He thinks sex is dead serious and deeply personal - too serious for heavy-handed media stereotypes and clueless philosophical abstractions. Any sweeping generalization about what the nature of a given type of encounter are to a person are bound to be dehumanizing - turning it into a caricature of what it is.
This is about as far from your position - that there's an inherent potential humanity in all people and prostitution impedes its expression - as I can imagine one getting.[ Parent ]
Then he says ``if we are going to have a grown-up debate about what we are entitled to do with our bodies, then each sex is going to have to think a touch more philosophically about the other.'' Maybe by that he means something other than what I take to be the plain meaning of his words. Maybe what he really means is that no judgment of any sort is possible.
And, certainly, he does go on to argue that the reasons that men visit prostitutes are quite varied, some to use and some to be used. His main point in doing so is that to lump them all together in the `to use' category is to commit the same sort of depersonalization of men that detractors say that prostitution inherently does of women, hence his conclusion, ``And does it not demean a woman, every bit as much as it demeans a man, to position her either as victim of men's appetites or as fantasist of them?''
What he doesn't do in that article is make any claims about whether prostitution is inherently just or unjust. Rather, his overarching point is that the debate is being had on the wrong terms and that the sex act is so deadly serious that we ought to have a proper debate that doesn't dehumanize one or both sides from the get-go. That certainly isn't all that far away from the essay I wrote.
If your allegation is that Jacobson probably doesn't see any moral problem with prostitution, while I do, that may very well be the case.
But if your allegation is that I didn't understand Jacobson's main idea, I don't know that I agree with that. A second reading of Jacobson's article based on your criticism of my reading of it reinforces my first perceptions of it. Jacobson and I do seem to agree that the the debate as typically framed is flawed and fails to treat human nature in its fullness. Further, I think I agree with him that a real dialog on the matter would be full of nuance and treat the people involved as persons rather than as if they were entirely only exclusively a victim, producer, criminal, or consumer.
I would say, however, after those few points, you two disagree pretty radically. You dismiss human difference in favor of a model of potential hurt (the McCain example – it doesn't matter whether it hurt a specific person, but whether a behavior could it hurt an abstract model of ideal humanity) whereas the experience of the individual is paramount for Johnson. I'd also say he's very much about the consequences – he'd just add that you can't generalize about the consequences. I also suspect you've got very different ideals about human nature: if only because you cite Aristotle and the Founding Fathers were he prefers to ground his discussion in two of the most famous bits 20th century French S/M erotica.[ Parent ]
