81–90 of 361 posts
I've launched Libr, which won't be doing any such purge. It was built as a replacement for Tumblr. I'm in Australia, SESTA/FOSTA is an American law.
Hah! No shit. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of steet prostitution. One night I was smoking a cigarette on my porch when a girl who was working that night popped out from behind a car, walked over and asked if I had a smoke, and I obliged her. Apparently she was ducking a guy who had asked for services she wasn't comfortable with, and when they started to argue, she got out. He started to get out and then reache…
Street prostitution is actually very rare these days compared to the past and it's mostly just the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel stuff by the community that is connected to the homeless/junkie scene that's in every city. A minor niche in an otherwise large grey/black market.
95%+ of escorting is still all online and the 'noble' fight to bring Backpage down to protect 'human trafficking' only forced more less technically literate women to engage in this backwards and far more dangerous method of marketing, which was otherwise quickly on its way dying out (there will always be some diehards to stick to the streets), protecting women by giving them a venue to request IDs and verify people through shared blacklists of bad-actors, and helping clean up communities.
The sites also making the polices job catching guys looking for minors way easier since they could just set up some ads from the office and catch 100 guys at a time who egregiously and explicitly ask for young girls.
There's still plenty of other grey-market websites and forums that quickly replaced Backpage for this sort of thing and there will always continue to be, just like piracy sites playing whack-a-mole.
Regardless of FOSTA it will be a constant problem for LEO to try to take them down and instead of having a few big sites to monitor the bad guys, they'll exist in shadier forms. And just like drugs, protecting women and preventing actual human trafficking will go to the wayside of punishing websites and workers for something that will never meaningfully go away.
The solution just like drugs in better prevention and regulation of these sites and of sex-work itself and ignoring the "think of the children" hysteria.
One of the biggest problems is that sex worker activists are naively extremely hostile to any attempts to legalize and regulate the industry. They think they can get it decriminalized and maintain a complete hostility to working with government oversight (ie mandatory testing), courts, and working with police, which is not how any safe, stable industries works. Just like how it was impractical for pro-marijuana groups to except decriminalization in Canada. They'd get this along a lot further if they just accepted this reality.
What is sad is that there are a lot of real-size social experiments in various countries that have a variety of legislation and situation and a ton of literature to guide policy there. I have (like everybody) some opinions on how sex should work and what limits paid sex should have. I'll just say that: My preferences are totally irrelevant and should be dismissed if they have any chance of increasing human traffickin…
The same applies to sex trafficking. All the system offers people is deportation at best and indefinite detention with no legal rights at worst. Or death. We should not pretend that we are acting in the best interest of the trafficked.
> "stamping out murder may have pushed it underground" Okay, and how is that a bad thing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where t…
There are always outliers with strange opinions in any sufficiently large movement, but a much more common feminist position is to be strongly in support of sex workers rights and safety.
The two arguments that people here use is that a person that do sex for money would not had done so voluntary, thus there no consent. The second argument is that paying a person to do something with their body is the same as buying a human being, which would be slavery.
You mean exactly how sex workers said it would, but nobody listened to them, because it was never actually about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-workers-bill-fosta-sesta_... https://medium.com/voices/while-america-gawks-at-stormy-dani...
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
I'm more curious about people who still think Democrats and Republicans are so different from each other
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was so infuriating to watch Democrats willingly get played by the religious right into supporting something that was so blatantly designed to legislate morality rather than actually help victims of trafficking. Glad that elected officials are now rethinking it, at least.
It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't just the religious right that pushes for backwards prostitution laws. It is also... feminists. Aren't feminists always going on about "my body, my right" when it comes to abortion and other forms of contraceptives? Of course, but when it comes to prostitution, they seem to take a 'differing' view. Why? When prostitution is decriminalized, the price of sex goes down, as would be expected in any market where t…
There are always outliers with strange opinions in any sufficiently large movement, but a much more common feminist position is to be strongly in support of sex workers rights and safety.
- the rights of sex workers
- the status of trans people
and a bunch of other things.