But battery and false imprisonment charges cover those. We don’t need to create a special class of crime for forcing people into MMA matches. I know you’ve already acknowledged you’d prefer assault legislation to cover all crimes against the person. Do you think that’s the ideal society should strive for? The destigmatisation of sex?
By the way, I agree that preserving chastity and Christian morality shouldn’t be the point of legislation and I personally think sex could be destigmatised further, but I recognise that for at least some individuals it will maintain a semi-mystical status - “the sanctity of sex”. In other areas, I’m willing to cede that demystification is a useful tool in fighting ignorance, but I’m not certain sex should be reduced to the prosaic.
Then you would agree that rape shouldn’t be a separate crime. A knife or a bullet is certainly a more harmful penetration to the sanctity of my body than a rapist’s penis. Especially when I was about to allow the “rapist” to penetrate me a moment before, but the money wasn’t right. What other reason for a crime of rape than morality (again, a crime separate and far more harsh than battery)?
That’s why I said the damages would still be quite high and the punishment should still be severe. I agreed that raping someone who wants to reserve sex only with its partner would be more severe in its damages. This should not be taken as indicative that I think raping a prostitute is light matter.
I am not interested in making decisions based on daydreams of ideal societies, this is definitely where you and I differ. I do want the destigmatisation of sex, not because it conforms to an ideal but because I assess it would improve outcomes over what we now have.
Any other crime is treated this way. Some are even codified into law. In Florida, a battery against a person over age 65 is punished more severely than a battery against someone younger.
I think were it not for the politicization of the issue, we could all agree that a prostitute would feel less damage from a rape than would a nun. We can’t say that in polite society, though, so we pretend its all the same.
As I’ve said, yes. It should be subsumed within assault.
I do not really like thinking in terms of sanctity. How about denial of autonomy and harm?
It’s true that if anyone who doesn’t consider sex special is raped (and even a virgin could think that sex is nothing special), then they cannot say “it was special to me”. This does not prevent sexual offenses from being potentially severe. To take a non sexual example, a boxer can still be traumatized after being assaulted. A prostitute could also be traumatized by a rape.
Note that I did not deny that morality should be part of the law, only Christian (and more broadly, religious) morality.
I don’t mind the turn of the discussion but I wonder if the OP is happy with it. OP, would you like to redirect us or are you fine with this change of focus?
In which case, it can be assessed for plausibility in the context of the society we’re in. Sex will not be de stigmatised in our lifetimes due to the vast preponderance of individuals in the society we’re in espousing belief in a doctrine where sex is considered of significance to a deity.
To answer the OP’s question, yes, as distasteful as I find it personally, it should be legal, with a few stipulations:
Licensing that is tied to STD testing. No license, no whorin’ - or no whorin’ legally, anyway.
Tax the shit out of it and actually oh, do something useful with the money. (Yes, I know, I’m dreaming.)
Divorce laws should be changed such that if a wife catches her husband with a hooker, she can be granted a divorce faster than the law would normally allow, AND the court takes into consideration why the divorce is actually happening and divides the assets accordingly as well as taken into consideration when deciding things like alimony (but not child custody). In my state it takes at LEAST 2 years to get fully divorced – if I caught my man in a brothel, I’d want out of the marriage ASAP.
…a typical, rhetorical screed against prostitution that has no basis in reality.
Do you think that rape laws changed in countries where prostitution is legal? Is consent defined any differently? Did the rape laws get rewritten when porn movies started being filmed? How about in marriage?
The “sex is not special” trope you’ve invented does not change how the law treats rape. If you want to see how this works in action feel free to look at the laws of countries like New Zealand or Australia and then come back and tell us why they are so unworkable. Show us some examples of people who are spending twenty five years in jail because they didn’t pay their prostitute.
I’m glad you included that qualifier at the end there, since licensing and testing requirements don’t stop people engaging in prostitution but just tend to give rise to a second, illegal sector. There’s also no evidence that they actually curtail the spread of HIV or other STIs, although they do have enormous costs which could be put to better use in effective prevention measures. UNAIDS, the WHO and just about every other major health organisation working in this area oppose these requirements.
Which illustrates our schizoid approach to the matter. Sex is not special unless one is subjected to it, in which case that’s horrendous. Of course, if one is subjected to it because of economic conditions, that’s fine.
You have a very, very non-mainstream idea of what constitutes coercion. As a matter of fact, your definition of coercion is so broad as to lose all useful meaning.
Regarding the idea of rape only being different from assault/battery due to the specialness of sexuality aspect, I would disagree.
Firstly, rape includes a number of potential harms that a typical assault does not–primary among them, the threat of pregnancy and STD transmission.
Secondly, we can recognize that rape is in a special class of crime (due to the psychological differences between sexual assault and non-sexual assault–differences that are not present in, for example, consensual sex and consensual assault (boxing, mma)) without “putting it on a pedestal”.
I agree that one can quite reasonably consider sex offensces separate for the reasons you give without putting sex on a pedestal.
Even if it were assault, rape could still be considered more serious than most assaults precisely because of the the potential and actual harms you list. If rape leads to greater psychological harm than most assaults, than it should be punished as such, whether or not it’s in the same legal category.
The psychological harm is a red herring because it is tied into the special plea for sex. One could just as well argue against prostitution because of the psychological harm having sex for pay causes.
Failure to disclose STDs is already a crime, so that’s a non-factor. Rapes are punished as harshly in instances where the victim cannot get pregnant (post-menopausal women or any non-vaginal sex) or where contraception is used.
You made the claim first, psychological harm for rape. Then I’ll see if I can find something similar for prostitution. Of course, there will be a confounding variable: prostitutes are those for whom sex is already demystified, which may not be the case with rape victims. A society with no objections to prostitution is one where sex is demystified for the majority.