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Notes -
'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.
If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.
Please stop arguing semantics. I hate when discussions devolve into word games as a way of avoiding the actual validity of an argument, and if this is the line of reasoning you're going to choose I'm not going to entertain this discussion further.
If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?
Either way, the negative externalities of turning sex into a consumptive act to be exchanged as a market is something that should be discouraged, regardless of age.
Renting out your body isn't anywhere near as bad as selling it, renting your body (and your brain) is what people do for work 8 hours ever weekday.
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I'm perfectly happy to discuss the issue itself, I just think that such discussions are much more fruitful when everyone avoids using loaded language.
For example, if I'm arguing against someone who opposes abortion being legal, I'm not going to go along with them using the term 'baby-murder' in place of abortion.
You probably don't think of 'selling her body' as being equivalent, but I think that just demonstrates how successful the activist framing has been. It implies that prostitution is a type of slavery, which it (usually) isn't.
After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.
No one held Anna Nicole Smith in any esteem when she married that geezer, and that was the central example of marrying a man for his money.
That's true, but that was confounded by their gigantic age gap. Plus, I can't imagine the average person thinking better of a prostitute version of Anna who just slept with him for pay.
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I find it ironic you consider the idea of a women 'selling her body' as loaded language in recent vernacular when and then proceed to issue the statement "After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel." which is a much more modern interpretation of marriage popularized in the last decade.
It's clear we won't come to agreement. I think the modern materialist/rationalist/objectivist notion that marriage is generally a pragmatic institution based off of materialism and risk aversion is generally false in a historical sense beyond well documented edge cases. This simplification is what largely damaged marriage as an institution and changes the game theory to make marriage seem risky with no real benefit. When marriage was considered a permanent union, people prioritized very different things in a partner than simply material wealth. The modern consumptive and transactional nature of sex and marriage has created significant costs in population growth and stability, family stability, and child rearing.
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