Porn & Sex-Workers are a neccessity to our society.
Without it forced sex / rape would be even more prevalent.
So if you are against either, you (scientifically) support rape!
> Immediately after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Japanese Ministry of the Interior made plans to protect Japanese women in its middle and upper classes from American troops. Fear of an American army out of control led them to quickly establish the first “comfort women” stations for use by US troops.
> By the end of 1945, the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs had organized the Recreation Amusement Association (R.A.A.), a chain of houses of prostitution with 20,000 women who serviced occupation forces throughout Japan.
> Five months after the occupation began, one in four American soldiers had contracted VD. The supply of penicillin back in the U.S. was low. When MacArthur responded by making both prostitution and fraternization illegal, the number of reported rapes soared, showing that prostitution and the easy availability of women had suppressed incidents of rape.
> John Dower, in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, cites author Yoshimi Kaneko's claim that while the U.S./Japanese-sponsored brothels were open “the number of rapes and assaults on Japanese women were around 40 a day,” but after they were closed, the number rose to 330 a day.
https://apjjf.org/-Terese-Svoboda/3148/article.html
Fair warning about the source: There are descriptions of some really nasty incidents in there.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...
I used the search term "study porn reduces incidence of rape"
There is no evidence that the later leads to an decrease in violence. Also considering that prostitutes are very often on the receiving end of violence this arguments only makes sense if you don't consider prostitutes to be people. We should not allow violent men to act out their fantasies. They need therapy. They can not be allowed to act out their fantasies on other human beings.
Longer version:
You are not technically wrong but the context in which you present this makes it very tacky.
We can always talk about corner cases and what not but in a civilized society always ensuring the consent of both parties to the fullest extend is a reasonable stance to take. And yes, violating this rule and failing to acquire to get consent from the other party is a form of violence.
It's interesting how bad ideas gain widespread purchase in society. The idea that porn increases rape doesn't even pass the smell test, but its widely believed for some reason.
The tldr is that at least a part of sexual violences DOES seem caused by a need for sex, and if you can buy it legally such violences can become fewer.
And plus I mean even if it were true that's not a solution to anything. If some significant portion of the population has an apparently uncontrollable urge to sexual violence (not a worldview I share!) then sacrificing our most vulnerable to them to ensure the safety of the rest of us is not a position I can support.
Lots and lots of "first time sex" acts -- by which I mean first time sex between two specific people -- involves alcohol. Alcohol is the number on date rape drug and men sometimes ply women with so much alcohol that they are falling down drunk and incapable of legally consenting.
Most people imagine that rape involves violent assault where some thug drags a woman by her hair screaming into a dark alley. Most incidents of rape aren't even violent. Date rape and acquaintance rape are probably far more common than violent assault of that sort.
Rape is a hard topic to discuss and there is lots of misinformation out there and people are very uncomfortable with someone trying to educate them. I've had people accuse me of being a rape apologist for talking about what really goes on.
See what the other reply linked:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...
> The idea that otherwise well-behaving members of society would resort to rape without sex workers is, first, pretty fucked up
Well change the framing. Yes preventing the tradeoff in absolute term raises icky moral issues. But we don't live in a trolley problem world. Instead use the language of "harm reduction" i.e. marginal gains, and also drop the "otherwise well-behaving".
"otherwise well-behaving" is a bit fraught. I don't want to get into "there's tons of a bad people", because I don't want to prop of criminality as a immutable aspect of character. But explanation is not justification: just because some denial of something empirically pushes people towards crime, doesn't mean it is or isn't a justified excuse.
> then sacrificing our most vulnerable to them to ensure the safety of the rest of us is not a position I can support.
This is flat-out wrong. Sex work != trafficking. "Sacrificing" implies once a sex worker, always a sex worker, which is no law. The fact is in a world of shitty service jobs, alienating gig economy, etc., sex work often does pay better.
Vice prohibitions never work, so if one really wants sex work to go away, the only solution is to simply make other things and the social safety net pay better.
Of course if one really wanted to present the curative, we'd do well to trivialize sex, but that would destroy marketing culture.
Rape is rape. But sometimes the rapist can also be a victim of something else. They can both by guilty of rape (and therefore accountable), but also a victim in need of help at the same time. In the law, we have ways to distinguish that - there is a reason why judges (a human) is typically given authority to choose actual punishment - to in take into account circumstances.
Where "weird implications" start appearing is when this interacts our current popular trend of blanket applying "evil" status to people who commit certain actions. My gut feel is that this is a (understandable) response/backlash to abuse of the structure of moral relativism thinking and other post-modernist thinking by various groups. Or perhaps it's backlash against to the perceived failures of moral relativism to deliver any benefits "to the common person".
- No one says there must be sex work in the utopia. But we have it in this world, and prohibitions of vice do not work.
- We utterly fail at catching and convincing rapists, let alone preventing rape with deterrence or something. The orthodox ways to prevent the crime are not working.
If there is already a failure of justice and prevention, and if sex work isn't inherently bad, what's wrong with improving the lives of sex workers and getting less rape as a side effect? And even without any utilitarianism, the key would be to focus on the unpatholization of sex work as something good in its own right, with the rape reduction side effect as not being decisive.
You sound hyper-defensive and I can only imagine you have some issues with sex/sexuality (as we all do) and I suggest you do some introspection instead of accusing strangers of being sex offenders.
Also, you did not answer my question. Just narrowly defining "sex act" is a cop out since we all know different people have different ideas of what constitutes a sex act.
Believe me, if someone asks for you to show them your feet in an explicitly sexual way, it absolutely feels like a sex act even though no genitals are involved.
Let's check a few reasons someone might not be getting it:
- They're ugly as sin
- They suffer from some condition that impairs socialisation
- They can't do it for medical reasons
- They can't get it from their partner, and they won't betray that partner
- They have high standards, and won't chase after just anything with two legs
None of those reasons is reprehensible. And it's a nasty, sexist slur to imply that all men are potential rapists.
This is wrong and dumb. There is nothing wrong with unenthusiastic sex. Criminalizing 90% of normal human sexual behavior is obscene. This is an example of where the cautionary rhetoric has intentionally or unintentionally morphed to be the baseline. The idea of enthusiastic consent was to avoid the possibility of someone feeling coerced but afraid to speak up. Now its transformed to enthusiastic consent being the baseline. This arms race to control social norms by way of emotional manipulation needs to stop.
Nobody ever died from lack of sexual satisfaction. You can always pleasure yourself. Rape is not sex. People with violent tendencies need to get therapy not some outlet.