Mathiäs;9853501 said:
You, Cyth, and anyone else who holds similar views really need to just chill out.
I'm pretty chilled out, man. I'm expressing some views of mine. Is that okay? Just because I don't say "lol yay, indulge your penis to your heart's content" doesn't mean I need to chill out.
Also, there's a difference between having sex with a prostitute (where she is paid appropriately) and fucking a girl enslaved in a prostitution ring run by gangsters. Just because a woman is a prostitute does not mean she's psychologically damaged, or in any way different from us, and making blanket assumptions about it is foolish.
I agree with the distinction that you make at the beginning there, but I don't think I'm making any blanket assumptions that are particularly unreasonable. Obviously, virtually every empirical generalization that's not a law of physics or something in that neighborhood has exceptions, and not every prostitute has a troubling past, which I thought I made clear in the last post. But it seems to be a reasonable inductive generalization to say that, generally, there is something troubling going on with people who choose this line of work. I think there is a pretty well-known connection between prostitution and sexual abuse. Here is a summary of some statistics which includes plenty of citations:
http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Prostitution Statistics IL.pdf
Mathiäs said:
What's the difference between a porn actor and a prostitute?
Perhaps not a whole lot.
Einherjar86 said:
The sexual act cannot be debased; there's nothing transcendental about it.
The same can be said about basically anything. How about this: There's nothing transcendental about somebody's desire not to be stabbed, and there's nothing transcendental about being in a state such that you are not stabbed. So what? But aside from that, the point is how things ought to be treated or regarded, not whether or not they are actually "transcendental" or whatever. Obviously, you don't think the sex act should be regarded in this way, but I don't know how your point really gets at the heart of the matter.
As a purely practical issue, I don't think most human beings really do or can live by the sort of thing you're saying here (this notion that sex is basically on a par with eating a sandwich or taking a shit, I presume). I dare you to live by that idea consistently.