Actually it’s legal to pay for the right to film sex and distribute the film. It’s not legal to pay for the sex.
How? Remember, we are talking about a Libertarian ideal here. If I don’t have an STD, and she doesn’t have an STD, who is harmed by a prostitution contract with no condom use required?
And in a larger sense, that is my problem with the argument. We pretend that there is this great legal principle that if there is no “harm” done, then it should be legal, but then that only makes us argue about what “harm” means.
I think you are a wonderful poster and I respect your opinions very much. But do you realize that you concluded a post with “prostitution can be pro-marriage”?
I’m sure you could put forth some examples like how one’s wife is paralyzed after a car accident and the husband is young and needs sexual release and they come to an informed decision to allow him to stray and get a sexual release with another woman under certain conditions.
But in vastly…and I mean fucking vastly more situations, you’ll have a typical argument in the marriage, and a guy goes to (under a legal prostitution situation) the local brother, probably after a few drinks, and his inhibitions are lowered and he has sex with a prostitute who does things that his wife will not do. Plus, he is 45 and his wife is 44 and the prostitute is 23.
And I won’t get too crude, but since they are professionals, she can probably make him come in ways that his wife never could.
Of course, by saying this, I will be accused of prudish stuff again, but I think most of the “sexual incompatibility” between spouses means something along the lines of, “Of the 11 women I have slept with, you rank about number 5 in ‘how I really like it’ and you won’t do activity X, Y, or Z which that one girl I dated in 2004 did and made my legs shake for four hours.” You’ll keep that in your mind and be unsatisfied with your wife, even if a little bit.
I’m as guilty of it as the next person, and I am arguing from a position of hypocrisy. But I think most of the problems with sex in marriage is the result of widespread accepted pre-marital sex which allows both spouses to compare the current spouse and his or her ability as it relates to all previous sexual partners.
I guess I need a definition of what “sexually incompatible” means before I can agree or disagree with you.
…nope. We fucking well are not. If you are going to use the advertising laws in New Zealand as a springboard for your point then its salient to remind you the New Zealand laws were instituted for the following reasons:
Only Libertarians argue for the Libertarian ideal. You aren’t in this thread arguing for the legalization of sex work: you are arguing against it. You are presenting the Libertarian ideal for the sole purpose of having something to argue against. The entire point of the law change was for harm reduction. The Libertarian ideal never played a part.
Thank you. And I’m glad you noticed. And that was exactly what I meant.
Mo
The problem with this is not the sex, it is the dishonesty. I’m fine with two people agreeing to be open - though I’m concerned about coercion, where one person presses the other to have sex outside the marriage. Neither dishonesty or coercion works for me.
I admit to zero experience with prostitution, but in a marriage with a good relationship you learn what turns your partner on. I’ll take that over a bored professional any day.
In an ideal world no one would cheat. Is a 23 year old prostitute worse than a 23 year old co-worker?
I’ve lurked on reddit, where there is more anonymity than here, and no one seems to have that issue. Lots of people have serious issues with no sex for months at a time. You appear to be seeing sex in marriage as something mechanical. Maybe it is for some people - but it can also be a great and free part of the relationship.
Plus not all sex is the same. Somedays your leg shakes for four hours and somedays it is good but meh.
So I don’t call this incompatibility, I call it regret at not being able to eat three meals off the menu at one dinner. That regret I’ve had.
But incompatibility is something that is the function of a particular marriage.
Can’t someone fantasize about the greatness of sex partners even without the experience? You’d hope that the person you choose to marry is at least in the top 10% of sex partners. Oops, hard to do without premarital sex.
If you are against premarital sex, then you must expect a greater chance of incompatibility. So the problem is even bigger.
We told our daughters that they’d be stupid not to sleep with prospective husbands. It must have worked, since they are both happily married.
Not to mention it makes the wedding night much less stressful.
Actually, I don’t think so. I’m willing to let couples define this for themselves. What’s at issue is what to do about it. Counseling if it is a big enough problem, and both sides agree. (Though sometimes one person refuses to admit it’s a problem.) True permission to find others. Cheating. Divorce. Taking it.
I think we’d both agree that counseling is good and cheating is bad. But I think if the issue is frequency or type, emotionless sex with a prostitute is better than sex with possible attachment with an amateur. And safer if it is legalized and regulated.
Not that legalized prostitution is going to stop people from having affairs, since I understand that they involve more than just sex. But it might help in some cases.
Divorce rates are lower in marriages without pre marital sex.
Many ascribe this to the fact there’s no comparison happening for either.
I’d probably ascribe it more to other aspects that are likely to be part of two people’s lives who never had premarital sex since curiousity is easily an arguable counter to the no comparison argument.
Note that the implied idea here (and enforced by judges) that divorce is something to be avoided is another bit of moralizing imposed by the whim of a religious majority on the rest of the population. I don’t mean to sidetrack, this thread is about prostitution, but essentially the arguments against divorce are very very similar to the arguments against prostitution. “I want to control how other people live.”
You can of course come up with various arguments that are somewhat true about how divorce causes problems for society and possibly harms children, which is almost identical to the anti-prostitution arguments.
An economics argument would suggest that if marriages were easier to get out of, the average citizen would be more likely to find a pairing they find satisfactory than if they are locked in to the deal. In a similar way that since young, fit women are rare, prostitution neatly solves the issue by allowing society to reward all the men who can afford a prostitute’s fees a chance to mate with those women for a temporary period of time, when without such arrangements, only a small number of men would ever get to enjoy these women. Also, the fees mean that these women are incentivized to engage in an activity that makes use of their value to society more than say, clerical or retail work. Yes, ideally all women would become college educated professionals but the system isn’t really built to make that a reality.
I mean it’s simple math, if you are talking about the top 5% women, then at best only 5% of men will get to enjoy relations with those women at any given time.
I wasn’t implying anything. Just throwing out some tidbits for the whole marriage argument. Though it only makes sense to me that if you want to maintain the ability to just split up whenever you want then you just don’t get married. Divorce is an awful lot of trouble.
Then again there are a lot of legal incentives to marry so… Again a product of Puritan ethics subconscious edge in our country… basically tge answer to our thread, prostitution is illegal because our whole legal system is still intertwined with it’s religiously dominated roots.
Most people are putting forward the idea that what consenting adults do is no business of another so long as there is no tangible physical or economic harm to that third person. That is the Libertarian ideal.
You are the only one, or a minority of the posters who are arguing, basically, that it will happen anyways, so why not make it legal so that it comes out of the shadows and can be regulated, thereby reducing some of the harmful aspects of it.
My argument is that it is harmful in and of itself and legalization, far from ameliorating the harm, cements it into positive law. But I agree that steps need to be taken that are far different than what we do know. Instead of having prostitution stings and arresting a prostitute and charging her with solicitation (and invariably drug possession) and fining her and letting her back out on the street, additional care needs to be taken to help these women as mentioned upthread.
Agreed.
Sure, professionals are bored, but most good professionals don’t act like it. When a client comes to me, I’ve probably heard the same story a hundred times, but to them it is the first time. As a professional, it is my job not to treat them like its just another day at the office. I have to, fake is not really the right word, but step back and be understanding and cater to their needs. I imagine prostitution is no different (insert lawyer joke here. 
)
As far as sex with a prostitute being “worse” than an affair with a co-worker, I take your point about the possible harm to the marriage in having feelings for the co-worker. But I disagree that nobody could fall in love with a prostitute. Isn’t that the whole point of the counterarguments to me? That there is nothing wrong with prostitution, so why shouldn’t someone love them or fall in love with them? They are the ones giving you the sexual things, and yes telling you things, that your wife does not.
I am not saying that sex is mechanical, but it is a very important part of the bonding process.
Remember when there were only 3 TV channels? When that was the case, we always picked the best of the three and were happy with our choice.
Now that I have 700 channels and streaming services that offer essentially every movie and tv show ever made, every complains that there is “nothing good on.”
There is a name for this, but I’m not sure what it is. There was a study done (sorry no cite) that when people were given a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, they made a choice and they were satisfied. When given a choice amongst 33 flavors, they took much longer to make a decision and when they left, most people felt that they should have picked a different flavor.
I consider promiscuity the same way. If you have sex with your wife and have only ever had sex with your wife, you are not comparing her with past partners, and you don’t wonder why if the past partner could do X or Y, why can’t the wife do it?
So, it is not that I cannot have three meals at dinner. I think the better analogy was in the past, I had three different meals in different restaurants of steak, chicken, and seafood. Now, I am in one restaurant that only serves chicken. Why can’t this restaurant order up a steak every now and then?
Well, of course, every couple should define “sexual incompatibility” for themselves, but I cannot think of any positive example where the answer to that question is to have an affair or sex with a prostitute, possibly saving my first example to which you said “no.” That is a short term bandaid to the larger issue; absolutely it makes you feel good in the short term, but the marriage needs a longer term solution. To me, that is like saying that if you are in a bad marriage you should just drink heavily to make it more tolerable. It is just kicking the can down the road and causing more issues without even beginning to solve anything.
The “libertarian ideal” point already being addressed, I’ll tackle the second sentence: under what circumstances would two sexually active but non-monogamous individuals know for certain that neither of them had an STD?
Even if we posit full honesty for both parties (which is in itself a ludicrous assumption), STDs can be asymptomatic in some people. If a person carrying an STD (knowingly or unknowingly) passes it to a prostitute, that prostitute can become an immediate vector for passing the disease to many others. Condoms greatly reduce the risk of this happening, thus “preventing harm”.
Under that logic, all sex without a condom should be illegal. That’s the usual refrain for legalized prostitution: that if you can give it away, why can’t you sell it? Well, if you can give it away without a condom, why can’t you sell it without a condom?
Umm, I think you’re conflating issues. Generally speaking, most unsafe behaviors in the workplace - working on a high location without proper safety harnesses, working on high voltage electrical systems without the proper safety gear, etc - are a civil law violation.
So if you “legalize” prostitution, then yes, in terms of the police and criminal law, after legalization the only thing the police want to know is (1) was their consent. And (2), were both participants in the sex act considered able to consent.
If the answer is yes to (1) and (2), that’s the end of it. The police can leave. But if someone is running a brothel and having their workers not use the proper safety equipment, that’s basically an OSHA violation. Civil authorities can shut down the work site and apply heavy fines, etc. The only role the police have in this respect is enforcing court orders signed by a judge.
In the New Zealand example, brothels and registered independent sex workers had to obey a number of civil regulations.
Respectfully, I think that you are conflating the issues. I don’t disagree with anything you said about the power of the government to have health and safety regulations in the workplace.
But one of the main arguments for even having a prostitution workplace in the first instance is that if you can give it away, why can’t you sell it? Following that, if you can give away sex without a condom, why can’t you sell sex without a condom?
If we conclude that selling is different that giving, and subject to regulation, then we have our answer to the argument of selling v. giving and why one is legal and the other not.
I guess I need to ask which argument you subscribe to as to why prostitution should be legal. Is it the: 1) selling v. giving, 2) consenting adults, 3) lesser harm by regulating v. keeping it illegal, or 4) something else.
I subscribe to all 3. So do most of the other posters in this thread I suspect. As well as (4) : government policy should be rational. Rational means you use numbers and data to quantify decisions, and you choose the decision the math indicates has more favorable long term odds. You also update your model as new information comes in and don’t be irrational and arbitrarily commit to any given policy, you always do what the numbers say to do. You also don’t just take someone’s word for anything, anything another person claims to know they need to be able to justify how they claim to know it.
I’m surprised no one has posted this yet, a ted talk from a few years ago (it does contradict Banquet Bear slightly though ;))
[QUOTE=UltraVires;21443167
Sure, professionals are bored, but most good professionals don’t act like it. When a client comes to me, I’ve probably heard the same story a hundred times, but to them it is the first time. As a professional, it is my job not to treat them like its just another day at the office. I have to, fake is not really the right word, but step back and be understanding and cater to their needs. I imagine prostitution is no different (insert lawyer joke here. )
[/quote]
Well, getting screwed by a lawyer and getting screwed by a prostitute are a little bit different at least. 
So you think love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled? People fall in love for reasons other than sex only. The difference between the mistress and the prostitute is that the mistress might want more of a guy’s time, and might be angling to break up the marriage. A prostitute won’t. Sure the guy could get infatuated with either, but he’d have to be very rich to get the time he could get with a nonprofessional. So while what you say might be a problem, it will be a smaller one.
Definitely agreed.
The selection dilemma wasn’t ice cream IIRC. My daughter does research in judgement decision making, so I know it well. But it isn’t a good analogy, since unless you are in one of those classical New Orleans brothels where the women get trotted out for you you generally don’t get to pick from a menu.
The thing about the 700 channels is that they have become specialized. Probably more like porn than about sex. Now this could be one cause of incompatibility, if he likes Animal Planet and she only likes House and Garden if you know what I mean and I think you do. Desires for things can come from the brain, not only experience. Maybe I have a better imagination than you do. And thinking about imaginary girl A doing act X might be better than remembering real girl B doing act Y, since you broke up with real girl B for some reason.
In some way you’d hope the person you marry is superior to those you didn’t. Being able to figure this out is the reason for premarital sex. An alternative would be a frank discussion of what kind of sex you want, but how likely is that going to happen when people are too hung up to try it. Hell, it seems most couples don’t even have that discussion about money.
I absolutely agree that someone having sex with a prostitute instead of addressing the real issues is a bandaid and a bad idea. The first reaction of a lot of posters in the subreddits I mentioned before is “dump her.” But they too are focusing only on the sex, and there is a lot more to marriage than that.
The best thing is a marriage with open discussion and compromises. But if the incompatibility is fundamental, and the couple agree that being married is better than not being married, prostitution is a better solution than other relationships. But maybe not now, more if it got legalized and regulated so it would be safer.
Prostitution isn’t the first solution, but it isn’t the last either.
And of course we mustn’t forget those not in relationships who might make use of prostitution also.
…I don’t see any contradiction with anything I’ve said. Her central point and my central point appear to be identical.
I just meant the distinction that’s being made between legalization and decriminalization. Not a real big difference, hence the smiley. The woman in the Ted talk does have a point about the effects of regulation that often come with legalization.
…nope. Its a strawman. There aren’t that many libertarian’s in the world. There aren’t that many people advocating for unrestrained capitalism, and none of them are participating in this thread. You are arguing with yourself.
Except that isn’t my argument. I’ve been clear on my argument. I couldn’t have been clearer in my arguments. At this stage I can only assume you are deliberately mis-characterizing my argument. Can you stop doing that please?
Its a piss-poor argument and you’ve made your case badly. Leaving morals aside: how is sex work inherently and objectively harmful?
Why do they need help? What is it that sex workers say that they want, and why do you think that you know better?
You’ve implied (but never stated directly) that you are still in favour of punishing sex workers for what they do. Are you now stating that sex workers shouldn’t be fined, and should never be jailed?
A long time ago my wife decided to bake bread and found some restaurants to buy it. She found that baking bread the public had more rules than baking bread for the family - for instance you could not use bowls with lips because bacteria could accumulate there.
Clearly we don’t need the government to come inspect our kitchens, because the harm of doing it wrong is more localized than if you cook for the public. The same would apply to sex.
Depends, historically many men lived in boarding houses, ate breakfast and dinner as supplied by the landlady, who also cleaned the rooms, may or may not have done the laundry [or they took laundry out to be done] so what is left, sex. Why bother supporting a woman and possibly kids if you can go out, pay for sex and go home satisfied to your room in a boarding house. Historically taking a wife tended to mean needing to support a varying amount of offspring and the need for housing, clothing, food and what education/dowry/apprenticeship fees the kids needed.
[hey when I was single female on dependable birth control and requiring a condom I got my rocks off with friends with benefits/fuck buddies rather than dealing with the agitation of dealing with a live in boyfriend. Never had to deal with splitting bills and arguing who made that 20 minute long distance call to Buffalo and who needed to replace the broken window that you had to decide whos friend got drunk and broke it. Argh … sometimes if I didn’t love mrAru so much I would have been better off alone <his ex had ran up a couple credit cards deliberately when he decided to dump her and told her while he was still deployed …and had given her power of attorney that took our combined income to pay off in 5 years …>]