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Well, the short easy answer is that it's clearly illegal, and almost everyone would think that it's morally wrong. So this feels like you're asking a weird academic question like "can you logically justify from first principles why murder is wrong?" I'm not an ethical philosopher, I'm just some guy, going off of what feels right and wrong.
But sure, I'll play along. To start. this:
Absolutely not me lol. I'm a lifelong atheist, and a huge degenerate who has often paid for sex. I also have some friends who were former sex workers.
I think I can confidently speak on this topic because I have so much experience with it. When you're paying for sex, it's not just a simple business transaction. It's still an intimate act that triggers strong emotions. Scientifically, it causes a huge spike of oxytocin, which is a hormone linked to pair-bonding, especially in women. So it's actually really hard to just wham-bam-thank you maam with no emotions. The girls I met who could do that seemed incredibly damaged. Most still liked to talk a little and have some sort of emotional intimicy (and I liked that too).
They also usually have a pimp/manager who can handle the business side of things. Partly that's for pragmatic reason (they can bring in customers and chase down the deadbeats who don't pay up). But I think it's also an emotional need, to separate the business side away from the sexual side. Most working girls have strict rules that they do not have sex with their own manager, and the less-shady managers should also follow that rule. If they do, they usually end up horribly abused. In that sense, even asking for sex is wrong, because it turns what used to be a strictly business relationship into this weird mixed thing, and the woman will have to constantly think about that every time she's with her boss now. Sex work is work, but it's emotional work in a weird way that's very different from normal jobs, and part of that emotional work is just dealing with men constantly propositioning you for weird sex acts.
In my experience there's not much of a "market price," you have to haggle for everything like an old-school bazaar. So that's another area where it gets weird, and the girl can get taken advantage of if she doesn't know how much to ask for. (or the customer can get ripped off also). I guarantee this 20-yr-old Au Pair did not know how much to charge a famous rich guy for kinky BDSM sex.
Also that is totally not my position. I was trying to explain why I think what he did was morally wrong, even though it wasn't rape. There should be a middle ground of scumminess, where there's deception and coersion but not actually rape.
@FiveHourMarathon this is also my answer to you
You contradict yourself. Lest we be under the illusion that only the religious can be sacred.
The vocabulary you're grasping for, the "weirdness" is only here to justify a preexisting irrational bias against turning emotions into a moneyed exchange. It literally is wrong because it feels wrong.
You're operating under the same moral intuition as the religious people. This isn't even to say that's bad. I think it has merit for the same reason I think it has merit that buying an old piece of art to destroy it is evil.
But none of this has anything to do with consent and my objection is indeed that the moral philosophy you're espousing to justify all this is a rotten edifice that is much better served by expliciting this bias instead of trying to hide it behind consent.
Because doing so creates the insane applications that turn normal human behavior into some monstrous exploitation for no reason but the requirement to deny this bias in the name of Reason.
I don't think it's an "irrational bias" to say that hurting someone emotionally is wrong. What about hurting someone physically? Can you logically prove that it's wrong to hurt someone physically, or is that also just an irrational bias?
I think it's fine to turn emotions into a moneyed exchange. Normal people do it all the time with therapists, and maybe with all service jobs like bartenders, salesmen, etc. But those people know what they're getting in for, it doesn't get sprung on them by surprise from someone with power over them. It would also be wrong to trauma dump all of your psychological problems on some poor retail cashier.
Tragically, we can not, which caused the death or around 200 000 000 people in the previous century. Much of what is good and moral cannot be arrived at through reason.
I don't have anything against sentimentalism, or even against irrational biases. I'm only suspicious of people who hide such natural tendencies in the cloak of logic and reason so that they may not be checked by tradition.
It is all well and good that disgusting sexual practices remain obscure and shameful, actually. But any proper application of this principle is completely incompatible with society as it is, and the strategic application of this principle to some has only been a font of power.
The irony of course being that many of the people using this mechanism do so under the auspices of the very philosophers that tried to denounce it.
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I appreciate the in depth response, and confess that I have little to add to a conversation about bona fide prostitution, I have no experience with it, to the point where it's something I honestly have trouble grokking that it exists.
But I'm going to persist: if a woman lacks agency to say no to sex with her boss because saying no might cost her the job, how does she have agency to say no to being asked to walk his dog, or to taking a cut in pay, on threat of losing her job? They haven't had sex yet, oxytocin hasn't come into play. The intimacy of sex isn't implicated yet.
Now if you wanted to argue at a more granular level that such and such acts can't be done because of the oxytocin and the pressure, that would make sense.
Or if we're talking about high leverage deals and job opportunities, common in show business. That I can see the logic.
I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.
Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.
I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today. Obviously in a corporate setting a middle manager having personal tasks done by his underlings is bad, because he is embezzling. But there's no law against a restaurant owner asking some of his waiters to help him move his mother in law to a new apartment on the clock. But there's that word again, ask. This isn't ancient Rome, an employee can always exercise agency by saying no, and if his employer no longer wishes to employ him he can be fired, and if the employer operates his business in such a way that employees don't stick around then he'll have to close his business or reassess his ruleset.
Where I agree it would be genuinely bad would be a bait and switch, where the employee accepts the employment on the promise of the opportunity to do certain work and develop certain skills and is instead given low level work. The magazine intern who gets stuck getting coffee and is never given the opportunity to work on articles, etc.
In all these cases, I expect the employee to advocate for themselves. If they don't want to do something, it is incumbent on the employee to say no to it, and to threaten to quit if forced. If that makes me an AnCap then so be it.
I don't particularly think that fucking your employees is good, but I do think that trying to make it into a consent violation is confusing and dumb. It's not a consent violation, otherwise women are incapable of consent and agency which is obviously a repugnant conclusion to most people making the argument against Gaiman in the New Yorker, it's a different category of thing.
The problem isn't really "it's wildly out of your job description", it's "it's wildly worse than your job description".
Putting up Christmas lights is not so distasteful a job that few people would do it (at least without an orders of magnitude pay increase if at all). Having sex with your boss is such a distasteful job.
De gustibus non est dispuntandum. I'm sure I could find some people who would sooner have kinky sex with me than help me put up my Christmas lights. Actually, I live with one. b'dum'tish.
But the perceived or actual unpleasantness of any given task isn't for you or I to opine on. It is for people making the deal to decide whether they want to accept the deal or reject it. Consent is the question of whether they validly agreed to the deal or not, not whether it was a good deal or a bad deal, or even whether they should be legally allowed to make such a deal. My question is and remains: why is sex the one part of the deal for which women/employees apparently lose all ability to utilize their agency and make logical cost-benefit analyses? If it isn't the only part of the deal for which women/employees lose all agency, than which contracts are and aren't they allowed to sign and forced to abide by?
On the contrary, the unpleasantness of the task is exactly what's for us to opine on. If we're going to have the concept of right and wrong at all, how much people are harmed is going to be important, and how unpleasant the task is is directly related to that.
Because sex is a really really unpleasant task to take on in this context and many employers are also highly motivated in the real world to demand it. This combination is pretty much unique to sex.
Sure, assume that sex is the worst thing in the world that any employer will ask you to do, and forbid any employee to consent to it for various moral reasons. I get all that. It doesn't change the factual question of consent and agency. "You're not allowed to consent to that" is different from "you didn't consent to that."
A good comparison would be minors. We traditionally don't allow minors to consent to sex, or to sign contracts to which they will be bound, outside of certain exceptions. We feel that minors don't have the power to consent to those things. I'm trying to get a proper explanation of women's power of consent in an employment context.
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The law has to draw a line somewhere. Should a person on unemployment be kicked off for refusing to work as a prostitute?
That's a different question than, is such a deal consensual.
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