> If a woman is poor, struggling to survive or trying to give a child a decent life in a society and economic system that is very sink or swim, do you consider it "consent" if she agrees to have sex with you so she can pay the rent, or have a decent meal, or buy the drugs she got hooked on dealing with depression and alienation, sold to her by a predatory drug dealer?
I give my boss consent to ask me to do stuff I'd rather not do. That's why they pay me. If I didn't get paid, I certainly wouldn't be doing things like attending Scrum meetings and fixing CSS bugs.
People tend to treat sex work like it's some sort of demeaning thing that no one should have to endure. If I had to choose between 1 hour of entertaining sexually entertaining someone for $1200 or 100 hours @ $12/hour of dealing with a shit boss in a demeaning dead-end job, I choose the former. And I choose neither if I don't need the money at all.
> People tend to treat sex work like it's some sort of demeaning thing that no one should have to endure.
I think this is exactly it. Many people can't imagine themselves having sex for money. Most people also can't imagine cutting into people as they do in surgery, but we don't ban surgery.
The purported "difference" is that surgery helps people. Sure, and helping a disabled person experience human intimacy is not helping them?
Another purported difference is that prostitution harms people where surgery does not. I think plastic surgery harms quite a few people, psychologically and physically.
The real "problem" here is people's hang ups about sex.
How the fsck is performing surgery analogous to being sexually penetrated by a stranger for money?
> Sure, and helping a disabled person experience human intimacy is not helping them?
First of all, it's all fake, there's no real intimacy there. Secondly, you make it sound like these whores take the job out of the goodness of their hearts. Having sex with cripples is the last thing on their mind... it's money first and foremost. Otherwise they'd just get a normal paying job like any other person who has self-dignity.
> The real "problem" here is people's hang ups about sex.
The real problem here is you misunderstanding human nature and attempting to normalize and rationalize something which clearly goes *against* human nature. Sex is not a commodity, selling sex for money is taboo and frowned upon in pretty much every society, even the so-called progressive ones that legalized prostitution. Since this stigma is universal to every society, there must be a psycho-biological reason for it, therefore prostitution is always going to be a niche, and never going to be "mainstreamed" ("My daughter is a prostitute!" said the proud mother).
> How the fsck is performing surgery analogous to being sexually penetrated by a stranger for money?
I just explained how. Read it again if you're not clear.
> First of all, it's all fake, there's no real intimacy there.
And you know this from first-hand experience I take it?
> Secondly, you make it sound like these whores take the job out of the goodness of their hearts. Having sex with cripples is the last thing on their mind... it's money first and foremost.
And I take it you work for your employer out of the goodness of your heart? No? So I guess the financial compensation must imply that you're not doing a good job. I mean, that is basically what you're saying.
> The real problem here is you misunderstanding human nature and attempting to normalize and rationalize something which clearly goes against human nature.
So what everyone agrees is "the oldest profession" is "against human nature". Haha, ok dude.
> Sex is not a commodity, selling sex for money is taboo and frowned upon in pretty much every society
No it's not. Some societies had accepted prostitution before they were colonized or conquered.
> Since this stigma is universal to every society, there must be a psycho-biological reason for it
Your pseudoscientific evolutionary justification is nonsense. The societies you're thinking of were colonized or conquered so there are obvious cultural reasons for shared taboos.
And even if your psycho-biological nonsense had even one iota of truth to it, it's completely irrelevant. By parity of reasoning we should therefore enshrine religious or supernatural theology in government policy because every society believed in supernatural supreme beings of some kind.
> therefore prostitution is always going to be a niche, and never going to be "mainstreamed" ("My daughter is a prostitute!" said the proud mother).
Ok, so it'll stay a niche. What's the problem? No one is going to be proud that their daughter works at McDonald's either. That's not a justification for why it should be illegal.
