Prostitution and Conservatism, Round 2

Nicola responds to my query:

Conservatives should object to prostitution because it profanes something that should be sacred. When inspected from a purely materialist level, traditional marriage is essentially an extremely inefficient kind of prostitution. But that isn’t the point. Commodifying the body, objectifying the sexual act without the emotional and spiritual content it should carry, breaks down our very notions of humanity. We are possessed of dignity, which is beyond price, and which is doubly important to the feminine. Dignity is so often the only — or, at least, the most effective — way to relate to power from a submissive position, because so long as it’s respected it requires the dominant force to behave differently.

The dignity-based argument fails to account for the many ways that capitalism asks people to do things they do not enjoy for money. Should conservatives oppose labor which is beneath dignity? I fail to see the difference between scrubbing a toilet or picking fruit or washing dishes, jobs which illegal immigrants do in this country for at best a few dollars an hour, and prostitution which pays women with very small skill sets hundreds of dollars an hour? If anything, the manual labor is the more undignified choice of labor. Yours truly supervised operations at a wastewater treatment plant for about 50 cents above minimum wage--including fishing condoms out of filters and holding a drainage pipe for sewage while suspended six feet above a 25-foot-deep vat of shit.

If one wishes to make the dignity argument, it needs to fall on a higher moral authority than Conservatism: it needs religion as a modifier. As a philosophy unto itself conservatism recognizes several things:

Humans are imperfectible: The suggestion that government should try to create policies which make people want what they should want seems utopian and likely to fail. (And, indeed, it has, hasn't it?)

Institutions exist for a reason: There's a reason that prostitution is "the oldest profession," and the Victorian moral crusaders who ignore this are doomed to tilt at windmills. Yes, murder is as old as time... but it violates property rights and is the most blatant form of non-consent. Government is right to protect against the coercion of murder. It is not right to disregard the fact that fences exist for a reason, and prostitution has existed in societies for millenia--if not far, far longer--without the collapse of civilization.

Voluntary communities work, Government doesn't: Religion is good at giving people a life philosophy which can resist the hurt which prostitution can cause, as well as healing and forgiveness. Government is really, really bad at discouraging this behavior, and that's why it has failed to do so at every attempt.

I resist the Burkean attempt to portray Conservatism as a moral philosophy. If you wish to build Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism into Conservatism, that's fine... but the beauty of the philosophy to me is that it's modular. Atheists and agnostics can be conservatives, and they can have a moral framework that is not derived from divine authority but which they get other men to agree upon under law.

We can also disapprove of prostitution--or the "hookup culture" or trans-fats or what have you--but public policy isn't the way to deal with these problems. They require social change and that has to come from communities. Government cannot legislate social change. It should stick to protecting the rights of individuals, and if responsible families and communities do their jobs the demand for prostitution will shrink without interference, and it will do so for the right reason: people changing their behavior, not hiding it for fear of punishment.
Jake McGuire | 4:15 PM | 1 comments|