Deep In The Prostitution Weeds
The blogosphere tussle instigated by Elliot Spitzer’s libido – and concerning the merits of the world’s oldest profession – is starting to get rather loopy:
Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?
That’s Ross Douthat responding to this bit from Will Wilkinson and another bit by Kerry Howley, both of the libertarian ilk.
There are several levels on which to respond to Douthat’s thought experiment. The first is to point out that when adults “force kids to perform all sorts of menial tasks as part of their education” they actually can do a great deal of damage – primarily emotionally, but sometimes physically. There are all sorts of petty cruelties and injustices a bitter or confused adult can inflict on their child in the name of “preparing them for real life,” and the psychological wreckage from that treatment can require years to crawl out of. So even if one does consider selling sex to be equivalent to selling labor, one may still consider forcing menial labor on a child to be wrong, and thus (by Douthat’s analogy) forcing sex upon them could be opposed as well.
Of course, under this logic, forcing menial labor upon a child is not necessarily damaging, only possibly so, and presumably the same could be said of forcing sex on them as well. (I guess it would primarily be a matter of degree.) So I think we can’t escape the conclusion that Douthat is essentially correct; sex is unique, and is not like pounding nails or cooking dinner. But that still doesn’t mean the analogy ultimately holds up, namely because that whole “consenting adults” business he blows over is actually really, really important. To utterly beat Douthat’s analogy into the dirt, we all implicitly recognize that a 50 year-old father having consensual sex with his 23 year-old daughter is not as bad as a 35 year-old father forcing himself sexually upon his 10 year-old daughter. In the former case, they are both of an age where the power balances are relatively equal, and in their understanding of their sexuality consent becomes meaningful. This doesn’t make the incest any less icky, but it would not be definitively evil as in the latter case of the 10 year-old.
Long story short, sex works on children entirely differently than it works on adults. One can acknowledge that sex is morally (ontologically? teleologically?) distinct from other activities while still maintaining that adults have an autonomous and developed handle on their own sexuality which children do not. From there it’s a reasonable step to conclude that adults have a decent chance of successfully navigating the emotional and psychological hurdles involved in selling their sexual company for a fee, should they so choose, while still maintaining that forcing sexual relations on a child is deeply wrong. Of course, prostitution could still be considered a rather lowly form of sexual congress, but just because it’s sex that doesn’t occur on the mountaintop of human experience is not much of a reason for declaring it morally out of bounds.
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