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I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
The other poster is too narrow in saying just sex, but for most of known human history, men trade resources for sex and offspring. What exactly do you think a man is doing when he provides for his wife? Divorcing your wife because she was barren, while frowned upon, was completely acceptable. Maybe it's different in the enlightened 21st century (I don't think it is), but historically, most, if not all, marriages were entered into to support tangible, real world gains. Love was something you developed later, if it developed at all.
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The problem with prostitution is not the selling sex for resources; as you correctly note, wives have been doing the same thing for all of civilized history.
The problem with prostitutes is that they provide sexual access to numerous men at the same time, thus spreading diseases, creating children of unknown paternity, and destroying their own ability to pair bond.
These are all problems even if she does it for free; hence why "slut" is as much of an insult as "whore".
Prostitution as a spot(often quite literally, in the sense of a geographically contained thing. Ancient law codes were big into defining where the red light district could be) in society probably isn't horrible; it's the spreading out from this little niche that tends to be the problem.
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That kind of transactional relationship sounds like the opposite of normal and healthy. A healthy relationship should be based around mutual love and desire; what you described sounds like being a sugar daddy, not a partner.
Plus it’s not like women need a man’s resources to have a successful life nowadays.
How many accounts — real or fictional — about relationships and marriage have you read that were written prior to the 19th century? Or from a non-Western culture (like any where arranged marriages were common). Marriage being treated to a great extent like a sort of financial/institutional merger involving two families, or a sort of "mutual physical/financial support" arrangement first, with "mutual love and desire" being a secondary factor — indeed, as something a couple deliberately builds over time — seems to be the more "normal" attitude across the history of settled human societies, with the 20th century West "all you need is love" attitudes being rather the outlier.
Edit: see also OracleOutlook's longer comment below.
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It's so strange to me that people's view of a normal relationship are so skewed here. It's like they turn off all their rational thinking capabilities when posting opinions about relationships on the motte.
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In a normal, healthy, average relationship, a single man and a single woman partner together to provide each other with resources that would be difficult for the other to get. They do this because they have a shared vision of the future, a shared project to raise the next generation.
The historical norm was for a woman to be spinning cotton, wool, or flax from sunup to sundown to make enough thread to weave enough cloth to sew into enough garments for herself, her husband, and her children. There was a gendered world - every civilization had their own norms, but they all had norms surrounding what tasks belong to women (tasks that can be done by weaker people with the tendency to get pregnant and have babies/toddlers hanging off them.) For example, in a European village a man paid taxes by giving his lord crops, while women owed their taxes in eggs.
Men needed women's labor. Women needed men's labor.
There was a weird period in the 19th-20th century where machines took over a lot of the labor that women could do, while there was much less automation of male labor. Then in the later 20th century, the women's labor that wasn't automatable went overseas to cheaper labor. This lead to more "Homemakers" outside the upper class.
But now, the majority of the time, both men and women work outside the home. Both men and women need to labor productively to keep themselves in comfort. We are reverting back to the historical norm (except for the "women taking jobs they can do while minding their own children" part. We'd probably need to repeal the CRA and some license regulations before we could get there.)
I agree with you that my initial formulation was an oversimplification, although I don't think any of this has much bearing on what makes prostitution in particular morally problematic. You could reasonably argue that prostitution is inferior to a long-term committed exclusive relationship based on certain metrics; but as I pointed out in my reply to KMC, many other heterosexual relationships would be judged inferior on the same metrics. Being single would also be judged inferior on the same metrics. But no one thinks that being single, or having a series of different monogamous partners, is morally blameworthy in the same way that prostitution is.
Prostitution dumps the sex market, which is also one of the reasons women hate sluts/whores the most.
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Yes they do. Lots of criticisms of serial monogamy to be had and it's actually a historical outlier that the modern west doesn't publicly worry about the plight of men not being interested in marriage.
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Plus the consequences of faking emotions on a consistent basis. Practice makes permanent.
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In a normal, healthy, average relationship, that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong. Not sure why you didn't notice those pieces of the puzzle.
But people (non-prostitute people) break all of these conditions all the time.
People date without getting permission, they have sex without procreating, they break up, they date new people. That's a very common course for a relationship to take in 2025, and no one thinks that's as bad as prostitution.
There are trads who disapprove of this sort of arrangement of course, but even they don't compare it with prostitution afaik.
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
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That is not just how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
It's pretty close to how it goes.
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Given that you cannot imagine the love that a man and woman would have for one another in a relationship, I doubt this.
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
I really want to explore your claim about feeling more emotions than other people, but also imagining a romantic relationship as purely transactional.
Can you expand on this?
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
Pinging @Stellula, as it may be relevant to their interests.
Can you name a type of human interaction that is not "transactional" in some way? If I talk to a stranger, is that not in some sense transactional? When I catch some random family's baby staring at me in the grocery store and begin making silly faces to try to get them to laugh, is that not clearly "transactional"? When I have lunch together with a friend, is that not transactional in some sense?
You seem to be claiming that there's the set of human interactions, and then a subset of transactional human interactions, and then a sub-subset of purely transactional human interactions. But if in fact all human interaction is transactional, and then a subset is purely transactional, then the "transactional" label adds nothing meaningful to the term "interaction", and the joint in reality is the "purely", the compartmentalization and formalization of an interaction, and with it the exclusion and severing of other possible connections and relations and interactions. We "transact" because we wish for more interaction with someone, and the "more" is open-ended. We "purely transact" with someone because we want a specific interaction and no more. These two modes of transaction are notably distinct.
Perhaps, if we confine ourselves to abstractions, though I'm skeptical that this is actually an accurate description at the object level.
I would not agree with this formulation, so far as I understand the argument; it seems to be a false dichotomy emerging excessive abstraction. The dichotomy is drawn between the instrumental "I love them for the characteristics they possess" and the arbitrary "I love them for for some ineffable, arbitrary themness", but there is a third option: "I love them because I have loved them." In this, the instrumental emerges from and utterly overtakes the arbitrary, while being inextricable from it.
Put a grain of sand into an oyster and wait, and the result often enough is a pearl. Pearls do not form without the grain of sand, but pearls are not themselves reducible to grains of sand. They are an accretion, a composite, of which the sand is a foundation but of which the foundation is far, far less than what is built upon it, like an inverted pyramid. One might describe them better as an investment.
My relationship with my wife began in a quite arbitrary fashion; having been acquaintances for a few years, we spent some time together at a church event and hit it off over a common love for movies, books and video games. On the other hand, this arbitrariness was only possible from an explicitly-instrumental foundation: we found each other because we were both actively looking for a sane, stable, committed Christian of the opposite sex to build a family with, and also there was some amount of behind-the-scenes matchmaking from mutual friends nudging things along.
The love we share now does not rest significantly on our common love for movies, books and video games. Nor is it based solely the instrumental desire for marriage and a family; we no longer want marriage in the abstract, we want this marriage, and our love were persist even if we were unable to have children. What it rests on is nearly a decade of choices made and actions taken out of love for one another: in-jokes, acts of kindness, acts of service, shared hardship, shared joy, shared knowledge, and so on and on. Further, these have accrued because neither of us acted as though these were "purely transactional", nor did transactionality enter the calculus in any significant way; we do the things we do because each of us perceive that such acts will please and support the other. I want my wife to be happy and to have a good life, and she wants the same for me, and the longer these objectives guide our actions the more solid and substantial our love grows, and the less we recognize a good apart from the good found in each other.
This appears to me to be sophistry through a retreat to arbitrary abstraction.
What does that definition mistakenly contain that we might better remove? What does that definition lack that we might wish to add? It tells us that love is a terminal value, and it defines that love is and is not. In what way is any of this "unsayable"?
I share this impatience, because such people are generally not describing Love but infatuation.
Just so. But equally, to claim that we do not know love when we have practiced it as an intentional way of life is sophistry. Certainly not all questions have answers, but just as certainly some questions do have answers, and this is one of them. Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
I'm not blowing you off; I just don't have the time in the day to keep responding to everyone for now. I may take some select points here and respond to them in a future top level post.
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I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that they are in love with their wives/husbands and children, and that yes it is subconscious.
Your frustration with this is because you haven’t personally experienced it. You should reevaluate your belief that you are experiencing a wider range, more intense set of emotions than most people, because you apparently have no experience with the emotion that much of the world feels most intensely, and you apparently do not feel at all.
As to your question: the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
Yes, love is real, yes it is healthy to love your wife and children, and no this is not all transactional. You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them, nor any of the other people of that persuasion have discovered something unique insight into human emotion. Aella et al have figured out an exploit in the human psyche that enriches them, at your expense and the expense of the rest of their customers.
You continue to misinterpret my claims.
Love, if it exists, is a miracle. But did I ever say, at any point in this conversation, that you shouldn't believe in miracles? I've said no such thing.
Regardless of what claims you think I'm making, this would not constitute a legitimate criticism of any of them.
You could almost say that it's the business of philosophical reflection to produce claims (or, plausible sounding arguments for claims, at any rate) that almost everyone rejects. It has variously been claimed by different parties in the history of philosophy that cars and buildings and animals are not real, that conscious experience is not real, that 1+1 does not equal 2, that there exist sentences which can be both true and false at the same time. Almost all humans reject these claims; but this is not taken to be any major impediment. Truth is not subject to democratic rule. The philosopher simply carries on with his business; he is well aware that other people will think he is in the grip of some kind of psychosis. When the propositions of "common sense" are finally subjected to long-overdue critique, the results will unavoidably be counterintuitive.
I mean, you will certainly believe that some people are incorrect and unhealthy and anti-social, but we still all have to try to get along, y'know? Tomorrow it could be you who's getting called incorrect and anti-social.
I don't agree with the TRP/PUA people at all! I've done a terrible job of explaining my positions if that's what you took away from it.
I'm less familiar with Aella, but I'd probably find points of significant disagreement with her as well.
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No, it is not.
As I have experienced it, marriage is almost a perfect inversion of my thankfully-secondhand understanding of prostitution. My relationship to my wife is not commodified, it is not compartmentalized, it impacts every decision I make each day in a significant way. In the sense that engaging a Prostitute is a discrete choice, my marriage is much less of a choice and much more of a consequence, an effect rather than a cause, leaning far more on path-dependence in a way that would be incoherent if applied to prostitution. You are attempting to fit something into a discrete box whose main feature is its inability to be discretely boxed, and then you are claiming that since everything outside the discrete box isn't inside the box, it can be safely ignored.
A concrete example: if we define "haggling" as "negotiation to maximize one's own benefit at the expense of one's opposite", then haggling's role in prostitution is straightforward and practical. And yet, in a proper marriage, there is no way to productively haggle, because your opposite's interest is your own interest. Most married men will grok the maxim "happy wife, happy life"; I am not aware of an equivalent formulation for prostitutes.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin. It doesn't imply there's no such thing as love, it doesn't imply that there's nothing beyond commodification, etc. (There are many complexities here that would have to be addressed, but I probably don't hold the views that you think I do on these questions.)
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution. People seem to think that prostitutes are bad, in some particularly unique way. We're trying to figure out why they think that.
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" is a claim that the exchange of resources for sex is the central feature of the relationship. It is true that marriage relationships involve both sex and the sharing (as distinct from exchanging!) of resources; they also involve a great many other acts and features: emotional intimacy, emotional support, the bearing and rearing of children, companionship, emotional and physical labor, cooperation, negotiation, and on and on; most forms of positive human interaction would either be included or approached by a complete list. What you are doing is to take two items from a very long list, and claim that these two items and their interrelation are central, and all else is peripheral. To say that this elides more than it reveals is a notable understatement.
Another concrete example: Parenting involves exercising total control over a human, while also providing for their physical needs. These two features are the essence of both slavery and imprisonment; therefore, parenting/slavery/imprisonment is basically just slavery/imprisonment/parenting.
One can play this particular game with any form of complex human interaction. Selectively ignoring and exaggerating the aspects and interrelations of any two forms of interaction allows one to claim that anything is like anything, but sophistry provides no actual insight, only the illusion of insight.
From a strict materialist perspective, it seems the chain of argument starts with noticing that these two modes of interaction appear to be mutually exclusive, and quite stubbornly so, and then note that one is very obviously more conducive to human flourishing than the other. It's really no different from materialist arguments against drug addiction, wireheading, or other forms of degenerate hedonism. If you yourself admit that prostitution is deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever relative to marriage and you recognize that prostitution and marriage appear to be mutually incompatible, then prostitution is worse in concrete terms, and in the abstract the situation is improved with less prostitution and more marriage, all the way up to no prostitution and all marriage. Why, from a strictly materialist perspective, should we encourage or even accept the worse state, rather than pushing people as hard as we can toward the better? Maybe that pushing grows counterproductive at some point, quite likely there's a level of coercion where the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but again, the same is true for all the other degenerate forms of hedonism, defection, and bad tradeoff behavior. We live in a society, as they say.
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