Anyone who says in relation to prostitution that “I think it would be a good idea for young women to sit down together, talk about it” (and in a positive light) has a very specific agenda that is entirely unethical.
The other thing that none of you pro-prostitution advocates ever get is that if, as you like to claim, “sex work” is a lovely choicey choicey job just like any other, we are also then fully entitled to judge anyone engaging in it, in the same way that we might judge anyone doing something we consider unethical.
You can’t have both choicey-choicey “sex work is work” and also no stigma. Because like it or not, many of us in society think paying for sex or getting paid or sex is unethical and distasteful. When prostitution is the last resort of desperate women who are forced into it for money or drug addiction and so on, then obviously women caught in are victims, shouldn’t be stigmatised and should be helped to exit it.
If, however, as you want it to be, it’s a fun daring choice for easy cash for lovely pretty students, then damn right we get to judge it and stigmatise it, because it’s doing something, and normalising something, that is at the very root deeply unethical and distasteful, and all purely for money. Because it’s antifeminist and antisocial and hell yes it’s downright wrong. And I’ll judge that the same way I’d judge anyone doing something unethical, illegal or borderline legal just for easy cash - selling vapes, working for a tobacco company, making money off exploited illegal immigrants, running drug farms, dumping sewage, screwing people out of money in boiler rooms, selling fake essays, scams and fraud and exploitation and unscrupulous/illegal business of all sorts.
I personally know at least two families - including children’s and their mother’s lives - destroyed by men’s prostitution addictions: do you think all the men buying sex are single carefree lads? No, it destroys the lives of those men and even more those of women and children who know them. It doesn’t happen in a lovely equal transactional vacuum. What is the wife or girlfriend of that man, or his father or mother, or his kids, meant to think? That it’s all oh-so-empowering to them? That they are second class citizens
because men’s dick rights must always come first?
And hell yes I am entitled to judge those men as harshly as I like: for exploiting women as pieces of meat first of all. And if the women he’s buying are not doing so out of circumstance, but are instead happily going along with normalising “sexwork” as fun and empowering for easy cash, I’m damn well judging them, too, because they should fucking well know better.
Prostitution is not consequence free. Men can’t expect to use prostitutes and other women and girls in the sex industry, and also get to have normal and healthy relationships and families and children, and also pretend that “sex work” is totes fantastic because some ghastly pseudo-media “research” says it’s all so great and “sex positive” and also convince us that we have to go along with it. You know it’s just about as convincing and empowering as Boris Johnson’s arsehole is; and we all know it too. And if you’re the kind of man who likes to pay for sex, you know perfectly well that none of the lovely fantasised student “sexworkers” would touch you with a bargepole if you weren’t paying; and you also know that if you’re the kind of man who pays for sex that no normal well-adjusted woman is going to want you afterwards, too.
Choose your sordid grimy life exploiting women and ruining lives if you will: none of us can stop you. But we won’t make it okay for you to be a disgusting exploitative pig, and also join in the transparently nasty and deeply stupid fantasy that it’s all empowering and positive. It’s disgusting and morally wrong and you fucking know it is. And you can shove your thinly disguised dick rights pandering pseudo-“research” where the sun doesn’t shine as well, because you also know perfectly well that no woman ever has found out that her husband or father (or son) is a punter, and just thought “oh lovely, because “Dr Petra Boynton” says it’s all okay!”