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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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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.

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.

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.

worried about traditional family formation

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.