This is one of the more out of touch bits of false equivalency I've seen on HN recently, and that's saying something. It's a bit of pop philosophy that says that sex workers are just like any other service provider. However, it totally ignores the psychology and power differentials in the industry. In America and especially in developing countries. The point 'LukeWalsh makes about child sex workers is relevant. The phat answer is: "well that's different, because children can't consent and nobody can consent on their behalf." Neat and clean. But the psychology that leads someone to push their child into sex work is not susceptible to a neat answer or pop philosophy. Whatever psychological phenomenon is at play, might a lesser but qualitatively similar sort of phenomenon be at play with less extreme examples of sex workers?
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this if you have any.
The trickiness comes from what is meant by "free choice". Is a drug addict free to make a choice about sex work? How about someone with huge debts?
And existing laws should be aimed at protecting the more vulnerable people (children; trafficked workers; etc) but have unintended consequences of pushing away from working from a well run brothel and towards working off the street or a poorly run brothel.
Clandestine mining would likely not be a serious concern if we were to ban mining, but on the other hand mining is far more essential that luxury service industries.
Edit: I think I should clarify this. I do think that reviewing the role of economic coercion in all industries is a worthwhile endeavor, I'm not trying to throw that out there like some sort of absurd slippery slope. However I don't think this discussion will ever happen without an extra push, a push like puritanical values provides in limited cases.
Smoking bans in bars might be a good example. I think that most people agree that it is a decide thing to do, to improve the quality of life of bar workers if for no other reason, but these are basically air-quality laws that are more stringent than our normal air-quality laws. I think the reason why bar workers get the benefit of these laws, but factory workers need to rely on less stringent OSHA air quality regulations, is because in the case of bars the air quality issue is the result of something that has gotten a pretty effective moral outrage campaign.
"Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Globalization of Organized Crime"
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globaliza...
The fact that other industries manage to (both literally and figuratively) throw their own workers under the bus, should give extra pause in legalizing work that have strong associations to abuse, degradation and harm.
(You can have other discussions about whether people should be coerced into selling shoes, but I think sex is special enough to warrant its own discussion.)
ETA: by 'starving children', I meant if your children are starving, you might 'voluntarily' enter the sex trade yourself to feed them. Constraining the discussion to consenting adults.
These are effectively answered by the broader liberal project: no one should ever be starving, homeless, or denied medical attention. When you take away these subtler forms of coercion, you have a far easier time finding plausible the notion that the sex worker in front of you is doing it willingly.
On top of this, our puritanism is being slowly--glacially slowly, but still--eroded away. Once that is sufficiently weak, we can make the industry more transparent and accountable, making it possible to do sex work safely, legally, and because you want to, without risk of future stigma.
We're not going to fix it overnight, but the various projects are moving along and a surprising amount of them are already in motion: none of the things I've said are unknown to mainstream awareness, regardless of the average person's opinion on them, and the arc of history is positive from a global perspective.
[1] Go to Manhattan and talk to a bunch of 25-35 year olds. Count how many men are sick of just "giving it up" and want to get married versus how many women express a similar view.
I am a woman in my 30s and I have never ever once in my life heard anyone else use the term "give it up." I am going to go out on a limb and say people just don't talk like that. Not the women I associate and have continued to associate with through my 20s and 30s.
And the real data might be surprising.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/21/why-men-are...
Rather than living up to the stereotype of commitment-phobic bachelors, modern men reported that they fell in love just as often as women, were just as likely to believe that marriage is “forever,” and scarcely bit when asked whether they'd prefer to “just date a lot of people.” But most shocking was how many of the single men wanted to settle down—and how willing they were to lower their standards to make that happen. A whopping 31 percent of adult men said they’d commit to a person they were not in love with—as long as as she had all the other attributes they were looking for in a mate—and 21 percent said they'd commit under those same circumstances to somebody they weren't sexually attracted to. The equivalent numbers for women were far lower.
the percentage of men saying "yes" to imperfect committment was actually highest among men in their 20s, almost 40 percent of whom said they'd commit without love (compared with 22 percent of women).
I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country. At least anecdotally, women express a noticeably greater frustration with not being in a committed relationship than in other parts of the country. In a way it's quite the opposite phenomenon of what I saw in my engineering days, with a disproportionately male crowd dissatisfied by their dating prospects. However, there is a palpable difference in the attitude of the two groups towards sex. The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.
This is absolutely absurd and I don't know what kind of women you are hanging out with. I've had frank honest women to women discussions about sex and relationships and this sentiment has never come up. EVER.
>I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country
This is absolutely false.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/02/neigh...
http://nycedc.tumblr.com/post/16175652438/ratio-of-single-me...
http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/smitten/2012/10/s...
>The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.
The survey I presented above does not support this.
Here's a better writeup
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/survey-shows-single-men-commit-...
and here's another:
http://magicbaltimore.com/3386661/more-black-men-want-to-set...
Nearly 43 percent of single black men said they’re looking for a long-term partner that can eventually lead to marriage. That’s according to a new poll of nearly 1,100 African-Americans out today from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
The survey asked questions about a wide range of topics, including communities, finance and dating. Respondents between 18 and 49 years old who were divorced, widowed or never married were asked whether they were currently seeking a long-term romantic commitment. Roughly half of the men said yes; just a quarter of the women said the same.
YMMV. Among other occasions, I was just talking about this subject with my wife the other day, based on her conversations with some of her friends. I should note that I've also spent nearly my whole life in cities listed on your first link as being one with the highest ratio of single women to single men.
> This is absolutely false.
Using your own data, New York City is #4 on the list for the highest ratio of single women to single men, and from the tumblr link you can see that Manhattan skews more heavily towards single women then New York City as a whole.
On top of there being fewer men in Manhattan to begin with, a higher percentage of those men have never been married: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/09/new_yorke....
Little do they know that even in marriage the dynamics don't change much, only the number of people involved (married people stereotype joke :-))
What.. really? Died farming gold?
Please Google it or something. I have used it correctly, I think you do not know ...
It is better for the government to constraint people's action, rather than allowing them learn from their choices and adjust over time.
Many sex workers are not in a position to leave "job paying below the market rate", for a combination of reasons like illegal immigration, underage, drug addictions, and psychological and corporal torture and abuse.
In most definitions of human rights there is a provision that these rights are "unalienable", making it at least highly questionable to "buy" the right to violate someones sexual self-determination, or inflict the long term damage that has been shown to occur even in "voluntary" prostitutes.
For the majority of the poor (and everyone else) who want to work and move up in life, don't put up any barriers to action and economic activity.
For the tiny minority who don't want to work and move up in life (usually, because they don't really care that much), who cares? Don't sacrifice the virtuous and capable majority for their sake.
You may say, "What about a country like India or (less extreme Eastern Europe), where the poor genuinely can't move up?" Well, the only way to change that is to free up the economy and let people pursue sustainable economic action. If you put up barriers to economic activity, the people who want to move up will never be able to; they will be permanently poor.
For example, ith an expanding economy, you can eventually make it so a person making $10/hour is able to live nicely, as productivity rises and prices fall.
But if you instead put minimum wage at $20/hour, people who only actually produce $10/hour of value won't have jobs, and the economy won't be able to expand to the point where if they had a $10/hour job, they could live decently on it.
Minimum wage and other regulations are why America no longer manufactures. We could be making all the things now made in China, with a commensurate decrease in expenses. Our factory workers wouldn't be rich, but they'd be able to afford the kinds of things they themselves make in the factories. Meanwhile, China would also be doing fine, it just would have grown at a more measured and sustainable pace, which isn't a bad thing.
It is possible for poor Americans to move up, but how probable is it for hard working Americans to be able to move up?
Step 1: Go to college, which you can do very nearly for free these days, and major in something useful, like (say) computer science.
Step 2: Get a job using that useful degree.
My grandpa took 8 years go to to college, by taking every other year off to work. There isn't much excuse for people these days except not having the knowledge of the above two steps.
If you fucked around in high school, that is also a barrier to going to college. But you can go to community college (they let everybody in) and then transfer after 2 years. It's a common occurence.
You can also simply become a tradesman at community college: Plumber, welder, electrician, heating/AC repairman, etc. From what I can tell, there is no glut of people in these professions, people just don't want them. 51% of Americans are now on government welfare, and that's a lot easier than working hard.
Don't assume that a prostitute can just walk away from her pimp, because you think you would be able to do so in her place.
I'm not talking about higher-priced or even "self-employed" prostitutes, I'm talking about the "mass market". These women don't earn more than minimum wage. Sometimes less, all things considered. In lots of cases they would even get more social benefits than the pimps pay them... In some reported cases the pimps take even the social benefits from their "employees".
First case: I am totally against slavery and any kind of coersion. That is what we have a government for.
Second case: Psychological problems. We can't actually solve for those people by forbidding prostitution (or whatever the cause du jour is).
If wages are still so low that people literally can't survive, guess what? You have a glut on the labor market, probably because of decades of government policy that encouraged people to have more children than the society can economically sustain. Don't blame that on capitalism. You have to either take the medicine (reduce social benefits) or be permanently sick.
In Germany we have legalized prostitution. Turns out, that pimps and illegal prostitution benefited a lot more than "regular" prostitutes, however you define that. For that matter all of these girls would be able to earn more money and live a better life (even illegal immigrants in some cases) if they would just go to the authorities and claim unemployment benefits.
How do you explain that they "prefer" sex work over easier jobs with more money or no job with more money. Easiest explanation: It's not so much about the prostitutes' "preferences".
In many countries around the world, especially the more developed ones there just is no economic need for women to go into low-rate prostitution. More expensive "engagements", maybe, but that's more of an exception than the rule. Even begging is preferable to being kept in a brothel and get raped multiple times a day (no, they don't have "fun", and without "fun" it will feel and hurt like rape).
No, because the government is US, the will of the people as expressed in voting.
From what is available in the media and public discussion you can deduce that commercially viable prostitution without exploitation is a very "niche" product.
I also wasn't speaking only about webcam studios, but even with these studios there is a lot that is going on "off screen". Forcing a model to perform sexual acts is still rape, even if the perpetrator is not on screen and even when he has "trained" the model to make a good show.
On behalf of the ignorant masses, forever shrouded in blindness by our inferior power of deduction and lack of access to such hallowed sources as the media and public discussion, I would like to thank you for educating us on the true state of the world.
There's plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion, and suffering involved in labor in many industries . In other industries, we deal with this by attacking specific exploitative, coercive, and suffering-inducing practices directly -- and by doing so, we've (in the developed world) managed to greatly mitigate the exploitation, coercion, and suffering in all kinds of industries.
In the sex industry, we've mostly taken the approach of viewing the problems inherent in having a sex industry, and used it as an excuse to preserve and reinforce the illegality and taboos against sex work, and as a result we've managed to perpetuate (and in some cases exacerbate) the exploitation, coercion and suffering in that industry
Care to share these findings?
That's not true for most people involved in sex work. It's not a free choice they've made. They find themselves in that situation to pay for drugs, or alcohol, or to pay off debts, or because they're modern slaves.
Camming is the lighter end of sex work, and thus the ratio of willing : unwilling workers is better than for other sex work, but it's still more likely to be harmful than harm free.
> That's not true for most people involved in sex work.
You know, if you dropped "sex" for most other domains wherein people might work, that'd probably still be true. There's probably a few areas of work where most people work in the domain because they like it, but for most domains of work people work in the domain because they need the money and working in the domain is the best way they feel they have of making the money they need.
Socially taboo -- and, even moreso, illegal -- domains of work, naturally, increase the risk of people being stuck in them and being less able to move to other domains of work later, and they also increase the risk of exploitation (because people feel trapped in them, because subject to abuse have less ability to address abuse, and because the social taboo (or illegality) of working in the domain naturally means that people, even if they like the domain, are less likely to choose it as a domain of work if they have other viable options, meaning the people that do end up there are usually the most vulnerable to exploitation in the first place.
See http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hookers-in-the-holy-land-an-u... for an example of something that qualifies for that description.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
No, not hard at all.
I had a friend from high school who met a guy at a party. He gave her drugs. Before long, she was addicted. She couldn't afford the habit. He let her get into full withdrawal, then offered her drugs if she'd have sex with his friends. She did. A week later, she had dropped out of law school and was working a street corner.
My understanding is that this is a fairly common path into prostitution.
While I agree with what you seem to be arguing in your post, this particular sentence is true in the same sense as "outside of triangles, its pretty hard to have a three-sided polygon."
4.5 million victims of trafficking for purposes of sex, 40 million prostitutes total.
I certainly won't argue with the idea that some of them are forced into it by circumstance, but no matter how you slice it you end up with a lot of voluntary sex workers.
You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
Your link in incoherent. One example:
> It is true that as I type this, there are young girls and women {and some boys} who are physically locked behind closed doors, who are threatened with their family’s safety, and who are paying off debts by servicing men in brothels. Estimates are, in fact, that there are about 4.5 million women and children forced, by coercion or abuse, into the sex industry today.
That's coercion, not trafficking. I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution. (Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?)
Here's a better article about modern day slavery: http://www.irinnews.org/report/98964/anatomy-of-modern-day-s...
And about helping people who used to be indentured workers. This article also has links to better quality information about human trafficking, about child trafficking, etc: http://www.irinnews.org/report/98867/new-lease-on-life-for-e...
Yes, to focus on people with choices, because it's obvious that trafficked workers are bad in any type of work.
>You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
I can and do claim that a large amount of non-trafficked workers are voluntary. Sure, not 100%, but I never argued 100%.
>There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
That's certainly a bad thing, but it's unrelated to a discussion of typical work, which involves consent-capable adults.
>That's coercion, not trafficking.
Well great, if that's accurate then it makes my point even better: <4.5M trafficked, <4.5M coerced, 35M voluntary.
> I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution.
Well I didn't link the blog for its own text, but for having the sources in a convenient form. It cites 21 million trafficked, your link says 30 million slaves, either number works fine.
>Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?
I would say that it can be both, but the answer doesn't matter when you're comparing 5 million to 40 million.
>Here's a better article
These articles are informative but I'm afraid I don't see the connection to my argument, which is that there are a large number of non-slave non-coerced sex workers, whether they particularly like their job or not.
No wonder, then, that such folks find themselves hurt by the work or perhaps drawn deeper into the vortex to earn a better income; they were already unable to pursue more typical paths.
Citation? I'm taking particular umbrage with "most".
I don't really have a point with that post, I just never drew the parallel before. I was very lucky I had skills that are wanted and pay well.
In pointing this out, I'm not just playing a philosophical game. Those who wish to assist sex workers, whether in leaving sex work entirely or just being safer or happier in sex work, ought to be practical enough to realize that many sex workers choose sex work over other means of support.
The rest of your argument applies to just about well-paying job in a poor country. I know software developers making an order of magnitude more than they would at any other job. Some of them don't enjoy dealing with software. It's still a voluntary decision.
If I say I would not want to work in telecom because I get paid more for my efforts in that field than others, is that somehow now involuntary?
Would you say that the internet industry is inherently harmful because much of this exploitation of children takes place over the internet? Would you say that the software industry is inherently harmful because some people write malware?
You said that "I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers" but I'm not sure how the most extreme realizations of abuse in a particular industry speak to the industry as a whole, unless those are somehow condoned by the majority of the industry or vastly more widespread in a particular industry.
There's a lot of the adult entertainment industry that works scrupulously within the law, and provides income for a lot of models. For some reason, a lot of people have a notion that they are being harmed merely because they are involved in sex work, no matter that they are consenting adults and are choosing this work over any of a number of other jobs that they could have.
So do you believe that working in the sex industry is inherently harmful in some way? Or do you believe that the industry exploits its workers more than is common in other industries? Or that acceptance of harmful behavior is more widespread in the sex industry? And do you have evidence to back this up?
And note, of course, that I'm talking about the legal sex industry; like in the case of any prohibition, such as alcohol prohibition back in the day or drug prohibition today, illegal industries tend to attract more crime, because you're already a criminal merely by participating in the industry. Do you have evidence that shows that the legal sex industry is particularly harmful or more conducive towards tempting people to abusive or illegal behaviors than any other similar industry?
I live in a country where prostitution is completely legal, and while that doesn't entirely remove all problems, it's certainly helped. Being in a western first world country also helps. it's not a simple topic, and your point is well made; we should think before we rush to judgements and conclusions, especially those based on "Puritan" morals and societies shunning of the industry as a whole.
The "most extreme realizations" of most industries have been shown to cause severe harm -- often both physical and emotional -- to exploited workers.
I mean, really, we see this fairly regularly with the all kinds industries that don't involve sex, and then we blame it on the particular abusive practices, and don't try to claim its fundamental to having an industy that deals in, say, garments, or electronics.
It's only emotional harm if you attach a lot of emotional value in the work you do. It's not really any different than whoring yourself out to Wall Street. If you have ethical concerns with the work, it will cause you anguish. If you don't and you're happy with the money you won't be bothered or emotionally harmed that much.
As the author of this piece pointed out, it's all incredibly pedestrian. The emotional harm really is the emotional pain of having no better options to make a living than participating in an exploitative system they don't fully agree with.
Yes, there are "sex workers" that are being exploited or coerced into their situation all over the world. Not everyone who turns on their webcam and disrobes for money is one of those people, and the fact that there are companies catering to them isn't in itself a "sad" thing. They're not part of some underground -- you can find the job listings for the studio's building managers, website maintenance and such on Monster.com. If you've ever visited Philadelphia and walked the tourist attractions, you unknowingly walked by the nation's largest phone sex hotline too. It's a cubicle-farm call center, the employees wearing normal work attire while working FT shifts for FT pay, benefits and bonuses.