To those who consider prostitution rape...

I’m getting more and more concerned about the pushing of consent as the be-all-and-end-all of moral arguments.
It’s ok to strangle a woman during sexual intercourse because she has consented? No it fucking isn’t. No one should be strangling anyone.
Someone consenting to a person carrying out an immoral act does not make that act suddenly moral.
Using strangers for sexual gratification is immoral.

(I’m not meaning the idea of morality here as a religious thing. It’s just the best word for the job)

Does the different way to earn cash earn at least £200 per hour? That's the going rate for escorts in Britain.

I think the exploited and trafficked women in the Managed Zone in Leeds getting a fiver a hand job missed that particular memo.

Sex wasn’t about merely about obtaining consent, female pleasure was considered very important in a way it seemingly isn’t now.

As someone who was a teen/young adult in the 90s I completely agree. I'm not sure where it went wrong but as a mother of teens now sex and healthy sexuality appears to be more complicated due to porn and weird expectations about what's "normal".

Hey dervel, not seen you on here in ages! Thought you had left! Great to see you back

Sex scenes in films don't involve sex. There is no comparison with either porn or prostitution. That argument is most commonly made by men trying to sanitise porn to relieve the guilt they feel about watching it.

Interesting read.
Porn, prostitution and the public understanding of consent | Nordic Model Now!

£200 an hour?! I must go and find the woman that was offering blow jobs for £10 in the takeaway the other day that she is seriously underpaid, although I suppose if she managed to do 20 in one hour she’d be golden./s

Prostitution is just wrong, and it doesn’t surprise me that the people who advocate for prostitution are also 99% of the time the same people that advocate for men in women’s spaces and also think there’s nothing wrong with surrogacy. Just shilling for men, that really is not feminism by any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t really have a firm position, beyond this question: Why is the bar for rape so incredibly low? I am inclined to argue from asking where is there harm? And work back from there.

I was in the last generation to really have an analogue childhood and was also blessed with part of my early adulthood in the late 90s. For all its faults it felt like I came into adulthood where female sexuality was starting to be centred. In a way that has totally regressed now.

Sex wasn’t about merely about obtaining consent, female pleasure was considered very important in a way it seemingly isn’t now. There would have been something shameful about using prostitutes, whereas everything is about embracing kinks, which we mustn’t shame anymore even if women are fucking dying in bdsm scenarios gone wrong.

I think the whole conversation surrounding sex needs a proper cultural going over to be honest. We can horsetrade over definitions of whether prostitution and pornography violates consent, but maybe the question is simply is it violating? More clearly articulates the problem.

I think a lot of these posts are really not relevant to the basic question.

There is a difference between saying prostitution is bad for women involved, or bad for society, or often has a lot of surrounding circumstances that are dodgy and mean the people involved aren't really in a good place to make decisions, or even that sex for money Is undignified or isn't an appropriate use of sexuality, which is the traditional religious position - and saying that because of these kinds of circumstances, it is not possible to consent.

There are many other kinds of situations in life that mean people don't have perfect circumstances for free consent, where they are poor and having to do dangerous work, or where there seem to be a lot of people involved who have social or psychological issues, and so on, but we don't say that means they can't consent.

In fact there are plenty of men women who are having casual sexual relationships in dangerous conditions with strangers, with drugs and booze, for extremely transactional reasons, and we don't say they can't consent. Although there was a time when we would have looked askance at women in particular behaving that way, and a big part of the reason for that was the problematic nature of the situation.

I sometimes think that modern sexual ethics is so thin and wanting that consent is the only lens it has for considering whether certain sexual encounters are good or not. So all unhealthy or destructive sex becomes rape.

Regards the "escorts" and their remuneration, is the figure quoted net, or is that the amount before the"agency" take their cut?

Oh not the 'happy hooker' trope. Please.

Most sex workers have absolutely no choice about it. They're trafficked and coerced and controlled by pimps.

If busty Bev up the road wants to cheer up sad, dirty gits who have never had a girlfriend by giving them hand jobs in her bungalow then I guess she can crack on. But she also does not get to speak for all the thousands and thousands of exploited women who have no voice and no choice.

Does some women's right to have sex (happily and consensually) for money trump the right of millions of women and girls to not be trafficked, abused ,beaten and raped?

There are other jobs that are extremely personally dangerous and can expose people to serious risk of disease.

And actresses aren't necessarily able to refuse nude or sex scenes and keep their job. They could have a standard clause to that effect in a contract, but that would mean there were jobs that would not be available to them. This is especially true for younger actresses trying to establish themselves.

The one area that I think is quite different is the potential for pregnancy and a child. However, while there could be a strong argument that would make legal prostitutions socially undesirable, and even immoral because of the position that would put the child in, I can't see why it would impact consent as such.

Is that what the going rate for a trafficked teenager is? How much of that £200 an hour ends up in her bank account?

Question for you OP, seeing as the man has no idea if the woman is freely giving consent or not, and he’s willing to ‘take the risk’, does that not make him a rapist anyway, based on his own actions/morals?

This is an extremely good point/question.

Does the different way to earn cash earn at least £200 per hour? That's the going rate for escorts in Britain. How does that compare to a min wage job?

I'm sure there's plenty of ways to do that if you're prepared to risk death, injury, infectious diseases and exchange body fluids with people, with no insurance, pension, holiday or other benefits

Let's ignore that this isnt even in the same universe as most women involved in prostitution.

In my opinion, rape can include having sex with someone who you know doesn’t want to have sex with you. If the sex worker is having to be paid, I’d argue that proves they don’t want the sex. So the one have sex with the sex worker is raping them.

I realise this is not necessarily the legal definition, and that people will disagree. But that is how I feel, in the simplest terms.

Does the different way to earn cash earn at least £200 per hour? That's the going rate for escorts in Britain. How does that compare to a min wage job?

Assuming they’re an adult and fully capable of consenting (ie not under the influence of drugs or mentally ill etc

See I would say that bit is quite an assumption.

Anyone who has sat next to the bed of a young woman who had taken a paracetamol od, in a and e, after she had been battered by her pimp and was scared of not being able to give him enough money, so had tried to die, would not bother to try and sanitise prostitution. Any one who has spoken to a mother who "paid" with sex, for her taxi, to attend court for her teenage son, would also not attempt to sanitiser this horrendous transactional relationship. That's before we get to the underage girls who are prostituted and the actions of their pimps and punters.

Before I started drawing any lines I'd start analysing systems that mean there are very few "men, up and down the land, who marry women who they are not in love with, but who they know will take care of them financially."

That's the problem with all these choicey-woicey , 'but they're adults' arguments. They focus on the individual and never look at the structures in which they operate

Probably worth adding. See also "why do you care how adults identify?"

I'd say in legal terms if the person had sex with a prostitute then refused to pay, that could be classed as rape. Also they may be doing sexual practices they would never ever do consensually with someone they liked or loved, only in exchange for money. So all sex work is so close to rape that there isn't really a line there to be drawn. It's basically allowing yourself to be raped in order to obtain cash. Not the same as any other job really?!

This is exactly it

Question for you OP, seeing as the man has no idea if the woman is freely giving consent or not, and he’s willing to ‘take the risk’, does that not make him a rapist anyway, based on his own actions/morals?

In some scenarios it would be rape, women trafficked into prostitution with no choice kn the matter. Those who need a heroin fix do it out of necessity. It's unlikely they actually want to, but the H fix trumps everything. Then there are the high class escorts with carefully screened wealthy clients who pay well. Money talks, as they say.....