JuanHamm wrote:I guess I just thought it was pretty well established that vice laws are pretty ineffective. People are going to get high drunk, laid... Etc whether it's illegal or not. All making it illegal accomplishes is is making it more dangerous for everyone involved.
I don't think it's a question of if vice laws are effective or not, more that I don't think prostitution law belongs in the same category as pot and booze because of the uniquely human element to it. BUT, if you look at what happened when pot was legalized,
what you'll see is that it's use skyrocketed. But you'll also notice that it
did not eliminate the black market, that competition drove providers to make
more extreme product experiences, and that it also resulted in
downward price pressures. Nothing shocking, we would expect this from knowledge of basic market economics. Legalization cause a spike in supply, the market responds. Same shit happens in the labor market, as labor supply increases price moves. It moves down to an equilibrium where there are no workers available at that price and the workers making that minimum are barely getting by (hence the need for minimum wage laws) and you start to get class stratification, etc. Again, basic econ. So why would we think that sex work would not follow exactly the same pattern of everything else? What makes us believe we wouldn't just be creating a entire generation of impoverished sex workers who would then need to start doing 'more' for lower prices to compete, particularly as they age? Maybe porn is really the best analogue here:
Hot Girls Wanted.
Jorge wrote:Bi_3 wrote:You're chatting with a poster who seems to think the way to address men buying vulnerable women's bodies via the criminal sex trade is let men buy vulnerable women's bodies via a legalized sex trade, and that somehow this a benefit to society writ-large. Because, as is obvious to all, the way to stop a person from treating someone else like a dehumanized object and not a person, is to sell that person to them. Exactly like McDonalds. Long and successful history of people purchasing the bodies of others here in the Americas.
This falls into that silly fallacious framing of sex workers are selling "their bodies" instead of a service, or labor, performed
with their bodies -- which is what all working people do. Framing it this way, and conflating consensual sex work with human trafficking as if there were no discernible difference between the two, is a pretty transparent rhetorical tactic to further delegitimize sex work. It often stinks of moral finger-wagging more than concern for the vulnerable
If you can reconcile that bit of linguistic rhetoric in your mind, the idea that an 18 year old typing in a spreadsheet for eight hours a day is the same thing as that 18 year old getting railed by strangers for eight hours a day... that getting paid to fold pants at Topshop or sweep floors at McDonalds is no different physically or psychologically than getting paid for intercourse... ok. I can't. And as I've put out the challenge before, what is the definition of consensual sex work that people are coming from? Cause, and I hate to back to this again, #MeToo has shown us that agreement to and consent can be very different things when it comes to sex and basically all of women's recorded history backs that up.
"The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
