Maine becomes first state to decriminalize selling sex
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
>Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, signed a bill into law this week that will eliminate penalties for those who sell sex while leaving in place laws against the purchase of it.
The reverse is, generally speaking, the case with regards to selling drugs.
it's a matter of which party is thought to be more greatly victimized, in other words.
they assume the sex workers have no agency and give them no voice in these proposals, opinions and legislation.
“believe all women, except them”.
many workers are saying “labor rights and harm reduction” and that thinly veiled eradication and weighing differences based on power dynamics does.not.help.
In New South Wales prostitution has always been legal, including street crawlers, and for the protection of the sellers it is illegal to be a pimp. The view being the women have agency but pimping is predatory
Nothing says pro women than using a term like this.
No it hasn't. It was made illegal in the early 1900s. Street-based sex work was decriminalised in 1979 (Prostitution Act 1979), and brothels were decriminalised in 1995 (Disorderly Houses Amendment Act 1995).
And there are plenty of victims in drug dealing. People get killed all the time and lots of children will never see their parents outside of visiting them in jail due to mandatory min sentencing. In terms of race for federal convictions for trafficking and dealing it’s mostly blacks and Hispanics that do all the time to feed America’s drug addiction. There’s the whole drug mule thing where cartels prey on people to be drug mules.
Surveys? As in asking people what they've used, and maybe how much? I can think of some reasons why prestigious/party drugs are well-represented there and gutter drugs aren't.
It's safe to assume that most money in drugs is made on harmful use, if you define harmful use even remotely sensibly. This is the case for alcohol, tobacco and gambling, and although there is always going to be more uncertainty around illegal products, you can be pretty confident it's the case there too.
This is why legalization isn't an easy fix. People running businesses that are harmful to their significant customers, know it. These industries will still attract gangsters in the sense of people that are OK with profiting from spreading misery, only instead of risking prison for it, they can openly build relationships to other powerful people, participate in lobbying etc.
Maybe this applies to homeless street walkers. But the majority of prostitution I'm aware of (anecdotal, I know) is middle-class men who go to freelance call girls 10x wealthier than they are. The customer pays a several days' worth of his wages for 2h of fun. So I would say it can be argued that the purchaser is a bigger victim than the seller, considering the financial power dynamics.
You stop commerce by stopping demand, not supply.
I would say sex is not dissimilar.
2) Sometimes we must refer to King Canute and the tide. The idea of "stopping demand" for prostitution seems like a long shot.
Drugs, alcohol, sex, abortion. You make it illegal and you get the same behaviour with a whole load of bad add-ons.
Have you got any examples of prohibition working?
There are always going to be cultural factors at play. You aren’t going to succeed in banning something if it’s popular enough, like jazz in the Third Reich, or if you just don’t have the power to enforce it.
In terms of harm reduction, a tightly controlled black market can easily be preferable to legalization. Kind of like el Paquete in Cuba.
There are other factors that drive the demand for these drugs, and I think we're in agreement that the demand can and should be addressed in large part by dealing with root causes. But sex, drugs, guns, abortions etc. have all been successfully prohibited. There's little human behavior that hasn't.
You can't stop demand. Preaching abstinence almost certainly doesn't work.
Buying sex is a horrendous, (socially and often also physically) violent way of exploiting (mostly women's) bodies.
Overall, it is a societal topic. As long as commodification of everything is the norm, bodies will continue to be commodified. There is no legislation that will make prostitution ok or be safe.
No, it doesn't. If you have to change the definitions of words from what is in a dictionary to make your argument work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.
And, disregarding your attempt to shut down discussion by shaming language, the fact still remains that mandating what sex consensual adults have with each other never works.
Legislating consensual sex is a primitive and regressive opinion, mostly opined by a few close-minded but loud and vocal puritanicals.
The government should not be getting involved in consensual sex between adults.
It's cool that you have to resort to low-key ("look in the dictionary", "shaming", "primitive and regressive", "close-minded") blows to push your argument, fantastic for discussion.
Oh, and you don't have to be a puritanical to think that intimacy for sale is a bad idea and should not be encouraged.
Once again, the problem is societal. If you treat everything as a market, you will get a society where everyone is treated as a commodity.
But you do have to be a puritannical to tell consenting adults what they can and cannot do to each others bodies, and for what reasons.
Anytime your argument starts with "sex between consenting adults should be regulated like this ...", step back and ask yourself "Do I really want the government in my bedroom?"
Because many the freedoms we enjoy today are because we kicked the government out of bedrooms. Now you want to invite them back in?
> It's cool that you have to resort to low-key ("look in the dictionary", "shaming", "primitive and regressive", "close-minded") blows to push your argument, fantastic for discussion.
Didn't you start off by saying all people who buy sex are mentally ill and all people who sell sex have no agency of their own?
You lead with slurs, what did you expect? You took civilised discussion off of the table, and then turn around and complain that others must expend more respect to you than you do to others.
No, I want the government to regulate markets. As in, I want the government to do everything in its power to abolish the sex trade market and help people get out of the famously violent, dangerous and abusive field of prostitution.
> Didn't you start off by saying all people who buy sex are mentally ill and all people who sell sex have no agency of their own?
No, I said they need therapy (which would benefit most people, me and you included). The fact that you are misrepresenting what I said and turning it into polemics is uncalled for and unproductive.
> You lead with slurs, what did you expect?
Nowhere did I use a slur. In fact, the only slurs dropped were by you, which I pointed out to you and now you become defensive.
Moreover, based on your outrage, it appears that you think that mental illness is something people (or right now: specifically me) use to denounce or otherwise degrade others.
Please look into how you are doing the actual thing (taking civil discussion off the table) you accuse others of doing.
And it fuels the Incel toxic subculture.
Why doesn't it work? Do you think perhaps it falls on deaf ears? Could it have something to do with a sexualized culture people live in that is overwhelmingly more influential than perhaps one clergyman one hour a week? Does it have anything to do with hot blondes on Carl's Jr commercials munching burgers, or dancing e-Girls on TikTok? Have men been disempowered, emasculated, and humiliated in their rightful roles by feminism? Is it perhaps related to third graders getting sex ed, how to don a condom, and a fresh supply of hormones no matter what their parents think? Is it perhaps related to unfettered access to contraception for everyone, abortion on demand, and no-fault divorce that nobody cares about keeping a family together or staying with their wives to support them in sickness and in health?
Yeah forget preaching, that preachy stuff never works.
I dunno. I don't care either. All I know is that mandating what consensual adults do to each other in terms of sex never works.
So has nuking the moon to stop communism.
(Hint: you’re comparing people to objects)
It seems like an easier defense would be for the buyer to say there was no payment involved and hope the seller does the same to avoid having to testify.
any effort rooted in the prohibition of sex work will harm workers, and these efforts are based on enacting their discomfort with men having increased access to transactional sex as a normal option.
this model simply exacerbates trafficking by removing one of the main ways exploitation is reported at all - by workers confiding in customers they've built rapport with!
it has to be harmonized as a labor issue, rooted in harm reduction.
edit: there it is
>“The point of this whole thing is to decrease the demand for commercial sex,” said Maine state Rep. Lois Reckitt, D., who sponsored the bill,
tackling this as a commercial sex issue debilitates avenues for addressing labor rights issues.
(There have been several studies evaluating the effectiveness of Dutch regulation, but comparing the relatively accurate numbers from the Dutch police force with the guesstimates from countries where prostitution isn't legal, means that conclusions are pretty soft).
However, there's a huge advantage to a legal transaction in that if something goes wrong the wronged party need not fear going to the police. It's much better for disputes to be settled in court than by violence.
Everything I've read about prostitution makes me think this never happens. Johns just don't help prostitutes. "Pretty Woman" isn't a documentary.
"Europe", even within the EU, also has a great deal of variation, ranging from effectively complete legalization in places like Switzerland and Germany to the Swedish model of aggressively prosecuting customers and countries where selling it is illegal as well.
Until the 19th century, prostitution was legal basically everywhere.
Since then Europeans have gone back and forth between kind of legal to kind of illegal.
It really does vary a lot. But the historical acceptance and modern ambivalence is pretty common.
This Maine law doesn't go far enough in that there's no provision for structured support to help those who are prostituted exit the sex trade.
assumes no agency, does your assumption assume the prevalence of independent people that are not trafficked?
With issues where people go emotional politics often goes this way, and the social pressure makes quality research nearly impossible, leading to decades of populism like that with little to no reasonable discussion, not to mention decent scientific inquiry.
Jurisdictions where voluntary prostitution is legal to provide or procure, have increased rates of illegal sex trafficking compared to jurisdictions where it is illegal. Criminalizing it from the demand side has much the same effect as a total ban, while also protecting vulnerable sex workers.
They are not trying to stop the trade, legalize the trade, etc... They are trying to make it so that those who sell their body are not 'locked' into the trade because they can't get a job, an apartment, etc. and escape the cycle of selling -> jail -> selling -> etc... Even if they get help, it's hard to continue your life if you can't find a job or sign a contract for a safe place to stay.
The nordic approach is a failure. Prostitutes are still marginalized, they're still stalked by police, and they still have to employ a great deal of subterfuge to make ends meet.
The upshot of that is you can get enough support to pass a law decriminalizing selling of sex (something social libertarians and many sex-negative feminists could agree on), while lacking enough support to decriminalize buying sex (which only social libertarians would support).
Ask these politicians how they are respecting men's body autonomy. They will look at you confused thinking "body autonomy" applies only to women or outright get angry and say you are arguing in bad faith.
It wasn't me asked, but I personally wouldn't mind my exclusive masseur having sex with someone, but I would mind if he massaged someone else.
The original question.
I’m providing a case where massage isn’t the same as sex.
I wouldn’t mind my wife working as a professional masseur, having sex with another person is a different matter.
They also don't get the same legal rights that workers in fully legitimised businesses do.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland have completely legal regimes including brothels, and Victoria in Australia just advanced their legal regime (including brothels) into a decriminalized regime to acknowledge deficiencies in a legal regime.
The goal is harm reduction. Its not intended to be a solution for trafficking, the existing labor trafficking solutions are intended to be a solution for trafficking in the sex industry.
For (otherwise) developed nations to be just getting around to single sided criminalization is embarrassing.
What's the advantage to keeping that illegal?
Demand doesn't evaporate because you declare it to be illegal. The sellers will still need to accomodate their buyers who - not wanting to be arrested - will prefer buying in areas where enforcement is lax with all the increased risk that entails.
Very similar to decriminalizing possession of drugs, or buying of drugs, but not the selling of drugs... Buyers are frequently victims of addiction, and ruining their life with criminal charges doesn't help them break the cycle
The bill is not about trying to adjust the market, or to allow/accept prostitution, but to help victims of the trade.
If their goal is to protect victims then full legalization goes even further than this half-measure.
This statement has the same fallacy that the following statement does: "Keeping child labor illegal means children will choose to work in places where they feel less safe from the law. This will make young children who feel they have no choice but to work in a factory operate in a less safe environment."
The very fact that a certain choice is legal increases the economic incentives to pressure people into making that choice; in contrast, removing a choice by making it illegal incentivizes employers to offer alternate choices that are potentially less exploitative. When child labor is illegal, employers are incentivized to pay their workers a high enough wage to support the whole family without children having to work. When the option of child labor is taken off the table, workers end up in a better negotiating position.
The same is true of prostitution. When people can make money legally off of prostitution, they will be incentivized to go into the prostitution business and hire prostitutes. When they can't do that, they will be incentivized to go into a different line of work, and create employment opportunities for women that are less inherently exploitative.
>Inherently exploitative
Ah here we go. The real crux... moralism. It's exploitation at any price even if a fully capable adult makes the choice.
The parent comment is saying that if prostitution is legal but hiring prostitutes is not, then people will only hire prostitutes in areas where law enforcement is weak.
A comparable analogy would be that if laboring as a child is not criminally illegal (which it is not) but hiring children as laborers is illegal (which it is), then the people that hire child laborers will be doing so in areas where law enforcement is weak.
This seems to be both a pretty apt analogy, and also seems to be clearly true in the child labor case.
It's harder to combat rape when you have to meet client in a more secret place, and when you can't take a photo of client's id. So no, in fact actual sex workers hate nordic model since it pushes them towards more precarious position while declaring the opposite.
But the nordic model is better that the criminalization of sex workers imho.
By making the purchaser the criminal, you now have the additional problem of forcing sellers to take steps to assure their buyers safety, which would include keeping silent about the majority of what they do.
The solution is to decriminalise the transaction, not to decriminilise one party to the transaction.
Usually prostitutes are women and buyers are men. So they legalized the part where there are more women. That's either because women have more sympathy from society or for ideological reasons. Fixing crime was way below those reasons on those politicians priorities.
It's the modern puritanism. They want to stop sales of sex.
"Because human trafficking" is their equivalent of "think of the children". Their stated reasons is not their reasons, its to shutdown discussion by shaming anyone who doesn't feel that selling of sex should be criminalised.
In Order to really get a handle on some bad side effects and improve everyone’s life, the first step is accepting reality and decriminalize it. Then introduce protection laws for sex workers and make them pay taxes, like everyone else. With regulations and getting real data every action can be tremendously more effective than criminalized (= uncontrolled) black markets.
Even Al Capone was ultimately arrested for tax issues, everything else was not provable in court
Probably the same reason why it's a thing in many places across the world, even in parts of "progressive" Europe.
However, I do also think that making this legal would help more effectively fight some issues surrounding sex work, such as violence, human trafficking, etc. I think this to be the case for drugs, too.
Libertarians Gone Wild in this thread lmao
Never again — the Romans were right in stripping SWers of their citizenship.
I do agree there is a problem with the easy money trapping people but I don't think that's enough to warrant making it illegal.
Also, here in Las Vegas outcall prostitution is quasi-legal. The outcall organizers make it very hard for police stings and the result is so long as they keep their noses clean otherwise (the old adage of commit only one crime at a time) the police ignore it. It's been a long time since I've heard of a case of trouble from it. (But I've heard of multiple cases of trouble from bar pickups in that time.)
I'm sure not everything makes the news--but that applies to both prostitutes and bar pickups.
Also People v Freeman, which makes the distinction that porn merely pretends to be prostitution, because whats actually going on is a business venture to produce a media product that just happens to include hardcore sex and the performers are paid.
Yes, but I'd choose another word than "foundation."
> I don't see much difference with a tech worker being coerced to spent 8+ hours a day building repulsive advertising and surveillance technologies to put a roof over their head. People sell their soul, mind and body in different ways.
Absolutely not. Your logic is vulgar. Transactional sex is a vice, so categorically different from software development. Furthermore, prostitution is a vice that undermines intimate sexual relations, both reproductive and otherwise. Family and intimacy mark a frontier of still-sacred relations that capital has thus far preserved in it's own interest. The nuclear family was wrought from villages as the smallest viable mobile labor reproduction unit. Society’s productive capacity straightforwardly depends on these sacred institutions. Software development threatens nothing of the sort. I can only imagine you are drinking libertarian kool aid, also a vice.
Really? When was the last time your boss's customers put their dicks inside of you and filled your body with semen? Your cushy tech job is a world away from prostitution.
I'm just saying that this statement is categorically false, in that, there are people who engage in sex work at their pleasure. You're dismissal of their existence, in fact, proves your ignorance.
For instance, we disallow the selling of organs. I'm all for bodily autonomy, but this seems reasonable.
At the very extreme case, one might say "I give you permission to murder me, if you provide for my family".
While I agree that self-direction and autonomy are essential rights (pretty strongly, in fact), everyone puts limits on them. For some people, the dynamics of prostitution might be that limit. It's not the case for me, but reasonable people might draw the line there.
I think this is the nub of it. When you strip away the BS, views on the legality of prostitution boil down to whether (safe) sex between strangers is (a) a harmful thing, or (b) a fun thing like a massage.
Discussions centered on trafficking or abusive buyers are a red herring. These are relatively rare scenarios. We don't close down eBay or Craigslist because of the occasional bad actor; we police the bad actors.
> These are relatively rare scenarios.
I wonder if this is true...
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2018/07/01/working-as-a-reception...
Note, I’m linking the story not the Nordic model. I don’t have an opinion on that yet.
Legal prostitution isn't a panacea, just as, say legalizing weed, isn't. It's harm reduction and it's the first step in the right direction. Smart policies need to be made and excuted.
Also the author says "The media glamorises prostitution and presents the illusion that it’s sexually liberating for women, and sex industry lobbyists claim that it’s just regular work. For a long time I accepted this without question." I have never seen anyone glamorizing sex work and say it's liberating. Porn, yes, but never prostitution.
legalization primarily has licenses, and is also frowned upon because its just parallel to a criminalized regime when not using the licenses.
For one, it is pushing people from "low socioeconomical backgrounds" into a life where everyone else, besides those calling prostitution "sex work" (but also many of these hypocrites), is deeply despising them on a very basic level, which no orwellian newspeak will compensate for.
Then of course, most of these people will be heavily abused, and it will be ignored since, you know, "papers are ok"..