(Untitled)

[ysabel]

I am very pro-sex (yeah, I know, all of you are going, Duh!) and, at least in theory, pro-legalized-prostitution. I also believe that prostitution as it currently stands is very harmful, but I'd had a lot of trouble sorting out how to make that concrete, because it's not just that it's illegal.

ginmar posted on the subject, and her post and the threads

Comments

[ysabel]

Overall, I think you're describing something much closer to the ideal than what I believe really happens in most prostitution transactions. Go read through ginmar's post and possibly some of the threads under it; for various reasons I think she's got the normative case pegged.

I would also argue that the scenario you describe doesn't necessarily look like a typical service transaction.

I've had that pointed out over there as well. It is what a normal service transaction involves in my world, though. I'm fairly picky about who I allow to touch me/get physically close to me. (Which isn't to say that there aren't lots of people who can meet my requirements or that I'm not touchy-feely, but that I do require a certain level of intimacy for that.)

I don't understand the notion that it dehumanizes women to be paid for sex.That's not the assertion, IMHO. It dehumanizes women to be dehumanized by men who treat them as just an object to fuck; prostitution as it normally happens is just one example of that dynamic. (Seriously, this is way

[ysabel]

In the most generic sense, it doesn't.

However, some of the things you've listed (massage, medical treatment, house cleaning, hair cutting) do involve either touching me or getting physically close to me. And for those things, I tend to need to hold those providers to a higher standard, or I don't end up getting service that I'm comfortable with. That's all I was getting at.

[the_gwenzilliad]

I have had fantasies of being a prostitute all my life, not because I want to be degraded, although I do identify as submissive and don't mind a little humiliation with my sexy breakfast, but because I love to see people, particularly men, transformed in the act of love. I love to give that to people. Sometimes I've done it at the wrong times or for the wrong people (haven't we all?), and sometimes I've done it more for myself than for them, but I always come back to appreciating it for that transformation. I think in another kind of world, I would have made a very good and honest prostitute

just my .05...

[ceruleansummer]

> I've often wondered, after the fact, if it was just me wimping out, or if I could have done better if it had felt more like a job and less like a dirty secret

[tessercat]

Charlie Sheen once said he paid for sex not for the sex (which he could get anyway) but for the woman to not expect anything more from him. The appeal for me would be that the male prostitute couldn't tell me later that I was "too sexually demanding" at some later date. Though that hardly matters. I'm "too everything" at some point. I've been "too smart, too critical, too active, too confusing, too dedicated..." just once I'd like someone to break up with me by saying I'm not enough of something. OK, I got off subject.

In order for prostutution to be OK, the person can't be "selling their body" but rather "selling a service." Maybe then, they would be respected for that service, and the skillset they bring to it, rather than denegraded.

[dbang]

Okay, I've gone over and read the original post

[ysabel]

Unless you can make some compelling argument about how someone is getting harmed in a direct way...

...

I'm not sure how to respond to this. I suppose I could try to dig up specific references/statistics about the number of women harmed in direct, obvious ways by prostitution as it stands today. Poverty, violence, abuse and inequal treatment by the law are the status quo as I understand it. Frankly, though, I'm stunned that there's any dispute on that subject.

Or perhaps you're trying to dispute something else at the moment and I'm not getting it?

[dbang]

I'm still talking philosophy, not logistics or the way things are

[ysabel]

...therefore it should be illegal to go to prostitutes.

This is a stronger statement than I'm attempting to make.

Even without fundamentally changing the sexism in society, even with the motives your friend believes johns have...even with our real-life world still intact, the harm from prostitution would be greatly diminished if it were legalized and regulated.

No argument with this particular bit. I don't believe that the harm fundamentally stems from the illegality; I do believe the illegality makes the existing harm far, far worse.

I think the question ginmar is getting at is something like, "What about that root harm?"

Look at the current situation - sure, it's illegal for both sides of the transaction, but who bears the brunt of the harm of the illegality? That's not because it's illegal, that's an indication of something else underneath. (One might argue that "underneath" is far too gentle a term.)

Even in a culture of misogyny and sexism, I do not find a compelling argument against legal prostitution.So here's a question

[drooling_ferret]

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this, but I wanted to give it more thought than I had time to last night.

But I also got into a conversation about whether it's possible to sell services that happen to include sex, in the ideal case, without getting into that harmful reinforcement of Bad Things™ or commoditizing sexual access to women's bodies.Which leaves me wondering how one does commoditize sex acts without commoditizing the provider's body, unless the provider is active rather than passive. The provider, then, has to be performing the service for/on the consumer, no? Which would seem to rule out some forms of sexual services

[ysabel]

The provider, then, has to be performing the service for/on the consumer, no? Which would seem to rule out some forms of sexual services.

Yes. There's a reason why I've tried to distinguish between the concept of selling sexual services and selling access to a body. I see them as having a philosophical difference.

What is the scope/context/scale/perspective of this ideal world?

A) A world where there are not gender-based power imbalances.
B) A world where people do not see sex as necessarily somehow different than any other bodily function.

I'm not trying to address issues of classist exploitation of workers, for example; I'm just trying to, for the philosophical discussion, eliminate things like 'it's inherently degrading because SEX IS EVIL' and the whole women-as-meat sorts of things. (Wouldn't it be nice if it were that easy?)

...this world needs to assume that consumers aren't SEEKING commoditization of the provider's body.

Agreed. I raised an analogy of selling beating the crap out of someone up above, talking to dbang. If

[drooling_ferret]

Yes. There's a reason why I've tried to distinguish between the concept of selling sexual services and selling access to a body. I see them as having a philosophical difference.

Well, without generating a specific list of sex acts, what sort of sexual services can be sold without crossing that line?

A) A world where there are not gender-based power imbalances.

Definitely.

B) A world where people do not see sex as necessarily somehow different than any other bodily function.

At risk of sounding obtuse: there are a lot of different bodily functions that have different... well, they're treated differently. I think sex gets some of the worst treatment, but the rest aren't all treated equally or close to. And, of course, every single thing any human ever does is essentially a "bodily function" to some degree or other, so it'd be good to set a boundary on this, for sake of discussion.

I'm just trying to, for the philosophical discussion, eliminate things like 'it's inherently degrading because SEX IS EVIL' and the whole women-as-

[ysabel]

Even so, one could never rightly call the sort of thing I'd see as okay in an ideal world "prostitution".

I think that's likely true, though some of that is just that "prostitution" has such baggage associated.

Possibly also not sex, but that's a stretch.

I could (I think) argue that most of what I think is healthy sexual interaction (and thus could possibly qualify as a reasonable service to sell in my worldview) doesn't qualify as sex under current cultural definitions. *grin*

The way mainstream American culture looks at quote sex unquote drives me up the wall, in so very many ways. It seems to me like many of the assumptions about sex roles and the appropriateness of violence against women and so forth are all built right in to the word "sex" in the minds of most people. That's really depressing to me.

...hypothetically, there could be a place for sale of sexual services in an 'ideal world' scenario, but even in such a world the types of services / sex acts up for sale and the entire practice/profession would be radically