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It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.
I support the latter being illegal, but there are obviously tiers of criminality. The sad reality of prostitution is that a large, disproportionate number of prostitutes are 16/17 and lie about their age, particularly in the poorest parts of the west, street walkers and truck stop sex workers, sometimes escorts on seeking arrangement / sugar baby sites too. Underclass and working class men hire them all the time without consequence, buying into the implicit suggestion they are adults if their conscience cares at all (it usually doesn’t).
It’s like the outrage over rich young actresses fucking ugly fat producers to become movie stars. I sympathize, but these are not the top victims of male predation. The purchasers of sex do something I think is wrong, but they aren’t worse than the millions of other men who do the same every day.
Those things aren't the same. However it is important to take a political stand in honest defence of values even if standing up for those values has short-term costs and ruffles feathers.
If we're gonna accept light statutory rape amongst elites (if it is even limited to light statutory rape, since the documentation and evidence of whatever's really going on remains concealed), why not medium statutory rape amongst grooming gangs? Where does it end? There are laws and those laws should be enforced. Laws and proper behaviour mustn't seem to be 'for suckers'.
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I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.
Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).
Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.
Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).
Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."
However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.
I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.
It's much easier to get a 16-yo to keep her mouth shut. A 26-yo will go to a gossip rag to tell everything about the sexual preferences of VIPs she was paid to have sex with the very moment her escorting career starts to wind down. A 16-yo is still young and stupid enough to be coerced into keeping her mouth shut, even stupid stuff like "would you like your parents to learn what you did?" will work on them.
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My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.
It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.
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What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.
The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.
It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.
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Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…
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I found Giuffre more sympathetic than, say, Maria Farmer, who seems a little crazy (but at least said No to Maxwell). I also think it's clear from Giuffre's own barely readable biography that she was definitely whoring herself out from a very young age, well before Maxwell marked her for Epstein. Now did she have a terrible home life? It certainly seems so. But Epstein didn't make her a prostitute. That she happened to be working at Mar-A-Lago was an absolute fluke. It's also clear she ran the game as far as she could until she felt she was fed up with it, at which point she bailed to Thailand on Epstein's coin and decided to run for it. It's a compelling dramatic story but the narrative (now set in stone after her death) that she was always Epstein's victim leaves out a lot of her own really shitty choices. I do feel bad for her, but hers is a tragedy in the Greek drama sense --her determination, her ability to push through and survive, ended up leading to the life that destroyed her.
What is that quoted from?
Fixed. Apologies.
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