Why does Belle Knox consider herself a feminist?

[BainsBane]

100. You mean the irritating people who talk about prostitution as it really is?

as opposed to a theoretical notion of what others want to pretend it is? Yeah, I can see how that would bum people out determined to avoid thinking thinking about underage sex and enslaved workers they consider inconsequential. Why deal with evidence when theories of captialist Utopias are so much easier?

You weighed in on the other thread and then went right back to creating one-dimensional strawwomen to mock. That, in my view, nullifies your other post and shows that thoughtful OP had no impact on you whatsover.

It's all an abstract game to you and others here. Raise the standard of living. Right. Like when is that going to happen? How? In the face of jobs going oversees and structural changes in the economy that most hurt the poor? With a government that won't pass a basic raise in the minimum wage? You know it won't, but reality is irrelevant. That you say it is enough to wish away the existence of millions of minors who are forced into prostitution either through desperate economic privation or forms of extra-economic coercion--an abusive parent, enslavement, etc. If it were about theoretical scenarios, any idiot could come up with a solution. Reality is far more complex.

The fact is without severe poverty, prostitution would be exceedingly rare. The Cuban experience makes that clear. Under Batista, American men came to Cuba to go to the casinos and hire prostitutes. That ended with the Revolution, and prostitution became a metaphor for American exploitation of Cuba. Prostitution was rare until the Soviet Union abandoned subsidies to the Island shortly before its collapse. Prostitution has since returned because people are struggling as they didn't under the Soviet era. The ability of men to buy sex depends on severe poverty. I don't for a minute think the people who see commodification of sex as sacrosanct want that to go away.

You can talk about adult consensual behavior all you want. It doesn't make it the exclusive or even dominant transaction in that industry. A great deal of prostitution is of underage girls and boys. Many if not most prostitutes start underage. You had a first hand account of that in Ism's HOF OP which you clearly made a point of ignoring. There is always the argument one poster made that girls as young as nine "willingly choose prostitution as a profession," which he believed made having "sex" with them consensual.

There is no way to find a solution that minimizes harm when people adamantly ignore that harm. That people consistently refuse to to deal with the sex trade as it actually exists makes clear they cosider those lives inconsequential. The self-serving capitalist ideology of the rights of the individual is about propping up power and privilege. The unyielding focus on the individual as the repository of rights, as opposed to the common good, privileges those who have the means to assert their rights over others. It's as true in Citizens United as in this discussion of prostutiton. Those on the other end of it--the poor, teens and children--are exploited, abused, and raped, which is what an adult does when he purchases sex from someone under the age of consent.

I think if you were actually confident in your position on this issue, you would not feel compelled to trivialize the arguments of others. That tells me you can't deal with the arguments as actually articulated and instead feel compelled to create a parody to mock them.