What are the purported benefits of this law?
Are they just assuming that paid online sex work is bad and should be stopped?
Who fucking cares what consenting adults do in private in separate locations via the magic of the interweb.
Hey, you thought TERFs were a weird wedge between European and US feminists when they first got a foothold in the UK?
I have terrible news about how that process has been running again regarding sex work and surrogate pregnancy.
Surrogate pregnancy is less controversial because there the traditional US stance is in the minority and bans have been expanding relatively unopposed. Sex work, though? There are outright porn bans being advocated in left-leaning circles all over Europe. The fact that they’ve been calling themselves “sex work abolitionists” should be sobering.
Expect the global right to try to deploy the same strategy on this issue going forward. There are already similar proposals in the US and they are very aware that they can recruit some segment of nominally left-wing feminist activists and voters with these issues, just like they did with transphobic policies.
Despite Sweden’s great international PR, they have extremely harsh drug laws and wildly restrictive alcohol laws. They very much like to police what consenting adults do in private.
While exporting one of the largest Vodka brands in the world (Absolut)
I’m an engineer so I don’t know much about morals, but I have a very simple rule to distinguish good from bad: I ask who is harmed because of the process. If someone objectively does – the process is bad. All is good otherwise.
You’re getting to the right idea, computer boy!
Bit simplistic, that.
Hey, my approach to engineering is “if machine moves, machine works”, and I’m sure there isn’t any more nuance than that, so… call it a tie?
The problem with “harm” is it’s hard to measure or qualify. What is “objectively less harm” in situations where you’re trying to regulate the use of narcotics or, indeed, sex work. Is it more harmful for it to be illegal because there’s some harm associated with it or is it more harmful to criminalize it? And if you don’t criminalize it but harm does come to pass how do you mitigate that?
What do you do when two people identify harm in opposite actions? How do you measure which harm is more harmful if you can’t have a zero harm outcome? What is the unit of harm?
The measure of harm is as follows: if any persons involved in the process feel that there is harm in it, however slight, then there is harm.
I’d say that’d work well
That’s not a measure.
If two people involved in a process feel that the other is harming them, then you need to weigh one harm against another. Similarly, if both an action and a lack of action cause harm you need to know what causes most harm.
I mean, if we stop beating around the bush and cut the socratic bullshit, the point is this: in all political action there are multiple interests that often, if not always, have conflicting positions and perceive the results of that action differently. The idea of the entire system is that a representative govenrment controlled by checks and balances will broadly align their choices with the interest of the general public, or at least do so more consistently than the available alternatives.
You can’t measure harm objectively. That’s not a thing. The world isn’t made of discrete actions where each either harms or doesn’t harm. It’s a web of interconnected interpretations, preferences, interests and benefits. Some are physical, others economic or moral. There isn’t an equivalence between them and there isn’t an objectively optimal solution. That’s the entire point of politics in the first place.
We’re not looking for a generalised measure of harm - just one good enough for safe sex work. For which my suggestion works, as it is basically equivalent to consent.
I disagree. We are looking for a generalised measure of harm because… well, because that’s what all politics does, but also because we’re measuring very different interests against each other.
There are people who will argue that while individual choices in sex work are neutral the system in general is patriarchal and harms primarily women with few resources or in vulnerable positions, so right from the jump you need to decide how many babies you’re going to throw with the human trafficking bathwater. Others will argue that sex work carries a moral harm, which I disagree with, but we’re not basing political choices on what I, personally, find acceptable (unfortunately, because I’m good at this).
There are the interests of online platforms, the interests of pornography producers (both mostly financial), the interests of people working in the industry, the interests of consumers of porn and other sex work… There are aguments about the impact of the sex work industry on sex education as online distribution weakens age limits, so by that channel you now also have to weigh online privacy against the ability to distribute properly targeted adult-only content.
It’s a complete mess of interconnected parameteres. Which is exactly why it’s a prime vector for conservative elements trying to attack it for ideological reasons to overlap with left-leaning feminists objecting to it for other reasons.
And if you come at it from an online bro “here’s an easy solution to a complex problem” attitude you’re almost certainly making the whole thing worse, so I’d caution against it.
There is plenty of people ignorant or in denial about harming themselves or being harmed. That is usually the stage where drug addicts are at before they realize their addiction as such.
Also it is very much possible to groom people who are legally of age into things where they think they are making the decision by themselves and from their own will, but actually they are manipulated and subjected to harm.
On the flip side there is also many situations where people claim to be harmed but actually are not and there is situations were people from the outside think to see harm or lack of harm and it not being true to the reality of the person affected.
It is difficult to navigate and there is no simple answers or measures to it.
Almost always something “bad” happens though, someone is harmed… Someone rapes, you jail that person -> the rapist is harmed. Is it a bad process? Of course not.
It’s not about not harming anyone, it’s about harming the right people. Who we harm in what case is what almost all political discourse is about.
I get what you’re going for, but as presented this is a terrible take, or at least a poorly worded one. Systemic harm isn’t a zero sum game. It’s not about putting the harm on the bad people, it’s about reducing the harm of the system overall without ever crossing the basic ground rules and limitations of the system in the process.
Not all harm to “the right people” is justified and it’s extremely difficult to determine the limitations around that. You are right that deciding what interests, legitimate or not, to affect when making a decision is the entire point of politics, though.
I mean I was just giving a simple refute to the guy that said all is good if “no one” is harmed, not really debating perfect systems in society. Basically this
And again a bunch of puritan assholes have the need to ensure that, like they themselves, nobody will enjoy sex freely in the way that they want to. It’s always a tiny group that just had to ruin it for everyone, and then they’ll spin it as “but won’t anyone think of the children!” or similar bullshit like that.
Fuck these right wing assholes
Gonna have an unpopular take here, but pornography and sex work under our current system shouldn’t be celebrated as a “bastion of freedom”, given how it’s selling access to one’s body and sexuality as a product. Even if they agree to it consensually, the choice happens in a world where money decides what people can or can’t do, if one is going to survive or not. This makes the concept of “real consent” complicated, because the need of money, much like the need of food or essential goods can force people into doings they wouldn’t freely choose if survival wasn’t on the line.
Given this, one could definitely consider it commodified rape - it’s not necessarily violent like forced rape, but it’s still shaped by money, power, and pressure in a system where people’s bodies get turned into things to be bought.
The law does suck ass and shouldn’t be supported though, the issue stems with a system where our survival depends on money (with selling your body being a way to get by) and not individual morals. I fully agree with Yidit when he says that it’ll just cause sex work to become more dangerous by moving it underground.
I wholeheartedly agree. Especially with the problems of objectification of people, in particular women, having gotten worse again, we should be very careful to assume everything involving a person of legal age to undress for someone else without direct physical threat to be automatically good or liberating.
On the contrary being able to maintain privacy over your body can be an expression of much more freedom as you liberated yourself from objectification.
Irrespective of that these aren’t issues that can be tackled through laws like this. Better legal avenues would be banning of sexualized ads, banning of advertisment for cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and the like to minors and the like.
Not sure I disagree with this proposal. This is wierd to me though. You can buy pre-recorded stuff. But not live stuff. Oh well.
So holding a poll of what to record and then selling that would be fine, I guess.
