IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’

Karen Burke

Last night our intellgentsia (in the form of the Intelligence2 debaters at the Royal Geographical Society in London) defeated the motion "paying for sex is wrong" by 449 to 203.

Apparently, the rocket scientists of our literati think that selling your body is much better for your soul than stacking shelves at Tesco - as if any of them have ever stacked shelves at Tesco or worked on a factory line (as I have, albeit for a short period of time).

If your mother or daughter turned around and said she wanted to be a prostitute, wouldn't your heart sink further than it would if she said she wanted to stack shelves at Tesco?

Sitting in the audience, we are told, were a number of prostitutes. Who is ever going to want to tell those women that what they do is wrong? No one. We are already turning away from the criminalization of the prostitute to the criminalisation of the buyer. Whenever there is a curb crawler sting, the wife sitting at home reading her local paper will find out what her husband and father of her kids was really doing when he said he was still at work. And legalising brothels is not going to stop curb crawling, but push the edge further into the danger zone for female and male prostitutes. Prositutes should be given help and support, not a green gard to beat themselves up as hard as they can as if we cared as little about them as a dirty £20 note.

People will always pay for sex - doesn't mean we have to promote the trade.
People will always murder people - doesn't make it right.

http://workofmyownfiction.blogspot.com/

Andrew Forbes

If you exclude God from a, then morality is merely a continuously shifting sand dune, blown by the wind of societal norms. This debate has demonstrated this.
What a shame so many of the nation's opinion formers were involved in this debate.

Sex was intended by God as a gift to cement a couple's love. I'm going to sound dreadfully old fashioned, but it was also intended to be confined to marriage. Just because society's use of sex has drifted so far from the ideal as to be nearer to prostitution, it doesn't mean that what is right drifted with it.

Aidan Storey

God doesnt exist, its a story, like Santa Claus, get over it. What goes on between consenting adults is their business.

Andrew Forbes

Aidan; one of us is clearly wrong. If it's me, there's still something clearly wrong here; where what is right is defined as what society finds acceptable. This drifts with fashion. On Pitcairn Island, the descendents of the Bounty mutineers found it acceptable to have sex with children.

David Bouvier

Andrew - I am impressed with your ability to know the mind of God.

As has often been pointed out, a literal following of Bible's injunctions is far from morally acceptable, and it has to be selectively interpretted.

But then it cannot be the source of selection and interpretation.

Unless you actually believe you are getting stuff direct from the big guy (la la la), where are you getting your divine insight from?

Morality is a human exercise. You can debate the issues, but god is not a trump on this issue - he is a busted flush!

David Bouvier

Andrew

To address the specific point, the work of Hausser, Pinker and others shows that there are some basic moral frameworks and assumptions people bring along, which is then combined with a tradition of understanding and interpretation to create a system of morality. It is neither purely about immediate exercise of power, nor is it entirely set in stone. It is a human institution that evolves.

There is some divergence of view and change of time, but that does not make morality merely arbitrary.

This model depends on a community of sufficient size and with some degree of dispersal of power so that morality can be independent of personal interest. Pitcairn is too small to stand alone as such a moral community - though I suspect some people there were not OK with what went on, even if they could do nothing about it.

John Bishop

The vote went the right way.

Many prostitutes are very bright and beautiful, have willingly chosen that way of earning a living for a few years to help them financially when young, and are often as removed from the saying "as hard a whore's heart" as it is possible to be.

They can often offer solace, humour, understanding, and sometimes even have a tolerance and tenderness for their clients.

They see the more truthful underbelly of existence - sometimes hard but often rather comi-tragic too. Who is the more debased the man or the woman? Both of them? Neither if mutual respect is offered/received?

Often these liaisons have more truth about them than a relationship of many years that has lived too long through convention or duty to children. Often they have children themselves and have funded their child's education. Belief in something deeper is not a barrier to this kind of liaison.

It can be a hard life for them, but they do perform a very real function in society God, or whatever you want to believe in, bless 'em. They know the truth, that most punters are alright, while a few are dangerous, sick, or lost to the world.

The danger for them is that they meet a bigger cross-section in the belly of that beast, part of which is animal sexuality.

Like most hard jobs it is best not to do it for very long, but the money can be hard to give up - especially if a girl has regular clients that she knows and gets along with.

Sex does cement love, which is why many prostitutes will not kiss - they have to have something that differentiates for when they do in love - which some may not. But some do - even with a client.

For the ones that are coerced into prostitution that is an obvious evil, but many aren't and have found a useful way to make a living.

Mary Magdalene knew a thing or to, and so did Jesus of Nazareth about judgement and finding worth in all sections of society - especially those who live on the fringes but understand its depths.

Andrew Forbes

I only appear to know the mind of God through the Bible, so David B, you'll be relieved to know I'm not lalala, as you put it. The bible is pretty unambiguous about prostitution. Whatever God might be thinking this very minute I cannot pretend to know. However, on the subject of sexuality and particularly prostitution, the bible is pretty unambiguous and leaves virtually nothing for us to interpret.

Jesus befriended sinners and found worth in many of them, it is true, but too many people, John Bishop on this page, conclude that Jesus was happy for people to continue sinning. Jesus called all sinners to repent. That includes all murderers (e.g. the apostle Paul), fraudsters (the disciple Matthew), and sexual sinners (Mary Magdalene). Crucially, he told them (us) all to leave their life of sin.

He didn't judge prostitutes or their clients, and nor do I. But he did say it was wrong, unambiguously.

seb

Harriet Harman mooted the idea of making sex-for-cash transactions illegal about the time of the murders of call girls in Ipswich. Many, naturally, were flabbergasted at such an insane idea.

However, there seems to be a campaign going on in the Guardian, which has published a number of articles that might indicate that New Labour is going ahead with this replay of Prohibition. Has anyone any news or gossip concerning this? If Harman gets her way, I just can't wait till my taxes are wasted on having the police try to enforce the sort of law this Puritan fury might put onto the statute books.

Bishakha Datta

Many comments seem to suggest that prostitutes sell their bodies. That's not true. Prostitutes sell sex - which is much less than bodies, children, kidneys, and souls. Their body remains their own; they sell sexual labour. That doesn't necessarily alienate them from their bodies, selves or souls.

And what is so wrong with selling sex? Why is it okay to use your body to dig wells, stack shelves, do factory work...anything except selling sex?

Millions of workers sell their labour in various forms today to make a living; some of us use our brains - isn't that a form of intellectual labour?

Max Gentle

I pay for sex sometimes and I've never come across a sex worker who wasn't in the business of her own free will, as far as I can tell. I buy vegetables but I have no way of knowing if these vegetables have been picked by foreigh workers exploited by unscrupulous gangmasters; I buy clothes but I can't tell if they were made by children working in an illegal sweatshop.

Arguments against prostitution seem to be based on moral or religious precepts which are held by an ever-diminishing number of adherents and which are not proven to be 'right' by simply reiterating them.

I choose to enjoy sexual pleasure with women who choose to provide it for a fee. I think I'm following a more morally acceptable course than the religious and political factions which have been hanging, burning and crucifying people for generations.