I will not respond to most of what you said, as it's getting rather repetitive, you seem to have made up your mind about how prostitution is exclusively all of the following and worse: necessarily extremely "degrading", "like selling organs and slavery", "leads to pedophilia", is about "sucking dirty dicks". Divorced from reality in other words. I feel like I am talking to a creationist who argues that evolution is just an unproven theory.
But this shit had my blood boiling:
>Considering that this prostitute was/is your friend, she must be educated and intelligent enough to keep your interest. Why was that the only choice for her, btw? Family violence or smth?
She had to be abused in order to become a prostitute? For the sake of the holy fuck...
First of all, aren't we a little bit elitist and superficial? I am friends with her because I like her as a human and she is a nice person and fun to hang out with, not because she is "able to keep my interest" with smarts and education...
She is average smart I would think, and in fact not well educated, tho has a certain natural curiosity to her. She fucked up her education, mostly by cutting classes a lot and partying, leading to bad grades. A rebellious teen at most, no abuse involved (something I kinda have in common with her, that rebellious/carpe diem phase, but I somehow managed to outgrow that phase soon enough to not completely tank my final grades, and still qualified to go to uni).
And prostitution wasn't the only choice for her, even tho thanks to her rebellious years and bad academic record, her choices were limited. That's why she started working as a cleaner in that hospital (another option) where I met her. She could have gone back to school, or gone to vocational school instead (she had/has supportive parents and a good relationship with them). No idea why she did not, or rather only in recent years started looking into that possibility.
I myself was working in that hospital only because German males at the time still had to either do mandatory army service or mandatory civil service, and I opted for the latter. We got talking at the "smokers bus stop" (basically a little space with a roof looking like a bus stop right outside of the hospital and the only place where anybody was allowed to smoke), then started hanging out after shifts. We lost touch after my service was over and left, and left home for uni to another town. But a couple of years later we ran into each other again, and that's when I learned she changed professions (well, after a while she told me, while initially being secretive about it).
She wasn't abused/hadn't been abused, she wasn't driven into prostitution by outright desperation (she wanted a less shitty job, but that's not the same), she wasn't pimped out by a "boyfriend", she wasn't forced into it by anybody or anything. She wasn't in debt either, as far as I know, just shittily paid for long hours, which only allowed her to rent a somewhat small and shitty apartment, drive a shitty used car, go on a low-end vacation every couple of years, and so on, and desired a life less shitty.
In fact, she told me she was rather skeptical at first and took a long time deliberating if she should do it, did a lot of online research first, and then took cautious steps into that business, doing it very part time for a time while still working her cleaner job, and then decided it was working well enough for her and a lot better than that cleaner job, and made the jump to full time. What initially gave her the idea of becoming a prostitute I don't know.
> how prostitution is exclusively all of the following and worse...
You never explained why we should exclusively decriminalize prostitution but not everything else which perfectly fits into wiki's labor definition
> necessarily extremely "degrading"
not necessarily. There is a tip of the iceberg - girls who write "fantastic articles", "informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny",- whose rights you are trying to defend here.
> "leads to pedophilia"
I think, you should've said "leads to gay marriages", for consistency
> "like selling organs and slavery"
you never explained where should we stop and why prostitution is different
> Divorced from reality in other words.
Alright
> I feel like I am talking to a creationist who argues that evolution is just an unproven theory.
I know that there are more than 2 opportunities and I figured out that you are from a developed country, so I chose a more likely reason to go into prostitution, according to my divorced from reality views.
> First of all, aren't we a little bit elitist and superficial? I am friends with her because I like her as a human and she is a nice person and fun to hang out with, not because she is "able to keep my interest" with smarts and education...
I don't think so. Humans have a huge variation in intelligence so understanding each other may be a big problem. I have acquaintances who are nice people but I feel very uncomfortable talking to them - it's like talking to big, adult-size kids. I also have nice acquaintances, who are like on the edge of understanding, from the left side of the scale - sometimes annoying but hanging out is fun. And I have those with whom I feel like we have a complete understanding(not agreement), and those with whom I myself feel like an idiot and need to put lots of effort to just keep up.
> And prostitution wasn't the only choice for her, even tho thanks to her rebellious years and bad academic record, her choices were limited.
Is technical college in Germany somehow a bad choice, compared to cleaning? Good grades are not needed and you get payed while studying, or it's not as cool as internet describes it?
That was interesting, thank you for writing.
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Let's cut everything I said before as irrelevant so you won't feel bad talking about it. Let's talk about what you wrote as I need your help to understand it, no sarcasm intended.
Prostitution is no different from work in McDonalds or even cleaning toilets, they are all labor. Alright. But then we get into a situation where .
So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men. Men are stronger but it doesn't bring much to their table: blunt force is not smth of a high value nowadays.
Therefore, when women tell me about their serious or not so serious financial troubles, I should suggest them to go into prostitution and give them a link to this topic which explains how to do it right. Yeah, people don't like advises they didn't ask for, but I just want to help - helped a couple of girls to get junior positions in IT when they didn't even consider it as an option, thinking that it immensely hard, but IT not even remotely close to the benefits of the prostitution. Most(I'd say absolute majority, but I'm not inclined enough to google statistics) IT positions, for which someone is willing to pay you, are extremely repetitive and boring, whether it's junior, middle or senior, and, if you come there for the money only, it will be a trouble getting higher on the salary ladder. In a country I am from, a highly qualified senior I know gets around 2600$ and he is not very thrilled about this job as he been doing it for 10 years but he likes the salary and that's enough for him. If we legalize prostitution so prostitutes could get pensions and other security benefits, it wins, hands down. And I'm comparing it to mental labor because it's hard for me to imagine physical labor to compare.
Alright, prostitution is the same and it wins.
But there's a problem here - if I advice that to the women/girls I know, I can 100% tell you that the response I will get is a slap or, more likely, a punch in the face, a kick in the balls or a combination from those. What am I missing here? Do you think it's because they are just not as open-minded as you are?
>You never explained why we should exclusively decriminalize prostitution
I - and others too - have repeatedly pointed out how prostitution is not different from other already legal physical labor, but here goes the summary: it's consensual, something adults do, it can be relatively safe[0], it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health[0].
Selling organs clearly does not fit that. Slavery does not either. Child prostitution does not either. Your argument seems to be "if we allow any paid work, this will lead to child exploitation". "If we allow factory work, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child factory work", "If we allow prostitution, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child sex work". No, it fucking isn't, no matter how often you repeat that argument, slightly rephrased.
Your only other objection I keep hearing is that that genitals are somehow magical and very different from other organs so that when you use them for work instead of pleasure they will immediately fuck with your head, unlike say your brain or hands which are fine to use for work. And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time. All those claims are not just outright wrong, they are on a level of "the earth is flat" to me.
> chose a more likely reason to go into prostitution,
How exactly do you figure it's "the more likely reason"? What informed that? Do you have any foundation to make this claim?
>Is technical college in Germany somehow a bad choice, compared to cleaning? Good grades are not needed and you get payed while studying, or it's not as cool as internet describes it?
That's a misunderstanding of how the system works. First of all, you don't get paid for visiting any school. You usually do not have to pay (much) either if it's a state run school (private schools are different and can be quite expensive).
We have state-run vocational schools, as well as private vocational schools. If you want to learn a trade, such as plumber, hairdresser or welder or sales or whatever, you have to find a company hiring you as an apprentice and then that company will educate you on the practical hands-on side while the vocational school will give you a good chunk of theory specific to your job and/or more generally applicable knowledge (e.g. they might teach you how to write a proper, legal invoice) as well as additional general education (math in particular). But here is the thing: finding a company to hire you as an apprentice is hard, and it can be quite impossible depending where you live if your final school grades are shit. Too many applicants for open spots, and there will be applicants with better grades. If you get an apprenticeship, you get paid a small salary by the company, but it's usually not enough to live on your own, often not even enough to live with room mates. So you can either "freeload" from your parents or take out a special state student loan[1] (or somehow have money saved). An apprenticeship lasts between 2 years and 4 years, depending on the specific trade. Expect 700 bucks a month if you're a plumber apprentice, before taxes. The pay is worse now than ever in most apprenticeships, by the way. My mom in todays equivalent money would have been paid more than double what she would get now as an apprentice in the same vocation.
Then there is what one could call "technical colleges", which are a little like community colleges I suppose. You get a "uni-degree-light" (Fachhochschulabsluss). E.g. you can become a "programmer" but you cannot become a "computer scientist" or "computer engineer" (for those degrees you have to go to a university). Applicants must however have a certain school or equivalent degree ("Fachhochschulreife"), and a lot of people don't (my friend did not). You can get this required degree by either staying a little longer in school, go back to a (night) school or you automatically get it if you get an accredited vocational degree[2].
Then there is full universities. In order to get in, you have to have the highest school degree (Abitur) or a completed masters degree or diploma from a technical college. So if you do not have either, you can go back to (night) school to get your Abitur. Certain fields of study, like medicine, have additional grade requirements ("numerus clausus") because there are far too many applicants (with certain exceptions, e.g. if you can demonstrate you had a "problematic" upbringing for example).
There are basically six ways you can leave regular school as a kid: no degree (congrats, nobody will ever hire you for anything except the worst menial jobs), Hauptschule ("main school" or "basic school", very hard to get an apprenticeship with just that, but not impossible) after grade 9, Realschule (mid school, you usually go the vocational school/apprenticeship route after that) after grade 10, Erweiterter Sekundarstufenabschluss I (basically Realschule+, the difference being your grades were good enough to allow you to stay in school and pursue the Abitur) after grade 10, and Abitur after grade 12 or 13 (qualifies you to go to university, technical colleges or you can of course go to a vocational school, but a lot of companies will not offer you an apprenticeship because they consider you "overqualified"). The "Fachhochschulreife" you can get by going the Abitur route, but leaving with good enough grades after grade 11, or visiting a "Fachoberschule" after you already earned a Realschule degree (Fachoberschulen often offer night school for people getting their Fachhochschule while working an unskilled job during the day).
Everything is rather complicated, I know. But it also gives you a lot of options and different way to get there.
The point is: you don't get paid going to school, and you don't get paid enough being an apprentice. I am sure that some people earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school as opposed to taking out loans or work dead end side jobs with a lot worse pay-by-hour rate. Tho the common trope is that your waiter is probably a student (which is true enough that it became a political issue when gastronomy was shut down during corona and a lot of students got into financial dire straits thanks to it).
>If we legalize prostitution so prostitutes could get pensions and other security benefits, it wins, hands down.
That's what happen in Germany, by the way. Prostitution counts as regular work and thus you get access to all kinds of benefits and access to the national retirement insurance, workplace injury insurance, etc.
>So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men.
Uh... what?
>But there's a problem here - if I advice that to the women/girls I know, I can 100% tell you that the response I will get is a slap or, more likely, a punch in the face, a kick in the balls or a combination from those. What am I missing here? Do you think it's because they are just not as open-minded as you are?
The thing is, you'd get that slap under the current situation, where prostitution is not legal were you are and highly stigmatized.
Then again, such advice would be misleading regardless. Prostitution is not necessarily better than other jobs. Other jobs often offer a guaranteed salary, while prostitution does not as you're usually self-employed. Self-employment usually has other legal and practical ramifications as well, in general. Prostitution usually has a limited time you can keep doing it, because demand for your services will get lower and lower as you get older (usually), so you have to earn enough and save enough to finance your early-compared-to-other-jobs retirement, or be prepared to change professions later.
I personally would not advice anybody to take up prostitution as their only profession, because of the uncertain financial future, even in a world were it's legal and does not carry an excessive stigma. I won't tell anybody not to take up that profession either, if I get the feeling they carefully considered the pros and cons. Then again, I wouldn't advice anybody to pick up any kind of other self-employment either, for the same reason, unless they well researched it first and are confident it's going to work out for them.
[0] If you do it legally and aren't cut off from the police and welfare systems, and take the right precautions. As with many other jobs, if you do not take the right precautions, you can be harmed. As with other jobs even with the right precautions you can only minimize the risk of harm, not eliminate it entirely. Some jobs are explicitly about you putting yourself into harms way, like soldiers, security and bouncers, bodyguards, police, fire fighters. Other jobs have an inherent risk like cab drivers, construction workers, etc. There are jobs that can be very bad for your mental health, like again soldiers and police, EMTs and nurses and doctors, child protective service and social workers, and a plethora of others. And dull, repetitive work does not have a reputation of being particularly good for your psyche either.
[1] Called BaFöG. Basically a no interest loan, and you only have to pay back if you can, but how much of a loan you depends on your means and the means of your parents.
[2] Vocational degrees are usually not given by the vocational school, or the company which had you as an apprentice, but by a trade organization. It normally requires passing a final round of exams administered by those organizations.
> I - and others too - have repeatedly pointed out how prostitution is not different from other already legal physical labor, but here goes the summary: it's consensual, something adults do, it can be relatively safe[0], it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health[0].
Oh, those are tight boundaries. What does "something adults do" mean, though?
> Some jobs are explicitly about you putting yourself into harms way
> Other jobs have an inherent risk like
> There are jobs that can be very bad for your mental health
> And dull, repetitive work does not have a reputation of being particularly good for your psyche either.
So the goal is to reduce that harm and risk, not in using their existence as justification.
> Selling organs clearly does not fit that.
Kidney donation and liver donation are considered safe and dont even seem to affect life expectancy much(kidney does but its like a year or smth). And you can also sell one of your eyeballs, if you have 2. All those are not harmful and you can perfectly function afterwards. What's wrong with selling organs, i don't get it.
> Slavery does not either
The difference between slavery and work at Mcdonalds is just the level of exploitation, it perfectly fits. Prostitution is just sexual slavery, no big deal
> Child prostitution does not either.
[x] consensual
[x] something adults do
[x] relatively safe
[x] according to you, it isn't necessarily more of a health risk than a lot of other jobs both for physical and mental health(ofc, talking about kids who reached puberty)
You seem to be afraid of kids. Kids are allowed to work part time almost everywhere, because they are supposed to study, not because they are magical. What's the difference?
> Your argument seems to be "if we allow any paid work, this will lead to child exploitation". "If we allow factory work, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child factory work", "If we allow prostitution, then it's a slippery slope to legalizing child sex work".
It's about the direction. If we start gradually increasing the length of the working day on a factory, we will get back to child factory work, eventually, because that's where we started. That's how lifting of restrictions works, one be one. And no, there is no physical law from which you want a citation and if there is no physical law, then it doesn't exist, i already understood your position. What you are trying to protect here, as many others, is "yes, i did take all his means for survival but I didn't kill him, shitty life did. And he would've died anyway, so who cares."
> Your only other objection I keep hearing is that that genitals are somehow magical and very different from other organs so that when you use them for work instead of pleasure they will immediately fuck with your head, unlike say your brain or hands which are fine to use for work. And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time.
Sex and intimacy, and intimacy of sex are one of those things that turn a good friendship into a relationship. The word intimacy is kinda self-explanotory. I don't know, read a psychology book about human sexual relationships or smth.
> And that prostitution is somehow degrading in itself [citation needed] most of the time.
I don't know what percentage of people made a "thoughtful analyses" prior to using it as a source of income, but i presume it's less than 10. So yes, most of the time it is.
> All those claims are not just outright wrong
You just don't like it because you decided that liberalizing your mind in one way but not the other is the right thing to do without much facts to support it. The positive effect you know about, on a tip of the iceberg in Germany, is not much evidence, would've been if we knew for sure where forced ends and voluntary starts. They say that decriminalization in New Zealand led to some improvements, but that's a unique case - 5 million people on an island, - and we have no idea about it's scalability.
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But alright, nothing is important, everything is the same, prostitution is just a physical labor. Then it shouldn't be decriminalized, like Aella and others want it to be, it should be legalized. All that noncoerced stuff should be registered as individual entrepreneurs, and be prosecuted for tax avoidance. Even more so, unemployed on welfare should be sent to brothels the moment a vacancy opens
What will we get here? Nothing. The real problem which was supposed to be solved there for the majority, problem of human trafficking, will not be solved. Even Aella with friends will lose as they won't be able to compete with brothels/callgirls and will get the same payment as McDonalds, eventually. And, suddenly, the only reason you wanted to do that for - more money for the same thing, - doesn't work anymore. So maybe it's not the problem, eh?
Legalization of prostitution is not the problem, that's a consequence of the problem. I read several stories about women getting education while sex working, getting a job and then still going back to prostitution because it's "easier". The easier the legalized work, the cheaper it is and even cleaning toilets requires smth more than consent and genitals.
> How exactly do you figure it's "the more likely reason"? What informed that? Do you have any foundation to make this claim?
> That's what happen in Germany, by the way. Prostitution counts as regular work and thus you get access to all kinds of benefits and access to the national retirement insurance, workplace injury insurance, etc.
Do they send unemployed to brothels yet?
>> So, if prostitution is just the same, we get serious inequality: women, by birth, have better opportunities than men.
>Uh... what?
You heard about the term "privilege", right? Last i checked, female prostitution was in a much higher demand and has always been.
The other side of a coin is that with current gender inequality, prostitution become an "equalizer" - women in difficult financial situation have no choice but prostitution or finding a wealthy husband if they want to raise their quality of life. So what's the point of legalizing this inequality? Women should be prostitutes because they can?
> Everything is rather complicated, I know. But it also gives you a lot of options and different way to get there.
I think, much more options would've been given if companies HAD to hire at least one apprentice if there happen to be one. Ofc, for a partial compensation from the government.
> The point is: you don't get paid going to school, and you don't get paid enough being an apprentice.
So this is the actual problem, not legalization of prostitution.
> I am sure that some people earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school as opposed to taking out loans or work dead end side jobs with a lot worse pay-by-hour rate.
Be honest, it's not "some people", it's women. Women earn money from prostitution and other sex work to finance their time in school.
> The thing is, you'd get that slap under the current situation, where prostitution is not legal were you are and highly stigmatized.
But this shit had my blood boiling:
>Considering that this prostitute was/is your friend, she must be educated and intelligent enough to keep your interest. Why was that the only choice for her, btw? Family violence or smth?
She had to be abused in order to become a prostitute? For the sake of the holy fuck...
First of all, aren't we a little bit elitist and superficial? I am friends with her because I like her as a human and she is a nice person and fun to hang out with, not because she is "able to keep my interest" with smarts and education...
She is average smart I would think, and in fact not well educated, tho has a certain natural curiosity to her. She fucked up her education, mostly by cutting classes a lot and partying, leading to bad grades. A rebellious teen at most, no abuse involved (something I kinda have in common with her, that rebellious/carpe diem phase, but I somehow managed to outgrow that phase soon enough to not completely tank my final grades, and still qualified to go to uni).
And prostitution wasn't the only choice for her, even tho thanks to her rebellious years and bad academic record, her choices were limited. That's why she started working as a cleaner in that hospital (another option) where I met her. She could have gone back to school, or gone to vocational school instead (she had/has supportive parents and a good relationship with them). No idea why she did not, or rather only in recent years started looking into that possibility.
I myself was working in that hospital only because German males at the time still had to either do mandatory army service or mandatory civil service, and I opted for the latter. We got talking at the "smokers bus stop" (basically a little space with a roof looking like a bus stop right outside of the hospital and the only place where anybody was allowed to smoke), then started hanging out after shifts. We lost touch after my service was over and left, and left home for uni to another town. But a couple of years later we ran into each other again, and that's when I learned she changed professions (well, after a while she told me, while initially being secretive about it).
She wasn't abused/hadn't been abused, she wasn't driven into prostitution by outright desperation (she wanted a less shitty job, but that's not the same), she wasn't pimped out by a "boyfriend", she wasn't forced into it by anybody or anything. She wasn't in debt either, as far as I know, just shittily paid for long hours, which only allowed her to rent a somewhat small and shitty apartment, drive a shitty used car, go on a low-end vacation every couple of years, and so on, and desired a life less shitty.
In fact, she told me she was rather skeptical at first and took a long time deliberating if she should do it, did a lot of online research first, and then took cautious steps into that business, doing it very part time for a time while still working her cleaner job, and then decided it was working well enough for her and a lot better than that cleaner job, and made the jump to full time. What initially gave her the idea of becoming a prostitute I don't know.