In the shadow of Spitzer, Jake asks why conservatives should be opposed to prostitution.
I suppose the family-based argument has some validity, but it’s incomplete: it says nothing about unmarried people without families who could engage in a consensual exchange. ($5,500 an hour indicates that both parties are VERY happy with the deal they’re getting. I don’t see why government should stand in the way of blocking that commerce.)
Most of my objections to prostitution are phrased along feminist lines, contra the Third Wave “oh, but it’s so empowerful!” way of thinking that says as long as it’s your choice it’s just peachy. Some of that applies here, too — even if one disregards the obvious situations where prostitution is the best of a bad series of options, and thus a reasonable thing to pick, I’m willing to believe that there will still be some women who want to be prostitutes.[1]
The question, however, isn’t what they want, but what they should want.
Conservatives should object to prostitution because it profanes something that should be sacred. When inspected from a purely materialist level, traditional marriage is essentially an extremely inefficient kind of prostitution. But that isn’t the point. Commodifying the body, objectifying the sexual act without the emotional and spiritual content it should carry, breaks down our very notions of humanity. We are possessed of dignity, which is beyond price, and which is doubly important to the feminine. Dignity is so often the only — or, at least, the most effective — way to relate to power from a submissive position, because so long as it’s respected it requires the dominant force to behave differently.
Conservatives should object to prostitution for the same reasons they object to hookup culture. Consent is necessary but not sufficient to establish morality.
[1]If someone could craft a policy that could distinguish between women/girls forced into prostitution by physical or economic coercion and women who really do want to be prostitutes, and could protect the first and permit the second to do as they pleased, most feminist critiques of prostitution (read: the ones that do not include the term “false consciousness”) fall apart.
A reply to a reply:
http://yalefreepress.blogspot.com/2008/03/prostitution-and-conservatism-round-2.html
Also, capitalism = coercion, prostitution = social coercion to get money, ergo prostitution = rape by society.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that capitalism is coercion, but certainly offering a woman money for sex when she has no other way of feeding herself/her family is edging on rape. I have another post coming about why some kinds of coercion in the workforce (Jake’s sewage plant example) are okay, and some aren’t.
I have no problem with capitalist coercion generally. Why else would anyone work?
It’s fine when it’s in terms of coercing people to have to do dignified things - lay bricks, or anything else. But call it for what it is - hanging the threat of starvation over someone’s head to make them do something. And it’s fine, because that’s the only way it works. Whatever. Cool.
But when it turns sexual, it’s rape. Not by the person giving the woman the money, but by the society that requires money for food, etc. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this in my eyes when it’s something ordinary. But when it’s sex, that’s how I see it.