| MrWayne said: That's some really hot takes you have here in this thread. 1) prostitution: If you're a little bit familiar with the history of prostitution you should know that abolishing it is basically impossible, illegalising prostitution only creates a huge black market without any government control or standards for sex workers. 2) What's your problem with porn? 3) surrogacy: Sure the exploitation of poor women is a problem but it can be minimised if you force the companies to take proper care of their surrogate mothers. I also fail to see how surrogacy is sexist or misogynist in its nature. Doesn't surrogacy primarily help women who can't bear a child themself? |
Regarding prostitution
Okay well history also shows that it's rather impossible to completely stamp out murder in any society of scale too, so I then guess legalizing it, thereby making it as common as possible, is the most sensible course, right? Or hey, if you ban assault weapons, you'll just relegate their sale to the criminal underground and they won't become any less common, just like the NRA says...right?
Around the turn of the century, a number of Western countries embarked on divergent experiments of how to reform prostitution policy. Some introduced what subsequently has become known as the "Nordic model" and criminalized the buying of sex, while others introduced full legalization of brothels, pimping, all of it. Today, the Nordic model -- which criminalizes sex-buying, pimping, and brothel ownership (but doesn't penalize prostitutes themselves, as it views prostituted women as the victims of an exploitative industry) -- continues to be embraced by more countries all the time, while full legalization, by contrast, hasn't had any new takers in over a decade. You know why that is? Because criminalizing johns works and legalizing everything makes the trafficking of women and children more common.
After Germany introduced full legalization of prostitution in 2003, for example, they saw a 70% increase in sex trafficking within the decade. Today, Germany's "brothel king", Jurgon Rudloff, is currently serving a five year prison sentence for similarly trafficking sex slaves in from abroad to service the heightened demand for prostitute services that resulted from legalization. In the Netherlands, most of the legal brothels have now been closed because they've been caught trafficking sex slaves in (which isn't legal) and the same is true of those famous communities in Nevada where prostitution has been formally legalized here in the U.S. Amsterdam's new mayor, Femke Halsema of GroenLinks (a left-leaning environmentalist party similar to the Green Party here in the U.S.), who is also the city's first female mayor, will be banning tours of the city's (in)famous red light district starting next year in a policy move supported by 80% of the city's prostitutes and is actively weighing other major changes such as banning prostitute windows. The city has been overrun by wealthy, foreign partiers, who now outnumber actual citizens on any given day of the year, as a result largely of legalizing brothels. That's how well it's going. One senses a definite policy direction here away from limitless permissiveness and toward cracking down. I could go on, but it's really the same story everywhere.
Liberals and progressives like to make the claim that full legalization of prostitution benefits the women employed in said field. When I point out that the actual result of that policy everywhere has been major increases in enslavement, not unionization (as they assure us), I find that they don't have much to say. It's as if they've just been choosing to buy into the talking points of a kazillion-dollar global industry, most often for self-interested reasons...
Prostitution is a major problem in my community (and I don't just mean among younger women) for two basic reasons: 1) because drugs are a major problem in my community, and 2) because, resulting in no small part from the former, sexual abuse is also not uncommon. Most of the prostituted women here had experienced both drug addiction and sexual abuse at the hands of a loved one before entering the field, and both of those things really seem to play a role. Pimps often pay women in drugs, for example, to keep them trapped in the business and rape is something that I can attest to from first-hand experience tends to tell you a lot about what you're worth to the world. Personal liberty is not an appreciable factor in the equation, in my observation. Most of them hate working as prostitutes, and indeed many investigations have born out that prostitutes tend to survive by dissociating themselves from their situation in the moment (as in pretending that they're somewhere else, doing something else), which I think tells you just how much "fun" they're actually having. Making a pattern of dissociation sometimes even leads to the wholesale loss of one's sense of identity, to where they no longer remember things like who they are, where they are, etc.
It ought to tell you something that a recent survey of American high school students found that most wouldn't have sex with someone they didn't want to for less than $2 million, while the average prostitute does so for less than $200. What does that tell you about the level of self-worth that's involved?
The goal here should be to minimize the commonality of prostitution, not to normalize what is, matter-of-factly, rape in all but semantics. That's what the Nordic model, as it has become known, does. And that's why it's the approach that's supported by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.
Concerning pornography
I'm reminded of a quote by Andrea Dworkin:
"Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women."
Pornography is basically just prostitution on film. We are likewise talking about the same basic demographic here composing its workforce: survivors of sexual abuse. That's who you're masturbating to. The fact is that the sex industry as a whole could not exist without rape. This fact alone is reason enough for one who possesses a conscience to object thereto.
But it's much more than that. Pornography isn't just a reflection and outgrowth of rape culture, it also reinforces it. The wanton proliferation of online pornography in recent decades is demonstrably changing the sex practices of the male population in the direction of abuse. We are seeing major increases in practices like heterosexual anal sex (which women's bodies are not designed for), involuntary choking, "jackhammering" to the point of causing vulva fissures, and other practices that men are learning from online pornography, and it's resulting in women starting to lose interest in having sex with men altogether. (see point 4 of this article for a metric ton of research on this subject).
And frankly, pornography also just makes the sex lives of everyday women more miserable in ways that are more psychological as well. For example, survey data over the last two decades has found that, as this article puts it, "Since 1999, the number of women experiencing orgasm during intercourse always or nearly always has fallen from 56 percent to 46 percent." The author of the linked article mainly credits the proliferation of online pornography in the interim with that result, being as it was found that "in 50 popular video clips included in the study [on porn's impact], only 18.3 percent of women were shown to reach orgasm, and stimulation of the clitoris or vulva only featured in 25 percent of these."
On surrogacy
Surrogacy is a specifically misogynistic practice by virtue of the fact that it harms only women by definition.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 10 August 2019
