Should prostitution be legal?

[GeorgeParker]

Again, I recognized it as humor - all is well. Was just teasing back.

Yes, I recognized that.

[Rogar]

Sorry - I think I'm getting confused. I wasn't trying to define sexual exploitation, but rather agreeing that "pimping also seems to be illegal. It falls under their definition of sexual exploitation.".

My "hamburger" example was in reference to "Apparently providing sexual services for pay, as in prostitution, is legal. But the clients, who are primarily men, are committing a criminal act by using such a service."

No apology necessary. Near as I can tell sexual exploitation depends on who is defining it. The Canadian government seems to define it as using the services of a prostitute, near as I can tell.

Moral issues don't always follow the best of pure logic.

[happystuff]

[QUOTE=Rogar;392197]No apology necessary. Near as I can tell sexual exploitation depends on who is defining it. The Canadian government seems to define it as using the services of a prostitute, near as I can tell.

Moral issues don't always follow the best of pure logic.[/ of QUOTE]

So true.

[GeorgeParker]

Apparently providing sexual services for pay, as in prostitution, is legal. But the clients, who are primarily men, are committing a criminal act by using such a service."

If the laws there are like the ones where I live, the thing that makes it illegal is the customer offering to pay for sex. That makes it "soliciting for prostitution" because offering someone money is similar enough to coercion for it to be illegal. If the woman asked for money, and the man agreed, then the legalities would get very murky IMO.

Solicitation of Prostitution Under the New Texas Penal Code §43.021. Under the new Texas law, it remains a crime to solicit prostitution even if no money is exchanged (or other form of payment) and/or no sexual conduct transpires. It remains a crime in Texas merely to ask for sex in exchange for any type of payment.

[GeorgeParker]

Sorta did. There’s a whole wide world of experiences out there…. The trick is to find a niche that matches your skill set and available market.

"Sweet dreams are made if this. Who am I to disagree."

[boss mare]

Wearing a mask isn't that different from wearing a gag if that's your niche. Not my idea of a good time.

I think you are being a bit of a drama queen here. Its not like a piece of material is like a leather ball gag gimp mask . You can google that if you wish

[jp1]

Wearing a mask isn't that different from wearing a gag if that's your niche. Not my idea of a good time.

Undoubtedly there are teenage boys in the world today who have developed mask fetishes over the past year.

[Tybee]

Rob, my heart goes out to that lady you talked to in Mexico. What a sad life. I wish the social response was "what can we do to educate people, to give people opportunities to work, how can we help others achieve what we have already?" and not "yeah, let's legalize their despair, their abuse, their lack of opportunity." What a sad world we live in, that folks are titillated by the despair of others.

[Jane v2.0]

People can be helped without continuing to criminalize prostitution.

[bae]

Perhaps relevant passage I came across today, in Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right To Sex”, an included essay she wrote for The London Review Of Books:

Since the 1980s, the wind has been behind a feminism which takes desire for the most part as given – your desire takes the shape that it takes – and which insists that acting on that desire is morally constrained only by the boundaries of consent. Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic: it is instead merely wanted or unwanted. In this sense, the norms of sex are like the norms of capitalist free exchange. What matters is not what conditions give rise to the dynamics of supply and demand – why some people need to sell their labour while others buy it – but only that both buyer and seller have agreed to the transfer. It would be too easy, though, to say that sex positivity represents the co-option of feminism by liberalism. Generations of feminists and gay and lesbian activists have fought hard to free sex from shame, stigma, coercion, abuse and unwanted pain. It has been essential to this project to stress that there are limits to what can be understood about sex from the outside, that sexual acts can have private meanings that cannot be grasped from a public perspective, that there are times when we must take it on trust that a particular instance of sex is OK, even when we can’t imagine how it could be. Thus feminism finds itself not only questioning the liberal distinction between the public and the private, but also insisting on it.

Yet it would be disingenuous to make nothing of the convergence, however unintentional, between sex positivity and liberalism in their shared reluctance to interrogate the formation of our desires. Third and fourth-wave feminists are right to say, for example, that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial labour undertaken by most women. And they are right to say that what sex workers need are legal and material protections, safety and security, not rescue or rehabilitation. But to understand what sort of work sex work is – just what physical and psychical acts are being bought and sold, and why it is overwhelmingly women who do it, and overwhelmingly men who pay for it – surely we have to say something about the political formation of male desire. And surely there will be similar things to say about other forms of women’s work: teaching, nursing, caring, mothering. To say that sex work is ‘just work’ is to forget that all work – men’s work, women’s work – is never just work: it is also sexed.

Original article:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/...e-right-to-sex