Prostitution is sexual coercion by the male?

Great Debates
21

I take your point, but wouldn’t the same argument lead to the conclusion that people must be free to sell their kidneys? Indeed, taken to the logical extreme wouldn’t the argument compel you to agree that people must be free to sell themselves into indentured servitude? Or into slavery?

I think the unstated premise in your argument is that “control of one’s own body” necessarily includes the right to take it to market. If you can’t sell something, you don’t own it, in short. And that seems to assign a central moral value to the market that, um, isn’t intuitively obvious, and not everybody would accept.

I don’t think it’s necessarily inconsistent to argue that a woman should be free to carry a pregnancy to term, or to terminate it, and at the same time not accept that she’s free to sell her body (in the prostitution sense) in any way she chooses. Not letting her work as a prostitute is not analogous to compelling her to carry a pregnancy to term (or to compelling her to abort). The appropriate analogy would be not allowing her to have sex with who she chooses (or forcing her to have sex with someone she does not choose to have sex with).

People - including some of the people in this thread - suggest that anti-Prostitution laws are basically puritan - the goal is to Stop Other People Having Fun. While I don’t deny that people’s attitude to prostitution can be, and often is, shaped by puritanism, anti-prostitution laws don’t stop us from having as much sex as we like with whoever we like (as long as they like to have sex with us); they just aim to stop us from trading in sex.

22

Just pragmatically, the danger is that, like every other law against some aspect or other of sex work that is held to be particularly offensive, it creates unintended consequences.

If, that is, it has any effect at all. Who, after all, is going to go to the police to say “This person paid me money for sex”? I think you can bet your bottom dollar that the upper end of the market will survive as “companionship”. The desperate bottom end will find ever darker hideyholes, exposing both parties to the kind of violent criminals who will offer “protection” at a price. And in the middle, there will be plenty of clients who will simply walk away without paying.

The one thing it won’t do, of itself, is reduce prostitution.

23

The feminist attitude against prostitution is incredibly infantalizing to me. They conclude that no woman of her free will could decide that using her body for sex is her preferred method of making money. That all acts of prostitution are acts of coercion by men, and that no one would make a free choice into it. And so women cannot choose to use their sexuality for money, because they must be protected from themselves, or because that’s not a valid choice anyone can make. Either way it’s insulting to women and takes away their agency.

Yes, in some situations, women are coerced into sex work, and that’s wrong. But people can be forced into other sorts of work too - say, people who’ve been trafficked into a richer country, but the people who traffic them hold their passports and force them to work in a sweatshop. That doesn’t mean we should ban one gender from working in textiles in order to attack those cases of legitimate coercion. That’s why we should seek out and punish the coercion itself.

Which is actually better addressed by legalization. Legalization of prostitution empowers women - they don’t need pimps if they’re working a legitimate prostitution job in a regulated, protected way.

But it’s really not about that. It’s about the idea that no one could possibly make an informed, adult decision to sell their sexuality, so in any such cases, the person may be a victim. That’s incredibly patronizing and, in some cases, puritanical.

Wouldn’t it be fucking wonderful if people didn’t have to work jobs they hated just so they could put food on the table? But where’s your concern for, well, the vast majority of everyone who has to work to live?

Plenty of people work degrading jobs that they hate more than the average prostitute hates theirs. But they aren’t special to you because selling your time as a sexual service is somehow more vile than selling your time in some other way. I can assure you that I, and countless other people, have held jobs that they view as being inferior to prostitution - who would switch to prostitution instantly if given the opportunity as a better alternative. But if some guy works some backbreaking, difficult job that compromises his health while humiliated by his asshole boss for $12 an hour, no one cares. But if a woman chooses to do much easier work for much better pay, voluntarily, because it’s better than the alternatives, then it’s some kind of crime against humanity and surely someone forced that on her, and she didn’t choose it for herself.

You can only think such way if you have weird puritanical ideas about sex, that it’s somehow so precious and magical that no one could possibly make a legitimately informed decision have sex for money, and that they all become damaged by it, or you have some regressive ideas towards women that they, in particular, are incapable of making that decision because they just don’t know any better, and you do. You rob them of that agency and infantilize them.

And so it’s ironic and funny to me that feminists lead the charge on this issue, given that they nominally stand for anti-puritanism / women’s control of their sexuality, and women’s agency. Apparently unless you want to use your agency to do something they disapprove of. Then you’re a mindless victim.

24

I dunno. That’s an empirical question, to be answered in the light of experience. This law is new in France, but similar laws have been in place for some years in a number of other countries, and no doubt there is research which seeks to identify what effect they have had. I haven’t read the research, so I don’t have any position on whether this is a better, or a worse, way of dealing with prostitution than penalising the sellers. But I think a simple assertion that it won’t reduce prostitution is not enough.

I also think we can decouple the question of whether prostitution is A Bad Thing/A Problem/Ought To Be Controlled Or Supressed and the question of, if it is to be controlled or supressed, what’s the best way to do it. The authors of the article linked by the OP proceed on the basis that the decision to penalise buyers rather than sellers of sexual services implies a moral judgment about the buyers, but it doesn’t seem to me that it need be so. If you take it as a given for the moment that the French want to control or reduce or eliminate prostitution, what’s the most effective strategy for doing that? They might choose “criminalise the johns” not on the basis of moral judgments about the johns, but because of a pragmatic assessment that that will be more effective. They tend to be people of higher social status than the sex workers, and so have more to lose from conviction, publicity, etc; they are less likely to view fines as an overhead of doing business, as a sex worker might; if you accept that sex workers, or a material proportion of them, are not entirely free agents then they won’t be as responsive to incentives (like convictions and fines) as the johns might be, etc, etc. So, all in all, you might think that it’s going to be easier to get the johns to change their behaviour than it will be to get the sex workers to change their behaviour.

So, yeah, I’m a bit sceptical about the authors’ claims about what the French legislation signifies. I have a pretty clear idea about why they welcome the legislation; I am less convinced that the legislators enacted it for the same reasons that the authors welcome it. And I think some of the criticisms of the legislation are as just as ideologically driven as the authors approval of it.

25

…please don’t make this out to be a problem with feminism. Thats a load of horse shit. New Zealand has some of the most liberal sex work laws in the world, and it was the work of many feminist organizations that helped get those laws passed. In feminism, just like in all parts of society there is disagreement on how sex workers should be treated. There are some feminists who oppose legalized prostitution. And there are some feminists who support it.

I’m a feminist and I’ve been a huge supporter of the NZ prostitution law reforms. Contrary to what you’ve stated: feminists have led the charge on this issue, changing the industry to make it safer and fairer and better.

26

This cleavage among feminists on such issues is long running and there are two pretty consistent camps within feminism concerning prostitution, pornography and related topics. What elements do you think this schism is based on?

27

Why would we expect feminists to agree about everything, any more than adherents of any other philosophy?

Feminists (Christian, democrats, liberals, stoics) agree about a fdw things - findamental principles or values, typically. But the application of those values in practice is a knotty affair, and reasonable people can reasonably differ about how the values play out in any given situation. Why shouldn’t feminists have differing perceptions of prostitution, different understandings of what drives it, different understandings of who is affected by it, and in what ways? If they come to diverse conclusions about the optimal societal response to prostitution, that’s not schism; it’s diversity.

28

Rereading what I wrote, I can’t find anything to the effect that feminists should agree about everything or that there shouldn’t be different perceptions and understandings on how to apply these values.

Since this schism is long-running and includes sub-factions which are pretty consistent in composition over a set of issues and both invoke feminism in their arguments on opposite sides, I thought I would ask Banquet Bear what s/he thinks underlies these differences.

If you don’t have something to reply to that question, fair enough. If you do, I’m puzzled as to why you chose to reply as you did. Are you sure it’s to me you’re replying or are you seeing an opportunity to say something you’ve wanted to say for a long time?

Schism = a split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=schism&oq=schism&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1126j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

29

…I’d answer it the same way as UDS. I’m not quite sure what other sort of answer you would expect.

30

My apologies if my answer rubbed you up the wrong way, MichaelEmouse; that really wasn’t my intention.

What struck me when I read your question was that there are strikingly divergent opinions about prostitution, pornography, etc in wider society. Unless we can point to some principle of feminism which requires or strongly indicates one particular position on these questions - and you don’t argue this is the case - wouldn’t the default be that we’d expect the diversity of opinion found in society generally to be more or less mirrored among feminists?

So the fact that there are these competing views within the feminist movement isn’t something that would seem to require a special explanation, any more than we require an explanation for the presence of competing views in wider society. And if we do look for an explanation, any account of why wider society has divergent views on these questions is likely also to explain why feminists do.

31

No, you shouldn’t expect to see that schism. If you asked feminists about a random topic like anti-vaccines, or something, you would expect them to share the same general views as society as a whole. But when you ask them about empowering women to have their own agency, then you would expect them to at least be in the same general ballpark.

But the “women should be sexually empowered, except if that means choosing to sell their sexuality, in which case they’re just misguided victims who can’t possibly make a decision or comprehend its consequences” runs counter to what feminism nominally stands for. It should not be the grounds of a schism.

32

You should consider the possibility that feminists who oppose prostitution may do so for reasons other than the one you attribute to them here.

Again, I don’t think we have to seek an explanation for why feminists would think like that unless we have good reason to believe that there are feminists who think like that.

33

There is a big split in feminism over sex work between those who see it as an extension of the women’s right to do what they want with their own body and those who see it as always coercive.

The logic doesn’t make sense to me, if you’re not allowing a woman to make this choice for themselves then you should logically think the same of a younger women that marries an older rich man. The sex is coercive because of the money / power imbalance, so it should be illegal. Lets make it so you can only have intercourse with someone that earns 1.3 times your income max, that should remove all money / power imbalances right? Of course this is ridiculous, but IMO so is the idea that a women cannot consent to sex work.

Coerced sex work is already illegal, it falls under human trafficking, or rape or assault charges, so making all sex work illegal is not necessary. I have a friend in Australia (where sex work is legal) that has chosen a career in sex work even though she is university educated, smart and talented. Shes likes the freedom it gives her to choose her own hours, take holidays where she wants etc. She’s paid off a house at a younger age than most can do and IMO will have plenty of options when she chooses to leave the industry (if she does, thats not necessary as there are plenty of clients that prefer mature women).

34

Seeing sex work as always coercive is, at best, some sort of puriticanal outdated idea that sex is something men “take” from women, and women do their duty and allow it. It’s not a thought that someone who’s sexually liberated and stands for female agency and empowerment should even consider. The idea that a woman can’t simply decide, as in your example, that sex work is her best option for whatever reason she chooses is condescending at best. The idea that she cannot possibly freely make that choice.

35

What about people forced to donate blood for money to live? Or people who become subjects of medical experiments in order to make money to live? Aren’t THEY giving up sovereignty of their body? Isn’t someone doing something to their body?

Also, this ruling still allows buying dinner for sex, though, right? :rolleyes:

36

Why is trading in sex letting someone do something to your body rather than your doing something with your body? And how is any other kind of physical work not the same?

37

All of that sounds religious to me. It sounds like words carefully chosen to be areligious, but failing miserably in doing so.

The biggest reason we don’t allow sale of organs is because we don’t want people selling other people’s organs. We don’t want to create a black market like they have in some third world countries. This could likely be overcome by requiring the sale of organs only to licensed organ brokers, like we could create licensed prostitutes, but there are issues with corruption there, and there are issues of commodification on the other end - we as a culture like to believe that rich people shouldn’t be the only ones getting kidneys and hearts when they need them. We’re afraid that if we allow people to sell organs, then they won’t donate them instead, and our supply of organs for the poor will dry up. So there are lots of nonreligious reasons to be against the sale of organs (some of which I agree with and some I don’t) on medical and economic grounds.

I honestly fail to see the fundamental difference between indentured servitude and contract positions, so I can’t help you there.

The problem with slavery is that there’s no out clause. There’s no way to break the contract and quit your job as a slave to go be a slave for someone else. That’s what makes it slavery. Any of the individual jobs that slaves do can be, and are, done by people who are not slaves. It’s not the work that makes it slavery, it’s that you can’t stop doing it if you’re offered a better position elsewhere. That doesn’t apply to prostitution, except for the sex slavery trade, which even proponents of legalized prostitution are against - again, not because of the job, but because you can’t leave it.

38

You can jump out of a contract without the risk of being hunted down and dragged back.

39

So then it’s slavery with a time limit? Okay, then it has the same problem that slavery does and prostitution doesn’t: you can’t quit. It’s slavery by another name.

40

Well, no offence, but the fact that all of that sounds religious to you may say more about you than it does about humanism. It’s entirely possible to assign transcendant value to something without being religious. For example, many in this thread obviously assign a very high value to individual autonomy. Does that also sound like religion to you? Or does it only sound like religion if people assign a high value to something that you don’t assign a high value to?

Is that really the biggest reason? Could it also be that we don’t actually want people selling their own organs?

It’s typically the case that if you own something, that means you can sell it with no out clause. If I own blackacre and sell it to you, that’s it, it’s sold. There’s no out clause if I subsequently change my mind. If I wasn’t free to sell blackacre, I would view that as a limitation on my ownership.

I suggest the reason we don’t allow people to sell themselves into slavery is because we place a high value on individual autonomy. Individual autonomy is so important that we cannot allow it to be commodified and sold.

But once you concede the case that there is a set of things that are too important to be commodified which contains at least one member, then obviously we face the possibility that it may contain more than one member. And in fact most legal systems do recognise other things that can’t be sold. You can’t, for instance, in return for money make a binding agreement to marry somebody, or never to marry, or to vote this way rather than that way, Or, as already noted, sell your kidneys. And since sex and sexuality is a very significant and intimate aspect of our personhood, it seems to me at least defensible, without any appeal to religion, to take the view that it should be a member of this set.