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Last week, in its dogged commitment to a free and open internet, the UK has instituted a criminal prohibition on certain pornography in England and Wales. It is now a criminal offense to view or possess pornography that depicts "strangulation" including choking or "face sitting", incest including depictions of step siblings, and any depictions of underage roleplay. The penalty for viewing or possessing any of these categories is a prison sentence that ranges from 2-3 years. Publication of these materials has a punishment of up to 5 years in prison.
Before a conservative cheered the prohibition of pornographic materials as a buttress against the immorality of modernity I'd remind him it is worth keeping in mind the context. The UK has been on a tear the past couple decades when it comes to regulating the internet. These efforts did not go without results, culminating most recently in the Online Safety Act of 2023 which pushed an age-verification regime. The OSA is not limited to porn sites to ban minors, but also potentially hits app stores, vendors, payment intermediaries, and more that extends the tendrils of the state into the internet.
Feminists and Labour politicians who hate violence against women, think-of-the-children conservatives, Christian organizations, and Ofcom the regulatory agency which, surprisingly, tends to voice support for more regulations-- what do these constituencies all have in common? It's not the weirdest coalition to lock arms in solidarity, but it's strange bedfellows. Public choice theory stays winning. Many are saying.
I can't claim abstinence, but I am not a big fan of porn. I don't think productions involving toasters are a social good and children should not watch porn. However, what I suspect laws like this to be in practice is to function as a carve out for a censorious state with neurotic apparatchiks to punch up criminal charges whenever they feel like. The next time Tommy Robinson gets picked up for violence they can hit him with the lude pornography laws. There will be no reduction of Violence Against Women when so many report sexual choking as consensual and pleasurable.
If you peruse internet commentary on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 you will find a lot of people who agree with me. From reddit to X, everyone has criticisms that this is selective or ineffective. If you stopped there you wouldn't know that some surveys indicate the majority of Brits support the ban, if not the criminalization. To properly do this experiment Brits must go full bore with social taboos, reverse the sexual revolution, and enforce criminal statutes to that effect. Reinstitute sodomy laws. The cowards will never.
Just legalize prostitution. It’s healthier than porn. A person going to see a prostitute is reinforcing all sorts of prosocial behaviors before obtaining his desired primary reinforcer: making money, scheduling, dressing up, heading to town, participating in the economy, conversing, being polite, connecting with another human, and then the nitty-gritty mechanical things. All of these are great micro-skills for when he one day has a wife. He’s reinforcing the right things. A person watching porn is usually just reinforcing scrolling, distraction, avoidance, all sorts of bad things. In my utopian head canon we would subsidize prostitution somewhat but require a prelude of flirtation before consummation. This is ideal.
Prostitution also takes the sluts out of the dating market (a plus), gives sluts a positive sense of life purpose attuned to their nature (a plus), takes away the imho excessive social privileging and monopolization of women today (a plus), eliminates entire industries of vice which ruins lives like clubbing (a plus), and reduces the number of women participating in the less-regulated pornography industry (a plus). The only bad thing I can think of is disease, but perhaps a regulated prostitution industry would actually reduce the general disease prevalence, because sluts don’t get treated regularly.
These two things can be true at the same time:
Morally, ideally, no one should see a prostitute, and it should not be promoted
Morally, practically, prostitution is better for society than porn
Retarded. Not only are they just throwing vast hapless Britbongs into the strangulating thighs of Mossad or the Central Casting Agency’s COINTELAMATEUR (good look keeping secrets Romeo), but they are going to be sending men to jail for enjoying the things that women also appear to enjoy. Just really stupid. What’s wrong with the British?
I used to believe this as well, that ladies of the night offered a convenient "dark arts" shortcut to developing the social and sexual confidence necessary for conventional relationships, but that doesn't really bear out in practice. Often times, the johns (the incel kind in the literal sense of the word) end up developing feelings for the girl, only to leave feeling more alienated, and being reminded of the intimacy they cannot experience organically. You can throw on a nice jacket, make conversation, and attempt to charm her. Or not. You're still fucking her for the same price. There is no psychological barrier attached to the social cost of insinuating that you find her goonable and wish to goon inside her.
I think if you were to make prostitution legal, you'd find that the porn-addicted incel would not participate. Too much social anxiety. That's right, not even confident enough to get sex that's being paid for, with all the removal of uncertainty that entails.
Well I think there's another issue, which is that being an incel is low status and hiring a prostitute doesn't fix that problem. In the eyes of society you are still a basement-dwelling loser.
To put it another way, hiring a prostitute won't get you female validation.
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Yes. Look at Australia, New Zealand. Fully legal. We still have incels. They can fuck a 100 prossies (RIP wallet), they'll still remain incels. And they're not even necessarily jobless losers, just no game and a crippling aversion to social risk-taking.
I would imagine that regular prostitution customers are more promiscuous with non-prostitutes, not less- because men who would like to pay hundreds of dollars for sex with a new partner are, well, disproportionately likely to have multiple partners.
Legal brothels in Australia advertise prices as low as 90 US dollars (specifically, 130 Australian dollars) for 30 minutes.
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Incels are a misnomer. In many cases they are voluntarily celibate because the women actually available for them to date or sleep with are beneath them (in their eyes). The correct term for incels are "people with status dysphoria." The incel's problem isn't "not getting laid," which is why he doesn't visit a prostitute. His problem is he is a loser, he knows it, and all his acquaintances (not friends, of course) know it. No amount of business transactions are going to solve that.
Ironic that a business transaction is the best way to model their actions.
The market clearing price is too high for those men to be {willing, able} to afford a woman of the same station. That's it. That's all it is.
Risk aversion is defensible if there is no directly observable benefit to taking that risk. Both that and safetyism (to name the symmetric female impulse) are parasitic at their core, but they both exist for a reason. Human instinct is often maladaptive.
{Pornography, prostitution, masturbation} are basically an AI simulation of this, which is why they're rejected in the same family of 'goonslop' (and why old men would want them restricted- especially those that showcase any "cheating" of that market dynamics- as a way to lock young men out of any other alternatives and encourage them to be appealing to women).
Yet these foolish old men, who have no other intelligence outside of instinct, don't understand that this won't fix the fact there are no women who are willing or able to afford the men either. Selfish old women approve of this posture, naturally.
So with respect to the original prompt of "why are F/m, 'help me step-bro', etc. being banned?", this is the answer to that question. Social conservatives were always feminist. One notes that the cultural Enemy of the Boomers was the last cultural movement that made young men great (and actively encouraged them to be with women) and I don't believe that to be a coincidence.
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Yeah I've really never comprehended the idea of hiring a prostitute. If you want mechanical gratification, that can be had for free. But sex is mostly about validation as a man; being selected as worthy of reproduction, and a prostitute can't do that for you. I'm fairly disturbed by the idea of someone paying for sex. Something has to have gone very wrong there.
Though I do have a friend who gets handjobs at a Chinese massage parlor, which he says do more for him than masturbation and which he prefers in lieu of 'using' young women whom he has no intention of taking seriously. Guess I can see where he's coming from but his problems aren't my problems.
To be fair, I also have friends who've hired escorts for a full GFE despite being perfectly capable of rizzing up women naturally, just cuz they're too lazy to actually pass that speech perk. Also full service escorts in NZ get STI screenings regularly, so you could argue that a brothel (on the pricey high end) is actually safer than a pub! Plus better looking girls, better sex, kink friendly... etc.
Personally I just don't see the appeal, but it's clear that many men do.
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Are you talking about casual sex, or masturbation?
The latter is more commonly available. I understand there are edge cases involving quadriplegia and so on.
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Well there is the idea that men aren't paying for the sex, they're paying for her go to away after (and perhaps paying for exceptionally good sex). But you'd have to be one seriously in demand guy to constantly be dealing with women who want to keep seeing you, badgering you.
Well I think that as a man, it's much easier to go out and get laid if you give the woman the impression that you are interested in a serious long-term relationship. But if you use that strategy and you are in fact not interested in such a relationship, then sooner or later it's going to lead to real trouble. Especially if the man is already married or otherwise in a committed relationship.
That being said, I would guess that there are other more salient reasons why men see prostitutes: To save them the time, expense, and uncertainty of pursuing regular women; to allow them to be intimate with women who are way more sexually attractive than they could otherwise pull; to be with someone who will accept the fact that he's married or otherwise in a committed relationship; to get the opportunity to do kinky or unusual sex acts. These all come to mind.
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Yeah that axiom never made sense to me. I doubt David Beckham crosses anyone's mind when they think of a typical john.
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