Unfortunately, this falls short of respecting bodily autonomy.
>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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
And it fuels the Incel toxic subculture.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Nothing says pro women than using a term like this.
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.
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.
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.
(Hint: you’re comparing people to objects)
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,
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.
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?
(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.
tackling this as a commercial sex issue debilitates avenues for addressing labor rights issues.
"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.
Everything I've read about prostitution makes me think this never happens. Johns just don't help prostitutes. "Pretty Woman" isn't a documentary.
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.
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.
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.
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.