General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I have the right to perform a sexual service in exchange for money. [View all]Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Legal prostitution would still be pimp-centered. And what's more if the law follows the well-trodden path of other industry regulation, the pimps will have more rights and protections than their workers. which becomes doubly dangerous when you consider that we're still looking at a very vulnerable sector of the workforce - pimp says "my way or the highway," well that's not actually a choice you can make - either you go their way or you go nowhere. It's the same coercive control disguised as choice in many other lower-end jobs.
Except at least your Wal-Mart manager isn't putting your ass on sale.
"We call it employment," indeed, and therein is the core of the problem - we accept that employees getting royally fucked over by their employers, coerced, manipulated, and abused, is "just part of the job.' There's this comfortable mythology of "free association" - don't like your job, well, just quit! ...And then what? Food and rent money rains down from the heavens until you land a job you like better? The power company is like "Oh, okay, we'll cut you slack, good luck on your dream job!" No, of course not, most lower-end jobs become mires that trap a person in a paycheck-to-paycheck existence where thy simply can't afford to hope for better, can't affort to step away, can't afford even the slightest interruption of that fiscal tightrope.
There is no such thing as "free association," not in reality - you're stuck. You can quit, but the penalty for doing so means that you actually can't, unless you're fortunate enough to have a fallback option, or someone to carry you along until the next job. And odds are, if you're prostituting, these aren't things you have.
Yes yes, go ahead, tell us about the college student paying off a few loans with freelance prostitution, I know you want to get it out of your system - but when you're done, go back and look at the industry as it actually exists, not as represented by a handful of publicized, best-case-scenario exceptions. Most hookers aren't out there because "i like sex and i like money ha hah ha, why not" they're there because it's really the only steady-ish pay available to them.
What I'm illustrating is that we are talking about taking existing industry problems and workplace abuses, paycheck-to-paycheck treadmills, and the coercion implied by this... and instead of applying it to the trade of labor, we are applying it to the trade of hyuman bodies themselves.
I find this a very problematic proposition. And to be frank I think a flawed illegality is actually better than putting the law behind the powerful and against the vulnerable, as would be the inevitable result of wholesale legalization and industrialization.because again, that's just how business and law interact - the people with the money, the power, and the connections get th protections under the law, and the more vulnerable persons in the arrangement get some scraps of platitude.
And just in case it didn't sink in, prostitutes are not comparable to drugs. One is a person. The other is an object. Treating prostitution as if it's just setting up a vending machine really ignores this distinction, as does blithely ignoring hte realities that would face these people as workers in a fringe industry.