That´s why I ask why we have rape (or in this case harassment) laws. The same laws that don´t allow a boss to ask "the baker to mine" could be applied to the boss that asks the secretary to give him a B.J.
But that´s not the case, there are SPECIFIC laws against sexual harassment and rape.
Do you think these laws should not exist?
Dude, harassment and rape are NOT the same THING AND neither one are prostitution!
But I´m not aware of having commited any fallacies yet. In fact I was trying to point out what I think are fallacious or contradictory aspects of society once prostitution is legalised.
I outlined it for you.
Most people do recognise a difference between being forced to work and being forced to become a prostitute. Don´t you?
Any type of slavery is wrong and sex trade is not the only place you find slaves.
Selling is legal, having children is legal. So why is seling children illegal?
We call that adoption.
While talking to a handful of them may seem convincing, it's very easy to simply do a search online and see statistics from the many studies done. 76% of prostitutes consider suicide, 75% were abused as children, 70% get raped by clients (of which only about 7% seek help because its illegal to begin with). etc
Since you made these claims, you find me the resources, please. I'm extremely skeptical of those numbers. The studies that I know of (which are actually very few) that have credibility don't say this. There *is* a high rate of domestic violence and rape towards prostitutes
in places where prostitution is illegal but a large portion of that is because prostitution is illegal and the girls don't have a way to seek justice and there's nothing protecting them. If prostitution were legal, those rates are likely to lower to the rates that you see in places where it is legal in Nevada.
There are also countless documentaries on the subject and its very rare to find prostitutes that actually enjoy what they do.
Documentaries are mostly anecdotal. They're flawed from the beginning, all you have to do to create a documentary one way or the other is to find the right people who hate their job or like their job. Documentaries are not substitutes for real studies. At best, documentaries give a platform of information for other investigations into a topic. Using a documentary alone as a reference point, though, is unwise.
Most are simply forced, or have to feed a drug addiction, or are in debt to a pimp. Some have to prostitute to pay their debt for being snuck into the country. And then of course for a large part of the world, prostitution is the end result of human trafficing. Unfortunartely it's not like in the movies.
Actually, you just described it point by point how it is portrayed in the movies and not very much like it is in real life. While some are forced, the numbers aren't usually that high. Some are in debt to a pimp, but then, legalizing prostitution would give the prostitute to eliminate connections that do illegal things like pimps sometimes do. As for human trafficking, that's another issue all its own. We find prostitutes who have been trafficked, but that is actually a very small portion of those who have been kidnapped into human slavery. Why? Because the two aren't intricately linked. The people who are trafficked have a variety of things that happen to them and the demand for them is high. Not all of them end up as prostitutes.
Assuming prostitution was leagalised:
Where should brothels be located?
Anywhere. They're just a bunch of women living in a house.
Where, when and how should prostitutes or their employers be allowed to advertise their services?
well, the US is already very prudish about porn, I'm sure prostitution will get treated as the rest of the sex industry in the way that advertising works. There are specialized places that advertise for jobs in the adult industry.
Pimps are a perfect - though only a small part - explanation for why we should have the ability to carry weaponry. I firmly believe in education (specifically, the branch/form known as Terminal Education ) for pimps and related!!
Or for specialized body modification.
Not all pimps are bad people.
Would anyone posting in the thread object to a brothel being set up next to a school?
Why/Why not?
No. Who's telling the kids what the women do? If the kids do find out, why can't the parents take the time to teach them instead of sheltering them from the world?
I´m not saying prostitution it is inherently wrong, if it is done freely. But since this might not always be the case, I am trying to show that there could be reasons to make prostitution illegal.[/QOUTE]
Anything has the possibility of not being done freely under the conditions you have presented. Someone couild stick a gun to my head and force me to run a marathon but that doesn't mean that we need to make marathons illegal, either.
[Qoute]Am I so bad at explaining things? Does nobody understand my point?
It isn't that you're bad at explaining it, it is that the argument is a poor one.
Your position seems to be that sex is like any other work. So where´s the strawman? If someone kidnaps my daughter and forces her to sow fields, or they kidnap her and force her to serve food in a bar, I wouldn´t be angrier one way or the other. Now, if instead they forced her to work as a prostitute it would be quite a different thing.
Nobody is saying we should legalise kidnapping and slavery.
I think the State has an interest in maintaining families. The illegality of prostitution (and adultery, sodomy, etc.) is based on this interest.
Actually, the legality of prostitution is a part of a much older practise of making it illegal. It has been a traditionally scorned job and is even mentioned in religious texts (in the Bible, Tamar is almost killed for prostituting herself until the person who condemned her learned that he was the person she had prostituted herself to). The same basis is true for adultery and sodomy as well.
From a different angle:
sexual-harassment laws exist because it is not the same thing to harass someone, f.e. to do some ordinary job or to do sex work. For some of you there might no distinction, but the existence of specific sexual harassment laws prove that for society there is a difference between the two types of work.
Agree?
I think you're making the assumption that we should make laws based on what society thinks is acceptable. This might be your problem. If laws were based on what society thinks is acceptable social progress would likely be even slower. Society doesn't think rationally about laws overall. In fact, many things that society has thought in the past would be terrible if they allowed it to influence law. Some of those things would include the killing of homosexuals, slavery being legal, legal indentured servitude, and drinking alcohol being illegal.
In reality, the reference to society is the Bandwagon Fallacy and, quite frankly, it is not worth jumping on.
But, AGAIN, what about the "secretary with perks" scenario? If such job were legal, a boss or any other empoyee could insist to a secretary to change her job description form one to the other. Would that be harassment or not?
Can you give a straight answer just for once?
She can turn it down. Just like if someone changed her contract now, she could turn it down.
That's the oh-so-comforting idea of how it would be on a larger scale.
So who do poor men go to to get some action?
Unfortunately, there is the ugly underbelly of prostitution that exists even in Nevada. However, there are ways to regulate even that. It is a buyer beware scenario, but still an exchange that should be allowed to occur between consenting adults. This underbelly does get some regulation from within, though. Things like watchlists and girlnotes (that's just what they're called here, I don't know what they're called elsewhere) have become a way of communication about clients between girls who are prostituting themselves. Many places we prostitutes have connections as well, like needle exchanges and food banks, often have people around who know how to access the lists.
But does it make it any worse?
That very well may be the case. It makes it more difficult to share information about both erotic service providers and clients. It also makes it so that if someone commits a crime against them, a prostitute can't seek help. Investigations of crimes are also harder because people fear incriminating themselves when they are in the business.
What I mean is, for example, a woman who can´t find a different kind of job, has a family or habit to feed and does it out of necessity, coercion being larger as her needs and desperation become more acute.
That can happen with any job, though ...
Great post. The next one by Dr. Buzzo is so silly it´s hilarious. Ah! Those brainwashed commie hating americans...
That post is too long to cross post back to here, how about you summarise what you liked about it? I think that post commits a lot of fallacies too, including the anti-prostitution links.
But the point was that if it such job title were legal, then bosses could harass employees freely, because they wouldn´t be technically harassing them, they would just be insisting that they change their job description.
No, one is changing a part of a contract which involves consent - you can't alter contracts with an employee without their consent. One is asking something that is unwanted and against someone's will.
Bingo! The problems I see are twofold:
1) It makes morally dubious behaviour seem more acceptable.
2) It will not significantly reduce the abuse of women because there will plenty of desperate women who will not be eligible to work in a legal brothel for criminals to exploit.
Laws are not there to enforce subjective morals, especially when those 'morals' don't have a rational reason behind them.
It can reduce the abuse of women AND give them a means to seek help when they are harmed that they don't currently have.
You are calling pornography art?! Have actually seen any? Porn is about as artistic as random dog droppings in the backyard. I hope you mean art in the form of a legal definition.A 4 year old with a camcorder could make something with more artistic merit. The only variation at all in porn is that there are simply more disgusting and depraved varieties but without plot or such porn lacks any artistic merit.
I have a large collection of old pin up drawings. I consider it to be art. I also have some classic porn clips from the 50s and 60s. I think if erotic performances were more socially acceptable, there would be a greater opportunity to produce even more artistic porn.
For example, if a woman is turning to prostitution to feed a drug habit, I doubt she would pass the entry requirements of a regulated brothel.
but when she is in need of help, she will be able to obtain it easier. And are you saying that women in the brothels are not helped?
Yes I am sure most all women dream of sleeping with 10-15 fat balding, hairy disgusting men who are too hideous to get women to sleep with them each day. It sounds like a dream come true.
I dislike the stereotype that men who go to strip clubs, use prostitutes or watch porn or visit camsites are all fat, ugly and unclean. I think the stereotype is just another way through which people demonize the industry. For the most part, it is not true. In fact, it is unlikely that all the guys that women in the industry interact with are ugly. The cam site I work on offers cam to cam. Most of my personal clients are actually quite attractive and I don't like that people continue to reinforce stereotypes that would make them look bad or in the wrong for what they are doing when most of them just want a little companionship and self gratification. Not that their appearance should matter any ... I tend to be turned on by intelligence and most of the girls I work with have varying things that turn them on, which makes the stereotypes even more problematic.
Also, to have someone pay you for something enjoyable is not bad. The main reason why I wouldn't be a prostitute at this point is in the risk and due to my current responsibilities. However, I love my job as a camgirl and I know many other women in the sex industry who love their work for the same reasons. Our jobs are all about pleasure. There are some women who don't like it, but it is their choice to be there.
Thats the problem, it's not as easy as a choice. You think that most of these women choose to be in that profession?
Many do. As it turns out, being a stripper or escort can have its own form of prestige, you just need the right social circle. Once outside your circle, you're condemned quite harshly.
There's also the matter of how liberating the job can be. It isn't all hell amongst fat men, bad food and drugs. Life in the industry can be great - it is the retarded social stereotypes that are a bitch to live amongst. Once you go out into the rest of society again, that's when you want to run, that's when it is tough. When the world tells you you're evil for doing this kind of work, that's when it gets rough.
They don't. Most are trying hard to get out, just like how many drug addicts are trying to get off drugs and many alcoholics are trying to get off booze.
While many have other goals in mind, not everybody is trying to get out. Part of the reason for having other goals, though, is the time that you can work is limited. After about the age of 35, the market is much smaller for you.
Yes they all have a choice. Why don't they just do it? Because life doesn't work that way. It may sure seem like it to those of us who live in a cozy heated home and enjoy internet access to sit in our chairs and discuss it with the mindset that everyone else in these positions is the same as us. But not in reality.
Maybe it is the case that you just don't want them to be just like you.
And with the legalization of prostitution it makes it all the much harder for these women to get help in getting out of prostitution since it's now legal.
Try just the opposite. You can't get help for something if you're afraid somethign worse is going to happen if you acknowledge that you're doing it.
You're definitely right about generalizations not being truth, and that has been my point.
It seems you're drawing quite a lot off of stereotypes that are inaccurate.
