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Notes -
Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.
And later:
Finally:
She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was
importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:
And soon after hits the high note:
Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.
Abortion
Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.
This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.
Consent to sexual relations
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.
Child sex
When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.
Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.
Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:
A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.
Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.
Economics
I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:
Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.
Closing Thoughts
I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.
1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.
I don't know how many people agree with me on this but I do believe that Sexual Revolution didn't go far enough, sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way. More over puritan factions won in both the right and the left in spite of proclaimed commitment to the principle of sexual freedom in the latter one. Technology did solve issues that come with unrestricted love-making, we just need to wait for the culture to catch up(just in time for some other tech to disrupt it again). Some niche cultures are already there and make polyamory work quite well.
I don't believe this at all, and I don't believe you believe this, either. To illustrate, I'll simply take my favorite argument against sex-work-is-work: suppose you have a close family member of the opposite sex who starts a business. I would want to support my family, and so I would make a point to patronize the business, at least once if not regularly. However, if the business was prostitution or sexual photography, I wouldn't think that my patronage would be welcome, and I wouldn't dream of trying.
So I ask you, if you had a family member who started a business, would you support them? If it was a bakery would you buy a cake or loaf of bread? If it was a vineyard would you buy a case of wine? If it was a landscape business, would you get your weeds pulled? And if that business was prostitution, would you become a client?
It very quickly becomes clear to me that sex work is not work, and that sex is not like tennis.
What if your mom/sibling/dad was a therapist? Is therapy not work?
I suppose you could go in the other direction and say it is not. It's a paid friendship or something of the sort.
Therapy also has more emotional significance than tennis or any other physical activity.
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I wouldn't buy weed from a relative either but it seems pretty clear being a drug dealer is work of some sort. They aren't selling sex, they are selling sex with them. And if you don't want sex with them (for incest reasons or because you don't find them attractive/they are the wrong sex), but others do and pay for it, then it pretty reasonably has to be considered work.
Now I don't think it's like tennis, but exchanging sexual services for money does I think fall under work.
I was thinking more, and came to an uncomfortable conclusion that if my brother were a pimp, it's much more likely that I'd patronize his business than if he were a prostitute, and there's orders of magnitude of difference between pimp and drug dealer, too.
I'll admit that I don't have the most fully explained rubric, but my example reveals the difference I care about. Sex isn't tennis for the same reason we have a word for incest in the first place.
If my sister were an assassin, I wouldn't employ her because I think killing people for money is wrong, but if she is getting paid by the Mob to give snitches concrete overcoats it is pretty clear she is working for them. Some work can be immoral or illegal. Sex work is clearly work, even if you think it would be wrong for you to have sex with your sister paid or otherwise.
I'm perfectly happy to include obviously illicit "work" such as assassination or extortion as similarly not work just like prostitution.
It's still work though. Just because we don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't. Even the Nazis running Death camps were working. There isn't a moral valence to the word. If we need to specify we can say illegal work or immoral work. Or indeed as we currently do the more specific sex-work in this specific instance, then people can impute their own moral intuitions onto it as they see fit.
But trying to say it's not work is just flat incorrect I think. You can work as a prostitute, as a porn star, as an assassin, as a CIA agent, as a pirate, or a privateer.
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Ok, let's isolate some variables here then, to remove the "incest" aspect. Imagine you are a father (sorry if you are, what follows might be upsetting to imagine), and your daughter just started a prostitution business; one day one of your coworkers says something like "whew, I've been horny these days, I wish I could get a little action tonight", do you enthusiastically direct him to your daughter, the same way you would if he said he was hungry and she was selling cupcakes?
Nope, but that doesn't mean it isn't work. If my daughter were an assassin and my co-worker wanted to hire someone to kill his wife, I also wouldn't give him my daughter's card. because I think murdering people for money is wrong. But if you are exchanging money for a service, whether that service is murder, sex, or making eggrolls, then it is work. It is just that some work can be illegal and/or immoral.
The reason I would be against my daughter being a sex worker is not because it isn't work, it's because I think it is a bad idea.
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Is being a gynecologist not work because a mother would refuse to let their daughter do a pelvic exam on them? Or if you require opposite sex if a father refuses to let their daughter do a physical/prostate exam/colonoscopy?
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That’s nepotism. If she’s driven to succeed in her chosen industry, any self-respecting mother would wish to stand on her own four limbs without having to rely on her son’s patronage.
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This seems like picking the criterion to suit the conclusion. Was there some prior general rule that "work" was something you'd support if your family did it? So if a family member sold medical equipment or industrial mining equipment, you'd buy it?
My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.
The Venn diagram of sex-worker rights advocates and prison abolitionists is not quite a circle, but it's pretty close.
Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary, but maybe it would help get everyone in the system enough to fight pimping/disease/violence/etc. And maybe people could audit the classes at the trade school and pick up some useful skills.
As I said downthread, it matters what order you do your goals in. If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.
Also, knocking off one example still leaves my other two, as well as the countless others I skipped over.
That's not wild. What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.
Perhaps, but that's just tactics.
My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing that sex work is not work through the argument of 'We're ok with making prisoners do work, we are not ok with making prisoners have sex, QED sex is not work.'
If that was the point of the comment, my response of 'we not ok making prisoners do work' does dissolve the argument.
I agree there's tactics involved in avoiding the bad outcome you hint at as a practical matter, although realistically I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes more than logical formulations, and you whole point is about how those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.
That's a whole different issue, though.
Yup, it sure would be wild if we did that for chefs! Or writers! Or drivers! Or dishwashers! Or babysitters!
It would definitely be crazy if Scope of Practice laws were used to do crazy things for no reason. But that has nothing to do with sex work. Scope of Practice laws aren't used that way because, again, voters wouldn't like it.
I was trying to make an argument about policy, not fact. e.g. "A whale is a fish because you can catch it with a boat".
From a fact-based position, prostitution is a job, gang membership is employment, and hitmen are contract workers. From a policy-based perspective, that's irrelevant.
For now. Aren't you trying to change the vibes?
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What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.
Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
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Fortunately I can care about, and make progress on, multiple political issues at the same time.
Unfortunately, making uneven progress on multiple political issues can create perverse situations like the one I've outlined above. Going from the status quo -> the government can't compel work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work is fine. Going from the status quo -> prostitution-is-work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work has a bit of a rough patch in the middle, to put it mildly.
I was being literal when I said it should be your first priority, and didn't mean to imply that it should be your only priority or your ultimate goal.
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It simply comes from asking myself what I would consider work, and how I would make the distinction.
And yes, I'd buy mining equipment from my family member, if I needed it. There's a bit of a difference between machinery that costs tens of not hundreds of thousands of dollars and a $5/month onlyfans subscription or $10 or bread from a bakery. But given I'm willing to buy the product from anyone, I'd prefer to buy from a family member.
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"If you wouldn't have sex with a family member you don't think sex work is work" is one hell of a take.
Make it indirect.
"Hey, my sister just hung out her shingle as a prostitute. If you go sleep with her and use my name, you get a 10% discount"
Sure, on the internet it's very easy to say "Well, if my sister made that choice, I would happily support her!" But it's a little different when your friend Dave "the Keg" is asking for coupons for family member fellatio.
My mom is a psychologist and I would not want her to take any of my friends as patients (and I believe professional ethics would preclude it).
Lots of jobs are like this.
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I have it on very good authority that people in Kazakhstan feel pretty much that way about family prostitution. See time 2:49 in this video for the proof: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YG7SHcVEJqI
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This relies on an assumption of legitimacy of my intuitions which, in this context, I may reject. Might I intuit that it is gross that someone I know is hiring a family member as a sex worker? Should I feel that way? I may feel a "yes" to the first question and a "no" to the second. There are many things in life I have intuited as bad that I have later changed my mind about due to reason and reflection. Maybe this should be such a case!
If your intuition is wrong then it's wrong in the same way as the vast majority of the human race past and present. It seems unlikely to me that so many people in so many times and places would be wrong in the same way.
Frankly, I don't put a lot of stock in historical people's moral intuitions given the conclusions those intuitions led to.
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This isn't meant to be argumentative. Because of the constant use of hypothetical statements, conditionals, and equivocation, I'm not sure what your point or position is.
I think sex work is work but would not have sex with a family member just because they were in the sex work business.
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There's no starker way that I know of to show the differences between work and sex work. Yes, if you wouldn't subscribe to your daughters onlyfans, then it's because you too understand the distinction I'm making.
Care to engage with it at all?
You seem to be arguing against the position 'sew work isn't sex', which isn't an argument anyone is making.
Yes, sex work is still sex, with all the attendant facts and context about sex. All your attempts to point out how sex work is like sex are kind of pointless; yes, it sex work is sex, hence the name.
The claim being made here is that it's work. Not that it isn't sex.
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Okay, first example that comes to mind, a middle-aged couple grappling with secondary infertility in the woman who already has an 18 year old daughter who is an ovum donor.
Do you think their refusal to buy her egg for the purposes of IVF makes that illegitimate? Or if she's offering to donate for free.
It's a ridiculous criteria, so no surprise nobody cares to accept it. The obvious answer is that most people are against incest, or at the very least have no interest in it barring maybe looking appreciatively at the tits of a cousin.
In what part of your scenario is anyone going to work? I wouldn't call selling eggs work any more than I would selling a kidney.
And I don't think, "being willing to take your father or mother, sister or brother, on as a client," is a bad first pass at what I'm getting at. Sure it lacks nuance, but it hits the gut check squarely.
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I think there are many industries my family members might engage in where I would not become a client. I don't subscribe to anyone's OnlyFans currently, for example. Am I obliged to subscribe to a family member's OnlyFans so I think it's "real work"? More generally, what if they start a company in an industry I don't ordinarily patronize? We all use bakeries, but we may not all use whatever industry our family members start their own business in.
There's a line that judges sometimes use in oral arguments where they admonish counsel for "fighting the hypothetical". That is, the judge is interested in knowing whether a distinction applies in a certain situation, and they dislike it when the response is to avoid answering and to argue that that's not the situation we're dealing with.
It's a hypothetical. Fighting the hypothetical is a dodge.
Ok, so you don't normally hire prostitutes. Great. But let's say you did for some reason - after all, sex is just like tennis, right? I'm sure you don't normally pay people to play tennis with you either, but let's say you had a reason to do so on this occasion. Maybe you're training for a big match and you want to get some training in so you can perform well. Or whatever circumstance you need to make the hypothetical work.
Do you hire your sister the tennis pro to show you some moves?
It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.
The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.
It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.
Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.
I mean, that's the point though, isn't it? The reason why it's fine to play tennis with your sister and not fine to have sex with your sister is the same reason why "sex work" is not just like any other job - Sex is Different.
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I do not think anyone engaging in adult consensual incest does anything ethically objectionable, if that's what you're asking.
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If you lose a tennis match, you don't end up with a life-threatening disease.
This comment has me imagining a situation where every sex act has a winner and a loser, and the loser gets the STD.
Isn't that how it works in reality? Like the websites where women having affairs with married men are all crying over "so the guy who was lying to his wife and cheating on her and deceiving his entire family is now cheating on me/doesn't want to get married/is not, in fact, getting a divorce like he promised me for five years he was getting".
Well, duh, girl, what did you expect from a proven liar, cheater, and deceiver? Fire burns, water is wet, and he just wanted some fun on the side.
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