Con: Sex work encourages male superiority, cycles of human trafficking

Most people are able to rationalize sex work and the products that come from it. Whether they call it empowering feminism or a job that pays well, it is still wrong to show or do something that can harmfully affect the brain, result in sex-trafficking, and promote male dominance.

Many call prostitution the oldest profession in the world. False. According the Bible, people were first farmers, as Adam and Eve first tended the garden of Eden. Later, once sin had entered the world, prostitution came about. Although prostitution may have been one of the first jobs, it is wrong and has many unintended consequences. Women in street prostitution are 60-100 times more likely to be murdered than non-prostitutes, 95 percent were sexually assaulted in childhood, 89 percent of prostitutes would like to leave, and 68 percent meet criteria for PTSD, according to Prostitutionresearch.com. Prostitution is dangerous and should be considered wrong and illegal in our society.

Multiple organizations claim that decriminalizing prostitution would help end sex trafficking, rape, and STDs, but this untrue. In fact, since so much criminal activity happens in places where prostitution occurs, decriminalizing it would allow many criminal businesses like sex trafficking and drug trading to flourish. According to the “Trafficking in Humans Report” by the US, “Where prostitution is tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.” In terms of stopping the spread of STDs, decriminalization would not be effective. For example, even if decriminalization gave prostitutes the opportunity to get checked out weekly for HIV, it would not be effective. This is because they would still test negative for up to 12 weeks, expose many other customers before finding out and that is if the prostitute quits after testing positive. This would not be an affective way to stop HIV. Instead abolishing prostitution would be much more affective in stopping the spread of sexual diseases.

Many feminists claim that being a stripper allows them to feel empowered to be a woman. But instead it creates the culture of men superiority. That men can get anything they want with some money and a little coercion. For example, men before they get married, go to bachelor parties at strip clubs to celebrate the freedom of being an unbound man before being “stuck” with the women they are choosing to marry. Men go to these parties expecting to be sexually aroused by some other women. Sexual arousal should only be saved for their spouses. Instead they take the freedom of looking and possible touching a young women’s body, allowing them to use another human being for their own selfish gain. Although being a stripper may feel empowering, it only adds to the antifeministic culture.

40 million American people regularly visit porn sites. One fourth of all internet searches are related to pornography. 79 percent of teens are exposed to internet porn before 18 years of age, according to Covenanteyes.com and Webroot.com. All these statistics show that porn may be taboo, but despite this, porn is widely used. And yet it is completely wrong to watch sex and things that create sexual arousal, according to God’s word. It not only is morally wrong, but can also have large physical, mental, and emotional consequences. Physically, a person can lose their jobs, friends, money, and family by using porn. Mentally, porn is akin to drugs in the medical field, and the more a person watches it grey matter in the brain is destroyed every hour by watching pornography. The grey matter in the brain allows for movement, speech, memories, decision making, etc., and is also known to be destroyed by smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. Emotionally, it causes anxiousness, depression, and disconnection. The people looking at it will forever compare their experiences and their partners body to an image on the screen. Although pornography may seem gratifying, it does not satisfy the need for intimate relationships and it connects the person watching to a nonliving piece of media. Sex, and things that arouse sexual desire, were not made to be watched by other people, it was made to create an intimate bond between husband and wife through physical pleasure.

Sex work hurts the workers, the purchasers, and the community. In order for this to stop, I believe that our culture needs to recognize that true fulfilling joy does not come from people or images, but from God.