What is the moral difference between sex work and other forms of work?

[MooFeatures]

Hear me out. I know the two are different, and that and that a person selling their body (indeed, their consent) for sex is morally different to other types of work which they wouldn’t engage in if that financial incentive (coercion?) wasn’t present. I’m not questioning this position... I’d just like to be able to fully articulate why the two are different. All explanations gratefully received

Your argument is still false.

The vast majority of ordinary people have no problem with their children doing manual labour. Most ordinary people see a merit in hard work. Goodness knows who these people are who think work is degrading, demeaning etc.

The vast majority of ordinary people would be devastated if their child was a prostitute. One or two odd outliers doesn't change that.

You didn’t originally state anything about being proud, it was about not wanting your child to do it

I only mentioned having pride in a child being in the armed forces because you said you would be unhappy at that. I very much doubt that the majority of parents share your views and if anything rather than discouraging it would be proud of a child serving their country.

You can’t see that there are quite a few people out there who, if their daughter said ‘I’m going to be a cleaner/Deliveroo driver all my life’ would be fine with that?

Anyway, basing what’s right and wrong in society shouldn’t be on what people would be happy with their children being, that’s my point. I can see that it’s fine for women to sleep with any many people as they like, but I might be unhappy with my own daughter doing that. Normal people don’t like to think of their children doing anything sexual - I can see that nude modelling for fine art is fine; I wouldn’t exactly be delighted if my daughter was doing it.

It’s like having a legal system where the parents of victims determine what punishment the guilty party would get. Rights and wrongs shouldn’t be so close to home.

And I know quite a few parents of children on the front lines of the armed forces; yes they are proud, but also terrified when they are away on deployment and many have mentioned to me they sometimes wish their child had/moves to a different job.

You can’t see that there are quite a few people out there who, if their daughter said ‘I’m going to be a cleaner/Deliveroo driver all my life’ would be fine with that?

You are twisting what I said.

The way I see it is that bodily autonomy is paramount.

Therefore the issue of freely consenting other people to use or interfere with your body is also paramount. This goes for things as diverse as medical exams, abortion, and indeed sex.

If somebody is only offering you their body because you’re paying them, that’s not free consent. That’s coercion. They wouldn’t do it if you weren’t paying them.

The issues here include both trafficked women and women who apparently choose to do this - even those women, if they had better socioeconomic circumstances would likely not choose to do this.

You can’t see that there are quite a few people out there who, if their daughter said ‘I’m going to be a cleaner/Deliveroo driver all my life’ would be fine with that?

Oddly enough, people aren't being kidnapped to become cleaners or Deliveroo drivers, there are enough people who want to work in those areas.

And how exactly does prostitution work as a lifelong profession?

A fundamental moral issue is that of contempt.

There is a deeply unequal relatonship between males and females due to their different reproductive roles. Deep in the male psyche, I believe there lies a very basic sense for many men that sex is a zero sum game and if he 'wins' by having sex with a woman, she has 'lost'. Lost her sexual virtue and therefore any right to be respected.

Common throughout history is men's idea that good girls don't sleep around and you marry a virgin who is due respect simply because she has not allowed another man to sully her virtue. By this thinking, a woman who simply lets a man sleep with her no strings attached is morally lacking and deserving of less respect. Clearly this has its roots in biology and men's desire to control the female body so that his reproductive success is maximised. The male wants to shag about as much as possible, while the female must only shag him not anybody else.

A woman you can morally corrupt by paying her money to sleep with you is even worse! She 'threw the game' and agreed to be defeated and sell her virtue for grubby money not even passion. (Somewhat like a sportsperson who agrees to throw a game for cash - nobody respects them for it, even if they provide a wanted service by those who pay them)

There is no other 'job' in which a woman is deemed by men to be so morally contemptible for what she does. The irony always being that he is desperate for her to do it. Always the double standard.

This the historical context in which prostitution occurs. The moral aspect of sexual 'work' is to do with how savagely men judge women morally for having sex and especially for being 'buyable' sexually. Sex and sexual control of others is deeply rooted in evolution and biology in a way that jobs unrelated to sex are simply not.

Then there is of course the exploitation aspect - the appalling harm to benefit ratio of the job - but others have written above on that.

If somebody is only offering you their body because you’re paying them, that’s not free consent. That’s coercion. They wouldn’t do it if you weren’t paying them.

I've never found this a strong argument. We don't usually think of paying someone for something as coercion or nullifying consent. Even when people are badgered by telemarketers or manipulated by advertising and such.

There are laws against blackmail, bribery, and extortion because most people understand money is a tool that can be turned into a weapon with coercive power.

There are laws against blackmail, bribery, and extortion because most people understand money is a tool that can be turned into a weapon with coercive power.

These aren't great examples, extortion and blackmail are about forcing people to give you money by threats. And bribery is a crime of the persons both giving and receiving the bribe, agains society.

I agree that money can be very powerful and can potentially be used to manipulate people, but simply stating that paying someone invalidates consent would make every tradesperson and shopkeeper a victim of coercion. Paying someone to clean my house isn't the same as threatening to beat her up if she doesn't.

You're misunderstanding extortion and blackmail as it relates to prostitution because you're leaving out pimps and traffickers.

Punters pay pimps and traffickers to outsource the violence necessary to force prostitution's victims into sexual obedience, it's pimps and traffickers who use force to take the money.

It vastly limits our autonomy and freedom if sex is work like any other work. An important part of being a free human is having the choice when to have sex, and with whom, and in what way.It would be an untenable invasion of our privacy if other people told us who we could have sex with. This why rape is such an awful crime - it takes away a persons' choice.

Imagine if I work for a company and my boss asks me to meet a client for dinner to discuss a deal. This doesn't particularly impair my autonomy. Maybe ideally I would have chosen to spend my time in some other way. But it doesn't impinge on my global freedom and overall autonomy. But further imagine we live in a world where sex work is just work, and my boss further asks me to give the client a blowjob after dinner to seal the deal. This action would greatly restrict my personal freedom. I should always have the choice of who I sleep with. To put it simply, sex shouldn't be part of the market because it would be too big an invasion of privacy. It's none of my bosses business who I sleep with and it certainly shouldn't be a requirement of work.

You're misunderstanding extortion and blackmail as it relates to prostitution because you're leaving out pimps and traffickers.

Punters pay pimps and traffickers to outsource the violence necessary to force prostitution's victims into sexual obedience, it's pimps and traffickers who use force to take the money.

Is that really related to the statement that paying someone for sex negates consent?

If you are arguing that as an industry sex work would be too prone to exploitation, fine, that's probably true IMO, but that's not really related to the statement that paying someone negates consent. That's a very strong statement with implications beyond sex work, and if accepted it could also easily have implications around women's ability to consent to sex more generally.

Ideas like this shouldn't be treated in a loosey-goosey way just because they sound good when used against something bad like the sex trade. They need to be looked at very carefully on their own merits - accepting ideas tends to have implications down the line.

I suppose one could say, "If you take the coercion out of prostitution then prostitution isn't coercive" and it would technically be true, but it's also dumb.

For me it does come down to my views, and experiences, of sex in a female body. A woman's sexual organ is primarily interior...inside of her physical boundaries.........and it assumes a penetration and an entering of one's interior. Sex, for women, can also lead to pregnancy.

There is something about the 'interiority' of the sexual experience for women that makes selling sex feel wrong. To do that you would have to seriously cut yourself off from your feelings, and also from your feelings of autonomy over your bodily integrity.

As someone else has said....it depends on how you view sex, really....and also will depend, and tends to depend, on your previous sexual experiences......with a high proportion of women in prostitution having suffered sexual abuse & rape as children, or as adults.

It would seem for them, that 'selling' something that had been previously been forcefully taken from you might, superficially, represent a liberation or empowerment of sorts.....but, personally can't see that....Can only see the original abuse being compounded.

I suppose one could say, "If you take the coercion out of prostitution then prostitution isn't coercive" and it would technically be true, but it's also dumb.

If the question was "is prostitution coercive" you'd be begging the question.

But the statement was that being paid negates consent, so it just doesn't address it at all.

You seem very sure that it's an accurate statement, you should be able to come up with something on point.

You've been answered, there are already several kinds of payments understood by context to be criminally coercive acts.

Justhadathough

Yes - for me questions around sex as work are very much folded into questions around what counts as "good" sex in other contexts, and also our attitudes to work more generally. If we have come to cccept work as fundamentally a kind of exploitation, or something where we can contract almost anything freely, that will make a difference. If we "freely" are engaging in sex that is fundamentally mentally or emotionally or physically damaging, that will make a difference. And there are certainly plenty of people in our society that think in those ways.

Paying someone to give up their bodily integrity is coercion though. It’s why we (the UK anyway) don’t allow people to be paid for organ, egg, or blood donation, or surrogacy. Consent for anything to do with bodily integrity should always be given freely - a clear and unfettered conscious decision.

But then I suppose this depends on how much you value bodily integrity - and that’s possibly delving into philosophical grounds as much as moral.

In the same way that rape is not theft (but if you can buy sex then is rape just theft?)

As PP have said, morally sex work(where sex is sold) is different from other work because:

1. It turns a human being (usually women) into a commodity to be bought
2. As a “product” the person must deny their self to play a role demanded by the consumer, ie. the “girlfriend experience” so it involves more than selling the act of sex.
3. This abnegation of the self to the desires of a buyer is degrading and ultimately dehumanising.
4. Buyers viewing prostitutes as subhuman then subject them to incredibly high rates of criminal violence ranging from beatings, to rape to murder.

Apart from the individual level (above) are the industry level facts

1. Estimated 80% of prostitutes are trafficked. This indicates that demand for sex far outstrips the number of volunteer sex workers. This means the industry itself causes modern day slavery to exist and that buyers do not care whether the women were trafficked or not.
2. One study I read reported that 97% of prostitutes they surveyed wanted to stop, but had no way or support to stop. Indicating that even women who initially “volunteer” to do sex work feel trapped and would rather do some other work if they had choice. The “happy hooker” and “empowerment” myths lure women into sex work and then traps them.

Paying someone to give up their bodily integrity is coercion though. It’s why we (the UK anyway) don’t allow people to be paid for organ, egg, or blood donation, or surrogacy. Consent for anything to do with bodily integrity should always be given freely - a clear and unfettered conscious decision.

But then I suppose this depends on how much you value bodily integrity - and that’s possibly delving into philosophical grounds as much as moral.

Moral grounds are philosophical, always. I think any discussion like this gets into all kinds of things that go well beyond the question at hand.

Bodily integrity is an interesting idea for instance. What does it really mean?

I tend to agree that certain things simply should not be commoditized on principle - they are not things that are transactional, and I'd include sex there, giving blood etc, as well as some things that are from totally different categories. The way I would say it is that it goes against their nature to be bought and sold.

I also think that there is a practical argument that making some of those things into commodities would tend to create a marketplace where exploitation could easily occur, and that's connected to the nature of the item being discussed. In some cases maybe that can be mitigated.

But what I wouldn't say is that is about consent being impinged upon by payment. If that were the case, it would mean consent was also being impinged upon in other cases where we pay someone, and I don't think that's true. It's not that it doesn't matter that when we pay a guy to refinish our floor that his consent to do the job was undermined by his desire or need for the money, because it's not that big a deal to non-concentually refinish a floor. The difference is in the nature of the act.

That being said, I think the idea that anyone makes any choice fully freely is naive. Very often I suspect we don't have much real choice at all.

Well I mean a lack of employment rights/lack of regulation comes to mind. There’s also a moral element. A lot of people believe that extramarital sex is wrong, that selling/buying sex is wrong, that consent in sex work isn’t real consent, that sex should be enjoyable for both parties etc. Then there is the reality of sex ‘work’, a lot of it is actually sex slavery.

The ‘what would you want your daughter to do’ argument is a ridiculous one as many wouldn’t want their daughter to be lots of jobs; doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. In some countries people don’t want their daughter to have a job at all - don’t think we should be going down that route

This, it's not going to be a popular opinion on here but I'm not comfortable with telling a woman what they should or shouldn't be allowed to do.
It's not something I particularly ever want to do, but each to their own.