Prostitution again

Tiny Judas has replied to my post about prostitution.

I think maybe you are missing the point of what an explicit acceptance of prostitution suggests about ever worsening gender relations in society.

As "lad's magazines" become more and more shameless in their objectification as women as sexual object the last thing we need is this cemented in a legal sense.

This suggestion women as a passive sexual commodity both silences the woman and reinforces the male conception that the man is the figure of agency in sexual relations.

This is undoubtedly an unhealthy paradigm to be seen to be supporting, especially in the light of giving naive young men (more specifically naive young footballers it would seem) the impression that they can (or indeed, have to) go out and 'get laid' in a threateningly active way that widens even further the already dangerous no-man's land between consensual sex and rape.

And don't throw Heidi Fliss at me, her and her scheme are undoubtedly very much the exception that proves the rule that in Prostitution it is women who are sold and men who buy.

[Emphasis mine—DK] No, in consensual prostitution, the women sell themselves, not "are sold". Yes, men are generally the buyers, that is true.

But also note that it is the women who are prosecuted and the men who are not (notwithstanding the change of law proposed in Scotland).

As for the point that it "widens even further the already dangerous no-man's land between consensual sex and rape", it is also true that the incidence of prostitutes being raped is quite high, and they are discouraged from reporting it for fear of too many questions about the circumstances. If prostitution were legalised, then those women would have the full protection of the law in a way which they do not currently and they could be protected from violent pimps (one of the rationales for the Edinburgh tolerance zone); indeed, they are currently persecuted by the law for providing a service that men pay for. That seems unfair and likely to increase the "ever worsening gender relations in society".

Prostitution, famously dubbed the "oldest profession", happens and, indeed, it is a very big market. And many women do go into it voluntarily (some even get a publishing deal) since, amongst other things, you can earn an awful lot of money in a very short time.

We are not living in Victorian England anymore, and reasonable people do not view sex as morally evil in and of itself. Many people, women included (and, really, I can tell you from experience), go out and sleep with random people just because they enjoy it; not everyone who sleeps around is a self-loathing inadequate just looking for a little love in this big, cruel world. Since this is the case, I think that many quite reasonable people might think "why not get some money—or, rather, a lot of money—for doing it?"

I think that we can leave aside the argument over whether we should see sex as a commodity, since it is a moral argument and therefore a matter for an individual's own conscience.