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Except you didn't start in the middle. by Christopher Robin was Murdered (4.00 / 2) #8 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 02:13:51 PM EST

You started with the assumption that it inherently involves "using" - that is to say, some depersonalization. You flipped the script slightly to conclude that this is inherent to the concept of prostitution and not dependent on the consequences thereof (though why dehumanization isn't a consequence, if perhaps an unavoidable one, was never clear to me - it seems like a word game), you still came out on the side of all one-or-the-other. You just changed the binaries, right?

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Now you've lost me by lm (2.00 / 0) #9 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 02:40:01 PM EST

If your allegation is that I didn't read Jacobson's article closely enough to begin with, I'm guilty as charged.

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.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
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: Okay. by Christopher Robin was Murdered (2.00 / 0) #10 Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 06:39:57 PM EST

Put that way, as a sort of investigatory baseline, I see where you and he overlap.
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.

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