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Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, this must be done.
Ross's is:
Parents can make their kids so some kinds of work.
This is some kind of work.
Therefore, parents can make their kids do this.
I did pause when I saw Ross' question but found your answer convincing. Something still bothers me though..
There is that other question few bloggers are approaching... even if they are legal, would you use one?
Most people wouldn't hesitate to answer `Yes', even if they believe legalisation is necessary to empower and protect the sex workers. Many people would say no, because they are in a relationship.
I am single, so I can't use that explanation... but if sex is no different from a massage, getting someone to build your house, or getting someone to cut your hair, why is it exclusive to relationships?
I think this is the thing that distinguishes prostitution from other jobs.
Every other aspect of a relationship can have a substitute. Siblings/Family/Friends can provide you with an income, you can hire a domestic worker, a nanny to raise your children, a teacher to teach them. You can get emotional support from a psychologist, and love and affection from friends.
IF there is nothing wrong with getting sex from a prostitute... and the next stage is legalising the business of `being a stud', or `pregnancy for sale'...
at what point do relationships (with A significant other) become obsolete?
This doesn't sit right.
Most people WOULD hesitate to answer `Yes’, even if they believe legalisation is necessary to empower and protect the sex workers. Many people would say no, because they are in a relationship.
(1) It is permissible for parents to make their children use their bodies in many ways (to study, to mow the yard, to clean up the dishes, to clean their rooms, etc., etc.).
(2) Sex is morally indistinguishable from any other "use" of the human body.
(3) If (2) is true, then there would be nothing wrong with parents asking their children to engage in sexual activities. (This wouldn't have to involve the parents themselves; say the parents told one child to masturbate the other child -- doing the other child a "great kindness" in Will's words).
(4) If (3) seems repulsive, as it does to many people, then maybe you should rethink this whole argument that sex is morally indistinguishable from any other "use" of the human body.
(5) More than that, once you start thinking about how sex is different from almost all other routine uses of the human body (for example, its extreme impact on the emotions and hormones, its potent power to cement together relationships or to break them apart, etc.), then you might end up somewhere other than strict libertinism.
(I say "libertinism" because libertarianism would only mean, as a theory of government, that the government shouldn't regulate sex; libertarianism doesn't in any way require you to take the moral stance that all handjobs are always a sweet favor.)
Moreover, sex is not the only type of use-of-the-body that has such special maturity requirements. You can't teach your kid to be a coal miner or a firefighter or even a wine critic. Yet no one suggests that these should not be morally (or, a fortiori, legally!) acceptable professions for adults. "Good, unobjectionable stuff for adults but not suitable for children" is not a category made up by libertines; it's a category everybody recognizes, which we libertines merely want to expand a bit.
And they manage to do this, while the overwhelming mjority of prostitutes do not.
"Children are not consenting adults. So there you have it... This takes some degree of emotional maturity, which is one reason why we encourage kids to sell lemonade, but not to perform surgery "
Question begging. You have not shown most adult women have any more capacity to "deal with" prostitution than children have the capacity to "deal with" blowjobs.
This is an empirical (not philosophical) justification on your part, and the empirical evidence does NOT support you. Prostitutes do not "deal with" their job. That is a fact. They lead tragic, short, dysfunctional lives.
Age of consent laws are predicated on the same logic as outlawing prostitution: stopping people from making decisions when we know, with high probablity, that they will make decisions for themselves that - due to inherent limitations in judgment - will lead to extrememly harmful outcomes.
The adult-child distinction is itself a *utilitarian* distinction. It's based on a fictional, essentialist understanding of children and their capabilities vis a vis adults, poor reasoning about "free-will" (There is no magic quality called "free-will" that adults have and children don't), and a theory that restricting certain classes of autonomy will not "spill-over" into more totalitarian-like laws restricting other classes of autonomy. But it's a *useful* distinction because it allows us to stop people from making certain classes of decisions, when we know these decisions will overwhelmingly lead to bad outcomes.
Allowing children to learn hand-jobs will have equally predictable consequences as allowing women to prostitute themselves. The only difference is that we know prostitution leads to *worse* outcomes for women than child sex abuse leads to for children!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al.
And prohibiting prostitution will have no more or no less logical or obvious totalitarian "spill-over" than age of consent laws.
Do you really have empirical evidence of the effects of prostitution, controlling for the influence of the status quo illegality and stigma? Where may I look at it?
It isn't. Prostitution isn't the only instance of sex outside of an emotional relationship. Casual sex of all sorts - hookups, no-strings-attached, fuck buddies, friends with benefits, casual encounters - is on display all over the internet on "dating" sites and craigslist, not to mention on most college campuses.
Just because you can get all of the constituent parts of a relationship by other means (well, except for the romantic emotional parts) doesn't mean that the sum of the parts is no greater than each part individually broken down. It's nice to be able to share all the constituent parts with one (or more!) romantically, emotionally connected partner(s).
Yes it would be fanciful, and let's not hint that I suggested otherwise. But laws based on this are necessarilly utilitarian. If children weren't emotionally or physically hurt by sexual experiences then it wouldn't make any sense to appeal to any such physical or cognitive differences to justify regulations against giving them such experiences.
"Do you really have empirical evidence of the effects of prostitution, controlling for the influence of the status quo illegality and stigma?"
I can provide plenty of citations that prostitution has uniquely horrifying emotional and physical consequences for most prostitutes in every permutation - including legal and illegal, street and brothel, etc. Here is one review, that deals with this topic specifically.
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/FarleyVAW.pdf
Can you find an unbiased source for your claim? The "review" you link to is from an organization whose stated goal is as follows:
"PRE’s goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while at the same time advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution - including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution."
They therefore have a vested interest in presenting research finding that women who engage in prostitution are harmed by it. Other studies have found the opposite.