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My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.
The Venn diagram of sex-worker rights advocates and prison abolitionists is not quite a circle, but it's pretty close.
Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary, but maybe it would help get everyone in the system enough to fight pimping/disease/violence/etc. And maybe people could audit the classes at the trade school and pick up some useful skills.
Is writing work?
Is writing erotica work?
Is writing erotica prostitution?
Can you force a prisoner to write erotica?
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You cited a paragraph saying that courts have upheld it; courts have upheld various thing Americans in general are against, this is a non sequitur.
Depends what you mean by 'can' I guess.
Will it empirically happen? Nah, most Americans would be squicked out and there's literally no one pushing for it, do there's no way laws would get passed to allow it. Every politician who voted for that would be saying goodbye to their career and personal life. So no, it 'can't' happen by that metric.
Is it morally permissible? No, I just said that making inmates work is not morally permissible, that's the comment you're responding to.
Can someone on an internet forum invent a formalization which focuses on specific features of a situation and meanings of words such that they can draw some type of logical parallel between it and other things that happen such that they are framed as similar enough to maybe suggest they are equally 'allowed'? Sure, you are doing that right now, but big whoop. That's the type of rhetoric that's easy to construct for pretty much anything, and generally has very little influence on what happens in reality.
Why? Every argument I can think of comes down to "because they don't believe sex work is real work", and the same arguments that would convince the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice would convince the Department of Corrections (and/or the voters upstream of those organizations).
I'm aware that the previous paragraph sounds like "without God, Atheists have nothing stopping them from murdering everyone!!!", but I literally don't see the limiting principle (assuming there is one).
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As I said downthread, it matters what order you do your goals in. If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.
Also, knocking off one example still leaves my other two, as well as the countless others I skipped over.
That's not wild. What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.
Perhaps, but that's just tactics.
My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing that sex work is not work through the argument of 'We're ok with making prisoners do work, we are not ok with making prisoners have sex, QED sex is not work.'
If that was the point of the comment, my response of 'we not ok making prisoners do work' does dissolve the argument.
I agree there's tactics involved in avoiding the bad outcome you hint at as a practical matter, although realistically I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes more than logical formulations, and you whole point is about how those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.
That's a whole different issue, though.
Yup, it sure would be wild if we did that for chefs! Or writers! Or drivers! Or dishwashers! Or babysitters!
It would definitely be crazy if Scope of Practice laws were used to do crazy things for no reason. But that has nothing to do with sex work. Scope of Practice laws aren't used that way because, again, voters wouldn't like it.
I was trying to make an argument about policy, not fact. e.g. "A whale is a fish because you can catch it with a boat".
From a fact-based position, prostitution is a job, gang membership is employment, and hitmen are contract workers. From a policy-based perspective, that's irrelevant.
For now. Aren't you trying to change the vibes?
No, progressives are not trying to make people feel more positively about rape.
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What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.
Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
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Fortunately I can care about, and make progress on, multiple political issues at the same time.
Unfortunately, making uneven progress on multiple political issues can create perverse situations like the one I've outlined above. Going from the status quo -> the government can't compel work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work is fine. Going from the status quo -> prostitution-is-work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work has a bit of a rough patch in the middle, to put it mildly.
I was being literal when I said it should be your first priority, and didn't mean to imply that it should be your only priority or your ultimate goal.
Sure. There is a theoretical worst case where sex work becomes normalized to the extent the government compels it like normal work, in the absence of other reform removing various compulsory labor measures. Practically we are so far from that world I am not sure it's worth worrying about. My expectation is that even if sex work were more normalized various carve outs to these kinds of compulsive programs would become commonplace.
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This is a very interesting argument, but I don't think "if it's acceptable for people to voluntarily perform an action for money, then it must be acceptable to force them at gunpoint to perform that action in the most dangerous possible conditions with no compensation" would be considered compelling for any line of work.
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Sorry, wait, sorry, is your impression that 'comfort women' were salaried government employees with due process rights and retirement packages and etc.?
Military conscription is bad but it's still qualitatively different from slavery in important ways.
The closest military analogy to comfort women would be something like child soldiers in Africa, which yes we do also strenuously object to.
You know that Japanese conscripts were treated pretty terribly and considered so disposable they were referred to by a term based on the price of postage on government mail, right?
So, listen: either you specify a type and context of conscription in which is is so exploitative and evil and that it is analogous to what happened to comfort women, in which case it is also an evil practice that should never be allowed, and once again the two things are not distinguished from each other.
Or you specify a type and context of conscription that's reasonable and ok in ways that make it unlikely what happened to comfort women, in which case it's a bad analogy that doesn't tell us anything.
We can play context games as much as we want, it doesn't change anything because the argument is fundamentally flawed. It's using the affective associations of the crimes and horrors committed against comfort women and trying to apply those to the notion of sex in general, which is a version of the Worst Argument in the World.
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I can't speak for "most people", but I would happily accept that equivalency. If I had the choice of renting out my bussy or being shot at, I'm getting the lube out. For obvious reasons, I'd prefer neither be the case.
It depends on the precise risks involved as well as the conditions. Presumably I'm not being asked to be a conscript or Comfort Woman from 1939 but their modern equivalents, who tend to have far more in the way of comforts and conveniences.
I'm certainly not going to become infertile from being fucked in the ass, nor by getting repeated abortions. And even women these days don't face those problems, we have better condoms, antibiotics and birth control today.
As for the risk of dying in battle, it depends on which nation you were conscripted for. Soviet conscript? I'd rather have anal Intercourse with a bayonet.
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