The Laws That Sex Workers Really Want

Via Justin J Lehmiller.

Thought provoking:

The too long didn’t listen version: Free markets are best.

I used to know a woman who once had a job as an intern with NATO doing intelligence work into human trafficking. She insisted prostitution should remain illegal because it was too difficult to determine if woman in a brothel were there by choice or under threat of violence. This didn’t seem quite like the proper solution to me but I didn’t have a good response. Now I do.

Watch the video and learn for yourself.

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3 thoughts on “The Laws That Sex Workers Really Want

  1. Straw-man arguments. The strongest arguments against prostitution is that
    (1) it spreads venereal disease
    (2) it provides an easy alternative to stable relationships – decreasing the number of marriages, destabilizing marriages, decreasing the number of children born into healthy homes.
    3) in providing an easy alternative, it takes away a primary incentive for men to strive and compete. Without the need to impress a future spouse, we get fewer engineers and doctors.
    (3) it produces fatherless children who need more social services compared to other children.
    4) prostitutes and their pimps victimize their customers. Talk to any sailor, and you’ll hear stories of naïve men being robbed and beaten. She completely ignores customer safety.

    What do the workers want, that she missed?
    1) More welfare. Their ideal would be to get paid without doing any work. She mentioned unions at the end. If the unions have their way, they have competition criminalized, just like every union.
    2) Drama, adventure, thrills, rebellion. If you talk with any rebellious teen who wants to leave home with no plan, their fall back is either that they have magic undiscovered talents (acting, singing, painting) or a romanticized version of sex-work.
    3) Honey trapping a rich, desirable man. Reference the movie Pretty Woman. The acceptable substitute is more welfare.

    • Without the need to impress a future spouse, we get fewer engineers and doctors

      Whoa, whoa, whoa… Are you trying to tell me that chicks dig engineers? Damnit, why did I become a musician?

  2. Some of those points come from prostitution being illegal, your drawback #4 for example. It would be instructive to look at the situation in Nevada (outside Clark Co.) and in Holland, both places where prostitution is legal. Some of the other drawbacks seem to be of the form “some people will make bad choices”. Sure enough, but freedom means that this happens just as other people making good choices.
    As for “easy alternative”, I don’t think that’s generally valid. Even when it’s legal and readily available, prostitution is not seen by its customers as a desirable replacement for a stable relationship. You mentioned sailors, who have for millennia been traditional consumers — but that’s precisely because they are itinerants. Their profession stands in the way of a stable relationship.

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