Owning a person

You are still being silly. It corroborates the fact that they are customers. In a minute, you are going to be labeling people who pay to get their shoes shined as predators because they do not acknowledge the humanity of the shoe shiner.

So public and impersonal dehumanization is OK?

 

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I don't think so. Maybe everything has a price for some people. I simply do not find it acceptable.

Also I'd like to see evidence that this is some kind of career choice that people are voluntarily choosing consensually and not due to limited options or initial coercion.

What are the known reasons for prostitution?

No dehumanisation is okay, but taking work orders from some person [who is not a stranger once you settle down into your job] is different from swallowing the body fluids of random unknown people.

For me at least. Maybe for you there is no difference?

 

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You have a benign view of cubicle service, and a jaundiced view of prostitution. Others may differ.

For one thing, a bad sex customer is gone in a few minutes (or even immediately - they are disposable, easily replaced). A bad boss or coworker or job situation is a semi-permanent part of your life, hours on end, years maybe - you have much less control of their influence on your life.

And jobs come a lot worse than cubicle service.

And neither one involves ownership, to return to the thread topic.

Very few people make any employment choices without limits to their options or coercive circumstances in their lives.

 

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Then by your call, most people should prefer prostitution to the cubicle.

DO they?

 

How's that? Most people don't value personal freedom so highly, or object to such coworkers so strenuously, that the confinement of a cubicle job feels all that bad to them.

Some even like the situation.

People differ. That is not a factor in whether or not they are owned.

 

Isn't it? Just because people differ in the degree to which they are willing to be abused does not make some forms of exploitation better than others.

I'm still waiting for evidence that prostitution is a career of choice and not dictated by initial coercion or financial constraints or limited options.

 

But you have not started a thread claiming that people stuck in cubicles are owned, and attempting to analyze their abused situation from a demand side peopled by predators who own them.

So what if it is? Most jobs are. Including the ones that suck.

A lot of marriages are, as well - a more likely field for analytical exploration of "ownership" than a 45 minute service job.

The only "intelligence" test I ever found interesting was a machine that measured processed communication speed between the halves of the frontal lobes of the brain - the subject is hooked up to a simplified EEG, a click noise is made in one ear, and the onset time of the reaction and the "reflection" in the two halves of the brain is recorded. It correlated very well with IQ testing among upper class white European males, diverged increasingly from IQ tests as the subjects' demographics diverged from that group. So it looked interesting.

The fastest brain measured at the time I read about this thing belonged to a stripper in a Chicago bar. Turned out she spoke several languages, dropped out of college from boredom, and was traveling the world as an "exotic dancer". Chicago was her latest stop, and she was taking advantage of the very good university there by picking up calculus in her spare time - with pro bono private tutoring from a grad student she'd met playing Go at a local coffeehouse.

 

She represents prostitutes the way Bill Gates represents college dropouts.

 

So?

People differ. Some want freedom more than others, some want money more than others, etc.

Back a few years some big movie star got caught paying for "escorts" from a Hollywood service, and his friend asked him "why?" - He could have bedded any of dozens of attractive women, even as brief flings, simply by asking; why was he paying? He said: "I don't pay them for sex. I pay them to go home afterwards".

He paid to not own them.

 

Marvelous. Clearly the ideal for all men.

 

?

Chosen in illustration of two things: 1) people differ No one is an ideal for all anyone. 2) Prostitution in general is not an example of "ownership".

So if you want to talk about owning a person, some other example would work much better. How about marriage? It lasts more than an hour, usually, involves contractual bond, is often entered into from coercion, need, and limited opportunity, and so forth. The matter of complete disregard for the needs and so forth of the owned party is also frequently observed.

 

Do you realise that the fact he was paying escorts rather than sleeping with attractive women he knew is support for the fact that he was merely interested in using their holes [when he felt like it], rather than seeing them as persons? He was paying for them to go home, because they were not people to him. He would rather rent a body than form a relationship.

 

I have been unable to find a peer reviewed study on reasons for prostitution, could you provide some links?

I think paying for college qualifies as financial restraints, but I am pretty sure you cannot write prostitution as your occupation when applying for a student loan

And yes I am aware that some people will put a price on anything, even childrens bodies. But I don't consider that as sufficient justification for me to consider it as moral.

 

So you are refusing to back up your claim? I thought this was a scientific site where the one making the assertion supported it? I base my opinions on my personal experiences with brothels in Mumbai. If you claim they are non-representative of prostitutes in general, I would like to see some evidence for it.

In my opinion based on my personal experience [and hence anecdotal] prostitution is resorted to by women of poor educational and financial means due to limited options. It is not something they wish to do for the long term, only until something better comes along. Frequently though, they find it hard to get out of it once they are in, due to the network of criminal elements associated with prostitution that exploit womens/childrens bodies for predators

Do you have any evidence that contradicts this?

Do they declare it as their occupation? How do you know they have other choices?

 

Since I could not locate any academic studies which I can access:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/femhist/sex_work.shtml

 

Can I see any evidence of this at all? Who says so? Where?

What do you think the topic is?