Of course they do. Unless your job doesn’t involve any physical activity at all. It’s just that using your sex organs is in essence different from using, say, your arms and hands (or more generally, that any kind of sexual contact makes it not a job, since if the prostitute was just masturbating the john, he would be equally guilty), and so regardless how hard, menial, health-threateaning, poorly paid, unsavory, etc…another job could be.
To answer to another post, yes, advocates of this law do think that paying for sex is akin to coerced sex, hence rape.
“significant”, “intimate” and “in essence different”…says who?
UDS, I would accept the term “philosophical” in place of “religious” if you insist, but the root of that philosophy, historically and culturally, is deeply religious, specifically the Abrahamaic religions*.
*MY religion actually has an apocryphal history and religious myth of sacred prostitution, so perhaps I should try being a prostitute under religious freedom laws? 
I know a few people whose employers dictate what they may or may not do during their free time away from work. See: mandatory drug testing.
Four or five years ago, an intelligent and talented female friend of mine, “Pamela,” told me that she was considering workng as a prostitute; she came to me, I think, because she didn’t think I’d get all judgy on her. She had just kicked her husband out of the house for being a useless wanker; she had a lot of debt to service and, though she was working, was struggling to make ends make. I told her that she probably could make enough money on her back to dig her way out of the hole she was in–she’s quite pretty and articulate and amusing, generally fun to be around whether she has her clothes on or not – but it might be more emotionally expensive than she was anticipating.
Was Pamela coerced by circumstance? Sure. But so what? Everybody working a job they hate is coerced by circumstance. I don’t especially like MY job. I was much happier working as a freelance writer than as a corporate sales rep, or as a sales rep than as a sales team manager, or as a team leader than a center leader, etc. But as I grew older and my responsibilities grew – wife & kids – I had to move away from what I enjoyed doing to what would keep beans on the table, provide good benefits, eventually pay for college.
Pamela is pretty casual about sex. It doesn’t mean the same thing to her that it does to many people. She says it’s just a fun thing to do for the most part; sometimes it’s just a way to manipulate people into doing something she wants. That attitude may not have survived her foray into hooking (if she actually made such a foray; I’ve neverasked if she went through with it, not least because I don’t want to seem to be trying to buy her services), but it may have. I worry about her, and I think it’s a dangerous choice, but I don’t think I or the government have the right to tell she cannot make the choice any more than I have the right to tell her to be straight rather than bi, or to carry an unwanted pregancy to term, or abort such a pregnancy.
If an unwilling person is forced into prostitution by another person using violence, the threat of violence, blackmail, or so forth, that is clearly immoral. But to say a wiling woman may not make a rational, if cold-blooded, choice to rent her services because I find it distasteful is paternalistic in the true sense of the word. It’s elevating my judgment over hers; it’s telling her she hasn’t the right to decide how her body will be used, that I know her feelings better than she does. It’s wrong.
The rationale of the initiators was clearly that prostitution is a form of violence against women. However, the text had a bi-partisan support (and also a bipartisan opposition). The representatives of the catholic right obviously didn’t vote it for the same reasons the representatives of the feminist left did. Similarly, it got support from (and was draft with the participation of) NGOs with similarly different (if not utterly opposite) leanings.
One type of organization it didn’t get support from is sex workers organizations for obvious reasons of predictable loss of income, difficulty of practice and heightening of risk (the two latter because customers will require more anonymity, discretion and hiding).
In actual practice, of course, marriage very often is coercive. Not always, but too often. Think of the typical relationship between a husband and wife.
Just sayin’ …
What ? You can quit a contract job , you just typically get no severance pay its out the door straight away and of course you risk getting a bad reputation which as a contractor is not a good thing.
He was referring to Indentured Servitude.
*She *was referring to Indentured Servitude, yes. Normally my gender isn’t relevant to topics, except when it is. 
The law itself (or at least the original draft of it I checked) refers to “person”, not “woman”.
If I pay you to give me a handjob, you’re the one doing something. I could pay you instead to screw a metal part. One will be a crime, the other not. Where’s the difference wrt your “bodily sovereignty”, exactly?
It’s not a matter of bodily sovereignty. It’s a matter of whether it involves sex or not. Sex is held as extremely special and sacred (in a litteral sense or not) by many, if not most people, and there’s a common assumption that society or other people should have a say in how you have sex with whom for which reason. Even if a john and a prostitute both feel that sex isn’t that special, and that paying for sex isn’t much different from paying for a massage, your (and that of others) opinion about sex, sex-related morals, feelings about how special sex is will be enforced on them.
Also, obviously, the initiators of the law clearly see prostitutes as victims. Which from their point of view, makes acceptable to deny agency to prostitutes (akin to the situation of, say, victims of domestic violence). Even though they outwardly deny treating them with any condescension, the patronizing was quite commonly blatantly obvious. To begin with, as I noted, sex workers orgs and NGOs working with prostitutes that didn’t support the law where mostly excluded from the preparatory works.
Is it typical? There has been a lot of arguing over here about this very issue, with extremely different points of view advanced by both sides. In fact, the definition of pimp itself isn’t that obvious. Under French law, any third party deriving a material benefit from prostitution is guilty of pimping. That would include, for instance, a live-in boyfriend if the prostitute pays part of the rent.
In fact, I meant that this was fundamentally the position of people supporting this law. But a change I made in a sentence made it look like it’s my position on the topic (and it isn’t). :smack:
You may need a pimp to protect you if you are a street sex worker in a country where its illegal. In countries where sex work is legal you really don’t get pimps. Legal brothels have managers, usually referred to as madames, they have to abide by health and safety regulations like in any other job, and they pay taxes. If they were to try and use violence against their workers they’d be shut down pretty quickly.
That’s really a simplification. Even when sex work is legal, there are often men involved in the background. Often husbands or boyfriends. Some long term, some that quickly turn out to care mostly about cash.
What France is concerned it will be interesting to see what will happen, but this law has been in the making for a while. In Belgium and the border region of Germany (both with legal prostitution) a lot of the clientele travels from France.
Heck, even where sex work is legal there is still extralegal prostitution – just as there are unlicensed electricians, mechanics, plumbers, cabbies, health providers etc. – and the pimp still exists.
No, the long term trend in public opinion (and laws) about prostitution is in the direction of liberalization.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/changes-in-positions-on-social.html
Also, while women are somewhat more conservative on prostitution (as well as many other social issues) they certainly aren’t ‘90% against it’. More like 60%.
I agree with pretty much all of this.
Is it also a religious notion that sexual activity is different than all other activities that might be forced upon one?
It’s pretty widely accepted that rape and sexual assault are worse than non-sexual touching or doing something to someone that they don’t want you to.
Nope. At least, it’s not a Judeo-Christian notion. Read the Old Testament. In the Mosaic laws, rape is considered essentially an act of theft against a woman’s father (if she’s a virgin) or husband (if she’s a wife). A rapist may well be punished by being forced to marry his victim; a married woman, raped in the city, is condemned for adultery and sentence to death, because the fact that the act happened in the city and was not discovered “proves” that she didn’t scream. (Even 10-year-old Skald, passionately believing in God and Jesus, saw that that was bullshit; what if the guy had a knife to her throat?) On their mythical conquest of Canaan, Hebrew soldiers are explictly allowed to rape captive women. Absalom, a son of David, gets treated as a bad guy for avenging his sister Tamar’s rape by their half-brother.
I’ve spent enough time with people who had no choice but to take low-skill physically demanding jobs that left them old men at 50, to think the above is bull. Lots of jobs that pay a lot less than prostitution beat the crap out of your body, and I don’t understand why it’s OK for a carpet installer to cripple himself to pay the mortgage, but not for someone to give a blowjob to accomplish the same.
It’s really just prudish sensibilities. Legalize it, regulate it, and move on.
And in such a case, nobody would be forced to prostitute any more than they are forced to run concrete cutting machines. Which might be inhumane, but I don’t hear anyone screaming that it should be illegal.