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Comment by selmnoo | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing probably because the secular crowd doesn't ascribe so much power significance to sexual matters. They don't see a girl being forced to do sex work (of any variety) as having been exploited in any way. What's interesting, I suppose, is that a new form feminism brewing (especially among women of younger age) shares these values -- they see sex work just like any other work to get money, and so the sex work is just fine and should be let as is according to them.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this if you have any.

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This is a messy topic. If you take two liberal/secular/progressive moral atoms -- "there is nothing intrinsically wrong with selling sex" and "sexual coersion is always wrong" -- you immediately arrive at a conundrum. How do you have legalized prostitution without allowing for sexual coersion? Even regulated, people will still enter into the trade who are being coerced by circumstance: starving children, foreclosure, medical expenses... just because someone finds some things worse than sex work does not mean they truly find it acceptable.

(You can have other discussions about whether people should be coerced into selling shoes, but I think sex is special enough to warrant its own discussion.)

ETA: by 'starving children', I meant if your children are starving, you might 'voluntarily' enter the sex trade yourself to feed them. Constraining the discussion to consenting adults.

> How do you have legalized prostitution without allowing for sexual coersion? Even regulated, people will still enter into the trade who are being coerced by circumstance: starving children, foreclosure, medical expenses...

These are effectively answered by the broader liberal project: no one should ever be starving, homeless, or denied medical attention. When you take away these subtler forms of coercion, you have a far easier time finding plausible the notion that the sex worker in front of you is doing it willingly.

On top of this, our puritanism is being slowly--glacially slowly, but still--eroded away. Once that is sufficiently weak, we can make the industry more transparent and accountable, making it possible to do sex work safely, legally, and because you want to, without risk of future stigma.

We're not going to fix it overnight, but the various projects are moving along and a surprising amount of them are already in motion: none of the things I've said are unknown to mainstream awareness, regardless of the average person's opinion on them, and the arc of history is positive from a global perspective.

The modern generation of feminism has a complicated relationship with sex. On one hand, it's generally sex-positive. On the other hand, there is a much greater willingness than with previous generations of feminists to acknowledge that men and women don't perceive sex in the same way. There is still a deep-seated feeling that sex is something men take or earn and women give up.[1] That feeling is what makes sex work, if not inherently exploitive, at least inherently susceptible to being exploitive.

[1] Go to Manhattan and talk to a bunch of 25-35 year olds. Count how many men are sick of just "giving it up" and want to get married versus how many women express a similar view.

>Go to Manhattan and talk to a bunch of 25-35 year olds. Count how many men are sick of just "giving it up" and want to get married versus how many women express a similar view.

I am a woman in my 30s and I have never ever once in my life heard anyone else use the term "give it up." I am going to go out on a limb and say people just don't talk like that. Not the women I associate and have continued to associate with through my 20s and 30s.

And the real data might be surprising.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/21/why-men-are...

Rather than living up to the stereotype of commitment-phobic bachelors, modern men reported that they fell in love just as often as women, were just as likely to believe that marriage is “forever,” and scarcely bit when asked whether they'd prefer to “just date a lot of people.” But most shocking was how many of the single men wanted to settle down—and how willing they were to lower their standards to make that happen. A whopping 31 percent of adult men said they’d commit to a person they were not in love with—as long as as she had all the other attributes they were looking for in a mate—and 21 percent said they'd commit under those same circumstances to somebody they weren't sexually attracted to. The equivalent numbers for women were far lower.

the percentage of men saying "yes" to imperfect committment was actually highest among men in their 20s, almost 40 percent of whom said they'd commit without love (compared with 22 percent of women).

I'm using that phrase not because I've heard it recently, but because it conveys the nature of the sentiment I've seen. Many women, at least by my anecdotal experience, see sex as something that they give up, and are expected to, after certain checkpoints in a dating relationship. I've never seen a man express this particular feeling.

I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country. At least anecdotally, women express a noticeably greater frustration with not being in a committed relationship than in other parts of the country. In a way it's quite the opposite phenomenon of what I saw in my engineering days, with a disproportionately male crowd dissatisfied by their dating prospects. However, there is a palpable difference in the attitude of the two groups towards sex. The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.

>Many women, at least by my anecdotal experience, see sex as something that they give up, and are expected to, after certain checkpoints in a dating relationship.

This is absolutely absurd and I don't know what kind of women you are hanging out with. I've had frank honest women to women discussions about sex and relationships and this sentiment has never come up. EVER.

>I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country

This is absolutely false.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/02/neigh...

http://nycedc.tumblr.com/post/16175652438/ratio-of-single-me...

http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/smitten/2012/10/s...

>The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.

The survey I presented above does not support this.

Here's a better writeup

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/survey-shows-single-men-commit-...

and here's another:

http://magicbaltimore.com/3386661/more-black-men-want-to-set...

Nearly 43 percent of single black men said they’re looking for a long-term partner that can eventually lead to marriage. That’s according to a new poll of nearly 1,100 African-Americans out today from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The survey asked questions about a wide range of topics, including communities, finance and dating. Respondents between 18 and 49 years old who were divorced, widowed or never married were asked whether they were currently seeking a long-term romantic commitment. Roughly half of the men said yes; just a quarter of the women said the same.

> This is absolutely absurd and I don't know what kind of women you are hanging out with. I've had frank honest women to women discussions about sex and relationships and this sentiment has never come up. EVER.

YMMV. Among other occasions, I was just talking about this subject with my wife the other day, based on her conversations with some of her friends. I should note that I've also spent nearly my whole life in cities listed on your first link as being one with the highest ratio of single women to single men.

> This is absolutely false.

Using your own data, New York City is #4 on the list for the highest ratio of single women to single men, and from the tumblr link you can see that Manhattan skews more heavily towards single women then New York City as a whole.

On top of there being fewer men in Manhattan to begin with, a higher percentage of those men have never been married: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/09/new_yorke....

All I can say is, talk to more women. I haven't noticed this sentiment you're talking about.

That article sounds like it supports a corrollary of rayiner's theory, that men are sick of having to "earn it". The article certainly seems to support that it is indeed women who control sex, and anytime they "settle for less" they feel like they're "giving it up".

Little do they know that even in marriage the dynamics don't change much, only the number of people involved (married people stereotype joke :-))

Adults with free choice should be able to buy and sell sex. There's no intrinsic problem with that.

The trickiness comes from what is meant by "free choice". Is a drug addict free to make a choice about sex work? How about someone with huge debts?

And existing laws should be aimed at protecting the more vulnerable people (children; trafficked workers; etc) but have unintended consequences of pushing away from working from a well run brothel and towards working off the street or a poorly run brothel.

If adults with free choice are able to buy and sell sex, then economics and the dynamics of capitalism are going to compel disadvantaged people into selling sex, far more than happens today. I'm not going to argue that the vice laws we have today are coherently enforceable or practicable, but there is more to the issue of outlawing prostitution than Puritan moralism.

If we expand our aversion to people being coerced into sex to an aversion to people being coerced into harmful work of any kind, we quickly find some pretty serious problems with modern society all over the place. The concept of the standard "Small Town, America" coal miner starts to appear pretty damn questionable. Forget vice and potential psychological damage; they are literally trading years off their life to pull themselves out of abject poverty. Maybe mining should be a vice.

Clandestine mining would likely not be a serious concern if we were to ban mining, but on the other hand mining is far more essential that luxury service industries.

Edit: I think I should clarify this. I do think that reviewing the role of economic coercion in all industries is a worthwhile endeavor, I'm not trying to throw that out there like some sort of absurd slippery slope. However I don't think this discussion will ever happen without an extra push, a push like puritanical values provides in limited cases.

Smoking bans in bars might be a good example. I think that most people agree that it is a decide thing to do, to improve the quality of life of bar workers if for no other reason, but these are basically air-quality laws that are more stringent than our normal air-quality laws. I think the reason why bar workers get the benefit of these laws, but factory workers need to rely on less stringent OSHA air quality regulations, is because in the case of bars the air quality issue is the result of something that has gotten a pretty effective moral outrage campaign.

For some more background on the need (or lack thereof) of reviewing work conditions in all industries, I warmly recommend:

"Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Globalization of Organized Crime"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globaliza...

The fact that other industries manage to (both literally and figuratively) throw their own workers under the bus, should give extra pause in legalizing work that have strong associations to abuse, degradation and harm.

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