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Sex is a market. Money is only involved covertly (many women seek wealthy husbands), but it is still a market. Some market pressures:

If some women have sex on the 1'st date, it will be hard for women who want to hold out until marriage to compete.

Similarly, if Tina and Joan and Kellie engage in fellatio, Jennie might have trouble keeping a boyfriend if she does not. There is your "race to the bottom".

Furthermore, sex can both cause pregnancy and spread disease, and therefore does affect healthcare.

You are trying to reach too far with this overly facile comparison. Let me show you how:

1. Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.

2. Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.

3. Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.

4. Sex isn't taxed.

5. Sex doesn't go on your resume.

6. Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.

7. People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.

8. Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.

9. Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers

And, as another commenter wrote, if there is a huge imbalance of power between two sexual partners, that is also often illegal.

> Sexual competition is not nearly as simple as job competition, for several reasons.

I think you have an oversimplified view of the employment market.

> Many people have multiple sex partners, but a single job is staffed by a single person.

Employers often have many, many employees -- sometimes more employees at one time than anyone has sex partners in a decade.

> Sex isn't required to eat or keep a roof over your head.

. . . and working at IBM probably won't give you herpes.

> Sex isn't taxed.

Thank goodness.

> Sex doesn't go on your resume.

Not your professional employment resume, anyway -- unless you have sex professionally (as in the case of porn stars or Las Vegas prostitutes).

> Sex is between two people (or so), not a person and a corporate entity.

. . . and one doesn't normally fill out an application to get hired by one's spouse. So what?

> People don't involve lawyers or accountants before having sex.

. . . except sometimes. Have you heard of "white weddings" and "prenuptial agreements"?

> Trading sex for money is, in almost all parts of the US, illegal.

The porn industry is huge in the US. There's definitely some sex going on, there.

> Individual's choices leading to STDs or pregnancy don't compare, on a magnitude level, with governmental regulation changes that affect employment because the majority of Americans who have health insurance are only covered thru their employers

On the other hand, governmental regulation changes meant to address STDs do at least match that "magnitude".

Ok, let me phrase my question more carefully, to avoid getting into a listing of detailed differences and similarities between sex and employment.

There is a commonly stated principle, "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom." This principle clearly has an unstated limiting clause: "two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in privacy, except when ___").

I'm asking what to replace the "___" with.

[edit: also curious why I'm being downmodded for asking.]

I don't know if you've noticed, but sex creates people.

The sex acts that are considered illegal do not create people. Thus they have no greater impact than childless heterosexual couples who only have sex in the missionary position. Whether that childlessness is intentional or accidental is even more irrelevent.

Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish.

Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.

If it were possible to ban all non-procreative sex acts and all forms of contraception, it definitely would affect how many children are born.

Of course if you banned contraception, the birth rate would rise. But that's not what we're talking about, is it?

We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.

You're taking the employment/sex "between two consenting adults" line and then adding an extreme element, like, for example, everybody on earth is required to work 40 hours a week.

Even if you didn't ban contraception, I'm sure birth rates would rise -- because people who wanted to get off and couldn't get fellatio might still not use contraception all the time.

> We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.

WTF?

We're not actually talking about sex, remember. We're talking about unpaid internships.

The OP was arguing that people are hypocrits, if they say "two consenting adults can do whatever they want" (behind closed doors) for sex, and then turns around and wants worker protection laws.

Nobody in this comment thread is actually talking about sex. It's all about the metaphorical comparison, which IMO, breaks down pretty quickly.

In the metaphor -- two sex vs unpaid internships -- there is no corollary for birth control. It is a red herring.

Get it?

I'm aware of the metaphor. What I find ridiculous is that you're part of the attempt to argue that sex between consenting adults behind closed doors has no larger socio-economic effect, and when someone points out a larger socio-economic effect you try to pretend it's not relevant.

Joe doing it up the butt created the AIDS epidemic. Seems publicly relevant to me. Not that I personally care much about Joe doing it up the butt, but once you think government has a role in sculpting society there is no distinction between personal social issues and personal business issues.

Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.

Having lots of sexual partners creates epidemics of, wait for it...sexually transmitted disease.

The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.

It certainly does. Anal sex is far more dangerous.

It does carry a higher risk of transmitting an STD from one person to another, yes. So I'm wrong to say that it has "nothing" to do with it. But in terms of epidemiology, the higher risk of transmission associated with a given form of sex is insignificant compared to having many partners. Spread, not risk of transmission, is by far the dominant factor here, even if they're not entirely separable. Sort of like the difference between scalability and performance.

And people eating pork created the swine flu epidemic. Please.

Because a disease preys on a population does not mean that population created the disease, whether or not it becomes an epidemic.

I'm pretty sure that AIDS didn't spring fully formed out of the abyss, thanks to anal sex.

And then, if you want to get picky, the deliberate ignoring of the health issues by public authorities escalated the epidemic.

While I'm not particularly fond of kingkongrevenge's example, I don't think you're faithfully representing it. He didn't claim it created the disease -- he claimed it created the epidemic.

So did the widespread distribution of farmed pig products create the swineflu epidemic, as I said -- if the reports are to be believed.

I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that I misrepresented it at all.