Is having sex with a prostitute as bad as raping her?

[Tom Sawyer]

Is having sex with a prostitute as bad as raping her?

Why does it matter if the person in question is a prostitute or not? It's an irrelevant designation.

You're asking if having sex with someone is as bad as raping him/her.
It's a badly worded question. Rape is a subset of "having sex" so the question becomes redundant.

You need to reword this. Relevant factors would be things like consent, age, competence, &c.

I think that's the point of the question. When you have sex with a prostitute, do you know if these factors are present?

As an example, last week here in Toronto the police busted a large human trafficking ring. They had forced a number of women into prostitution, several of whom were underaged. There are a number of escort agencies in Toronto and the traffickers made websites which looked pretty much exactly the same as the legitimate ones and the customers who used one of these agencies really wouldn't have had much of a way to distinguish between a young woman making a free choice to get a job as a prostitute or a sex slave who's being forced into the business against her consent.

One has to assume that the traffickers, who have far more experience in the matter, would be far more experienced in concealing the sex slaves' lack of consent than the customers would be in discovering it. There didn't seem to be any lack of men having sex with these sex slaves and I have to figure that at least a large subset of those customers would have avoided raping a sex slave if they'd known that this is what they were doing - but they didn't know that.

While there are likely a number of ways to mitigate that risk, when you have sex with a prostitute, you can never really know whether or not she's actually consented to having sex with you.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

It is as bad if she has a pimp.

 

[fromderinside]

Lode.

The phrase is 'Mother Lode'.

It originated as a concept amongst gold prospectors, who believed that the flecks of gold they were finding in rivers indicated the presence of a massive nugget or ore body - a lode - upstream of their workings. If they could find the 'Mother Lode', then they would be able to retire in luxury, rather than having to labour to recover tiny traces of alluvial gold that barely covered their costs.

The phrase 'Mother Load' on the other hand means "I use terminology that I don't understand, so I am probably not as clever as I would like you to think".

Wow. How about you cum in her and she is your mother. Plays on mother fucker and your mom is a hooker. She has new mother load. A little sexual pun is all it was, but, you have to go all 49er on us and from down under of all places.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Wow. How about you cum in her

'Come.'
That's the verb. "I'm coming," "he came on me," "come on my face, you cowboy."
You cannot conjugate 'cum.'

 

[fromderinside]

Wow. How about you cum in her

'Come.'
That's the verb. "I'm coming," "he came on me," "come on my face, you cowboy."
You cannot conjugate 'cum.'

Time for some schooling eh.

From: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cum

cum1. n. Semen
2. v. To orgasm


Usage Note: the word is spelled with a 'u' to differentiate it from 'come,' which has a... cleaner definition.

Covers me both ways.

We're just getting this topic in perspective here people. Morally prostitution is seen as less clean by many. No of ftopic or hijack.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Covers me both ways.

Kay.

 

[fromderinside]

Kay.

Kay.

 

[credoconsolans]

To the OP - it is if the prostitute is coerced or otherwise forced into the business. In those cases at worst, it's rape, at best, it's exploitation of desperate people.

Sadly, regulation of prostitution hasn't stopped sex trafficking, even in nations where prostitution is legal.

And in legalizing prostitution, the burden of such a job still falls on the sex worker. If a condom breaks - as they all eventually will - and a worker gets an STD from an infected john, the infected customer is not turned away for future business, but the infected worker is fired.

 

[ronburgundy]

The customer would have to reasonably be aware that the prostitute was was being forced via threat of physical violence to herself or loved ones.
In such a case, then the customer is paying the pimp to enable him to rape the prostitute without getting his own hands dirty (although literally his hands might get dirty).

Mere "coercion" is not sufficient. At some level, nearly every worker at every job is "coerced" into doing what they do. It has to be use of or clear threatened use of physical force and violence.

If a person is poor and desperate for money, is it robbery for me to buy their car from them for a reasonable market value?
No. Same goes for prostitution. Whether you are even taking advantage of them is also questionable and depends upon how much you pay them.

 

[J842P]

The customer would have to reasonably be aware that the prostitute was was being forced via threat of physical violence to herself or loved ones.
In such a case, then the customer is paying the pimp to enable him to rape the prostitute without getting his own hands dirty (although literally his hands might get dirty).

Mere "coercion" is not sufficient. At some level, nearly every worker at every job is "coerced" into doing what they do. It has to be use of or clear threatened use of physical force and violence.

If a person is poor and desperate for money, is it robbery for me to buy their car from them for a reasonable market value?
No. Same goes for prostitution. Whether you are even taking advantage of them is also questionable and depends upon how much you pay them.

Coercion implies the use of force/violence or threats of the same. It is a form of "persuasion" that implies that the party being persuaded is under duress.

 

[ronburgundy]

The customer would have to reasonably be aware that the prostitute was was being forced via threat of physical violence to herself or loved ones.
In such a case, then the customer is paying the pimp to enable him to rape the prostitute without getting his own hands dirty (although literally his hands might get dirty).

Mere "coercion" is not sufficient. At some level, nearly every worker at every job is "coerced" into doing what they do. It has to be use of or clear threatened use of physical force and violence.

If a person is poor and desperate for money, is it robbery for me to buy their car from them for a reasonable market value?
No. Same goes for prostitution. Whether you are even taking advantage of them is also questionable and depends upon how much you pay them.

Coercion implies the use of force/violence or threats of the same. It is a form of "persuasion" that implies that the party being persuaded is under duress.

Many people (rightly or wrongly) employ "coercion" to mean any form of "threat" broadly defined about anything, not just about physical violence and even if there is no one making a threat, just the threat of reality.
For example, some would claim that poor people are "coerced" into taking jobs like prostitution because they will starve otherwise. No one is threatening them with anything. Rather it just a fact of reality that they must eat, thus must work, thus must take the jobs available.

I just wanted to be clear that such "coercion" doesn't count. It must be actual persons making direct threats of violence.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

What a lot of people who argue that prostitutes are desperately poor women forced into it to survive fail to realize, is that a lot of these prostitutes become quite well off through the work. The hooker you are going to go see may very well be richer than you are.

 

[credoconsolans]

What a lot of people who argue that prostitutes are desperately poor women forced into it to survive fail to realize, is that a lot of these prostitutes become quite well off through the work. The hooker you are going to go see may very well be richer than you are.

The expensive call girl ones are. The majority however, are drug addicts and are one BJ away from starving.

 

[bilby]

What a lot of people who argue that prostitutes are desperately poor women forced into it to survive fail to realize, is that a lot of these prostitutes become quite well off through the work. The hooker you are going to go see may very well be richer than you are.

The expensive call girl ones are. The majority however, are drug addicts and are one BJ away from starving.

That is likely true in jurisdictions where prostitution is banned; In other places, it is unlikely that such people make up a majority of prostitutes - although there is a persistent small minority of such, usually working outside the lawful and regulated sector.

 

[Jokodo]

Well that's what they say when asked. The money is apparently pretty good.

This article from a couple of years ago suggests that the defendant was so keen to work as a prostitute that she broke the rules and borrowed her sister's health certificate; The idea that either sister would take the trouble to either obtain a certificate through the correct channels (or by breaking the rules), in order to work, strongly suggests that they were both keen to do the job.

Sure, it's a bit icky having sex with a bunch of strangers; but some people tolerate it better than others - and there are plenty of icky jobs out there that do not involve sex, where nobody suggests that the people doing the job are not there of their own free choice.

Cleaning public toilets is icky; but nobody forced me to do it - the wages were enough to persuade me to do the job, and nobody said I had to enjoy every minute of it.

I haven't found any reliable statistics about how many prostitutes (of any gender) engage in prostitution voluntarily or are coerced into prostitution. Human trafficking usually means prostitution, almost always women and children who are tricked or coerced into prostitution in a foreign country.

Human trafficking doesn't usually mean prostitution. According to the UNODC, sexual exploitation is the most commonly reported form of human trafficking, but with the caveat that's probably a statistical bias because it is more easily detected (since prostitutes have to be out in the public view in order to be of any use for their traffickers) while the victims trafficking for forced labour is much easier to hide and thus underreported. I'd like to add another caveat: Many countries will count any and all unregistered foreign prostitutes as victims of trafficking without trying to determine whether or not he or she was forced to do it as a matter of routine. Since authorities do not by default treat undocumented immigrant fruit pickers as slaves until proven otherwise, this adds to the statistical bias.

What Is The Most Commonly Identified Form Of Human Trafficking?
In UNODC's Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, sexual exploitation was noted as by far the most commonly identified form of human trafficking (79%) followed by forced labour (18%). This may be the result of statistical bias. By and large, the exploitation of women tends to be visible, in city centres or along highways. Because it is more frequently reported, sexual exploitation has become the most documented type of trafficking, in aggregate statistics. In comparison, other forms of exploitation are under-reported: forced or bonded labour; domestic servitude and forced marriage; organ removal; and the exploitation of children in begging, the sex trade and warfare.

The International Labour Organisation reports, based on their own studies and not exclusively relying on government reports, that 4.5 million out of a total 21 million victims of forced labour are used for sexual exploitation - less than 20%, and those include household maids who double as their master's sexual slave. Forced prostitutes might be a minority even among those 4.5 million.

In such cases, it is generally the case that the sex workers actually retain almost nothing of any wages earned and are not free to leave the trade.

This is equally true for victims of trafficking forced to work as fruit pickers. I don't see anyone arguing for banning the sale of fruits on those grounds.

 

[Jokodo]

Of course, any person who is forced to have sex (for money or not) against their will, is the victim of rape; But there is no reason to think that every prostitute is a rape victim, any more than there is reason to think that every taxi driver is the victim of a car-jacking.

Of course. But it is much easier to know that a cab driver is driving a cab because he wants to drive a cab.

How so? A cab driver's job is to drive people from one place to another. Most costumers are decidedly not interested in hearing a cab driver's life story, and might actively try to shut him (or her) down if they try. In contrast, certainly not all but many johns are very keen to hear a prostitute's life story because they want to pretend that there's a deep, personal, emotional even, connection between them and the prostitute, to camouflage the fact that they're paying for a service. This behaviour is certainly frequent enough for some prostitutes to find it a more annoying aspect of their work than sleeping with strangers. So if, between driving cabs and prostitution, there's one job that makes it easier for a victim to hint to a costumer that they're enslaved, it's prostitution.

 

[TSwizzle]

What a lot of people who argue that prostitutes are desperately poor women forced into it to survive fail to realize, is that a lot of these prostitutes become quite well off through the work. The hooker you are going to go see may very well be richer than you are.

I used to live in an area that was notorious for prostitutes. I got to know a couple of them casually, enough to talk to them. They would come into the bar on cold nights when business was slow and nurse a drink or have a bowl of soup. Very sad state of affairs for these girls. They were badly treated, regularly beaten up and money taken off them. Dumped in remote parts of town after some asshole had fucked them in the mouth and not paid etc. Generally just abused and treated like shit. A "pleasant" transaction (tolerable) was if the guy paid $10 for a five minute blowjob and took her back to where he picked her up. They weren't making an awful lot of money, enough to buy drugs.

I remember one night I bumped into a girl I worked beside in the area. Turns out she was working as a prostitute for a short period of time. She was mortified that I had caught her.

I feel sorry for the girls. It's rough dealing with the sickos out there. It's all well and good saying it's a simple transaction between two consenting adults but from my experience, the girls hated it.

I've never used a prostitute, never will.

 

[bilby]

What a lot of people who argue that prostitutes are desperately poor women forced into it to survive fail to realize, is that a lot of these prostitutes become quite well off through the work. The hooker you are going to go see may very well be richer than you are.

I used to live in an area that was notorious for prostitutes. I got to know a couple of them casually, enough to talk to them. They would come into the bar on cold nights when business was slow and nurse a drink or have a bowl of soup. Very sad state of affairs for these girls. They were badly treated, regularly beaten up and money taken off them. Dumped in remote parts of town after some asshole had fucked them in the mouth and not paid etc. Generally just abused and treated like shit. A "pleasant" transaction (tolerable) was if the guy paid $10 for a five minute blowjob and took her back to where he picked her up. They weren't making an awful lot of money, enough to buy drugs.

I remember one night I bumped into a girl I worked beside in the area. Turns out she was working as a prostitute for a short period of time. She was mortified that I had caught her.

I feel sorry for the girls. It's rough dealing with the sickos out there. It's all well and good saying it's a simple transaction between two consenting adults but from my experience, the girls hated it.

I've never used a prostitute, never will.

I presume that these prostitutes you describe are in a jurisdiction where what they are doing is illegal?

The conditions you describe are often the result of criminalisation of sex work. They are not an inescapable or inherent characteristic of such work.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I used to live in an area that was notorious for prostitutes. I got to know a couple of them casually, enough to talk to them. They would come into the bar on cold nights when business was slow and nurse a drink or have a bowl of soup. Very sad state of affairs for these girls. They were badly treated, regularly beaten up and money taken off them. Dumped in remote parts of town after some asshole had fucked them in the mouth and not paid etc. Generally just abused and treated like shit. A "pleasant" transaction (tolerable) was if the guy paid $10 for a five minute blowjob and took her back to where he picked her up. They weren't making an awful lot of money, enough to buy drugs.

I remember one night I bumped into a girl I worked beside in the area. Turns out she was working as a prostitute for a short period of time. She was mortified that I had caught her.

I feel sorry for the girls. It's rough dealing with the sickos out there. It's all well and good saying it's a simple transaction between two consenting adults but from my experience, the girls hated it.

I've never used a prostitute, never will.

I presume that these prostitutes you describe are in a jurisdiction where what they are doing is illegal?

The conditions you describe are often the result of criminalisation of sex work. They are not an inescapable or inherent characteristic of such work.

I have an ex-girlfriend who worked as a stripper for a short time (before we met). She still had some friends working at the strip clubs and some working as escorts (code word for hookers). I don't recall any of them having less money than I did. They all drove nice cars. They all worked either together or for themselves. There were a few boyfriends here and there, but the girls were clearly in charge. If somebody tried to abuse these girls, they'd simply report them to the police or even more likely have some friends deal with him.

This was before Canada brought in the new law making prostitution illegal last December. I am no longer in touch with any of them. I wonder if it being illegal changed all of this into the dreary story you tell.

 

[TSwizzle]

I used to live in an area that was notorious for prostitutes. I got to know a couple of them casually, enough to talk to them. They would come into the bar on cold nights when business was slow and nurse a drink or have a bowl of soup. Very sad state of affairs for these girls. They were badly treated, regularly beaten up and money taken off them. Dumped in remote parts of town after some asshole had fucked them in the mouth and not paid etc. Generally just abused and treated like shit. A "pleasant" transaction (tolerable) was if the guy paid $10 for a five minute blowjob and took her back to where he picked her up. They weren't making an awful lot of money, enough to buy drugs.

I remember one night I bumped into a girl I worked beside in the area. Turns out she was working as a prostitute for a short period of time. She was mortified that I had caught her.

I feel sorry for the girls. It's rough dealing with the sickos out there. It's all well and good saying it's a simple transaction between two consenting adults but from my experience, the girls hated it.

I've never used a prostitute, never will.

I presume that these prostitutes you describe are in a jurisdiction where what they are doing is illegal?

Yes but it was an area where prostitution was so rife, the area became a special zone where it was tolerated by the police. Much to the chagrin of the residents.

The conditions you describe are often the result of criminalisation of sex work. They are not an inescapable or inherent characteristic of such work.

Indeed. Taking away some of the abuses and dangers may make the situation somewhat more tolerable for the girls.

We nick named the prostitute "The Soup Dragon" because she would mostly have a bowl of soup on cold nights.