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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34858 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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The problem is that "prostitution" is as worthless of a word as "homeless" because they can be used to describe a vast spectrum of behaviors and situations. A single mom who gets fired in an economic downturn and thus can't pay rent and is evicted is not the same as a 25 year old man with a fent habit who lives in a tent for easy access to his dealer and things to boost to pay for his habit - and yet both would be "homeless"

Similarly, the vast majority of women who sell sex in the US are not like Aella they are like the street walkers you'll find in the shitty parts of any city. These women tend to be addicts, tend to have a fraught relationship with "consent" (is it really consent if their pimps beat them for not making enough money?) and live sad lives of poverty. One could argue that full legalization would solve this issue and balance the scales more towards Aella-types...but many studies have shown legalization increases human trafficking (a supply and demand problem that will exist forever - very few women wish to be prostitutes compared to the number of men who wish to use prostitute's services).

So, even basic questions of policy in this debate are difficult and highly depend on what one values more in society. Prostitution and porn are "questions" that cannot be answered with data because data cannot tell us what we ought to value more than something else. That's going to depend on the individual's moral palette. Let's assume that the data show that violent porn does not lead to violent tendencies in men who view it regularly - that wouldn't convince someone who believes violent depictions of women are inherently wrong. If it was shown that watching child pornography does not lead to pedophilic abuse in men who view it regularly many people would still feel that child pornography was wrong - even if it was drawn/rendered and not real. Even if it was shown that viewing realistic rendered child porn decreased pedophile offending rates (this is unlikely, some studies show that consumption of this kind of pornography makes offending more likely - but we just don't know), many people would still consider the production of such images wrong, perhaps even criminal.

Similarly, the vast majority of women who sell sex in the US are not like Aella they are like the street walkers you'll find in the shitty parts of any city. These women tend to be addicts, tend to have a fraught relationship with "consent" (is it really consent if their pimps beat them for not making enough money?)

Is this based on any data? I've heard claims of diametrically opposing nature (from "nobody is ever forced to do sex work nowadays, it's completely voluntary because it's the easiest job ever, you're literally born with everything you need for it" to "vast majority of sex workers are forced into it and trafficked and nobody talks about it") but I have no way to verify it. I've read self-reports from several Aella-type sex workers but I imagine I wouldn't have access to the opposite stories as opposite cases probably won't be very active on the internet, and I have no independent means to research this. So how would one know if it's true or not?

but many studies have shown legalization increases human trafficking

Prostitution is legal in Nevada, though with limitations. How much did that increase the human trafficking in Nevada compared to, say, Oregon and California? I read Las Vegas does have issues with underage prostitution, but ironically prostitution is not legal in Las Vegas at all.

So how would one know if it's true or not?

Normally I'd recommend triangulation, but the spread between what each side claims is so wild it's probably not going to yield anything accurate.

Let's assume that the data show that violent porn does not lead to violent tendencies in men who view it regularly - that wouldn't convince someone who believes violent depictions of women are inherently wrong. If it was shown that watching child pornography does not lead to pedophilic abuse in men who view it regularly many people would still feel that child pornography was wrong - even if it was drawn/rendered and not real. Even if it was shown that viewing realistic rendered child porn decreased pedophile offending rates (this is unlikely, some studies show that consumption of this kind of pornography makes offending more likely - but we just don't know), many people would still consider the production of such images wrong, perhaps even criminal.

This is where we defer to the Constitution and more broadly the justice system in a liberal democratic republic like the USA, isn't it? Certainly anyone is free to find anything immoral for any reason, but for criminalizing images, in the USA, there would have to be more justification than just finding them immoral. IANAL and I don't know about the specific legal reasoning behind criminalizing some types of porn, but given the strong free speech protections due to the 1st amendment, I imagine carving out exceptions to free speech in order to criminalize them must involve at least some consideration of the empirical reality surrounding them, such as how fair use for using copyrighted material partly hinges on if it competes directly with the original copyrighted work.

Of course, the moral judgments of society also affect the Constitution and the law, but the system is designed to make such effects go through multiple layers before taking effect. And in the case of criminalizing something purely on grounds of finding it immoral and nothing else, at least in the US, that tends to be a lot of layers. One can circumvent that by stepping up another meta level and replacing the Constitution wholesale in one shot, but that also tends to be difficult mainly for physical reasons.

"Carving out exceptions" isn't exactly what's going on, though the difference may seem pedantic outside philosophy-of-law discussions. The idea is that the original philosophical concept of free speech at the time it was instantiated into the First Amendment wasn't a complete blanket protection of all communication, from which exceptions were carved for practical reasons--it was that several types of communication did not fall under free speech at all, and never did. So categories like slander, perjury, or obscenity occupy their own metaphorical territory beyond the borders of free speech.

You still have the same debate as to where the correct line is between protected speech, and say, slander, though the philosophical grounding may affect aspects of the debate like burdens of proof and so forth. Copyright is an interesting example, because there's a longstanding debate over whether "intellectual property" is a philosophically-grounded right prior to its legal protection--that is, is IP created by or recognized by the laws protecting it. (The various items in the Bill of Rights fall into the "recognized by" category, incidentally.)

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