“This makes no sense, and it’s absurd.”
“Ah hah! You said it’s absurd, that’s a fallacy!”
No, it isn’t. Pointing out that something is wrong and that it’s ridiculous is not a fallacy.
No, you imagined that.
This is nonsense.
If you start from the premise that there will always be abuses, the idea that having it be unregulated, underground and covert is not a solution. If there will always be abuses, we can bring it into the daylight and do our best to monitor it, or we can make everybody associated with the business into criminals with a vested interest in secrecy. How’s that worked out for the War on Drugs?
If you sell your kidney, it’s gone forever. If you have sex with someone, you’ve lost pretty much nothing.
Whether legal or illegal prostitution is happening all of the time.
If its legal, you can control disease, stop women being forced into it by physical brutality or drug addiction, stop pimps robbing clients, and clients turning nasty on the prostitutes.
Also it would stop ordinary women being pestered in certain areas by kerb crawlers, and ordinary men being pestered in certain areas by prostitutes.
And it could be taxed.
I also believe that it would reduce the numbers of rapes plus sexual harrasment of ordinary women by drunks.
It could prevent sexual frustration in the congenitally shy, plus any psychiatric problems caused by enforced abstinence.
It could also save marriages, if you have a wife who just doesn’t like sex but otherwise the marriage is a loving, functioning relationship, the man can quickly and easily relieve his frustrations without any problems.
The alternative, whereby the man gets into an affair for sexual reasons, but which later develops into an emotional partnership at the instigation of one or the other of the participants can then lead to a messy breakup with financial implications, and upset to children of the marriage(s).
I can see plenty of advantages both for individuals, and society by legalising it, the downside not so much if at all.
Thus, it’d be immoral to provide such a provision to women, because doing so would be discriminatory. If it weren’t discriminatory, then the collapse of society would entail as nobody would be willing to work.
If nothing else, it’s a strawman. Nobody in this thread made the argument that “we need to protect [women] for [their] own good” (in order to prevent them from acquiring currency), you just constructed that particular strawman in order to ridicule it.
Here are the points of contention once more:
As a society, we have a higher standard for seeking consent for sex. Some women have sex as their profession. These women depend on that profession in order to pay for amenities necessary for survival. Consent is not meaningful when one’s life is dependant on consenting. Pornography and prostitution fail to meet this higher standard.
I’ve worked a few retail jobs where I was treaty with anything but dignity by the customers and/or management. Should I have been prohibited, by law, from working at them? And, again, are women adult, autonomous beings, or not? If they are, who are you to tell them what voluntary employment contracts they may or may not enter into? Not to mention, if you’d find working in the sex trade as beneath your dignity, nobody is forcing you to. If someone wanted to, however, who are you to force them not to?
My gut feeling is that the kind of hard economic times our country is going through would effectively coerce women into prostitution. As it stands now a person goes broke, can’t find a job and so goes on unemployment if things go well. With legalized prostitution everyone can holler at the unemployed, “Go get a job!”, with prostitution being one of the now-legal options when all else fails. Do we want to shame the unemployed into prostitution? I think that is what would end up happening.
My only concern is that legalizing prostitution needs to include some safeguards to insure that it is voluntary. Or maybe kidnapped and forced to work as a hooker only exists in made-for-TV movies.
I go to work because I want to eat, have a place to live and own things. Someone making a choice to be a prostitute because he/she doesn’t see other options to eat/live/buy would be voluntary under my scenario.
Your argument is to quality assumptions what the Corvair was to quality automobiles.
… you realize that if you cut off the beginning of a sentence, you can’t pretend that the rest remains unchanged, right? What does “By this standard” mean to you in the context in which I used it?
A) This is what I believe
B) According to someone else’s standard, this is the (il)logical conclusion
Like I said, you imagined it.
What’s more, the fact that you cut out the essential context and neglected to actually include a quote box with a link inside it is, shall we say, less than savory.
Multiple people have.
Including one just a few posts up who posits that we must protect them from loss of dignity.
Your errors of fact make it less than worthwhile to engage your argument as it stands.
And unless we apply puritanical standards to sex, there’s no reason to be at all perturbed by the fact that people would be “coerced” to earn a living wage. Are you equally concerned about men working construction jobs in the hot sun all this summer? Should we make construction work illegal? Why or why not?
So, if you should lose your job, how much dick are you willing to suck to pay the bills and how much dignity do you believe you will retain while doing it?
No one is forcing anyone to work at a job filled with employees that demean women. They can go somewhere else and find work. If dignity has no business being protected and any remedy brought about by market forces then sexual harassment laws are unnecessary.
If I lost my job (and for some reason couldn’t get another one, or a comparable one) I also wouldn’t like to work retail again. Should working retail also be illegal? What if I feel that I’ve lost dignity because some obnoxious customers treat me like a serf, then can we make retail work illegal?
The false analogy fallacy and pretty much everything that follows.
Comparing a hostile work environment which is not wilfully engaged in by an employee with a position which is voluntarily taken by an employee is a rather silly attempt at rhetorical gaming. You might as well have gone more absurd and said that you assumed I’d be fine with raw asbestos being randomly sprayed around in the workplace, too.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. What the Ontario Court of Appeal did was agree with a lower court decision that current laws against brothels and living off the avails of prostitution are unconstitutional. It gave Parliament one year to draft new laws. In the mean time, police have no grounds to charge someone for prostituting herself (or himself) from a private location. Although street prostitution isn’t, and never has been, technically illegal, it is illegal to solicit for prostitution.
I think all sex work should be legal. However, I think pimping should not be legal.
I’m all for clean and safe prostitution. I’m all for unionizing prostitutes so they could you know, pull together and get medical plans.
I am not for third party thugs controlling their choices as to what, when, where, and with whom they are going to do and I am not for third party thugs controlling the money. If a prostitute (or a stripper for that matter) wants to take a job, and that job might be sketchy, she should be able to hire a bodyguard out of her own profits should she so choose.
I think humans should get to be in control of their bodies and their choices regarding how and if they wish to make money from their bodies. I don’t think other humans should get a cut just for being a pimp. Pimping takes the power of control over their own decisions away from the hookers, which is what I think make the profession so dangerous. Let the hookers make their own decisions and throw the pimps in jail.
Ah, I see you’re doubling down on your false analogy fallacy. Nifty.
Shall we play fallacy tennis?
“I believe that everybody who works in a building and has raw, free floating asbestos blasted in their face is exactly like someone who works retail. Ban big box stores.”
Speaking of fallacies, I think you’re setting up a false choice here - the answer isn’t to restrict the employee and neither allow him/her to enter into an undignified employment situation, but rather to regulate the employer so employees are treated with dignity.
I don’t understand why it’s useful to pretend all employment is equal in terms of its effects on participants and wider society - prostitution isn’t retail isn’t drug dealing isn’t coal mining isn’t speculating, just a few of the industries which require regulation and oversight by the communities in which they operate. So, there’s an obvious and convincing argument for legalization and regulation that doesn’t rely on the unintuitive notion that sex work is just like any other type of work.
As others have pointed out, the ultimate aim may very well be to eliminate some of these industries all together (three of the five I listed above, certainly) because in practice the problematic effects are just too hard to limit effectively (speculative bubbles, environmental destruction, health issues, violence, etc).
As gamer mentioned with Catalonia, by curbing the worst abuses, legalization and regulation can open up new opportunities for participants which may ultimately lead to the elimination or transformation of the industry as a whole.