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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4096 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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The master of trolling is at it again. Hanania:

Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with a 14 year-old girl, and will pay her $10 million. The money will go into a mutual fund that will pay out when she's 21. The girl agrees, as do both of her parents. Should this be allowed? And are you male or female?

As of this writing, the results are:

  • "Yes, male" - 5.9%
  • "No, male" - 78.1%
  • "Yes, female" - 1.3%
  • "No, female" - 14.7%

Look at the engagement metrics on this tweet: 94,000 votes, 3.4 million views, 4,700 comments, 273 likes. This might be the most "popular" Hanania tweet of all time.

Now, I am one of the apparent sickos who voted "yes", but I can see some decent arguments for "no". I'm still surprised the results are this lopsided, and I'm also surprised that there appears to be no gender gap.

Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?

But of course, it's not your daughter - the premise is that the parents also consent. Would you let someone else's daughter have sex with an old man?

That is a very strong "maybe". As something that happens once in a long while and secretly, it might not be terrible, might even be the least bad thing. However, I'm strongly against this becoming normalized and accepted. It's nasty, even if there might be some value to it.

At the cost of turning sex into a consumer transaction? You might argue this already exists and has always existed in some for of human history, (which you would be partially correct), but I think the consequences of widespread acceptance of this practice are largely damaging to cross gender relationships, especially the perception of women, as well as damaging to formation of families. Even historical practices of marrying women to richer/more wealthy men focuses on marrying and producing heirs, not simply for carnal desires. Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

They're aren't a lot of people who would pay $10 million to sleep with a 14 year old, so I don't think there is a risk of it becoming widespread.

Women who sell their bodies for money

I.e literally almost all women?

When was the last time a female doctor married a male plumber?

There is not nearly enough effort backing up your substantive point, here. Please engage with effort, charity, and an eye toward writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.

If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.

Please stop arguing semantics. I hate when discussions devolve into word games as a way of avoiding the actual validity of an argument, and if this is the line of reasoning you're going to choose I'm not going to entertain this discussion further.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Either way, the negative externalities of turning sex into a consumptive act to be exchanged as a market is something that should be discouraged, regardless of age.

If word choice is your problem, is 'renting' better than 'buying'?

Renting out your body isn't anywhere near as bad as selling it, renting your body (and your brain) is what people do for work 8 hours ever weekday.

I'm perfectly happy to discuss the issue itself, I just think that such discussions are much more fruitful when everyone avoids using loaded language.

For example, if I'm arguing against someone who opposes abortion being legal, I'm not going to go along with them using the term 'baby-murder' in place of abortion.

You probably don't think of 'selling her body' as being equivalent, but I think that just demonstrates how successful the activist framing has been. It implies that prostitution is a type of slavery, which it (usually) isn't.

After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel.

No one held Anna Nicole Smith in any esteem when she married that geezer, and that was the central example of marrying a man for his money.

That's true, but that was confounded by their gigantic age gap. Plus, I can't imagine the average person thinking better of a prostitute version of Anna who just slept with him for pay.

I find it ironic you consider the idea of a women 'selling her body' as loaded language in recent vernacular when and then proceed to issue the statement "After all, I would argue that a woman who marries a man for his money (to a first approximation, most women who have ever existed) is 'selling her body' to a much greater degree than a prostitute, who is merely renting it. And yet the wife is held in much higher esteem than the jezebel." which is a much more modern interpretation of marriage popularized in the last decade.

It's clear we won't come to agreement. I think the modern materialist/rationalist/objectivist notion that marriage is generally a pragmatic institution based off of materialism and risk aversion is generally false in a historical sense beyond well documented edge cases. This simplification is what largely damaged marriage as an institution and changes the game theory to make marriage seem risky with no real benefit. When marriage was considered a permanent union, people prioritized very different things in a partner than simply material wealth. The modern consumptive and transactional nature of sex and marriage has created significant costs in population growth and stability, family stability, and child rearing.

If the going rate for one sex with a 14 year old is ten million dollars and consent of the parents, then I think it highly unlikely that such a practice would be widespread. If anything it would probably be less widespread than it is nowadays.

Women who sell their bodies for money have rarely been treated more than 2nd, or 3rd class people and do it at the cost of having a successful long term relationship.

Yes, because they don't sell their bodies for enough money. If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

If they sold their body for ten million dollars, they would not end up as 2nd class people.

But they do, and the evidence of this is clear: how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships? The evidence is clear that reputation destruction (and whatever psychological damage that happens during the repeated engagement of promiscuity) that women receive when they engage in these acts is fairly permanent and follows them throughout their lives, even if their acts cause financial success.

Not many, but then, most prostitutes sell themselves for much less than 10 million. I imagine there are lots of well-functioning women (and men) out there that might be willing to compromise themselves for such a sum. I would also hazard that the women that compromise themselves for small amounts (or even nothing) probably have pre-existing issues.

It's not really that obvious to me that most women have a reputation that's worth 10 million dollars, and in any case I don't support trying to destroy women's reputation in order to punish them. If you knew that a woman you know was the victim of such a scenario, would you think less of her, or try to destroy her reputation?

how many prostitutes and former actresses have ended up in successful happy functional relationships?

Most of them? Actresses are the highest status women on earth, and settle for billionaires and presidents after they've had their fill of co-stars and producers.

Given the context of the discussion, what kind of actresses do you think we were talking about?

Actresses being promiscuous yet extremely high status refutes your point about the psychological or reputational damage suffered for promiscuous behaviour.

Besides, the ancients didn't bother differentiating between actresses and pornographic actresses, but one still married justinian.

More comments

So you are of the sincere belief that parents pimping out their children is only a negative when the money isn't managed correctly?

It's absolutely a negative, thing is though that the $10 million on the other end is more than enough of a positive to counteract the negative, provided it is managed well. All good things aren't correlated, tradeoffs exist.

Would the situation sit better with you if the parents disapproved, or if they had no knowledge of the scenario?

I'm against all of it and think adding layers of qualifiers pointless.

My comment was more in response to an earlier one of yours

"Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?"

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