On Mon, 9 May 2005, joanna wrote:
> I guess because I don't see prostitution as work that must be done. In any
> society, you have to build a bridge, teach skills, cure disease, dig graves,
> etc. Right now, the people who are doing these activities may not want to do
> them or may not want to do them in order to make some capitalist richer, but
> would still acknowledge that the work needs to be done. But prostitution is
> by definition sex for money, and I don't see that it's necessary to sell sex
> no matter what.
>
> Joanna
I think this is the core of the debate: in my (and I think Doug's) socialist utopia, sex work would be one of many possible forms of work that people could participate in. To update Marx, I could be a porn star in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, a critic in the evening. For J., there's no place for sex work in an egalitarian, socialist society.
I guess Jordan should put one of those "Check prediction" flags on this thread: come the revolution, there will be a proliferation of sex work, not the elimination of it.
Miles
ps. Please, please, please spare me the "teenage daughter" hyperboles; that's a rhetoric device people use if they don't have a coherent, logical argument. We're better than that.
M.