Paying For It

[docbrite]

The sins of Amsterdam were still a recent surprise
And we were flying over Scandinavian skies ...Not much surprises me there anymore except rudeness: some tourists, of course, and the portion of the large expat community that seems to believe Amsterdam would be a much nicer place without all those uppity Dutch people. (This is seriously a thing.

Comments

[poto_heart]

I find it odd, at the very least, that in the US it's not illegal to pay somebody to make pornography, but it is illegal to pay them for actual sex.

In my opinion, it is a basic human right - body autonomy, as you said - to be able to earn money with your body however you wish, assuming it isn't in a way that harms anybody else. Of course, that also puts me in the pro-selling-organs camp. Obviously there are issues to consider with each - these are things that disproportionately affect people in lower classes, who are much more likely to be desperate for some way to make money. But I don't think criminalizing prostitution (being the topic at hand) is the way to deal with that; as everybody is aware, it still happens in the US anyways...it just can't be regulated in any way.

But it does still concern me that it may lead to people in certain circumstances feeling pressured into prostitution - by family or others - if they aren't left with any other options as far as work goes. But, again, I'm sure that still happens anyway.

At the very least, I think the US laws regarding prostitution should be looked at very carefully, since they've been around a long time and IMO were made for a lot of the wrong reasons. IIRC, as the laws stand now, the prostitute is the criminal, either moreso or as much as the customer, which is a pretty good way of barring prostitutes from seeking legal or medical assistance without at least having to lie about their circumstances.

[teaberryblue]

Yes, plenty of people are pressured, coerced, forced, and even sold into prostitution as it is, but at very least legal regulations give someone some recourse. If you feel you're being treated badly by, say, a porn photographer, you can do something about it, and even though you may be judged negatively by people, you're not going to get arrest, and you have a better chance of finding legal resources that are on your side. If you're a prostitute who is being treated badly, you have to worry that going to the authorities might get you in more trouble than anyone coercing or otherwise harming you.

[orthanc]

This exactly. There are definitely great swathes of prostitution in practice in the US that victimizes the women and men in question. But this is due largely in part to the tone of prostitution here, one of failure, shame, disgrace and crime, which doesn't allow a prostitute to take advantage of any of those piddly little things like the right not to get beaten by a pimp or stabbed by a serial killer.

[mastadge]

This also contributes to another problem: many incarcerated sex workers are not convicted on prostitution charges but instead on other charges, which allows us as a society to go on pretending that prostitution (or, more specifically, the way in which we as a society deal (or, often, fail to deal) with prostitution) is not a problem. We're locking people up without even the grace to acknowledge what we're actually locking them up for, which allows us to go on not thinking about why we should be locking people up for it.

Because why deal with a situation when you can ignore it or pretend it's something else?

Best book I've read on the topic lately (I decided to do some reading after getting caught in an argument where the other person relentlessly attacked prostitutes not by the usual avenues but as homebreakers, painting the wives as victims. When I asked whether the onus was not on the john not to visit a prostitute if he was in a monogamous relationship the other guy simply scoffed, "ridiculous! We're talking about the prostitutes." I wish I had read Paying for Pleasure before getting into that particular argument) is Sex Work Matters.