I'm pretty sure this is entirely false. Much research I have been hearing about lately has shown that there are physical effects of sexual/physical abuse on the brain and its development. It does have an effect on a persons ability to make rational decisions in their adulthood, and even if I am not strictly against prostitution I believe it is immoral to benefit in a way that puts an individual through acts they despise but have little choice over due to their childhood history.

We arent all rational economic actors in complete control of our destiny. NIMN, I forgot the stats but could you restate if the stats stated that prostitutes were "broken homes" types or specifically sexually abused.

I'm gonna post some Molyneux (an ACist who is totally against prostitution) links that people should probably have a listen to before they continue with the same tired libertarian defenses of the indefensible

http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traff...in_Abuse_1.mp3

http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traff..._interview.mp3

http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traff...f_violence.mp3

And if you arent interested in listening to some random guy on the internet, the second link is with a professional psychologist

We arent saying this and have never said anything like this in this thread. If a girl loves getting paid to bang dudes, great! I'm happy for her. What we are talking about is the fact that most of these women are victims of child abuse and you are taking advantage that fact if you solicit their services.

I also have to disagree with the general lack of degree going on in this thread. If someone is addicted to cigarettes and you profit from their inability to make rational economic decisions then I think you are engaging in an unethical act. Is it as dastardly as soliciting the services of a child abuse victim? Not at all! Smokers of cigarettes have many cheap and effective medical solutions, smoking isnt going to harm them for many decades, and many people are casual smokers. Prostitutes have much less choice then smokers of cigarettes and most likely deteste what they have to do to get through life.

So lets lighten up on the bad analogies and get back to what we are actually discussing, soliciting child abuse victims for sex.

i voted 2.

i feel a lot of people in this forum conflate their political views with their ethics. i think it is entirely possible to have a voluntary transaction (thats another thing, i think a lot of ACers define voluntary in far too literal and black and white a manner) to be harmful to one or more of the participants, but it obviously does not logically follow that such transactions should be banned.

Well there are plenty of other voluntary ways to help people get out of prostitution too. Education in communities and schools or wherever, setting up shelters, social centres, providing counseling, getting them into drug rehabilitation, helping them get eligible for welfare if they need it (not your cup of tea, but it's better than them being on the streets imo), helping them find jobs, providing training to make them more employable, and so on and so on. There are innumerable ways to help out if people have the desire to.

Just as a side question - you seem to not really believe in standards of behaviour outside of the non-aggression principle. What is it that makes initiating violence, theft and fraud immoral in all cases?

Yes, of course those are all ways to help prostitutes. But the thing that you are advocating here ITT, convincing others not to frequent prostitutes, does not seem to me to help them at all.

Why do you say this? Just because my standards do not conform to yours I have none?

If something is immoral in any case it has to be immoral in all cases imo.

Not necessarily. Plenty of people donate to charity right now, it's just that people are even more invested in those that they personally know. Everyone that wants socialism and welfare and so on right now would probably donate to the poor in ACland (or maybe they are huge hypocrites )

Do you mean that one person will regret the transaction later? Of course that's possible. I could buy some milk and find out that it is spoiled when I get home.

If neither party will regret the transaction then you may be imposing your own value system. Just because it is something you wouldn't do doesn't mean that it's not mutually beneficial to those people. I wouldn't smoke cigarettes myself but others might regardless of the health risk.

I suppose there are edge cases there where someone smokes cigarettes without knowing about the health risk (they don't make the connection between the transaction and the bad consequence so they can't regret it).

lol this guy said he would love it if his daughter was taking a big dick all day long! It is so amusing to me that some guy would admit this on a forum!!! /NIMN

I dont get the point of your argument, to be honest. "X is the choice that only sad, abused people pick. If we get rid of X, we will get rid of sad, abused people?"

There must be something wrong with drug rehab centers, according to this reasoning, right?

If that were what was really, transparently, going on, the thread would have 5 posts, the OP, three people agreeing with the OP, and JiggsCasey saying something about how this is the governments way of controlling the plebes or something.

Instead, its a perpetual bait and switch. NIMN asks what we think about prostitution, and then instantly switches in "prostitution+implicit rape+child abuse+sex slavery." When we finally realize thats what we are REALLY talking about, we all say "yes of course all of that stuff is bad!" at which point we switch back, "See, prostitution is bad!"

Wheeeee.....

If you insist on defining prositution as "an act performed against their will by victims of child abuse that amounts to rape and perpetuates suffering" then ok, I am fairly positive everyone would oppose that. We have only left to quibble over whether thats ACTUALLY the definition of prostitution (the most boring kind of semantic argument because its basically axiomatic) or to dance around with rhetorical tricks like bad analogies.

I retract all my posts in this thread, and would like to replace them with the following:

It is acceptable to have sex with a True Prostitute, but not No True Prostitute.

Well I think making others aware of what goes on in most real-world forms of prostitution and how bad it is is a good thing for them. Awareness is pretty important to solving problems.

Ah, my bad, I thought it was you who said this -

Then again, maybe this is all just due to communicative difficulties and differing interpretations of words.

But you agree there is this thing, let's call it X for the sake of clarity, which describes generally agreed upon rules about what is right and wrong in a given situation outside of the NAP? X might not be universal, and X might not be an exact science, but X is very important to voluntary human interactions.

I can't think of any moral rule I would want to apply to everyone that isn't covered by the nonaggression principle.

lol

Instead, its a perpetual bait and switch. NIMN asks what we think about prostitution, and then instantly switches in "prostitution+implicit rape+child abuse+sex slavery." When we finally realize thats what we are REALLY talking about, we all say "yes of course all of that stuff is bad!" at which point we switch back, "See, prostitution is bad!"

Are you sure you all said that stuff is bad?. A lot of the thread has been me trying to convince mjkidd that having sex with a prostitute we know was raped as a child is wrong -

See above for someone who would oppose that, there have been others that seem to have been coming from this angle too.

Orrr..... we could talk about prostitution and how it exists in most of the world and try to have a discussion about whether prostitution is in general an ethical thing to partake in when people will almost always have very little information about the chick they are banging.

If you really want to reduce this to a question of whether it's ok to bang the mythical happy, adjusted hooker, go right ahead, but that's not really what I made this thread for. I made this thread for a discussion of the realities of hooking in general.

Ok, but what is so immoral about violence, theft and fraud that they get a special place like this? Have you derived the NAP from logical reasoning, consequentialism, natural rights, emotional response, intutition, or what?

The argument is not that getting rid of X gets rid of the abuse. The argument is that X is a form of self abuse that is not a rational choice but is a harmful after effect of the abuse. I actually don't believe you think I was arguing that getting rid of it would get rid of the abuse.

Also, your analogy is also apples to oranges. Since prostitution is likely a harmful choice that is a consequence of abuse. While your analogy is presenting help to a problem and equating it with prostitution.

Its not as if abuse is to prostitution as drug abuse is to rehab.

also- I find it odd that you equate being happy that your child has a healthy sex life to prostitution. I really don't see that those are equivalents.

I second the poster who early pointed out that the analogies in this thread are really bad.

How is this basic sexual drive developed into a much fuller, diverse set of sexual preferences? Why are we attracted to what we're attracted to? I'm also talking about "human" as distinct from "animal" though we don't understand animal psychology all that well.


We're not talking about why we have sex, but rather why we have the kind of sex we do. So differences in sexual practices are precisely what's being discussed. Otherwise, there's nothing to be explained about those prostitutes' sexual practices either.


This may or may not be true, but it's not relevant. I don't think a person who didn't go through traumas as a child is even an imaginable thing, so determining whether such a person would have libido or not is pointless as a mental exercise.


Medically speaking, "trauma" as a condition is distinct from "trauma" as a phenomenon. "Traumas" as a condition are the subset of "traumas" that induce, in the society's opinion, maladaptive coping strategies. The latter are simply experiences that overwhelm the ordinary cognitive mechanisms in such a way to induce permanent changes in the mind. Thus, ignoring the normativity inherent in judgment of various coping strategies - for instance, suicide is not okay in 21st century America, but was perfectly fine in medieval Japan - the distinction is arbitrary and meaningless for the purpose of understanding how the human mind works.


Everyone was abused as a child in the sense of there having been significant stressors causing overwhelming emotional responses, much the same way any socially unacceptable forms of abuse would have. Socially unacceptable forms of abuse are considered "traumatic" because they tend to result in socially unacceptable forms of coping behavior for various reasons.


http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...-post14141556/

I wouldn't say my argument has nothing to do with morality - I was simply trying to describe why morality regarding prostitution was the way it is, without taking the present norms for granted.

I have no idea what the last sentence is supposed to mean, but my point was that particular patterns of attraction and preferences for certain sexual practices are distinct from the sexual urge itself, and talking of specifically sexual preferences, or even preferences related to sex, in the absence of the sexual urge is incomplete. I'm suggesting that this more basic drive is the primary motivator of almost all sexual conduct, so an interpretation that analyzes the relationship between childhood trauma and sexual behavior should be careful not to overstress its primacy as a motivator.

Yes, I know what we're talking about, I'm trying to add something to the discussion. I said that I thought your explanation was implausible because it seemed to me to overemphasize the relationship between childhood experiences and later sexual conduct. That we're trying to explain a particular type of sexual behavior doesn't mean we should ignore the obvious motivators for all sexual behavior.

This seems like a weird way of using the word "trauma," but sure. As an aside, so many disciplines insist on choosing words that have an ordinary English meaning and redefining them in such a way as to be incomprehensible to ordinary English speakers. I suspect there must be a reason for this (technical terms allow for more rapid comprehension to those familiar with them), but it's the source of a lot of confusion in our culture.

I don't know why you think these are so intimately related with later sexual interactions, though.

Prostitutes arent child abuse victims by definition, it just happens that most of them are victims of sexual abuse. Technically we are talking about all people that have experienced sexual abuse and more broadly childhood abuse in general. I think it does open a slippery slope of 'well what about the mcdonalds guy who was abused and now works for $5/hr'. I think it is a larger problem in society that we cant really do much about, there is a gray area and everyone has to make that decision for themselves.

However, there is a huge gap between an abused person at McDonalds trying to lead a relatively normal life and cope with their issues, and someone living on the lowest rung of the economic ladder constantly reliving her abuse through repeatedly selling themselves. Where we can't really do much for those that end up in dead end jobs, I think if I had the opportunity to solicit sex from someone I knew had a history of sexual abuse I would have to pass out of a sense of basic empathy for their situation.

Given that the odds are high that any random prostitute is a victim of sexual abuse, it seems acceptable to blanket the general act of soliciting sex from prostitutes with the same value judgements we would as if someone knowingly solicited sex from a child abuse victim.

Mabey the discussion wasnt clear for those that came in, and mabey me and NIMN have just misunderstood what people have been saying, but to me it does not seem like there has been any bait and switch going on and there have been people defending the acceptability of soliciting sex from child abuse victims. It seemed like people were like 'hey she is a child abuse victim and doing this makes her feel like **** but its not my problem, here's your money!'

I'm just choosing not to go into this as to limit the scope of discussion. From a purely causal standpoint, it's enough to say that all children go through some traumas and all adults have some sexual urge, thus in adult humans, the presence of sexual urge itself isn't something that has to be explained, nor can traumas be ruled out as the primary reason for the existence of human sexual drive in the first place. If I had to guess, the sexual drive itself exists independently, though its activation and refinement take place through interactions with the limbic system and higher cognitive mechanisms which are shaped by significant emotional experiences of all kinds.


You're not actually saying anything. You're saying that water is the primary ingredient in the chicken noodle soup, in response to my pointing out that the presence of chicken is what makes the the soup, chicken noodle soup.


If you think I'm overemphasizing the relationship, the correct step is to point out that the variation in childhood experiences does not explain the variation in adult sexual preferences, not to point out that sexual drive exists in all adult humans, regardless of the specificity of their childhood experiences. Yes, all soup has water in it.


I am indeed using a fairly ordinary English definition for the word trauma, as it relates to psychology. Without knowing anything about you, I'm certain that you have all kinds of painful emotional experiences in your childhood, memories of which you've largely repressed, though you may occasionally have nightmares about them (but you wouldn't remember those either) and your behavior and preferences, sexual or otherwise, are significantly shaped by these experiences in ways that you are not aware of. Several years from now, you may even discover some connection between one of your behavioral quirks and some series of traumatic experiences from your childhood that you've repressed for many years.


How I came to this understanding is a lot less important than whether or the extent to which this understanding accurately and concisely describes our nature. Btw, I don't think only childhood traumas matter, merely that childhood experiences are much more lasting and significant than adult experiences, because we are far more emotionally insulated as adults. Either way, while people may disagree on the specifics, nothing I'm saying regarding the general importance of childhood experiences in formation of adult sexual preferences is something most theorists on psychosexual development would disagree with. There are largely two groups of people in this world - people who haven't spent much time thinking about how sexual preferences are formed and people who have theories on how sexual preferences are formed in response to childhood experiences.

If no one went to prostitutes, do the years of childhood abuse cease to exist?

It's unfortunate when someone is abused, but I don't think it follows that they'd be better off if prostitution wasn't an option. The problem that's driving them towards prostitution is still there and it will still manifest itself.

People who were abused probably need positive relationships and professional therapy. Short of this, I don't think you do them any good to take their outlet away. They probably just resort to something worse.

Yeah, basically, the problem is that every voluntary transaction between two parties has externalities, though they may be small, so to say "oh, in this case I recognize this third party to have a legitimate right, but in this other case I don't" one gets very close to Montius's point:

What about encouraging other people to violate the nonaggression principle (again, with some version of the absurd example I gave earlier in mind)?

We weren't put on this Earth with some set of rules to abide by. Life on this planet is from random chance, pure luck. No one can tell anyone what they should or shoud not be doing.

This seems like a non sequitur. Life is random luck, pure chance. I agree. Why does this randomness mean no-one can tell anyone what they should or should not be doing? Clearly this is not the case. People can do this, and they do do this all the time. If your point is that everyone should leave everyone else alone and not force them to do anything - if life is just random, and there are no rules, why shouldn't I force people do do stuff against their will. If there are no rules, why shouldn't I just rape, kill and steal whenever I want?

It's just your bad luck that you don't want to do those things, I guess.

Stupid conscience

What's also really unlucky is my stupid conscience stopping me from participating in many completely voluntary exchanges. I'm so unlucky. How can I free myself from this puritanical mindset?

It's annoying when, in these types of discussions, someone inevitably says, "there's no right or wrong; morality simply comes from social norms and subjective preferences; etc." Well, what's the point in even having this discussion then? It turns every discussion about issues with a moral component (this includes all political issues) into "Chocolate is better than vanilla." "No, vanilla is better than chocolate!"