Do you support or oppose the legalization of prostitution?

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think everybody knows my opinion by now, but arguing for it on this forum has proven utterly pointless.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It depends what you mean by that.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Support. Most of modern American heterosexual dating culture is glorified prostitution with a stifling Puritan/Victorian veneer anyways.

wat

I'm not convinced he's wrong, but one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, et cetera.

He's categorically wrong. Women most likely to have causal sex with a string of different dates are also the most likely to pay their own way on a date. If anyone is exchanging sex for money, it's conservative marriage minded woman who are trying to find a breadwinner.

I'm not primarily thinking of money as the object of exchange here.

What then? I'm genuinely curious.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Support. Most of modern American heterosexual dating culture is glorified prostitution with a stifling Puritan/Victorian veneer anyways.

wat

I'm not convinced he's wrong, but one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, et cetera.

He's categorically wrong. Women most likely to have causal sex with a string of different dates are also the most likely to pay their own way on a date. If anyone is exchanging sex for money, it's conservative marriage minded woman who are trying to find a breadwinner.

I'm not primarily thinking of money as the object of exchange here.

What then? I'm genuinely curious.

Young people, at least in my part of the country, seem to actually date more, not less, than young people apparently used to, yet there's immense pressure to make a relationship sexual almost immediately, such that I have known couples where both partners actually want to wait but rush into sex anyway because each believes that the other expects them to put out. The sex--at least in relationships that I've seen, many of which have gone so disastrously as to destroy friend groups within weeks--becomes transactional in and of itself, being itself used as a form of currency to communicate social and emotional capital that can't be reliably communicated in other ways. It's, for once, less a casual sex thing than a 'people are constantly, more or less openly on the take from one another and use being in a sexual relationship as a means to 'pay back' forms of caring and gratitude that they don't know how to mediate any other way' thing. Which has some of the same fundamental moral problems with it as prostitution, although it's obviously not legally or sociologically equivalent. I'm sure this isn't what Derpist meant by his initial post, but I don't really care.

I see. I was vaguely aware of this sort of situations but I never imagined they could be so widespread. It's very concerning indeed - especially if, as I'd assume, this pressure weighs a lot more heavily on women.

I wonder if this problem is specific to the US or affects other Western countries as well. I don't know French dating culture any better than I do American, so it's hard to tell.