Thursday, March 13th, 2008...11:55 am
Without Prostitution Laws, Will We Know When We are Prostituting Ourselves?
Ross Douthat thinks prostitution should be banned because selling sexual services amounts to self-harm. That’s a clean and coherent position and, as with most Douthat posts, you’ll be smarter for reading this one. But I have no idea what to say about this:
A debate in which Kerry Howley’s side is committed to the position that true sexual liberation requires removing any distinction between having sex for love or pleasure and having sex for money is a debate that social conservatives can win.
I suppose Ross was helpless to reply to the post I actually wrote, so he imagined I wrote a different one and replied to that.
In my interviews with Tracy Quan and Laura Agustin, I found them to be both quite eloquent about the difference between sex as intimacy and sex as work. It is prostitutes themselves, obviously, who understand this distinction best, and Quan, in her books, describes in great detail the rules sex workers adopt to better compartmentalize work and love in different emotional spheres–no kissing clients on the lips, to pick to the most simple example. It seems that it’s anti-prostitution types who believe there is “no distinction;” this lurking fear that human beings who sell sex cannot possibly experience the two differently, that they’ll never have normal sex lives, that they cannot emotionally detach themselves. It’s as if they believe men and women cannot suss out the distinction themselves, and so the state must step in and do so for them.
There are any number of activities that we classify, in different contexts, as both work and markers of intimacy. You can prepare a meal for your family in the morning as an act of love, and for customers in the afternoon as a source of income. You can take care of a sick spouse and expect nothing in return, and take care of sick strangers and demand a paycheck. Yes, yes, I know — sex is different. But I’m still waiting for a convincing explanation of how and why that doesn’t hinge on the stigmatization of sexually active women.
5 Comments
March 13th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[…] the way that people are reading what he’s saying (see, for example, the first sentence of this post), and so I still think that this is a strategy that complicates things unnecessarily, and makes […]
March 13th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
“Ross Douthat thinks prostitution should be banned because selling sexual services amounts to self-harm. That’s a clean and coherent position…”
Really, you find that “coherent”? By what criterion is selling sex “self-harm”? He may be fully capable of determining for himself that selling sex would be harmful to HIM (provided that there would be anyone offering to buy sex from him), but by what standard does he define “self-harm” for anyone else who may be a prostitute?
That’s what I love about conservatives: The slippery utilitarianism. Just like their forebears, the early 20th century “Progressive” movement.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:10 am
[…] Ross Douthat responding to this bit from Will Wilkinson and another bit by Kerry Howley, both of the libertarian […]
March 14th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
David Hume: “The rules of morality… are not conclusions of our reason.”
That’s the basis for the case of free markets Hayek uses in The Fatal Conceit. He points out that morals developed in a similar way as behaviors in a free market—not from a rational, top-down design, but rather unconsiously evolving over great amounts of time to reflect actions that foster the survival and success of a group.
Laws tend to reflect morals. Morals of a given group tend to encourage behavior that has helped, and discourage behavior that threatened that group.
You asked for a convincing explanation of why sex is treated differently. I think an answer is that your construct is perhaps too limited. You should at least consider that since a sizeable portion of our society thinks prostitution is harmful, there may be some evolutionary accuracy to the idea.
However, I’m a free marketeer. So, I’d hasten to add that by knowing where morality comes from (essentially formed during our unregulated prehistory), it stands to reason that you should consider preserving, at least to some degree, a similar environment that grew the morals in the first place. An overly regulated society may ironically suppress its own ability to adapt a successful morality.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[…] and considering it dirty, but in making the case for legalizing prostitution, the advocates claim it’s not substantially different from scrubbing dishes mowing lawns, and other menial labor tas…. So who is it that hates sex, […]
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