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Ban porn, subsidize prostitutes: a modest defense of whoring
The popular view is that masturbating to porn is fine, and using the services of prostitutes is not so fine. Porn is not a poor man’s prostitute, but instead a cleaner acceptable method of sexual satisfaction. You might joke with a friend, like Markiplier on the Logan Paul podcast, that you gave up porn because the two-hour wank sessions got old. Were Markiplier to say he recently gave up prostitutes, which he had been using for a decade, the conversation would have taken a somber tone. Yet for most of Western history, this moral calculation was inverted. Masturbation was seen as worse vice than than the vice girl. Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Voltaire, and Richard Wagner all thought the solitary vice more dangerous than the sex worker. Why would this be?
We don’t need to get too bogged down in the historical miscellany and theological glosses. For starters, our ancestors noted that fucking a woman is more natural than fucking a hand. But this was not haughty naturalistic phallicy. This is complex. Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself. Let’s flesh this out. On the first level, once you’ve completed the intended act with the harlot, a memory is formed in which all preceding sensations cue for satisfaction of the urge. There’s [urge -> satisfaction from woman], but we can go deeper. There’s [urge -> WOMAN -> satisfaction from woman], with all the sensations of a woman encoding sexual satisfaction: pheromones, tone of voice, clothing, mannerisms, and importantly socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages. There is one more social benefit, which is that the [dressing up -> traveling -> paying] is more prosocial than opening a tab on a laptop, and associating sex with money is great salience on the value of money.
If sex were the Milky Way and the earth were a wife, prostitutes would be Venus and porn would be Pluto. It’s very far away, and it’s not even a planet.
But the argument is yet to reach its climax. Prostitutes are seen as dirty, and this again betrays our modern misunderstanding of psychology. Going out, away from your home and work, to purge your desire with a woman is a way to keep your home and work life free from the cognitive “stain” of sex, because the whole sexiness is entrenched in its own unique context. The home and office, and the home office, are clean of memories and cues of intercourse — you have ejaculated these cues far away from your “pure” life. There’s no risk of Toobin-ing all over your keyboard after a zoom meeting, because your computer has no cues related to sex. Instead, your conception of sex is caught up in a web of strong cues, all of which are related to real life women.
I would never visit a prostitute, not as much because of morality but more because of myriads of STDs, some of which are highly infectious and very hard to get rid of such as Herpes/HPV viruses against which you cannot protect even with condoms. I sincerely believe that it was STDs that historically made prostitutes "unclean" and made them verboten in loads of cultures/religions. One prostitute infected with syphilis could wipe out half of a small town. In fact, apparently 20% of men in London caught syphilis by the age of 35 despite overall culture denouncing this behavior.
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Setting aside the impossibility of banning porn, let's say you somehow could. Your alternative doesn't feature men forced by the dearth of porn to visit a local prostitute... they just find something else to jerk off to, up to and including their own imagination, or memories of past sexual experiences. Porn isn't cutting into the prostitution industry's bottom line in any significant way, I would imagine, or the explosion of online porn would have put them out of business by now.
How does stripping feature into this dichotomy of yours anyway? It's in person, but it just encourages masturbation.
Overall I question your understanding of typical male sexuality.
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Sterility, which is why your argument that "prostitution orients men towards sex with women" doesn't work. Porn will have sex with women, why isn't that conditioning as much? Hookers dress and act (and recite a script for interactions) in the stereotypical way which involves a lot of 'this is supposedly sexy clothing and behaviour'.
The reason masturbation was seen as worse than common fornication was precisely because it was a solitary vice. Having casual sex was at least open to the chance of pregnancy, it was following the natural path of "men and women have sex, babies result", even if it was being contorted for pleasure (by men) and money (by women). Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, use of contraception are trying to avoid the natural end of sex and its natural consequence: babies.
So modern prostitution would be as ill-regarded as porn: it's sterile. Prostitutes and their clients have methods to avoid conception. Sex is purely a transaction of money for satisfaction. The problem with modern sex, be it porn or prostitutes or cohabitation or contraception and abortion within marriage is sterility, deliberately avoiding what sex is meant to do. (This is completely ignoring the problem of STIs, which haven't gone away, and as the monkeypox outbreak demonstrates, good old promiscuous sex is still the best way to spread diseases).
So modern prostitution, even if it did orient men towards women, is not orienting them to relationships with women, it's towards the woman as source of satisfaction as you want it. The prostitute isn't there to have a good time herself, she's there to provide a service that you pay for, and since it's a transaction, she has to sell the goods to your demand. Even if that demand is for intimacy, the 'girlfriend experience', it's still a fake. It's not socialising awkward men to be able to interact with women, it's socialising women to be what men see in porn. Because this is what modern sex has become: for increasing novelty, porn has to provide something new and spicy. And after a while, seeing this in porn, consumers want it in real life and glossy magazines are all too happy to write articles on how you, too, modern woman, can be a porn star in the bedroom.
Oral sex was once something only whores did. Now the expectation is that of course your girlfriend will give you a blowjob. Anal sex was mainstreamed via porn, and once the novelty of heterosexual sodomy has worn off, I have no doubt that Cosmopolitan will be writing articles about the best way to perform the new kink.
Possibly incest, there seems to be a lot of interest in brother-sister as step-sibling incest porn? So Cosmo will have articles on "10 Ways To Role-Play Incest" and "How To Play Sister And Brother With Your Boyfriend".
That's modern sex. That's not about socialisation, it's about 'consent is the most important thing' and 'pleasure is the only reason for sex' and adopting "sex work is real work" will still have a stigma, because there was an excuse for men to go to prostitutes once upon a time (my wife would never do this act and I would never ask her to do it) but nowadays, women are supposed to be sex-positive and willing to do anything, because sex is not dirty and no act should be beyond the pale. So it still will be "only the losers who can't get a girlfriend go to the sex workers".
And again, that is ignoring the whole problem of the awkward men who do want the entire girlfriend experience, who do want "this attractive girl is with me because she wants to be and she likes me for who I am", not "I am paying this woman for an hour of her time and access to her body, and she has other clients before and after me". The socially awkward guys may want "the formation of relationships and marriages" but there's more to being with a woman in a relationship than "okay, I've been to hookers so I know how sex works". If all the problem is "lack of confidence" and going to a sex worker helps with that, it may result in "can get a proper girlfriend". If the problem is more than that, it won't solve it.
There are men who use prostitutes who have wives, etc. and it's a matter of convenience for them. They don't need socialisation, they're horny and want a quick, convenient climax where they don't have to bother about their partner's pleasure or anything other than getting off the way they want. They needn't be jerks while fucking the hooker, they can be quite pleasant, but it's nowhere near "socializing with a woman, implicating your social personality and hers. This works to develop a craving associated with all the sensations of women, increasing the desire for the company of real women and the formation of relationships and marriages".
They already have relationships and marriages, they're horny right now and just want to get off and their wives/girlfriends aren't there to satisfy it.
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Prostitution is banned because of the impact on those selling sex, not because of the impact on buyers. I don’t think you have to be a feminist to see that this post totally ignores what selling sex could do to the woman’s psychology (and her health in general). Plus there is always the fear that women are being forced into it by pimps. I personally think it should be decriminalized instead of legalized — I don’t think having a McDonald’s of sex would be a happy development.
"Food, folks and fun" indeed...
Though, this begs the question of how places where prostitution is already legal are fairing. I haven't heard of any major differences between NZ, the Netherlands, Nevada, Denmark, and the rest of the world that are attributable to their approaches to sex work.
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I'm not sold on the idea that working as a sex worker in a regulated industry is significantly worse for mental health than other low status occupations, especially given the amount of money earned. If you consider someone who works in hospice care, and while this isn't a low status job per se, it's psychologically grueling, stressful, and disgusting. Additionally, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of prostitution in a defense of the oldest profession, we should instead imagine a case that can be reasonably actionable with regulation. Like if someone wants to bring back coal mining, we shouldn't imagine the worst case of 19th century coal mining, we should imagine an industry with regulation an safeguards.
There are many women who already sell their bodies on Twitch, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, and OnlyFans. Sex work entails more risk, even when regulated, absolutely, but the psychological act of selling one's body is not different here.
I think having to make physical contact with someone for money is psychologically distinct from selling pics/videos online. In this I guess I agree with the OP!
But yes, this isn't an issue that I feel I have completely made up my mind on, and I'm willing to be convinced that it could be regulated in a relatively safe way. I do think the psychological impact of selling intimacy has to be reckoned with in any argument for legalizing (or subsidizing!) prostitution. I also think that if you are worried about traditional family formation, as many people on this site seem to be, further going down the road of explicitly turning sex into a commodity is a bad thing.
this genie is out of the bottle and isn't going back in. A retvrn to Christian moral hegemony isn't happening, the tide is going in the exact opposite direction. Furthermore why do we care so much about the psychological impacts of prostitution when we don't care about how the feelings of garbage men or plumbers are affected by their jobs?
And to be clear, we aren't "turning sex into a commodity", we would be treating sex formally as an interaction or transaction between two people. Right now it is that, but we just pretend it isn't because it makes us feel good.
Because they're men and we "live in a society" ... - insert more MRA talking points here -
Sadly true but nothing we can do about it right now.
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I'm not arguing for a return to "Christian moral hegemony," and I think you can be worried about family formation without wanting a full on return of 1950s sexual politics. But either way, if you are trying to maximize people being in stable, monogamous relationships, legalizing prostitution feels like a significant disincentive for both men and women for pursuing that -- men because they can get easy sex outside of a relationship even if they are not the type of guy who successfully manages to have casual sex, women because they can have a "side hustle" that will often put tension on any serious relationship.
See, you are arguing that monogamy is preferable to hypergamy or whatever else, and i dont disagree. American culture values individualism too much for marriage and even monogamy to a lesser extent, dedicated relationships almost categorically will require sacrifice for and acceptance of someone else. These are just not highly valued traits in modern popular culture. My problem with your argument is that you will have to change how people value others for change to happen, or to put it more bluntly it won't happen. You can't legislate what people want. If people want multiple partners or freedom from commitment, be it financial or otherwise, how are you going to change that?
Legalizing prostitution may even highlight why people would want a real relationship in the first place. If we decouple sex from the partnership of a relationship then peoples incentives can align way more closely in the dating market. letting all of the sleaziest and most animalistic urges get taken care of leaves people who want more with a more like minded pool of people to choose from.
Even further, if the dating market stays effed up or gets more so, prostitution may be the best some guys are gonna get, and i feel like its kindof a dick move to stand between a willing whore and a guy who legit will not get laid without her.
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It's much less garbage men or plumbers, (the people I know who do these things seem to be satisfied with the job itself) and much more telemarketers, retail/service employees and so on.
I don't think sex work is for everybody. And for reasons, I wouldn't make it into expected work, as in, expecting people on welfare to do it. But at the same time, I can see how it would be some people's cup of tea.
Truth be told, I think the trad-sex elements of some forms of conservatism to be well..missing the point I think. It's not that I think they're misidentifying the problem...increasing amounts of men seem to be incapable of fulfilling roles that are broadly seen as desired (even if people like to pretend that's not the case), but the problem isn't really in the sexual sphere. Because of that the solutions are all wrong. Porn/Prostitution in this way are fillers for people who have internalized ideas that either the male gender role is bad, or lack the skills to perform the male gender role.
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There are many jobs that are uniquely harmful for the ones performing them, and this is usually compensated for in some way. By higher pay or greater satisfaction or social praise, for examples. I don't see why prostitution requires special regulation.
Or are you implying that whores are always effectively slaves?
Name a job? I can think of dangerous jobs or jobs that require long hours. I can't think of a job that involves selling your own body so a stranger can use you for sexual pleasure. That feels different enough to require "special regulation".
I think there are women who enjoy sex work and can do it without too much of an impact on the rest of their lives, yes. But I think that any woman being forced into it, either through physical coercion by a pimp or because they don't see another way to financially provide for themselves, is a moral catastrophe that we should try really fucking hard to prevent.
Selling access to your body would seem to describe surrogacy, possibly certain forms of modeling, organ sales, and paid blood/sperm/plasma/marrow donation as well as prostitution. And notably we put all of those things in a separate category from working at McDonald’s.
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You mean, other than prostitution? You can't think of a job that is prostitution, other than things that are prostitution?
Fair enough, I suppose I set myself up for that. My point is that selling your body for sex feels extremely different from other unpleasant/harmful jobs (like being a garbageman or a plumber, which are two examples another poster gave). Setting aside the risks (abuse, pregnancy, STDs), the work is deeply, unavoidably, personal and potentially alienating in a way that other jobs are not.
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Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women. (in current modern conditions, upon which that depends very finely. no idea if hunter gatherers masturbate or how often, etc). Or they'd just torrent it. A better argument would probably be directly against masturbation as opposed to for banning it.
Why isn't this also true of masturbation? It orients one towards women because it's images of them!
Old World Monkeys and Apes masturbate so I think it's safe to assume that every version of our ancestors spanked the monkey.
But, frequency - i've seen a video of a monkey sucking its own dick, and some humans do that, but neither is common for either. Is masturbation a once-daily or once-weekly thing for monkeys and apes?
Monkeys are notorious for jacking off (as well as shit-flinging) at the zoo -- if it's common enough to see at a random zoo visit I would think that they do it quite a bit? Auto-fellatio is probably anatomically easier for monkeys, which might explain why humans don't do it so much; also the known problem of being more like sucking dick than getting a blowjob. (which is presumably less of an issue if you're a monkey)
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Do you think they'd do it as often? This sounds similar to saying that if you ban fast food people will just gorge themselves on healthy food, except they'd also probably stop gorging altogether.
It's not obvious that all the anti-porn arguments differentiate that much between masturbating 1x/day and 1x/2 days, tbh. And - from various reading, it seems like, when given access only to 'sexy women' magazines, people still did it very often.
And the problem is it's just complicated - both fast food and health food share issues like having poor nutrient content and tasting mediocre that, locally, lead people to fast food (people say "eat your vegetables", but store-bought vegetables taste flavorless. Heirloom varieties, grown well, of the same often taste great. So replacing fast food (and a store-bought prepared dinner, or even making your own white bread loaf with butter, is still pretty bad) with healthy food still leave people wanting the bad food.
The frequency or characteristics of masturbation could similarly depend on society, but depend on more things than just 'pictures available'. Or maybe it really just is 'pics available'. Wonder if any primitive-ish societies keep around any cosmo magazines.
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They absolutely will. Maybe not if you ban sugar entirely.
I should rephrase.
Assuming you can enforce a ban, the further you go along the spectrum of ruling out easy, tasty, addictive, unhealthy foods: the less likely people are to gorge themselves.
And the same for porn, the further you go along the spectrum of removing the easiest, most stimulating porn, the less likely people will be to overindulge.
Yes, marginal effects do matter. Their effects are often a lot less than the perfect solutions one might hope for, but I suspect that it's rare that they have no or negative effect - perhaps compared to what expected, it might feel that way.
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A prostitute is about as intimate as your hand, less convenient and more expensive. Beyond that, I fail to see how this is argues for banning porn at all.
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I think its time for me to admit that I am an ex John and an ex compulsive porn user. I visited well over 20 prostitutes in my life and there were periods where I was masturbating to porn 3-4 times a day. I don't do either of those things anymore. But that's a different post.
Having laid out my past, I would say your post sucks big time.
Bait title (nothing about banning pornography or subsidizing whores), and same old hot take that 50 million people had on the internet before (go visit /r/redscarepod for 5 minutes). Anyways, since I can't just call your post shit and leave it at that, I will try to lay out why I think so;
The central thrust of your post, which is that masturbating to porn and having sex with prostitutes are distinct because one of them involves a "real woman". Is extremely naive to the psychology of actually visiting a prostitute. Why do I say this? Because the distinct categories are not {having sex with a mutually attracted partner, having sex with a prostitute} and {porn} it's {having sex with a mutually attracted partner} and {porn, having sex with a prostitute.} As someone who has had sex with a prostitute and someone who did it willingly, its not the same thing at all!
When I visited prostitutes, the same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn. There was no need to please the other person, no mutual feedback, no higher order feelings (such as "love" or a genuine interest in the person), it was a pure satisfying of lust. And I don't think any other John would attest against this.
In fact, one of the reasons I stopped was because I started going to them incessantly and this was getting too expensive, I never wanted to incessantly have sex with my "real" sexual partners. With them, having sex was a nice thing that happened ever so often, it wasn't something that happened ONLY to satisfy my urges as it were with porn and whores. Seriously, I never went to a whore for anything but sex. And those who visit whores for intimacy are still just masturbating, real intimacy isn't paid for, its reciprocal, it's not something you can summon at will.
Prostitution is cleaner than masturbating??
You are aware that whores tend to have are at least an order of magnitude more likely to have common STD's and multiple orders of magnitude to carry the godfather of all STD's HIV. In some cases upto 57% to whores have HIV.
Also the psychological distinction also doesn't make sense. If you are separating sex from home, do you not have sex at home? Your logic lies on the fact that sex with a prostitute is the same level of dirtiness as having sex with a consensual partner. Without that assumption it wouldn't be any different from masturbation would it?
Masturbating and compulsively masturbating to porn are two distinct things along the axis of purity or whatever you seem to care about. Your arguments apply to both of them, not only one of them.
Also jacking off into a keyboard? Is this a troll? You shit and piss in the toilet, I don't think jizzing into the toilet seat is all that worse, if you think it is, congrats on the advanced solipsism.
I explained why porn is worse for a human than seeing a prostitute, and why prostitution is in prosocial in its orientation. So I wouldn’t say my title is mistitled at all. I wasn’t going to go into the history of prostitute regulation or scholastic theology. If porn is bad and prostitutes are better, I advocate banning porn and subsidizing prostitution. It would be awesome if the RS subreddit made this point often, but I don’t think I’ve seen it, if you can link me that would be cool.
I can’t dispute your personal lived experience, but I do wonder if you’re an outlier. “The same pathways in my brain were firing as the ones that do when I beat it to porn” is extremely improbable given the unique cues associated prostitution. The lack of intimacy is one reason why prostitution is not identical to real intercourse, but this doesn’t supersede the numerous reasons why it is closer than porn. Living in a society where, I think it’s 30% of men haven’f had sex in a year, doesn’t afford us with the counter argument of “just find a gf bro”. Ideally everyone would be in longterm relationships and yet historically cultures saw fit to introduce regulated prostitution.
Re: cleaner, we’re talking about psychological cleanliness involving cues. A girlfriend is a living breathing psychological cue for sex. She doesn’t exist on a tab in your computer. While sure, your bed would associated with sex (with your girlfriend), that still retains more psychological “purity of space” than having porn in the same browser that you work on. The question is what we’re associating together. Associating being alone and the internet with sexual gratification is worse than either a prostitute or having a significant other.
Sure, I just think its a very naive argument.
Neither of those things are trivial.
Not the banning porn or the subsidizing prostitutes. Books can be written on the edge cases and unintended effects of both those policies.
It reads very much as a hot take clickbait title. You don't even seriously attempt to discuss those policies.
I know many other Johns. And their thought process is the exact same as mine. The sugar daddy, hire a prostitute for companionship trope is not as common in the "Real world" as certain media would have you believe.
The prostitute is an entity that lives in <Address of massage place that offers happy endings>.
I don't even remember what the prostitutes individual faces looked like. As I said, you can come up with a lot of armchair psychology on why visiting whores is unlike porn, "cues" and all that, but until you have actually been in the mindspace to have done it for real instead of just thinking about it, you are probably filling in a lot of the gaps with pop-psychology hooplah.
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I'm interested in digging in a bit more on why you think this is important.
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If that's all she is, then you are treating her as a prostitute, and that's not solving the problem you set up.
That is a property of a girlfriend but not the only property of a girlfriend.
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Ban anonymous browsing of the internet. Publicly broadcast all internet users' media consumption habits.
As much as I expect to be downvoted for it, this.
Anonymity is the enemy sociability.
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If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean.
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That would also kill this site, and whatever
What is it that that idiot Yudowsky is always saying? That which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed?
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I would argue that this relation is flipped if you compare paid prostitutes to free porn, as opposed to paid porn. That is, paid porn is worse than prostitutes is worse than free porn, because paying for sex distorts everything and makes male-female relationships transactional rather than cooperative. There is a component to many relationships in which men give money for sex, and women give sex for money, even if this transaction is implicit. My belief is that the more explicit this transaction is, and the stronger it is, the worse the relationship is. Or, at least, the lower the ceiling for how good it is becomes. A healthy relationship ought to involve people who genuinely like each other doing things either that they both like, or doing things the other person likes because they want to be kind to their partner who they genuinely care about, not because they expect to get something in return. No real relationship is going to achieve that level perfectly, but the closer you get the better the relationship is (assuming both people are doing it and not just one person slaving away for the other).
Explicitly paying for sex is about as transactional is it gets, and normalizes it in the minds of both parties involved. Men who pay for sex are going to be more willing to pay in the future, are going to believe that they have less intrinsic value as a sexual partner. If they have low self confidence this makes them easier for women to take advantage of in the future and exploit for money, or if they have high self confidence it will make them feel more entitled to sex as long as they have money and respect women less as something other than a piece of merchandise. On the other side, women who are are paid for sex, or sexual content over the internet, will also come to believe that they have less intrinsic value other than their bodies, and/or will view men as having less value aside from their money. It actually sickens me when I see the way some female streamers view their own audiences, just cash registers waiting to be emptied.
While in-person prostitution is probably not as bad as online simping, because it involves some semblance of real connection as you explain, I think the main reason it's less bad is simply because it limits the damage. An extremely attractive woman can only ensnare so many men if she has to spend a night with each one in person, while an attractive woman online can ensnare thousands or possibly millions.
Meanwhile, I don't think free porn has the same damage because it's much lower stakes, and therefore lower emotional stakes. A man is much less likely to fall in love with an actress he saw in a few videos on the web than he is to a camgirl who keeps talking to him directly and thanking him by name every time he donates $100. And a woman who puts up an amateur video on a website is less likely to repeatedly do it day after day week after week until it becomes a part of her life like a camgirl or prostitute is.
It is inevitable that money will be some component of relationships, just like politics. And similarly, the more it can be minimized the better.
Agree on your dangers of simping (great point). I disagree however on the danger of “transactional sexuality”. Ideally, sure, a man and woman would come together because they have found value in each other that is higher than money and all that the dollar represents. Their personalities entwine beautifully, conversations roll off the tongue, and their experiences couple each others. But where I disagree is that (1) many prostitutes and courtesans in history were sought after for these very properties, geishas in Japan or Tyrion’s fantastical whore in GoT, and (2) I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse. Purchasing the right apartment, haircut, dentist, photographer, car and clothes will ensure matches. Back in the day, it was inheriting the right title or deed. Sex for resources is a tale as old as time.
Sounds like the slippery slope keeps on slipping. I don't entirely disagree that there's a lack of categorical difference, but see that more as an inditement of 21st century intercourse.
Or rather, there is a spectrum. Everyone is different and has different levels of promiscuity and transactionality, and prostitution is on the far end (imo the bad end) of both but not quite an outlier. I don't think pointing out that it has existed for a long historically has much bearing on whether or not it's healthy. Lots of people have done lots of unhealthy and destructive things throughout history. And lots of people didn't, again everyone is different. And I would argue that the people in the past with less transactionality in their relationships had, with positive but less than 100% correlation, healthier relationships.
Additionally, historically in a lot of places going to a prostitute was seen as shameful or taboo or low class. Although this is not universal, it was at least true in the near past, so pushes towards normalizing it are part of a modern phenomenon at least locally. Which I view as bad because people respond to incentives, so normalizing it will increase its frequences, which then funges against healthy relationships. Which we can see occuring in real time. Gender relations have not been going well recently. An awful lot of men are alone and angry and purposeless. And they respond in different ways. Some become angry incels who hate women, some become pickup artists who try to trick women into sex on false pretenses. Or chads stringing along dozens are women. And women aren't happy either, with femcels, and feminists, and the MeToo movement. Things have gotten worse for an awful lot of people within the past few decades, and while I can't say that sex work alone is responsible for all of it, it's both a symptom and a cause of some of these problems.
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Come on. This post is about as real as the Mouse Balls memo.
Please don't feed the troll.
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Top take. I'm glad you posted this.
Sarcasm ?
Not at all, I just love the contrarianness.
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I think this would be better, but most of the benefit would come from the banning of porn. Encouraging prostitution seems bad to me, but the energy required to use prostitutes is so much higher than watching porn that it would still be better than our status quo.
Prostitution will never have the benefits that it had in earlier eras, where sex with peers was rare before marriage and men would travel weeks on end. I’d say the ideal is longterm monogamy, but per statistics many men are not having sex at all. So encouraging prostitute visitations is genuinely better for them (and society) than porn habits.
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