How Sex Is Different, Part I

I don't understand the evolutionary logic here. Why would lack of paternity confidence make men want to coordinate? Isn't paternity a zero-sum game, where one guy's loss is another's gain? It's obviously not in a man's fitness interest if his woman sleeps around, but if other guys' women want to sleep around with him then that is in his interest. On average these interests will balance out, so why would the one interest win out over the other and become the social norm?

Blar, its not zero sum if there's one philanderers for every 10 men.

It's a big mistake to think that slut-shaming is an exclusively or even predominately male activity. My conversations over time with women about female promiscuity in general and recently the Spitzer case/prostitution in particular has convinced me that female norms are far more reflexive and intense when it comes to female promiscuity, paid or unpaid.

I haven't really considered it in terms of evolutionary logic, but I suppose it would go something like this: if a man sleeps around outside a committed relationship, he could potentially father a child that would shift his loyalties either wholly or completely away from the woman he's currently seeing. Considering the relative ease of seducing a man, a promiscuous woman in some sense becomes an intra-gender predator, capable of 'stealing' a male, and therefore an object of deep suspicion and dislike for other women.

Mind you, all that evolutionary logic really amounts to nothing but post-hoc, 'just so' rationalizing. The proof's in the empirical data, and from my anecdotal body of evidence there's a consistent trend of intense female dislike for promiscuous women.

"I think are largely explained by a mix of paternity confidence issues and male dominance of social and cultural institutions, which may also have a partly biological explanation."

While slut-shaming is, indeed, partially rooted in patriarchy and biology, a key feature of your explanation is incorrect: cross-culturally *women* are the primary regulators of female sexuality. Lots of evidence for this here:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/baumeist...

Concerted slut-shaming is a classic male strategy to raise the cost of female extra-pair coupling.
Men want to increase the supply of sluts but prevent women they already have a "claim" on from straying. Women want to decrease the supply, just like labor unions. Baumeister explains more in Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions. Steve Sailer discusses the "jealousy belt" here.

I find Will and Kerry's arguments somewhat convincing, but this paragraph from Wikipedia makes some good points:

Feminists who believe that prostitution is inherently exploitative, such as authors like Andrea Dworkin, herself an ex-prostitute, argued in the 1980s that commercial sex is a form of rape enforced by poverty (and often overt violence by pimps). Proponents reject the idea that prostitution can be reformed. These feminists believe that the assumptions that women exist for men's sexual enjoyment, that all men "need" sex, or that the bodily integrity and sexual pleasure of women is irrelevant underlie the whole idea of prostitution, and make it an inherently exploitative, sexist practice.

I don't agree with all of that. But here are some statements which, if true, would make me pause before embracing prostitution's legalization:

- The only women who become prostitutes are financially desperate.
- Prostitution tends to lead to an unhappy life, with high probability.
- When a man uses the services of a prostitute, it tends to reinforce a belief in that man's head that women's preferences about sex are unimportant.


Now, the first two bullet points could be made about coal mining, too, arguably -- and I'm not for banning coal mining. But even though we should tread carefully, I don't think "weak paternalism" is inherently wrong. "Weak" meaning "close off people's ability to enter, with high probability, a life of unhappiness." This is also why I would be willing to consider keeping crack illegal, for example.

There are plenty of thorny questions involved with any paternalistic policy proposal. Plus, Will is right to say that outdated moral attitudes drive the prostitution ban to some degree. But once the moral fuddy-duddies are rightfully driven from the debate with rhetorical welts on their rear, there are still non-moral-fuddy-duddies making reasonable utilitarian arguments in favor of circumscribed paternalism.

Will,

From your earlier post,

"Even granting the assumption that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified, which I certainly don't, the claim that prostitution is, by its nature, a kind of self-harm is pretty clearly false."

I think this helps me clarify the point I tried to make earlier. The question of whether or not prostitution, by its nature, tends to cause harm to the men and women involved is a purely empirical question. The question of whether it would or would not cause more harm if the prevailing cultural mores were radically different and if the laws were different is a question that we can't answer.

If we frame our arguments for decriminalization on the idea that there is nothing different between selling sex and selling lettuce, then we're making an appeal that may be doomed to fail. It's an argument that fails if it turns out that prostitution (even legal prostitution) does tend to harm prostitutes. But more to the point, if there is a biological disposition to regarding prostitution as wicked (as you've acknowledged), then appeals that run counter to that ingrained moral intuition may fail on their face. (I'm not saying that ingrained moral intuition is just and right and true, only that it exists.)

And by making a claim that runs counter to such ingrained moral intuitions, you're fighting a losing battle. You're trying to make the argument that under the right circumstances, prostitution is no more inherently dangerous than any other form of labor. But your opposition, armed with ready facts and figures about the woeful state of actual prostitution in the real-world will tend to prevail (especially if there's a biological disposition among voters to agree with that conclusion).

And I think that by framing the argument as one in which the degree (or existence) of self-harm matters, you've ceded the essential point about paternalism and consequences.

In a response to one of me earlier comments, you said,

"Prostitution is not an especially attractive profession, but it is not especially terrible either, and the people who choose to stay in it are probably the people for whom it seems like the best deal. I don't see the point of making that choice more fraught or emotionally loaded than other similar labor market choices."

I sympathize. You may see no sense in endowing the act of sex with great moral weight, but many, many people do.

What we can do is refuse to concede the deeper and more fundamental issue: "that paternalistic efforts to protect adults from the consequences of their own choices are justified." If we can agree that the criminalization of prostitution causes damage, over and above the damage that the act itself may or may not cause, then at the very least, we'd can try to reduce the damage that criminalization causes.

You wrote a while back on how biological dispositions can affect individual happiness. In the same sense that the degree of variance in individual dispositions to happiness is huge, we should expect the risk of commercial sex to vary widely from person to person. And just as appeals to the inherent danger of sex mask relevant individual differences, so too do appeals to the idea that sex carries no more moral weight than brick-laying. And just as it makes sense for us to account for biological dispositions in forming individual strategies for happiness, it makes sense for us to account for biological dispositions when forming strategies for cultural change.

You say (very eloquently, I might add),

"The specialness of sexual psychology mostly helps us to understand the panic about and strenuous resistance to liberalizing norms of female sexual autonomy. And the history of moral panic contrasted with the good results of actual recent sexual liberalization gives us reason to be especially skeptical about the special damage that will come of deregulating women’s sexual behavior."

I would argue that you can marshal those insights to help you make the case that decriminalization is worth pursuing--regardless--or whether or not the risk of self-harm in prostitution is necessarily greater than other fields of work. You can argue effectively and persuasively that the criminalization of prostitution has enormous negative consequences, regardless of whether or not the sex itself is inherently damaging.

You write, "To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake."

This is true in its weak form, but as presented I think you overstate it. The human pattern of moralizing concepts related to reproduction is not _necessarily_ a mistake; if it's not, unthinkingly endorsing it could very well be the best strategy of a skeptical species.

Also, this type of moralizing is something of a frozen component in human psychology, and you're right that it's this fact of homo sapiens which creates (for us) the distinction between the sex-act and more banal activities. But I wonder how far you allow this train of thought to go? I refer, of course, to your certainty that moral obligations actually exist. If prostitution is, in your words, not wrong in general, but judged wrong by us according to our evolutionary psychologies + socialization, then you must agree that there is no moral obligation in general, just moral obligation judgments which emerge out of our evolutionary psychologies + socialization.

And so I'll repeat: "To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake."

As other commenters have pointed out, Will has got slut-shaming backwards.

I'm fascinated by what a moralizer Will is, despite all his denunciations of moralizers. His natural first reaction is not to try to get the facts straight, but to start moralizing about things that he only vaguely understands.

Yes, because Steve Sailer, maestro of foreigners, is a known as someone who gets all the facts right.

Steve, Don't be a jackass. I completely agree with the point that women have a strong strategic incentive to promote slutshaming norms as well. I thought about this, and would have said something about it, but needed to get on the plane. I don't think that changes things much other than reinforce the point that the peculiar evolutionary psychology of sex helps explain why we will be inclined to conspire against women's sexual autonomy.

Yes, I am a moralizer. I think it is both right and useful to denounce immoral people. Often they are moralizers, too. Many people are wrong about morals!

Robert, if Steve has gotten something wrong, shouldn't you point it out?

Will, it's not just that women have an incentive "as well", it's that they have a greater incentive than men, though you only laid responsibility at their feet in the original post.