On Wednesday, we headed down to Sheffield Humanists for their talk by Dr Natalie Hammond, “Paying for Sex.” She had recently completed her PhD on the subject, specifically men who pay women for sex and the law surrounding it.
After the talk, there was a group discussion which took a while to get going, initially with people discussing the laws surrounding the topic, but finally someone got up and moved the discourse to where we really wanted it to be – the ethics.
Naturally, being a progressive group, most people were in favour of women having the right to do as they wish and rational enough to see that it is just the same as selling your body to any labour (I sold my body to McDonald’s, doing hard labour for far less money for example), and supporting decriminalisation so that victims are not afraid to come forward and the industry can be properly regulated.
A good parallel between this with the law surrounding abortion. Even if you disagree with abortion, it still makes sense to legalise it because of the harm caused by back street abortions and driving the practice underground.
Similarly, the harm caused in prostitution is nothing to do with any inherent problems in the industry, it’s the fact that we drive it underground and as a consequence the pimps, the human traffickers, the drugs, etc, etc get involved and that is what causes the problems.
Luckily, there were a few people in the audience with more regressive views, so some great debate got going :D.
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Tags: debate, ethics, paying for sex, prostitution, sex industry
This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Life, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.