Debts and Deferences

I agree with you--I hope I get at the difference you point to by distinguishing between "honor" and the "honor system."

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Yes, I didn't think to post the older posts on this reddit page. We can keep all discussions here, since I have no idea what's going on with the comment function on the blog.

Regarding roles, I think anything you do implies participation in an institution with roles--roles that are "accepted" insofar as they are essential to the institution. Being a doctor involves accepted roles; being a mother; being a teacher, etc. Everyone would agree that doctors, mothers and teachers can violate the norms constitutive of those roles, even if we would disagree on what counts as a violation. Working within the media also involves established roles--journalists tout their devotion to "ethics" constantly, and even purveyors of entertainment provide moral justifications (and answer moral criticisms) of their products. It would be very hard to find someone who says "journalists should publish whatever they want about whomever they want whenever they want without any regard for truth or the public value of the information," which means that everyone accepts that being a "journalist" involves constraints. Whether the media, especially driven by victimary imperatives, operates immorally to obscure these norms and roles is a different question.

I think I can best answer your question regarding "neocolonialism" on more general terms. The interest of wealthier, more powerful countries in the weaker, poorer countries is in ensuring secure sovereignty in those countries--not making them more free, more democratic, or more like us in any way--and not making them less like us for that matter, either. If there is already secure sovereignty, we should leave well enough alone. Disasters like plagues and famines are obviously not conducive to secure sovereignty, so intervention might be justified. I don't see any point in pretending that the situation is other than it is--rich and powerful confronting weak and poor, with the former helping the latter sometimes the moral thing to do. I'm against NGOs altogether--they are controlled by neither the powerful nor the weaker government (at least not in any accountable way) and no government interested in maintaining its sovereignty should allow them to operate in its territory. Regarding "sex work" more specifically, the question is, would a government that effectively secures and controls its country allow its country to be established as a site of sex tourism or prefer established familial roles? I suspect the latter. Now, it is of course possible that a country can have traditional familial roles, even mixed in with women's access to professional roles, in the main, with a tiny minority "set aside" or allowed to "drift into" prostitution. After all, it probably doesn't even take 1/10 of 1% of a country's women to create a viable "sex industry." Since this wouldn't impinge on the security with which sovereignty is held, NGO or other international intervention is wrong (who could throw the first stone here?), but anyone could point how that tacit acceptance of such a situation is shameful.

Can an argument be made for the morality "sex work"? You think so, on grounds of "far greater degrees of freedom." Most of the counter-arguments today would focus on the intrinsic "exploitation" involved in prostitution. Neither, of course deals with the question of "accepted roles," but we could, for the sake of argument, try out the possibility that prostitution serves a certain need, can be supported via orderly institutions, is perhaps even a "discipline" that can be performed more or less properly, etc. It will certainly never be the predominant sexual institution, though--that would be marriage. So, the real question would be whether prostitution supports or subverts the institution of marriage, and the "accepted roles" of husband and wife, mother and father. One could make an argument that prostitution supplements marriage by providing dissatisfied spouses an "outlet" that makes its easier to stay in the marriage--but even that presupposes that satisfaction within the marriage would be better. And it certainly removes the prostitutes themselves from any possibility of performing those roles. It may be that no minimally advanced society has completely eliminated prostitution, and it may not be worth trying to do so, but there are very good reasons for instituting on its marginalization, and resisting its legitimation.

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Roles can't be completely fixed because they do change and new roles emerge. How do they change and emerge? Through exchanges that seek to enhance reciprocity within existing roles, and exchanges that seek to undermine those reciprocities. We can also speak about "roles" more broadly than suggested by stricter, more "feudal" uses of the term. Those engaged in a conversation are fulfilling roles--one provides information, one "cheers the other up," one offers "another perspective," one tries to one-up the other with jokes or wordplay, one questions and the other answers, etc. These kinds of expectations kick in as soon as we begin talking, or resume an previous conversation. We could identify these roles with some precision if we needed to, even though they may change several times in the course of a single conversation. As a partner in conversation, then, you either play your role, get better at it--or you resist it, reject it, try to transform it into a new role, etc. Which approach is the most moral depends on the conversation of course, but the ultimate criterion is ensuring that the conversation will remain a "genuine" conversation, whatever the participants take that to mean. Likewise, the media give us various roles to play, and ways of playing them--they purvey and enact certain narratives, in which we have bit pieces (and a few have starring roles). The moral way of engaging these roles is to make the media more of what it should be. What that entails will be a point of disagreement. Perhaps in general we would agree that the media should be more "honest," and that the larger media organizations should display a wider range of narratives. We would then disagree on what counts as honesty, what narratives have been concealed or falsified, etc., but no engagement or exchange is going to proceed very far with absolutely no agreement on what we are looking for (that's why almost everyone's default move is to accuse others of "hypocrisy"--it's a way of affirming a shared set of values). Of course, there's the exchange that isn't really an exchange but a performance for others--or, you could say that the real exchange is between each participant in the exchange and the audience he is playing to. And these roles can overlap and combine. (This all suggests that I might see the formal/institutional distinction in a wave/particle way--if you're primed to see one, you miss the other, and can't quite catch them both simultaneously, and yet they are very intimately intertwined.)

Ultimately, we have bring power and sovereignty into the discussion. I can certainly imagine a sovereign who decides that marriage and prostitution are, indeed, complementary institutions, and I can also imagine a way of protecting prostitution so as to minimize its degrading effects. As for seeing marriage and prostitution as equally venerable, that seems to me less likely, but who knows? Can we imagine a sovereign who would subsidize the prostitution industry just to keep it going if marriages were generally happy and healthy and young women had a range of acceptable life-options? Also unlikely, I think, but no doubt there's an argument for it. At any rate, I don't think the reasoning would be the liberal one of increasing "degrees of freedom" for women.

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Thanks. Yes, it's good to know as much as possible about what one talks about. So, I'll proceed no further for now, since while the centrality of marriage to social order may be something to insist upon, the precise role of prostitution is not.

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That GA post you quote from is not mine, but I suppose that's beside the point here.

It can't really be that hard to imagine why prostitution has been, certainly not universally, but very widely, considered "problematic." Any social order needs families, which means it needs most women bearing and caring for children. Prostitution cannot provide a model for that, since the sex they provide is explicitly intended to be child-free. At best, then, prostitution can be a marginal practice, and a suspect one because only a certain number of women can be spared from participation in the broader familial order. Prostitution can only be seen and judged in terms of that order, which means that at best it can be seen as providing a necessary "release" for men without wives, or with wives in unsatisfactory marriages that it is nevertheless preferable stay intact. (There's also the whole history of sacred prostitution associated with temples and sacrifice, but does that even exist today?) Insofar as any community sees women as having a "destiny," which it be a wife and mother, or, to put it more mimetically, to be like her own mother, prostitution, for the individual woman, must be seen as a kind of derogation from that role and degradation of the individual. Insofar as sex is seen as an activity best enjoyed within a loving relationship, especially marriage, prostitution must be seen as a degradation of the sex act. Now, you can insist that women really have no such "destiny," the very assumption that they do being a "sexist" imposition; and you can say something similar about the sex act from a kind of materialist or utilitarian perspective. But that simply means that attempts to establish prostitution as equally legitimate as marriage are part of a feminist, materialist agenda, aimed at devaluing marriage, family, and the kinds of community that place them at the center.

Like drug use, the criminalization of prostitution generates a kind of paradox: the very forms of degradation that is associated with the condition and used to justify its criminalization can be attributed to that criminalization itself. Just treat the use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc., the way we treat alcohol, perhaps providing some treatment for those who get addicted, and all the nasty side effects of of drug use will be gone. By the same token, legalize prostitution, regulate it, remove the stigma, and we get rid of the pimps, the violence, the disease, and we have a perfectly respectable profession like, say, massage therapy. I'm not necessarily opposed to this argument, and it wouldn't change anything I said above. But while ending prohibition eliminated (as far as I know) bootlegging, I think that legalization in the case of both drugs and prostitution will generate a considerable black market or underground of illegal versions of these activities. Why? Because legal, respectable, regulated versions of these things will never provide a lot of the customers with what they really want--secrecy, and the particular forms of excitement that go with it. A man can easily tell his wife he's going for massage therapy; he can't tell her he's going to bang a prostitute at the local brothel--but if prostitution is legal, he has to pay by credit card, there's a receipt and a record, his "provider" is free to speak about details of the encounter (I don't anticipate any "privilege" being applicable here), he will be liable to all kinds of charges of mistreatment (surely the whole thing will be covered by sexual assault as well as labor, health and safety laws), and, aside from all the risk of exposure and liability, the whole thing might become too boring to bother with. Men will seek out the genuine, unregulated experience, and rough men will corral desperate young women into quasi-slavery in order to provide it.

If sex is not sacralized in some way, it becomes a site of violence--commercialization is a way station towards that.

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Is "decriminalization" quite the same as "legalization"? Here in the States decriminalization means you don't go to jail but can still be fined and penalized in other ways. So, that's an example of marginalization. In Nevada, prostitution is fully legal. So is gambling. Maybe it all works out fine--I think it's mostly confined to a couple of cities. So, if you want to go to a brothel and gamble all night, you go to Vegas. But other states are not in a rush to follow suit. That's marginalization. If an office is hiring a receptionist, and she puts on her cv "two years as a working girl in Barnacle Bill's Brothel," she's probably not going to get the job. That's marginalization. If a woman wants to settle down with a man she's been seeing and they come clean about their respective pasts, and she tells him, "oh, I was a call girl for a few years back in grad school," contrary to what Hollywood tells us, that man is now less likely to marry her. Also marginalization. If he brings her home to his parents, and says, "oh, by the way mom,..."--you get the idea. Are these indignities and minor atrocities? Maybe--very minor, it seems to me. Should all of the people in the above examples act differently? Should the people of an Indiana suburb want a Vegas-style brothel in their midst? Should the lawyers or doctors office hire the applicant with the colorful background and unique experiences? Should the suitor joyfully embrace her having slept with hundreds of men past? Please tell me how you would convince them that they should do so?

If the sexual can be sacralized, it can also be desecrated. Gans has a Chronicle where he offers an explanation for why sex is always "dirty" or "sinful"--in the sexual act, the couple isolates itself from the community, and therefore against the community. We might say that the solution is to have all sex conducted in public orgies, but even then the couple engaged at that moment would be turning their back on everyone else. So, to integrate sex into the community, the relationship between the couple needs to be consecrated. Marriage can do that, and prostitution cannot.

It seems to me your arguments are very narrow. Do you want to argue for a particular kind of sexual morality? Against all sexual morality? Against morality in general? Or are you just protesting the ill-treatment of prostitutes?

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Yes, certain activities should be stigmatized. Let's say we have someone who consistently behaves disruptively at work--shows up late, interferes with others' work, insults the bosses, etc. He gets fired, and has trouble finding other work because prospective employers look into his work history. He might overcome the stigma, but he would have to overcome it.

Reciprocity and morality only take on meaning within a social order. Any social order has a way of organizing sexuality, which is one of the most important areas of social life. Is polygamy immoral? Should there be a stigma attached to it? There have been plenty of social orders in which the answer was "no"--there still are a few. You could even make a case for it on terms of contemporary morality. It's all consensual; the husband can treat his many wives well; men who don't find wives, well, there's always homosexuality (which has been de-stigmatized), or enlistment in some militia which will most likely drastically cut short your life, so who cares; or prostitution. But if it's no good to have lots of desperate young men circulating in a civilized social order, then a marriage system of monogamy should be enforced. And then morality is based on preserving that system. Who does what to whom within that system can be judged in moral terms. So, for example, it's wrong to try and entice a married man or woman into having an affair with the offer of short-term pleasure and excitement, even if it's all consensual. You can destroy people's lives for no good reason at all. A man or woman in a community who is known for attempting this should be excluded from social gatherings and, generally, shunned. And for the same reason you wouldn't want a brothel near by.

If I take your word that prostitutes are often abused, what difference does it make how many accounts of the abuse I am familiar with? I can also easily take your word that there is a lot of "prohibitionist propaganda," and if you want to call it "raving," fine. But none of this means that the abuse is because of the propaganda, or that there would be less without it. Your own insistence on "decriminalization" rather than "legalization" seems to me to suggest otherwise--if the abuse is because of the stigma, why wouldn't making it completely legal end the abuse? Why, exactly, does this distinction matter? I think that prostitutes are often abused because they have sex with lots of strangers, some whom will inevitably be violent or refuse to pay, so they need the protection of violent men themselves, and those violent men will often abuse them--just less unpredictably and permanently than random strangers are likely to. It is possible that an elite class of prostitutes, serving a much wealthier clientele, can escape these conditions, but I don't think the mass of prostitutes can.

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This is an interesting question. I think this is an area where I see things differently than Gans. Your argument here seems to be that "technology" (especially media technology) creates anarchic social conditions, where it would indeed be absurd to speak of a "community" or a "center." This seems to me what Gans means by a "decentered market." And yet there are states, and states control borders and enforce laws within the territory they control. If you've been reading my posts over the past year or so, you know that I consider this a rather more important observation than Gans does. I think it means there is a center, even if there are powerful forces working hard to undermine those centers. The argument they make towards that end is the argument you make--given today's technology, which transcends borders and connects people across the world instantaneously, etc., how can we imagine we still live in a world divided into nation-states, etc. Leaving aside the question of who is pushing this agenda, and why, to embrace it is to gamble that the global market can establish a higher level of morality and civilization than a world dominated by relatively stable states. I think it's a very bad bet. I think the global market means unending war on people who want law and order, stable communities, non-disruptive social change, and meaningful work and relationships. To say such developments are inevitable or have already happened (so just get with the program, already) is to take sides surreptitiously.

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I don't really see a distinction between "controlling ways of influencing and limiting the moves of those who have chosen sexual services as their path to greater freedom" and "the treatment of sex work AS work, and the governing of sex work by the very same laws that affect all other employment and labor." The laws that affect employment and labor are, I think your call girls might find, quite "controlling." Business get raided, fined and shut for health, safety and employment law violations fairly regularly. I don't think the police are especially gentle in these cases, either.

So, these days there are only call girls, no streetwalkers and hookers? That would be an interesting development--I'll now be on the lookout for information on all this. I do hear talk of sex trafficking along with the broader transportation of illegals from Mexico, but who knows?

Anyway, I'm not opposed to decriminalization (nor am I exactly in favor of it either--it's not a core issue for me), as long as "sex work" is subjected to one other type of regulation that also affects ordinary businesses: zoning laws. Communities should have a say in whether they want a local brothel.

Is all disapproval and distancing "stigmatizing"?

There's always a system--an order of ostensives and imperatives, we could say. There's always a relation between the names of things and practices (ostensives) and commands/demands across the sexual, economic, political, linguistic, etc., realms. There are various attitudes you can take towards it: you can try and preserve it; you can try and destroy it; you can try to reorder it; you can try and replace it. I have been thinking, for a while now, that precisely in a mature "declarative order" (where ritual and sacrificial-style imperatives have been deferred considerably) hierarchical orders are inevitable and therefore the chain of command should be made as clear as possible. Egalitarianisms and universalisms are really attempts to destroy the system--they offer no real projects for reform, and their proposals for replacement are invariably hideous. Hence, absolutism. A clear chain of command is good for the declarative order--for science, for serious thought in general, for art, for more refined and reciprocal moral relations, all of which rely upon not having to think too much about their relation to power. If power relations are essentially settled, these engaged in these activities don't need to think about them.

I don't say that prostitution fits in any particular way into this abstract schema, but, anyway, maybe that is a "bridge."