R0bert thanks for supporting my input.

I have a strong preference for a more neutral term such as sex worker over prostitute as I cannot say I commonly see prostitute used in anything other a negative slant, and if used in non-industry related ways is always negative.

People talk of desperation and being trapped in the industry, this can be true of any industry- I've not met many furniture movers who chose their career - sure some are happy, but no one is seeking to "save" them or disband the service they provide.

This is the difference that stigma can, and does make. One of the obstacles in changing careers from the sex industry (besides working longer hours for less pay, no longer having a job that directly improves the happiness of others, no longer having the choice of which clients you to provide professional services to) is what can I put on my resume for the last however many years. A blank resume is bad, but with stigma around sex work, putting sex work is worse. Sex workers have fantastic communication and people skills, it's all customer service, negotiating, reading people, ability to work independently, openness and often freely accepting people as they are and focusing on the positives. Private workers, add phone skills, advertising, general business acumen and skills and many others.

All valuable skills in almost any industry. I list that though, I will be openly and freely discriminated against. The stigma forces me to lie about my work history if I wish to appear employable. As a fiercely honest person, this kind of omission is soul-crushing - the idea that me as I am, and part of my life experience is so inherently unacceptable.

If sex work is seen as real work, and the skills associated with it recognised, stop pushing views of shame, lack of morality, and weakness. Then you would be helping the workers you wish to, the ones who may want a career change and leaving the people who are happily working to their own thing.

Shaming people into silence helps no one.

It is the grossest moral and intellectual blunder to confuse consensual and non-consensual activities.

I have shown that prostitution is on a continuum with heterosexuality in general; it merges by insensible degrees into other casual sex and male-female companionship of a hundred kinds, and into girlfriendhood and marriage.

But no-one has shown in any way that prostitution, or any other consensual sex for that matter, is on any kind of relevant continuum with “violence”. Violent and consensual interactions are, morally speaking, categorically different. To confuse play with fighting, peace with war, consensual sex with rape, employment with slavery, only shows the worst kind of censorious confusion.

Get this: - the consent of competent parties answers all issues of morality.

The feminists vilifying prostitution seem to get their script straight from patriarchy – hating women for their own sexual independence, hating men for extra-marital sex, and asserting that, properly understood, women are incapable of making decisions for themselves.

All the anti-prostitution arguments founder on this double standard.

If men, by paying women for consensual sex, are exploiting them, then obviously men who do *not* pay women for consensual sex are in a worse not a better position, and all casual should be criminalized too. And any women who marries for any material consideration should have her husband imprisoned. That’s the level of illiberal moral and intellectual gibberish that is being urged here.

rational-debate, your argument, far from being rational, is entirely illogical. It’s circular. You haven’t even begun to join issue.

The fact that you don’t approve of other people’s private and consensual sexual activities does not make them “violent” or “demeaning” and provides NO JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER for shooting, electrocuting, handcuffing, or locking anyone in a cage. It’s you who need to understand you’re talking about real people and quit your academic pontifications.

Tristan thinks that if someone feels lonely, therefore someone else is guilty of “violence”. But he thinks if the police beat someone into submission or imprisone them as a means to fund the forced redistributions that are the basis of his entire political philosophy, *that’s* not violence.

(cont.)
That’s just caring and sharing presumably. It would only be necessary for Tristan to arbitrarily decide that sexual services are as much of a “need” as the internet, for his moral theory to justify rape, let alone prostitution.

If Ameline suffered any non-consensual sex, there is no question that that is and was bad, and should be a serious crime.

But that apart, the fact that one feels bad, even very bad, doing something, doesn’t convert consensual activities into “violence”. I experience a variety of very strong negative emotions, at work but I don’t *therefore* declare that employment should be illegal (and spare me the bigoted assumption that only women are capable of real feeling).

An 18 year old woman friend is visiting Australia and wanted work. She *wouldn’t consider* prostitution because she already knows she wouldn’t like it. So she got work cleaning homes.

I would no way accept working at a blast furnace but at one time that was the only work available. Did I declare I’m the victim of violence? No. I *took responsibility* for my *freedom* and *changed* what I was doing until I got work I could handle. That’s what Ameline should have done. “Gender inequality” has got nothing to do with it. What’s that supposed to mean? Ameline will only stop advocating the violent persecution of others when men give birth to an equal number of babies? Or when an equal number of women buy an equal number of sexual services in equal positions from an equal number of men for equal amounts? It is such mental confusion that caused Ameline to disown the responsibility for her own actions which caused her distress, not gender inequality.

For centuries in many societies, various consensual sexual activities have been persecuted as “crimes” or abuses, including homosexuality, fornication, masturbation, anal sex, group sex, adultery and prostitution.

But even when the meddlers’ intolerance is armed with the punishments of death, mutilation, torture or imprisonment, they have never prevented these sexual activities, so the chance of stopping prostitution is precisely zero.

This is not about preventing “violence”, which
a) is already illegal, and
b) does not describe consensual activities,
any more than rules against masturbation are about preventing “abuse”, than rules against homosexuality are about preserving “the order of nature”, or than rules against adultery are about preventing the displeasure of “God”.

These are laws to impose sexual morality by force, based on sheer blind prejudice, simple as that. Its own advocates are unable to provide any moral or rational justification but perfectly circular argument. The author is in exactly the same category as the Pasdaran, the religious police of Iran, or the Taliban, who go around caning and flogging people for “immodesty”: an unprovoked attack by the self-appointed VIOLENT guardians of other people’s sexual morality.

Pelican
Your illogic and hypocrisy are staggering.

The article is openly suggesting that *men* should be imprisoned for *consensual* sex. So men are not being “over-defensive” when they point out that there is no rational or moral basis for the argument.

Similarly, the fact that men may want to have sex with women, and that women may be willing to accept payment to agree, does not self-evidently prove that men “hate” women you bigoted fool. On the contrary, it is you being hateful by urging people should be imprisoned for private consensual activity that is precisely none of your business, based on nothing but your own intolerance, illogic, and belief in forcibly improving others. So much for love, for caring, and equality.

The real victims in this world are those who are on the receiving end of aggression, not those who don't like the consequences of their own actions.

Women are not presumptively incompetent and don’t need you advocating police and prisons to keep them on the straight and narrow. Hypocrite!

Melanie
Yes it’s the attack of the prurient censorious God-botherers all over again I’m afraid, only this time their god is the State.

Could you let us know whether the stigmatization comes equally, and equally viciously, from men and women? Or is one sex more prone to indulge this vice than others.

Thank you for your input Sam Jandwich. (Great name)

I am clearly distinguishing between consensual arrangements in those more legitimate establishments and environments where sex workers are in control of their choices in all aspects of the business.

Peter Hume has unfortunately read more into my comments without reading them fully. Where have I suppored imprisoning men for using sex workers. My argument is if you imprison the sex worker then you must also imprison the user if the activity is deemed illegal.

Read first, think and then print.

Peter your words are so elegant and logical that it brings light to my view of humanity which often cloud everytime people get on the stigmatisation vice. I love that you call it a vice, people's blind pursuance of it against all sense and logic it seems it can be little else.

This:
The real victims in this world are those who are on the receiving end of aggression, not those who don't like the consequences of their own actions.

Is one of the best sentences I have read in recent times.

Stigma is a tricky one to pin on who, perhaps through luck or perhaps though how I openly present myself it is the rarest of occasions I have experienced this to my face. By face I mean in person, person to person, not though people hiding behind monitors, sitting in offices, universities and government buildings.

It is easy to dehumanise, to demoralise and discount the views, feelings and experiences of people who to you have no face. I will let people at times go on anti-sex-work rants, I am open, I am out, and when I disclose my status, and relate my views, feelings and experiences people seem to come to a more reasonable position. People from all walks of life, I will have discussions with people anywhere.

Face to face people people don't tend to say you must feel this, you must think that. They ask, they accept my view. The do not dictate how I must feel or think. I am not all sex workers, but I am one and I am a real person, with valid thoughts, feeling and experiences. It's too easy to just look at a group, and make broad statements, hurtful statements and impose rules and forget that group is all people.