Consider the example of a highway robber that holds you up at gunpoint and asks for your wallet on the threat of death. In this situation there is typically consent by the victim in handing over her wallet to the perpetrator - after all he has the _free will_ not to hand over his wallet.
In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.
I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_ choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz. housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2) does society provide these basic needs to all its members.
From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through college. But not everyone is middle class.
What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of an individuals creativity.
A person being robbed at gun point is being coerced. He is having a choice forced upon him by another person. Society, being composed of individuals all of whom do not want to be coerced has an interest in preventing coercion.
This is not true of having to work. The biological necessity of your body requiring food is not forced onto you by anybody. So nobody can be held responsible for it.
A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better, because depriving her of having to choose does not improve her life, while depriving a man of having to choose between being shot and giving up his wallet improves his life greatly.
Suppose you wander into the desert and get lost. Suppose you're on the verge of dying from thirst when another person shows up. He says "I'll take you back to civilization, but only if you agree to be my slave forever".
You're not any worse off than if the slaver didn't exist, because you can always choose to reject the slaver's offer. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Yet I think that most people would consider that a very unconvincing argument for permitting slavery: that a would-be slaver would simply not show up if slavery were illegal.
Arguing in favor of free will, you could say that all other things being the same, a world where you get lost in the desert and the slaver shows up is no worse than one where you get lost in the desert and nobody shows up.
Arguments in favor of control thus rely on all else not being the same, that making something illegal changes the wider society, not just any single individual's ability to do that thing.
If you have the idea of the "independent entrepreneur", that adult woman who is proud to use sex as a creative expression, it's true that she's making her life better. If it's a scared 15-year-old whose mom kicked her out because boyfriend was starting to make comments about her ass, and she has no idea where to go or what to do but a guy say she can have a place to sleep if she has sex with him (and then he starts pimping her out to his friends), that's a very different situation. Or if you're an LGBT teen and you're kicked out by your parents for being gay and fall into a similar situation.
The article is pretty nuanced.
"So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates."
The whole economic system we're in is coercive to many.
> A prostitute being given the option to sell her body for money actually makes her life better
It brings her money, no doubt. Does it also bring emotional/mental trauma? What if it was your job to exchange your body for money at a high rate daily/weekly/monthly? Would you be ok with your daughter being a sex worker? What about your wife or your mother?
Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.
The truth is that many sex workers look at the alternatives and see sex work as the easier option. And by far the most lucrative.
In fact, having spent time in a part of the world free from the residue of Christian morality, I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
They were baffled that sex could come without an exchange of something of value.
> Many jobs come with emotional trauma. Try working 14 hour shifts gluing heads on dolls in some provincial Chinese city. Or swimming through sewers to undo blockages in a Haiti slum.
While a factory worker gluing heads on dolls might compare themselves to a successful CEO and feel a very low sense of self worth, I'm not entirely convinced that having sex with strangers in exchange for money wouldn't bring on an any different set of self worth problems.
> I know many women who mock females who 'give it up for free' as foolish.
I do agree that most women see performing sexual acts on a man as an exchange, especially in power. In their eyes, as a man, you are fortunate if this woman "decides" to let you have sex with her.
As a sex worker in my eyes, you are getting rid of your power/right to choose who you want to have sex with/when because it is linked to "I need to pay my rent".
I believe a sex worker's self-worth and mental trauma take on new levels as soon as a sex worker has sex with somebody they wouldn't have had sex with in a typical romantic/casual hookup situation.
The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.
Why is that particular act singled out? Humans need to do lots of things both to ensure individual survival and the survival of the species. Why is "the human reproductive act" morally different from, say, paying someone money to cook food for you? Why is genuinely immoral work (such as advertising) given a free pass?
Part of it, historically, is the "reproductive" part. Cooking food for you doesn't result in a pregnancy and a kid who then grows up with a mom who was by definition in the position to consider sex work the best choice. And in fact if you're the child of an exploited sex worker (as opposed to the independent entrepreneur), you are a child in high danger of being exploited yourself, because exploiting you can be quite lucrative.
Now, we could help children by helping people and providing social services -- but it's easier to just make prostitution illegal.
What if I pay a security guard (or a soldier for the army for that matter) with an implicit non-trivial risk of being killed by an intruder he's there to repel? That seems like an even more significant "act" that will also affect their children, as well as a lot of others potentially. Not speaking of the gravity of the act itself for the person being paid. Should that also be illegal?
I agree with this. A 'happy ending massage' worker "has to" give a 'happy ending' to a customer, and a vet "has to" shove his hand elbow deep up a cows orifice. Somehow we treat the first ones as victims/immorals and the second ones as doing noble work.
> What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation.
Uh, that's totally deniable.
Ten years ago, Germany legalized prostitution in an attempt to reduce crime and improve sex workers rights, standing, etc. Curiously at the same time, Sweden made prostitution illegal (incl. soliciting), for the exact same reasons.
Ten years later, the outcome is pretty clear. Germany is seeing exploitation and trafficking on a much larger scale, mostly because the criminals can more easily hide behind a screen of legality. Sweden sees less trafficking and exploitation.
Just declaring something legal or illegal is not sufficient to solve any kind of societal issue. The right laws need to be in place to be effective.
I have no idea what Germany did, but if all they did was one day say "hey, it's legal to be a sex worker now, go nuts!" ... then the outcome they got is not surprising at all. Even if they did more than that, it's a complex issue, and you need a comprehensive legal framework in place in order to ensure that exploited sex workers have a path to justice.
If the response from exploiters is "well, sex work is legal", and the law buys that and looks the other way, then the law was not made particularly well.
> depends on what _alternative_ choices are available
Doesn't that put a negative stigma around sex work? It makes it sound like sex workers should/would only get into sex work if they had no other options available.
Anecdata here, but I knew a couple of sex workers (one was a stripper, one was an escort) at university. Both of them looked at their options - food service worker, work/study job in the bookstore, and retail employee at the local big box stores and decided that the level of compensation, ability to set one's own hours, ability to choose ones own clients, and relative level of risk was such that being a sex worker was more remunerative and gratifying.
They had other options. They chose sex work knowing the risks, knowing they could quit if they wanted to, and knowing their alternatives.
I'm aware that not every sex worker enters sex work that way, but it's equally wrong to say that all sex workers do sex work because they have no other options.
In the same way, you have the _free will_ not to work, but the consequences of not working are ending up on the streets. As a special case of this, a prostitute has the free will not to work, on the threat of ending up on the streets. The only difference between a generic worker and a prostitute is that it is the human reproductive act itself that is being commodified.
I guess that the question of whether prostitution is exploitative or not, and whether generic work is exploitative or not, depends on what _alternative_ choices are available: Does society guarantee that you will not end up on the streets i.e. (1) is there a scarcity in the basic human needs of society, viz. housing, jobs, the recognition in law of that someone is a citizen etc. (2) does society provide these basic needs to all its members.
From this framework it's possibly to argue that _in principle_ prostitution is exploitative. It is no more exploitative than any other form of work, but perhaps has a tendency to attract the most vulnerable in society who do not have a safety net to fall back on. So I don't see anything especially exploitative about a middle class woman becoming a stripper to get through college. But not everyone is middle class.
What's undeniable _in practice_, is that legal prostitution leads to less criminal behaviour and exploitation. Hopefully we can work to change the conditions that make prostitution exploitative as opposed to an expression of an individuals creativity.