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.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A close friend (Bob) is considering proposing to his girlfriend (Alice). Alice is an ex-prostitute. I am trying to talk him out of it.
By Bob's account (which I presume in turn is him parroting Alice's account), Alice's stint in the oldest profession was a regretted youthful indiscression perpetrated in her teens, for a couple of months. She wasn't groomed, she wasn't coerced, she wasn't doing what she had to do to feed her starving family: she was just horny and kinky and thought it would be hot. After it proved less hot than she anticipated, Alice got out of there and never did it again, and since had the 'normie' sex life of a 21st century young woman: (uncompensated) app hookups interspersed with long term monogamous relationships, most lately Bob.
My gut-level revulsion at the prospect of wife-ing a ho makes my effort to talk Bob out of it difficult, as my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than, in so many words, just yelling "CUCK CUCK CUCK" at him. Perhaps with a side of "If you're not part of the solution for deterring teen whorishness by making it's practitioners persona non grata in polite society, then that's how you get more teen whores".
I am wondering if the astute minds of The Motte can help me think up any more coherent arguments to deploy.
Unless Bob shares your morals (which given he is considering marrying this woman, he probably isn't), I doubt that an argument that he should punish ex-whores by shunning his girlfriend will be a winning one.
I also doubt calling him a cuck or spewing disgust will deter him. Maybe, if he values his relationship with you more than he values his relationship with his girlfriend. But otherwise you're just likely to be cut out of his life.
If I were you, I'd think hard about whether you want to speak to him as a concerned friend, or as someone with a lot of feelings about punishing whores. Because the strategy for the first is to be tactful and express your honest concerns about whether she is really wife material. The strategy for the second is to talk to him like you're talking to us here. But don't fool yourself if you really just want to express your disgust. That's like the guy who calls fat people pigs and then says he's just trying to encourage them to lose weight for the sake of their health.
Which, obviously, can't really be heavily mediated by the fact that she was a hooker. This is already priced in! Bob isn't going to hear that line of argument and think, "wow, I failed to realize that there are some negatives to consider about the fact that she was a hooker". Bob either has different object-level beliefs about prostitution than the mainstream (possible, and if true, you probably won't convince him otherwise) or already knows the same things that everyone else does and decided that it was still an acceptable tradeoff for him. Maybe he'll be wrong, but it won't be because he has never thought about this before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link