.html - this woman might not have had the ability to work in the US legally, on account of her immigration status, but we didn't actually talk beyond the formalities of her ride.
I intend to write a blog post titled "the predicaments of girls and boys", but haven't gotten to it yet.
Haha, as I've gotten older, this seems more and more accurate. I'm not saying it's all about money, but more like women are interested in one set of benefits a man provides, and men are interested in another set, and they're not necessarily inclusive.
I've traveled and lived in several different countries. Some of them seem less interested in pretending it's all about Disney, partners forever, and are more relaxed about relationships being mutually beneficial without all the pretense (i.e. women that are essentially offering sex and companionship in exchange for financial support, and the amounts wanted are openly negotiated. I almost prefer that to the courtship rituals we use in the West.
Andrew Gurza writes about this as a disabled person. Here’s one of his articles about it: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disability-sex-workers_n_5ca2...
No, men don't have a right to sex, because it involves a woman surrendering herself; its not something innate to the man that is being denied. It's dark to make it so that women need to surrender themselves to strangers on demand for cash because men have a right to the act, and that's just part of it. Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment; without it there is a huge lack of protection for the woman and it becomes a banal experience for the man, because he cannot have love or intimacy from it, just the act that becomes more and more extreme over time precisely because its divorced from human sentiment.
honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism; there's no "intellectual curiosity" about this, just sort of a repetition of a specific set of views with very little attempt to challenge or provide the unpopular side.
I would say men have a moral right to sex as much as women have a moral right to not be physically and sexually abused by men, at least in an advanced human society that we want.
Naturally, evolution has left the sexes in an unpleasant predicament - look at higher mammals like chimps or great apes for the state we'd fall into without our societal boundaries.
We're long past the point where we've 'artificially' propped up women to a pedestal that wouldn't be obtainable without men raising them up - the freedom to earn money regardless of actual production, safety against physical / sexual violence which is only enforced by other men, reproduction rights, etc.
If this system is to sustain itself, a large amount of men will also need to provided for, and that means sex (or maybe in a sci-fi future some sort of drug or simulation that mimics it in the brain, and releases the 'pressure'). Otherwise, one side of our artificial society is no longer balanced.
>Sex is really only healthy where there is mutual love and at least some level of commitment;
Sex itself is the goal for most men, at least primitively. The rest is just a bonus.
> honestly i wish dang would ban these kinds of topics because we usually only get one side of them based on sort of an inhuman libertarianism;
Typical. You've been able to express you opinions. I've been able to express mine. Censoring / banning speech is ridiculous, and should never be even considered by a company like YC who owes quite a bit of debt to the US system, which believes in free speech. If they want to start banning more and more speech, they can go set up shop in China or the UK.