If you hire somebody to do an illegal act ...

[untermensche]

In many places the users of prostitutes are arrested as well as the prostitutes.

But usually it is just the prostitutes.

And none of it makes the making of prostitution a crime legitimate.

 

[Derec]

In many places the users of prostitutes are arrested as well as the prostitutes.
But usually it is just the prostitutes.

There may be more prostitutes arrested but that's most likely because it is easier to do a sting pretending to be a customer than a provider.

And none of it makes the making of prostitution a crime legitimate.

Do we agree again? What's happening?

 

[SimpleDon]

I think a SCOTUS challenge is the best bet. Under "right to privacy" and Lawrence v. Texas etc. there is no constitutional justification for laws banning prostitution.

Possible, but unlikely. Unlike the question in Lawrence v. Texas prostitution involves commerce.

If only arresting johns reduced prostitution sufficiently then I say that it is good enough.

Why? For one it is highly unjust to only arrest one party to a transaction. Second, there is no legitimate reason for state to tell consenting adults what to do with their bodies.

Once again, prostitution involves commerce, a legitimate area for government regulation. If there is no money exchange involved then it is a question of the right of privacy.

Both men and women prostitute themselves but many more women than men and the customers are overwhelmingly male.

Hence it is politically correct to only go after customers.

If your definition of politically correct is anything that Derec doesn't like.

This is the nature of the beast and there is no reason to assume that only arresting johns is a reflection of anything but that nature. Certainly it is not a plot to oppress men. The johns have an adult choice to make to not participate in the activity if they don't want to be arrested.

How is the radical feminism inspired 'Swedish model' not a plot to oppress men? The only reason they only go after clients is that they are overwhelmingly male and sex workers overwhelmingly female.

No, the only reason to go after the johns is if it is more effective than going after the prostitutes. We certainly have a long history of ineffectiveness of just going after the prostitutes.

And besides, the reason every society has had sex work ("oldest profession" and all that) is the mismatch between male and female sex drives. Professional sex services serve to correct that imbalance and thus are a worthwhile and necessary service in any society.

Men are prone to be much more violent that women. Do you believe that laws against domestic abuse oppress men because it exploits the mismatch between male and female propensity to violence?

The same reasoning applies to abortions, if they are made illegal again. If arresting the abortion provider and not the women reduces the number of abortions sufficiently then more power to them.

And what if arresting women and not providers reduced abortions even more? Would you then be in favor of that solution? Or do you always favor discriminatory treatment if it benefits women?

You seem to have avoided somehow the main points of my post. I don't believe that laws against prostitution or any potential laws abortion are or will be enacted to discriminate against anyone. The purpose of such laws are to reduce the incidence of those acts. The only question is how and if the laws are effective. If they accomplish what they are suppose to accomplish.

I personally don't believe that either are or will be very effective in reducing the respective acts. This is especially true of abortion. The only open question for me about legalizing prostitution is how widespread it would be if it were legal. I wouldn't want it to double for example. I don't think that it would based on the experience in the European countries that have legalized it. But American attitudes toward sex are quite a bit different than the Europeans.

However, a word of caution. There is no reason to believe that making abortions illegal will substantially reduce the number of abortions. If you want to make abortion illegal so that the country is right with your god then make them illegal. But I won't support you because there is no such a thing as a god. If you want to reduce the number of abortions, which is what I want to do, then the only proven way to do it is with the widespread use of contraception. Not by making abortion illegal.

We don't disagree there.

I wonder if you even realize that your hair trigger against anything that resembles discrimination against white males most closely parallels the attitudes of the other side that you try to demean by labeling it politically correct? The identity politics and the oppressive, never ending victimization?

I thought for the longest time that you were using it as sarcasm, the way that I suggest that abortion must be considered premeditated murder. But I am beginning to think that this is really the way that you think. Please tell me that I am wrong about this.

 

[Derec]

Possible, but unlikely. Unlike the question in Lawrence v. Texas prostitution involves commerce.

Why should that affect constitutional right to privacy?

Once again, prostitution involves commerce, a legitimate area for government regulation. If there is no money exchange involved then it is a question of the right of privacy.

Government regulation, yes. Outright ban, no.
Nobody is objecting to reasonable regulation of sex work for health and safety.

If your definition of politically correct is anything that Derec doesn't like.

No. In this case political correctness involves different treatment based on gender. Going after women is not PC, going after men is.

No, the only reason to go after the johns is if it is more effective than going after the prostitutes. We certainly have a long history of ineffectiveness of just going after the prostitutes.

Where both being customer and a sex worker is illegal most enforcement focuses on sex workers because that is more effective. Sex workers are more visible, be it by street walking for hours or having ads or working out of "Asian massage parlors". There are also more individual customers than sex workers so busting N sex workers is more effective in reducing sex work. And last but not least it is much easier to pretend you are a customer than a provider. For all those reasons it is more effective to go after providers.
The reason why a jurisdiction would want to focus on customers and not go after providers is because of erroneous notion that all sex workers are innocent victims who either did not make the choice to do sex work or that their choice to do sex work is somehow invalid (feminist parentalism). That's why it is areas where feminism is strong that have implemented this policy - countries like Sweden and Iceland as well as left-wing cities in the US like Chicago, NYC and Seattle. It has nothing to do with effectiveness, it has everything to do with ideology.

But if you really wanted to be most effective you would have both be illegal though and focus on providers. If you want to suppress drug use, you go after both dealers and users but focus on dealers. If you want to suppress abortion you go after don't-wannabe mothers and doctors but focus on doctors. Etc. Going after customers only makes sense only if you have an ideological pro-provider position.

Men are prone to be much more violent that women. Do you believe that laws against domestic abuse oppress men because it exploits the mismatch between male and female propensity to violence?

Domestic abuse (and make no mistake, many domestic abusers are women) involves an unwilling victim. A better analogy would be government banning fighting sports because they "promote violence" or some other bullshit excuse.

You seem to have avoided somehow the main points of my post. I don't believe that laws against prostitution or any potential laws abortion are or will be enacted to discriminate against anyone. The purpose of such laws are to reduce the incidence of those acts. The only question is how and if the laws are effective. If they accomplish what they are suppose to accomplish.

I fail to see how giving half of participants in an illegal act would suppress that activity more than criminalizing both. That does not mean the LE should go as aggressively against both as going after providers of abortion, like with sex workers, might indeed be more effective. However, the risk of getting caught would deter some men from hiring sex workers and some women from seeking abortionists. So how exactly do you think not penalizing those who hire abortionists at all is going to reduce abortions?

The only open question for me about legalizing prostitution is how widespread it would be if it were legal. I wouldn't want it to double for example. I don't think that it would based on the experience in the European countries that have legalized it. But American attitudes toward sex are quite a bit different than the Europeans.

I do not have a problem with any specific level of it. I don't have any problem with any specific level of beauty parlors or pizza joints or wine bars. It should be up to the people and their individual decisions where the equilibrium lands.

I wonder if you even realize that your hair trigger against anything that resembles discrimination against white males most closely parallels the attitudes of the other side that you try to demean by labeling it politically correct? The identity politics and the oppressive, never ending victimization?

I thought for the longest time that you were using it as sarcasm, the way that I suggest that abortion must be considered premeditated murder. But I am beginning to think that this is really the way that you think. Please tell me that I am wrong about this.

The problem is that the erroneous notion of white male privilege is so ingrained, especially among the left, that any suggestion that white men are discriminated against in any way is dismissed without consideration and even ridiculed.
The notion of white male privilege was definitely correct in the past, but it hasn't been true for a while. Now white men are the only group that it is ok to discriminate against.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You seriously don't think there are any female privileges?

Not when it comes to child support and divorce?
Not when it comes to co-called "affirmative action" in colleges and workplaces? Or scholarships and grants only females can apply to?
Not when it comes to expelling only the man when a drunk man and an equally drunk woman have consensual sex?
Not when it comes to receiving shorter sentences for crimes, especially things like spousal murder?
Not when it comes to not having to register for selective service?
Not when it comes to it being illegal to charge women more for health insurance but legal to charge men for car or life insurance?
Not even when it comes to dating where men are still expected to pay?

No, Derec, I don't. For every situation where a female *might* have an advantage, there is another situation wherein a male will have the advantage. You forgot to add that only women get to use tampons. That's clearly unfair, right? Do you also get so bent out of shape because seniors get discounts at some businesses while ignoring that most seniors are on fixed incomes? This is what your constant complaining about this mythical "female privilege" is like.

Tampons aren't anything like the scale of disparity in the things he's talking about. How about showing equivalent cases???

 

[Frikki]

No, Derec, I don't. For every situation where a female *might* have an advantage, there is another situation wherein a male will have the advantage. You forgot to add that only women get to use tampons. That's clearly unfair, right? Do you also get so bent out of shape because seniors get discounts at some businesses while ignoring that most seniors are on fixed incomes? This is what your constant complaining about this mythical "female privilege" is like.

Tampons aren't anything like the scale of disparity in the things he's talking about. How about showing equivalent cases???

Are you serious?

 

[Derec]

Tampons aren't anything like the scale of disparity in the things he's talking about. How about showing equivalent cases???

And besides it is not society's doing that women bleed out of theirs whatevers once a month.

 

[ronburgundy]

No. In this case political correctness involves different treatment based on gender. Going after women is not PC, going after men is.

That's a loose and sloppy definition of PC. Gender itself is not the factor. It is the objective differences in motives of the different parties. It is an objective fact that a huge % of prostitutes engage in it out of either fear, coercion by others, or economic desperation. It is implausible that hardly any enjoy the type of work. Some might have other decent options and choose prostitution because they make more money than those options. But there is no way for law enforcement to parse those out. Any prosecution of the prostitutes guarantees that some people who were forced, coerced, or just desperately trying to pay their bills will be further fucked over than the world has already fucked them over. Normal humans have empathy for that. The customers motives are that they want sex. Actually, that the ideal case. In many cases, its that they want to treat a women like garbage and act out rape fantasies without going to jail for assault. Regardless, none of them are coerced into it, and none of them are paying for sex in order to survive and pay their bills. IOW, their motives don't evoke much empathy.
The motives also relate to the efficacy of punishment. When the motive is coercion and desperation, then punishment for getting caught will have almost no impact. When the motive is getting one's rocks off, then punishment will often be enough to make they person choose masturbation or other legal sex options.

IOW, its about the having empathy for the objective differences in the circumstances behind the different parties involvement in the illegal act (which is not PC, its just ethics), and about effectiveness of law enforcement on reducing the frequency of the criminal act.

This same thing applies to your original topic of abortion.

 

[RavenSky]

No. In this case political correctness involves different treatment based on gender. Going after women is not PC, going after men is.

That's a loose and sloppy definition of PC. Gender itself is not the factor. It is the objective differences in motives of the different parties. It is an objective fact that a huge % of prostitutes engage in it out of either fear, coercion by others, or economic desperation. It is implausible that hardly any enjoy the type of work. Some might have other decent options and choose prostitution because they make more money than those options. But there is no way for law enforcement to parse those out. Any prosecution of the prostitutes guarantees that some people who were forced, coerced, or just desperately trying to pay their bills will be further fucked over than the world has already fucked them over. Normal humans have empathy for that. The customers motives are that they want sex. Actually, that the ideal case. In many cases, its that they want to treat a women like garbage and act out rape fantasies without going to jail for assault. Regardless, none of them are coerced into it, and none of them are paying for sex in order to survive and pay their bills. IOW, their motives don't evoke much empathy.
The motives also relate to the efficacy of punishment. When the motive is coercion and desperation, then punishment for getting caught will have almost no impact. When the motive is getting one's rocks off, then punishment will often be enough to make they person choose masturbation or other legal sex options.

IOW, its about the having empathy for the objective differences in the circumstances behind the different parties involvement in the illegal act (which is not PC, its just ethics), and about effectiveness of law enforcement on reducing the frequency of the criminal act.

This same thing applies to your original topic of abortion.

excellent argument

 

[untermensche]

...It is an objective fact that a huge % of prostitutes engage in it out of either fear, coercion by others, or economic desperation...

If we include things people do out of economic desperation we include a lot of people.

And a lot of the coercion and fear is because the activity is illegal.

But there is nothing wrong with consensual adults having sex.

Even if one person pays the other for the experience.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Ya, that's like saying you're doing something wrong if you pay a waitress because she's only serving you food out of economic desperation. If she's an adult and she made a free choice to sell sex for money, her motives aren't the problem of the client.

 

[laughing dog]

The notion of white male privilege was definitely correct in the past, but it hasn't been true for a while. Now white men are the only group that it is ok to discriminate against.

Why should anyone take your rants seriously when they are filled with such tripe?

 

[Derec]

The notion of white male privilege was definitely correct in the past, but it hasn't been true for a while. Now white men are the only group that it is ok to discriminate against.

Why should anyone take your rants seriously when they are filled with such tripe?

It's not tripe. Your ideological blinders prevent you from seeing.

 

[laughing dog]

Why should anyone take your rants seriously when they are filled with such tripe?

It's not tripe. Your ideological blinders prevent you from seeing.

No, it is tripe, like most of the "content" of your misogynistic rants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Tampons aren't anything like the scale of disparity in the things he's talking about. How about showing equivalent cases???

Are you serious?

Where is there discrimination against women at a level like his examples??

 

[Derec]

That's a loose and sloppy definition of PC. Gender itself is not the factor.

I think double standards are one of the core principles of political correctness, but that's a different discussion.

It is the objective differences in motives of the different parties.

But it is not. In the case of sex work, the professional provider is deemed an innocent victim without valid agency while in the case of abortion the professional provider is deemed the sole guilty party. Whether the provider or customer is villified vs. deemed a victim (see women as "second victims of abortion" rhetoric) is reversed, and yet in both cases it seeks to protect women. In a rather condescending, parentalistic way too, that true feminists should object to.

It is an objective fact that a huge % of prostitutes engage in it out of either fear, coercion by others,

No, that is not an objective fact.

or economic desperation.

As do many other workers. We do not seek to make those jobs illegal.
Also, that applies only to the low-end of the profession, not at mid- to high end. Yet the "sex workers are always victims" dogma does not differentiate there either, just like they do not differentiate between sex slaves and women who freely choose sex work.

It is implausible that hardly any enjoy the type of work.

Why is it implausible? I am sure many do enjoy the work, while others don't.
I see no reason why enjoyment of work should enter into whether such work should be legal anyway. We do not do it with any other kind of occupation. Imagine we banned retail or fast food work because many people who work there do not enjoy it. Yet that is an argument offered with a straight face when it comes to sex work.

Some might have other decent options and choose prostitution because they make more money than those options.

Again, why should that even be a factor? We do not do it in any other industry.
And if sex work is these women's best economic option, why take it away? Makes no sense.

But there is no way for law enforcement to parse those out.

Of course there is.
Of course, that would be easier if LE could focus on actual victims and villains rather than going after consenting adults.

Any prosecution of the prostitutes guarantees that some people who were forced, coerced, or just desperately trying to pay their bills will be further fucked over than the world has already fucked them over.

Then legalize and regulate the profession, don't pretend all sex workers are victims and all customers no-goodniks who deserve to be punished for wanting consensual sex.

Normal humans have empathy for that.

Normal humans should have empathy with both and realize that legalizing it is the best option.

The customers motives are that they want sex.

And what's wrong with that?
I see a similar sort of puritan outrage as with abortion. In both cases people are to be punished for having sex the moralizers disapprove of. The difference is that while the religious right frowns on both, the feminist left is more selective (by gender) in their outrage.

Actually, that the ideal case. In many cases, its that they want to treat a women like garbage and act out rape fantasies without going to jail for assault.

Not my particular cup of tea, but there is nothing wrong with consensual rape fantasies. Many couples engage in that, and if you do not have a significant other to do it with, why not hire a pro? Same goes for men who want to be tied up or whipped by a dominatrix. As long as the provider is consenting, who are you do tell her that her choice is invalid?

Regardless, none of them are coerced into it, and none of them are paying for sex in order to survive and pay their bills. IOW, their motives don't evoke much empathy.

Freedom is a value you do not seem to value very much. And life is more than mere survival. You could have the same argument against Lawrence v. Texas - sex with other men is not necessary for survival of gays. They could choose to just be celibate or have sex with women after all. I.e. to use your words "choose masturbation or other legal sex options".

The motives also relate to the efficacy of punishment. When the motive is coercion and desperation, then punishment for getting caught will have almost no impact. When the motive is getting one's rocks off, then punishment will often be enough to make they person choose masturbation or other legal sex options.

And yet it doesn't work. Sex work has been with us no matter what the societies do to stamp it out. The only thing you accomplish is to ruin the lives of normal people who got unlucky to get caught up in the drag net.

IOW, its about the having empathy for the objective differences in the circumstances behind the different parties involvement in the illegal act (which is not PC, its just ethics), and about effectiveness of law enforcement on reducing the frequency of the criminal act.

Funny how these so-called "objective differences" get parsed so that they target the opposite functional party (provider in one case, customer in the other) but with protecting women being the similarity between them. Are you saying that is merely a coincidence?

This same thing applies to your original topic of abortion.

I do not see it. If abortion is murder, should not the person ordering the hit be held responsible?

 

[SimpleDon]

Why should that affect constitutional right to privacy?

Once again, prostitution involves commerce, a legitimate area for government regulation. If there is no money exchange involved then it is a question of the right of privacy.

Government regulation, yes. Outright ban, no.
Nobody is objecting to reasonable regulation of sex work for health and safety.

The right of the government to regulate includes the option to ban certain forms of commerce.

If your definition of politically correct is anything that Derec doesn't like.

No. In this case political correctness involves different treatment based on gender. Going after women is not PC, going after men is.

And you consistently refuse to address my point that it isn't discrimination against men, it is arresting the customers of prostitutes who are violating the law.

No, the only reason to go after the johns is if it is more effective than going after the prostitutes. We certainly have a long history of ineffectiveness of just going after the prostitutes.

Where both being customer and a sex worker is illegal most enforcement focuses on sex workers because that is more effective. Sex workers are more visible, be it by street walking for hours or having ads or working out of "Asian massage parlors". There are also more individual customers than sex workers so busting N sex workers is more effective in reducing sex work. And last but not least it is much easier to pretend you are a customer than a provider. For all those reasons it is more effective to go after providers.
The reason why a jurisdiction would want to focus on customers and not go after providers is because of erroneous notion that all sex workers are innocent victims who either did not make the choice to do sex work or that their choice to do sex work is somehow invalid (feminist parentalism). That's why it is areas where feminism is strong that have implemented this policy - countries like Sweden and Iceland as well as left-wing cities in the US like Chicago, NYC and Seattle. It has nothing to do with effectiveness, it has everything to do with ideology.

You should concentrate on my use of the word "if" in my statement, "No, the only reason to go after the johns is if it is more effective than going after the prostitutes."

I am not arguing that it will be more effective. It may not be, but it is at least worth trying.

Thank you for the explanation of why it won't be effective though.

But once again, it didn't address my post.

But if you really wanted to be most effective you would have both be illegal though and focus on providers. If you want to suppress drug use, you go after both dealers and users but focus on dealers. If you want to suppress abortion you go after don't-wannabe mothers and doctors but focus on doctors. Etc. Going after customers only makes sense only if you have an ideological pro-provider position.

Or if you thought that going after the customers would be more effective. If you thought that the deterrence of arresting customers would be greater than the deterrence of arresting the providers. If you thought that no matter what we can't arrest all or most of the people who are involved in this illegal activity and we have to rely instead on deterrence. Like we do with every other law that we have.

By your reasoning that it is the desire of the authorities to oppress men that leads the Swedes to target the customers then by that reasoning virtually the entire rest of the world, including you, wants to oppress women by targeting the providers.

This is not what I believe. It is as ridiculous as your position.

Men are prone to be much more violent that women. Do you believe that laws against domestic abuse oppress men because it exploits the mismatch between male and female propensity to violence?

Domestic abuse (and make no mistake, many domestic abusers are women) involves an unwilling victim. A better analogy would be government banning fighting sports because they "promote violence" or some other bullshit excuse.

You are halfway there. You realize that there is another reason for arresting domestic abusers than the desire to oppress men. Now, apply that revelation to the question of prostitution.

You seem to have avoided somehow the main points of my post. I don't believe that laws against prostitution or any potential laws abortion are or will be enacted to discriminate against anyone. The purpose of such laws are to reduce the incidence of those acts. The only question is how and if the laws are effective. If they accomplish what they are suppose to accomplish.

I fail to see how giving half of participants in an illegal act would suppress that activity more than criminalizing both. That does not mean the LE should go as aggressively against both as going after providers of abortion, like with sex workers, might indeed be more effective. However, the risk of getting caught would deter some men from hiring sex workers and some women from seeking abortionists. So how exactly do you think not penalizing those who hire abortionists at all is going to reduce abortions?

I don't know what will be more effective in either case. Most probably nothing will be. But I don't believe that whosoever the many different jurisdictions decide to target that there is absolutely no evidence to believe that they will do it to oppress a particular gender.

And nothing in this response supports your contention that the choice of enforcement targets is decided by gender bias, apparently, only when the targets are the johns.

The only open question for me about legalizing prostitution is how widespread it would be if it were legal. I wouldn't want it to double for example. I don't think that it would based on the experience in the European countries that have legalized it. But American attitudes toward sex are quite a bit different than the Europeans.

I do not have a problem with any specific level of it. I don't have any problem with any specific level of beauty parlors or pizza joints or wine bars. It should be up to the people and their individual decisions where the equilibrium lands.

This puts you in the minority with regards to prostitution. Even the other people who want to legalize it want it to be minimized as much as possible. Prostitution is considered to be a rather poor career choice even where it is legal, for example.

I wonder if you even realize that your hair trigger against anything that resembles discrimination against white males most closely parallels the attitudes of the other side that you try to demean by labeling it politically correct? The identity politics and the oppressive, never ending victimization?

I thought for the longest time that you were using it as sarcasm, the way that I suggest that abortion must be considered premeditated murder. But I am beginning to think that this is really the way that you think. Please tell me that I am wrong about this.

The problem is that the erroneous notion of white male privilege is so ingrained, especially among the left, that any suggestion that white men are discriminated against in any way is dismissed without consideration and even ridiculed.

The notion of white male privilege was definitely correct in the past, but it hasn't been true for a while. Now white men are the only group that it is ok to discriminate against.

And you never considered the possibility that it is ridiculed is because it is ridiculous?

I don't use the term white privilege because it means so many different things to different people. But you seem to be an example of one of those meanings, a person who believes that removing an advantage that you once had is discrimination against you.

Your most often repeated example of the oppressive discrimination that white males suffer under, affirmative action, especially in graduate and especially in medical school admissions, where "those" people are admitted instead of more qualified people as determined by their MCAT scores, has been repeatedly shot down. I don't mean to any further derail this thread. I suggest that you search on ' SimpleDon || "medical school admissions",' for my often repeated explanation of why this isn't a valid argument.

And you didn't address my argument that you are using the same appeals to emotion, to the subjective, that the left uses in their identity politics and constant victimization, in your claims of discrimination against white males.

 

[ronburgundy]

I think double standards are one of the core principles of political correctness, but that's a different discussion.

It is the objective differences in motives of the different parties.

But it is not. In the case of sex work, the professional provider is deemed an innocent victim without valid agency while in the case of abortion the professional provider is deemed the sole guilty party. Whether the provider or customer is villified vs. deemed a victim (see women as "second victims of abortion" rhetoric) is reversed, and yet in both cases it seeks to protect women. In a rather condescending, parentalistic way too, that true feminists should object to.

The provider-customer distinction is meaningless and irrelevant to the motives of the parties, thus the provider being targeted in abortion but the customer in prostitution is not at all a contradiction, but rather is an internal consistency based upon the principle of targeting the person who has the most options and is only doing it for motives that are easily satisfied by other means. In abortion, it is the doctors with the most options and would suffer the least harm if they stopped participating, but in prostitution it is the customers with the most options and would suffer the least harm if they stopped participating.

It is not about them being women. That isn't what makes them more sympathetic participants, thus sexist paternalism has nothing to do with it. It is clear objective facts about the differences in motives and options between these groups, with gender being incidental (except in that women being the biological child-bearers is what makes their consequences more dire in abortion, and evolutionary relates to why women comprise the majority of prostitutes).

It is an objective fact that a huge % of prostitutes engage in it out of either fear, coercion by others,

No, that is not an objective fact.

The vast majority of prostitutes are raped and assaulted during the course of their job, which for the vast majority is not a lucrative profession. What kind of absurd theory of basic human psychology do you have that says that most people would be happy to have a job like that and wouldn't need to be motivated by coercion or desperation.

Here are research based stats on prostitutes and the horrors of their profession that sane people with options wouldn't choose.

- 65% to 95% of those in prostitution were sexually assaulted as children.
- 70% to 95% were physically assaulted in prostitution
- 60% to 75% were raped in prostitution
- 75% of those in prostitution have been homeless at some point in their lives.
- 85% to 95% of those in prostitution want to escape it, but have no other options for survival.
- 68% of 854 people in strip club, massage, and street prostitution in 9 countries met criteria for
posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD.

or economic desperation.

As do many other workers. We do not seek to make those jobs illegal.

Huh? Prostitution isn't illegal because sex workers are economically desperate, and this isn't about whether it should be illegal. None of my argument imply that it should be and I don't think it should be.
The question is, if a type of economic exchange is illegal for whatever reason, does it make more moral and practical sense to reduce the illegal act by going after the party only involved out of desperate necessity or the party for whom the act is a luxury and a choice out of other legal options?

Also, that applies only to the low-end of the profession, not at mid- to high end. Yet the "sex workers are always victims" dogma does not differentiate there either, just like they do not differentiate between sex slaves and women who freely choose sex work.

First, your dichotomy of "slaves" versus "freely-choose" is a false dichotomy. Most US prostitutes are not "slaves" but also are not "freely chosing" a life of abuse and sex with countless strangers from among an array of plausible careers, and many if not most have mental health issues tied to childhood abuse and the psychological trauma that prostitution itself has been shown to cause. The vast majority of sex workers in a system where it is illegal are "low-end". Thus, it applies to the vast majority, like I said. Given that the "low-end" is also where many other connected crimes (like rape, assault, murder, and drug trafficking) occur, it makes sense to focus enforcement there. Cops can't accurately determine which prostitutes are "freely choosing" versus coerced by other or desperation. So, the question is whether going after the minority that are "freely choosing" it is worth the harm or punishing the coerced and desperate that would inherently occur with any effort to punish prostitutes.

It is implausible that hardly any enjoy the type of work.

Why is it implausible? I am sure many do enjoy the work, while others don't.

The evidence and any viable theory of basic human psychology shows you are wrong, and that very few enjoy it and most would get out if they thought they could.

I see no reason why enjoyment of work should enter into whether such work should be legal anyway. We do not do it with any other kind of occupation. Imagine we banned retail or fast food work because many people who work there do not enjoy it. Yet that is an argument offered with a straight face when it comes to sex work.

This has zero to do with whether it should be illegal or why it should be illegal. It has to do with, if it is illegal, how should the law be enforced in order to actually discourage he activity without causing more harm to people only involved in it because they have been or are being harmed. They don't just lack enjoyment of it, they fear and hate it. That is relevant because it supports that they wouldn't do it unless they were so desperate or coerced that arresting them would be both ineffective as a deterrent and cruel.

The customers motives are that they want sex.

And what's wrong with that?

Nothing is "wrong" with it. It just a luxury motive that doesn't have the same level of immediate survival desperation that most prostitutes are motivated by. Therefore, in normal humans, it doesn't evoke as much empathy as a motive for illegal activity, and is more likely to be impacted by fear of getting arrested and thus is a more efficacious leverage point for reducing the illegal activity.

[I snipped your other stuff that was only about the irrelevant issue of whether prostitution should be illegal in the first place, since it has no bearing on how it should be enforced, if it is illegal. I think it should be legal and much of the facts I presented here that you deny actually favor it being legal, but also favor that if it is illegal, then any enforcement should focus on parties other the sex-workers themselves, such as customers or "employers"/pimps ]

IOW, its about the having empathy for the objective differences in the circumstances behind the different parties involvement in the illegal act (which is not PC, its just ethics), and about effectiveness of law enforcement on reducing the frequency of the criminal act.

Funny how these so-called "objective differences" get parsed so that they target the opposite functional party (provider in one case, customer in the other) but with protecting women being the similarity between them. Are you saying that is merely a coincidence?

Coincidences happens every second of the day. You'll be a lot healthier if you don't infer them to be evil conspiracies among men-haters.
But in this case, it is not just random coincidence, just not do to them merely being women. The objective differences in motives and desperation versus real choice are indirectly tied to women being child-bearers, as I explained above. Also, the fact that women happen to also be less physically strong also contributes to why and how so many are abused in their profession and yet fearful of leaving it.

This same thing applies to your original topic of abortion.

I do not see it. If abortion is murder, should not the person ordering the hit be held responsible?

The problem is your general worldview that law enforcement is about vengeance and trying to cause harm to evil doers. If that it your goal, then yes. If you have a more sensible goal of reducing the actions that have been deemed harmful and thus illegal hen you enforce the law in a way that goes after the parties who have the most legal alternatives and thus are more likely to choose not to be a part of the illegal activity in question. In the case of abortion, it is the doctors, and in the case of prostitution, it is the customers.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Isn't it generally considered a crime to hire someone to commit a crime on your behalf?

Yes, and I'm surprised it took this long to point that out.

It's called accomplice liability, and is often accompanied by charges of solicitation and conspiracy.