If prostitution were legal and safe, and well paying, I can imagine women with marketable skills who could make more money that way than the traditional way. I suspect the women who have rich people as clients could do other stuff also.
If we had a majority religion which made sex a sacrament, you probably would have lots of people saying this.
That seems to be begging the question. You’re saying it’s a low status profession because nobody would work in it if they had an alternative. And you’re saying the people who work in this profession must have no alternative because nobody would choose to work in such a low status profession if they did.
I feel that some women might choose to work as prostitutes even if they had reasonable alternatives. Legal prostitutes in Nevada can make several hundred dollars for an hour of work. I feel there are women who would feel that working eight hours a week as a prostitute is better than working forty hours a week in an office job for less money.
Prostitution is generally a low-status occupation, even in societies where it is pefectly legal. Theyre may be exceptions, but they tend to be just that - exceptions.
And I don’t think we should treat status and legality as independent variables. Sex work is legally restricted in the US in part because it attracts considerable moral disapprobation. That’s not going to disappear if sex work is legalised. And we observe that currently legal forms of sex work - for example, working as a stripper - are still low status occupations in the US.
…from the Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act by Abel, Fitzgerald and Brunton:
It should be no secret why sex work is considered a “low status occupation.” People call them “whores.” “Street slags.” Can you think of any other occupation where that could happen and most people wouldn’t care?
It isn’t because they have no “marketable skills, knowledge or expertise other than using her body for sex”. Some of the people I know who worked in the industry were really fucking smart. The reasons why people enter the sex industry are varied, the reasons why they stay in the industry are varied, there is much much more to it than “they are all desperate.”
I take it you’ve never seen Gigi.
Cops, attorneys, used car salesmen? Many occupations have their detractors.
At no time did I use derogatory words towards all sex workers. But if you had to deal with the 3TC’s I have, the ones that bring crime, disease, and disorder to residential communities and business neighborhoods, you probably would not have much respect for them.
Over the next decade Americans will overwhelmingly be more comfortable with marijuana being legal in far more places than it is now. The next frontier will be legalized prostitution, and I endorse that. But no way are our citizens going to accept unregulated, unlicensed, no medical test required prostitution. And no way are they going to support street hookers everywhere. If someone pushing legalization uses your all or nothing approach, that is exactly what they’ll get: Nothing!
I’m too lazy to pick through all the other posts in this thread to see if somebody else actually said or implied that they wanted this, so I’ll just say that this really smells like a strawman to me.
…yet I don’t recall you calling used car salesman “whores” in this thread.
Indeed. You reserved it for the most vulnerable of sex worker.
Can you imagine what it would like walking the streets in your neighbourhood? Imagine what it would be like to be attacked, assaulted, or raped in your jurisdiction if you were a street waker. Would you report that crime to the police? The same police that calls you a “whore”, a “street slag”, that accuses you of bringing crime and disease? Just to remind everyone you didn’t just use the words “whore” and “street slag”, you said they were jargon. Commonly used. Its how you define them. The police department you represent see absolutely nothing wrong with calling sex workers “whores” and “street slags” as a matter of routine.
You are exactly the sort of person that Georgina Byers talked about in her speech, and you represent a law enforcement model that is toxic and harmful that advocates for harsher punishments for some of the most vulnerable people in your society.
The hypocrisy of a country that will happily send people to jail for lifefor marijuana crimes on the one hand while giving millionaire moguls the keys to the kingdom is noted, and is precisely what needs to be avoided in the move to decriminalise sex work.
Bits of this are a strawman, and bit of this is simply argument from ignorance. The sex industry is not unregulated here. If you run a brothel you are required to have a licence, but if you work on your own or with a couple of friends then you do not need a certificate to operate. And we don’t require medical testing because there is zero evidence that it has any impact on the health of either sex workers or their clients. That’s evidence based decision-making that has been backed up by 16 years of real-world data.
Its not an “all or nothing” approach. Its an evidence-based approach based on the harm-reduction model that when implemented in New Zealand saw the number of street walkers drop dramatically. It wasn’t a decision based on a whim, based on an “all or nothing” ideology. I won’t pretend that America would be able to perfectly duplicate what we did here, and I can imagine an America that decriminalised sex work in a manner that put restrictions on street walkers.
But harsher punishments on street walkers misses the point. Its needlessly punitive against a group of people that have very little options. Throwing them in jail doesn’t help. The study by Abel, Fitzgerald and Brunton I cited earlier goes looks into the reasons why (in New Zealand) streetwalkers choose to both start walking the streets and why they continue to walk the streets. Harsher punishment won’t change those reasons. They cite camaraderie with other workers as one of the main reasons why they stay on the street. A society that thinks they deserve to get locked up is a society that they won’t want to be a part of. Its a cycle. You reject them, you insult them, you treat them like filth, you throw them in jail. They will reject you, they will hide from you, they will bond with the people that accept them, the cycle will continue.
If your argument is that Americans won’t accept this because they are too ignorant to accept evidence based proposals that wouldn’t surprise me: just look at universal healthcare, just look at gun laws. But that doesn’t need to be the case. Education can work. You need to listen to and amplify the voices of sex workers and not the people who want to call them slurs and want to throw them in jail.
When one considers that there is no term for a promiscuous man, and that men who have sex with different women frequently are considered ‘studs’, the idea of legalizing prostitution seems unfeasible. As long as a double standard exists that classes women as ‘sluts’ when they act like men, we will have strong resistance to legalizing sex between consenting adults for money. Morality is a thin facade for abusive and exploitative behavior. Christianity has a long history of sexual repression, being one of the primary forces behind treating women as subhuman.
Sexuality must be separated from religious beliefs, and dealt with as something flexible, where the participants are the only ones to decide if they are being harmed.
Legalize it, but access by prescription only. So the health insurance will cover it.
legalize