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

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 todo.It'ssomething I particularly ever want to do, but each to their own

That's such a silly point. As Goosefoot says there are plenty of things men and women are told not to do. Prostitution is damaging on an individual and a societal level.

Most societies tell people they can't sell their kidneys. Oh no, nanny state, etc.

@Goosefoot

Be enraged all you like but don't trivialize what I said. You know as well as I do that the actual 'enthusiasm' displayed doesn't have to be overt or physical. You don't need to be clapping for joy at the prospect of sex for the consent to be enthusiastic.
A woman having sex to avoid negative consequences is not consent.

There was a good docudrama on BBC a while back called 'Is this rape? Sex on trial'. A group of young women were discussing it and one admitted to having sex even though she didn't want to but she wanted to avoid a negative reaction if she refused. In what way is that consenting? That is coercion.

And if you have an issue with enthusiastic mutual consent then take it up with the NHS because that's quite a big part of their sexual health and relationships training delivered to professionals who actually deal with this daily.

My feeling is that it can only be a choice if a woman could make the same amount of money with her level of education. skills and in many cases addiction.

If she can't earn the same or more then it is not a choice and therefore not consesual.

And no one should be forced to 'work' in any setting.

The U.K. is behind the times by not recognising legally (de jure) the reality (de facto) of female rapists.

Oh god this again. Section Four of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 criminalises forced sexual activity. The statutory guidance accompanying the Act states explicitly that this includes "forced to penetrate" assaults perpetrated by women against men. The law does not call it rape, correctly IMO because it cannot leave the victim pregnant, but the law absolutely does recognise the wrongfulness of such a deed and criminalises it.

Most societies tell people they can't sell their kidneys. Oh no, nanny state, etc.

We recognise that the sale of organs is, to use Dido's words, "damaging on an individual and a societal level", so we criminalise the purchase of organs. We can do this without criminalising the seller because we recognise the power imbalance between someone desperate enough to sell a body part and someone rich and powerful enough to buy one. That a tiny proportion of organ sellers might be happy to repeatedly sell organs that regrow such as bone marrow and blood, or might be happy to auction one kidney or part of a liver in order to fund their education, doesn't make the sale of organs any less harmful to the majority of sellers nor to society as a whole.

Apply the same reasoning to prostitution and you have the Nordic Model.

“tiny percentage of women who rape”

I only corrected a PP who stated that “rape is a male disorder” and linking “men’s will to rape” to the existence of prostitution as not being factually correct. It isn’t.

So I don’t understand your reaction to my post? You didn’t jump all over a poster who corrected a poster that said if a woman doesn’t have a good partner, they have only sex toys and hands to resort to to get an orgasm, this poster said truthfully women do have access to male prostitutes if they want an orgasm even though very few prostitutes are men. So why jump on my correction of a blatant gender stereotype?

You have to consider too that UK with its gender restricted definition of rape that does not even legally recognise the existence of female on male rape are going to therefore automatically exclude any female on male rapes from your figures. Similar to how a few decades ago marital rapes were excluded from rape statistics because it was not recognised as rape, not because it did not happen.

Please consider the following study:

“While cultural stereotypes lead us to consider sexual offences by women as rare, a team of researchers at the UCLA School of Law have found this to be far from the truth.

Published in Aggression and Violent Behaviour, the researchers stress that while they are in no way intending to minimise the impact of sexual violence perpetrated by men, that their results are vital when considering “stereotypes between sexual victimisation and gender.”

Looking at data from the Center For Disease Control’s Survey, researchers found that in 2011 equal numbers of men and women reported being forced into non-consensual sex.

Similarly, the 2010 survey showed comparable results estimating that nearly 4.5 million men in the US had, at some stage in their lives, been forced to penetrate another person – and that in 79.2 per cent of cases, the perpetrator forcing the sexual act was a woman.

Stemple’s team also considered data from the U.S. Census Bureau which revealed that in 2012, a study of a percentage women and men who admitted to forcing sex found that 43.6 per cent of that subset were women, compared to 56.4 per cent of men.”

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/female-sex-offenders-more-common-gender-bias-statistics-rape-abuse-a7839361.html

“The law does not call it rape “ which was my point. Other countries call forced to penetrate rape. Besides, can’t men rape men in the U.K. under your laws? Since it’s “penetration with a penis”

How does that work with your thought that “forced to penetrate” is only not called rape because the victim doesn’t have a risk of getting pregnant. A man being raped by a man has no risk of pregnancy....

You have to question the type of person who defends prostitution. Do they even think that at best the punters are willing to potentially rape trafficked and vulnerable women without a second thought.

I don't think casting dispersions on people who are talking about what can be complex problems is helpful.

I would make prostitution illegal. That doesn't mean that I don't see that it is serious to restrict the conditions under which people have sex and that could have consequences in other areas, or that the problems stem at least in part because it is black market activity, or that it might seem to invade their privacy, or that people might think that given that it seems very difficult to eradicate, a harm reduction model, as with drugs, might be worth considering, or even that the view of prostitutes who advocate regulation needs to be considered.

These should be things we can discuss.

Dazedandconfusedpart2

I am being entirely serious, and I ready don't give two hoots about what the NHS says about this, especially when they seem to be directing this stuff mainly at teenagers and 20-somethings.

I am also not talking about people being loud.

A young woman who has sex because she doesn't want a negative reaction - an expression of disappointment, sullenness, being dumped, whatever, that is not threats or threatening, is not coerced. Some people are jerks, or insensitive. And unfortunately we live in a culture that does not see sex as very consequential in many cases and that makes it more difficult to say no to. She may feel pushed in a direction she doesn't want to go in by others expectations, or her partners wants, or her own expectations. It's still up to her to choose what she does, we can't give those choices away. And she can choose any reasoning she thinks is sound.

Adults are capable of choosing to do or not do things that they think are important. Sometimes others will not be happy with our decisions. Part of being adult is being able to weigh these things and make a decision. That is why adults, as opposed to children, have the ability to consent to all kinds of things, many of them complicated and with mixed results.

The consequences of this enthusiastic consent business is to reduce women to being children who cannot make adult decisions, and people in need of the protection of others in their sexual dealings. It means their partners (or others!) can tell them they, even if they are sober and in good health, do not have the capacity to consent. That is a serious impingement on their freedom and its infantilising.

People choose, especially over the course of a lifetime or a long term relationship, to have sex for all kinds of combinations of reasons and under all kinds of circumstances. Sex is one of many things that happen in a relationship where there is give and take on both sides and people's bodies and desires change over time. It's neither always the most important nor the most vulnerable activity., in fact sometimes it's rather mundane.

With the legal definition of rape - I think if we are talking in psychological terms, as in, do women rape, it makes sense you use the broader definition and not get caught up in that rather particularly legal distinction around whether it counts as a sexual assault or rape. I had a male friend decline to have sex with someone, pass out drunk, and came to to find her having sex with him. I don't see that as really psychologically different than a man in a similar scenario.

Sex work is different in my view because it is harmful to women and it's very difficult if not impossible to make it safe. The harm is that it's likely to be at a minimum uncomfortable for the woman, if not painful and possibly causing injury. The woman is exposed to STDs. And the woman is likely to be exposed to violence. That's before you get into the issues of trafficking, drug use and coercive control.

The comparison of working in a strip club is completely different, because in that situation there are ways of making it safe.

It's best to shift focus from the morality of the 'worker' to the employer or customer.

E.g. it's not morally wrong to employee people to make coffee it's not morally wrong to pay a barista to make your coffee. It is morally wrong to pimp out women, it is morally wrong to pay to rape women

Why do we always scrutinise the women in this?!

from PlanDeRaccordement's article

"Most recently they pointed to a 2014 college study of 284 men and boys which found that 43 had been sexually coerced into unwanted intercourse, with 95 per cent of the perpetrators reported as being female."

PlanDeRaccordement, you should start a new thread on the silent epidemic of college women raping college men, surely 95% of college men's rapists being women is something more feminists should see you proclaiming.

@Goosefoot

A young woman who has sex because she doesn't want a negative reaction - an expression of disappointment, sullenness, being dumped, whatever, that is not threats or threatening, is not coerced.

The fact that you don't see emotional blackmail as abusive, and therefore, threatening makes a me think that a rational argument won't ever get through to you. Certainly not worth the time and effort that a fruitless attempt would require.
I genuinely hope that you never feel forced into any kind of sexual activity and that you can always feel safe in enforcing your boundaries. Sadly this doesn't happen for a great number of women and they should never ever be told that their feelings on such a "mundane" activity are invalid.

A man being raped by a man has no risk of pregnancy....

A victim of anal rape has a high risk of anal injury and may contract STIs from the rapist because the rapist is leaving bodily fluids inside the victim's body. This risk of injury does not apply to Section Four offences and the risk of STI transmission is lower because the penis is not a mucosal membrane.

The use of a penis to forcibly enter another person's body comes with a risk profile matched by no other sex crime. That's why it's appropriate for rape to continue to be defined distinctly from other sex crimes.

which found that 43 had been sexually coerced into unwanted intercourse, with 95 per cent of the perpetrators reported as being female."

How can you have 95% of 43? 40.85 perps: how can you have 0.85 of a person? I smell bad science reporting, would prefer the original study.

No other 'work' sells your body. All these retorts of "the builder sells his body" or whatever, no, they sell their labor. Sex work sells access to the body.

I don't think casting dispersions on people who are talking about what can be complex problems is helpful.

I'm not. I'm casting aspersions on people who dont have an issue with prostitution and defend it under the guise of 'sex work is work'. Punters have no idea if the woman is genuinely consenting and dont care. As I said, they have no issues with potentially being a rapist. I DGAF how helpful that is.

The fact that you don't see emotional blackmail as abusive, and therefore, threatening makes a me think that a rational argument won't ever get through to you. Certainly not worth the time and effort that a fruitless attempt would require.

Emotional blackmail can be abusive, and inappropriate, but it's not the same as rape, though in some cases it could be. But to call someone having a negative reaction the same as emotional abuse of manipulation? Other people have reactions we don't like sometimes.

Then all of that takes another leap to get to sex needs to be entered into enthusiastically, that choosing to have sex mainly to please someone else, or because it's good for the relationship, or because you've been a bit of a git yourself and feel the need to apologise, etc, are invalid reasons, and that a person cannot consent to sex if certain people (the NHS? students sitting around in the gender studies department?) don't think her reasons are good enough.

I'm a grown women, I've been married for almost 20 years and it's been sometimes rocky and sometimes not, I've had other relationships in the past, some good and some not good and some with manipulative people. I can make all kinds of decisions that will have profound impacts on how my life will go, I can decide to take a job or not, get a bank loan, become pregnant, never to clean my house, pick up and move across the country, have an affair. But I can't decide that I will have sex because I'm feeling rather indifferent about the proposition?

I think @insideandout3’s post of 01:27 should be pinned at the top of the feminist boards as a constant reminder of and introduction to why feminism exists.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffendingvictimisationandthepaththroughthecriminaljusticesystem/2018-12-13#how-prevalent-are-sexual-offences is derived from the 50,000 subject Crime Survey of England and Wales. I attach figure 3.

The overwhelming majority of adult victims of sexual violence in Englsnd and Wales are female. Section Four offences, the top pair of bars, make up a tiny proportion of all offences. Notably, a man is more likely to be raped or assaulted by penetration than he is to be a victim of a S4 offence.

The majority of sexual offenders are men. The pdf report at www.gov.uk/government/statistics/an-overview-of-sexual-offending-in-england-and-wales states on p29 that over 96% of cautions for sexual offences were issued to males, and on p32 that over 98% of prosecutions were of males.

Irrespective of tiny studies carried out in a different continent, sexual violence is mainly something men do to women. I have provided proof of this. Stop gaslighting us by trying to tell us otherwise.

How can you have 95% of 43? 40.85 perps: how can you have 0.85 of a person? I smell bad science reporting, would prefer the original study.

A survey is not a study.
The question framing in these kinds of self report surveys need to be closely examined. Too often they are designed to produce the desired outcome.
I submitted to unwanted sexual relations because I didn't want to be beaten into submission is worlds away from I submitted because I did not want to hurt their feelings.

"How can you have 95% of 43? 40.85 perps: how can you have 0.85 of a person? I smell bad science reporting, would prefer the original study."

41 out of 43 is 95.3...% i.e. 95% rounded.

Then all of that takes another leap to get to sex needs to be entered into enthusiastically, that choosing to have sex mainly to please someone else, or because it's good for the relationship, or because you've been a bit of a git yourself and feel the need to apologise, etc, are invalid reasons, and that a person cannot consent to sex if certain people (the NHS? students sitting around in the gender studies department?) don't think her reasons are good enough.

You've misunderstood enthusiastic consent. There's a big difference between enthusiastically wanting to please someone without getting anything in return (I believe the term in lesbian circles is "stone butch") and yielding to someone because you feel guilty about something. Enthusiasm doesn't have to be motivated by a desire to orgasm or receive pleasure, it can be motivated by a desire to give pleasure.

I've submitted to sex because the alternative was him putting cigarettes out on his arms and telling me it was my fault because I wouldn't have sex with him. This was abusive. It escalated to me waking up to find him penetrating me, which is rape because sleeping people can't consent. I take an extremely dim view of people who try to pretend that guilt-motivated sex isn't abusive, because it is. If I want to apologise, I use my mouth to say "I'm sorry", not to suck his dick.