Adam, you seriously sound like you have personal issues to resolve from your childhood.

You obviously didn't pay attention to his article while you were reading it, if you read it. His intent at least is that if it was legalised & considered work there would be better control. To campaign against prostitution is like campaigning against the laws of physics. You will loose. And in the mean time prostitutes will suffer the very horrors you mention because of your ideologies. The desire for a perfect universe is natural but its not going to happen.

Besides, not everyone who turns to prostitution does so because of abject poverty. There is social security in Australia if you havent heard. So whomever does it legally does it to make more $ than they would otherwise. Ie, its their choice not their only option.

"degrading names names, abuse" etc can occur to anyone, so it does not support your argument.

Sex is an act (as in 'activity'). It is neither moral or immoral. Its merely movement of the body, chemistry, etc, like running, exercise, etc. Same with prostitution. It is therefore a person's choice to view it favourably or otherwise, but either way not a provable fact.
Your personal preference or opinions of sex & prostitution therefore have no place or relevance in this debate. Just like it is irrelevant what food you prefer, or what your favourite colour is.
Its just a personal opinion.

"being gang raped, not being able to say no because you don't know how and you have no where to go." ...... Adam, you really r missing the point & getting emotional for no reason.

Anthony suggests categorising prostitution as work & thus bringing it under the strict guidelines of OH&S would avoid this. But you ignore his points & act as if he is advocating child molestation or some such. I suggest you do a better job of 'acting' like a professor with reasoned arguments rather than a frenzied feminist on a podium preaching damnation & hell fire.

Sex object? Degraded? That is not YOUR decision to make on other peoples behalf. Those who feel degraded can stop & go on the dole. We r not in a 3rd world country with no social security.Clearly these people choose that profession, not forced into it.

Illegal workers r another matter. That is where you should be directing your anger. Those workers r abused as you say. They r the ones that need rescuing, not the one's that choose to do it to make $ faster than they could otherwise.

Without being too pedantic, we might all do ourselves a favour by recognising finally that sex only refers to being male or female. Sex was not associated with genitalia or copulating until the early 20th century, and then via D. H. Lawrence. Before that prostitution was properly considered whoredom, fornication, lascivious misconduct.

It seems to me that rescuing the word sex from being hijacked and mobilised by those who want to clean up the laswcivious image might be a good idea. It may well be the first real step toward tidying up our perception of what's actually going on here.

It will certainly rescue the most of us from suggestion that we are whorish merely by virtue of being male or female; rescure our bodies from the taint of lascivity by merely being, and in that restore the idea that men are not all the same, and neither are women.

As I have pointed out often enough, body pleasure is inherently neither harmful nor lewd. It is an unconscionable act, however, to judge everybody the same, which is the other end of the problem.

May I suggest then that prostitution be restored to its rightful place in the real world, and those who wish to pursue it make up their own 'correct', nonjudgemental terminology, and argue it out with the moralisers and prudes.

I doubt they will succeed, either party, not with the West flooded with bibles, but at least it lets the rest of us off the hook.

In short, maybe everybody own their own behaviour instead of abstracting it; rendering process as object and distancing themselves from it to their own political ends, and take responsibility themself for harm done, if any.

i tend to take my lessons, cues, & guidances from nature (both biological & laws of physics), considering it has existed & developed for billions of yrs whereas our human ideologies for a nanosecond in comparison.

I agree with your thoughts on the term 'sex', though i have never thought it to mean male/female till you mentioned it in this topic.

I notice people put whatever slant they consciously or subconsciously desire on questions of morality. My take on it is rather simple, again cued from nature & science, that morality is simply a mode of conduct but that in itself does not exist. i tend to view things not form a moral point but a logical one, with as much impartiality as i can muster. I recognise typical examples of right & wrong but unlike some i also understand life is much be more complex & more facts are involved than meets the eye. Hence why some things are not as they seem, morality wise.

I was amazed Adam, a professor, could be so off track. As if he was responding to a completely different article.

I doubt the impartiality of anyone claiming prostitution is always harmful. Simple logic would dismiss that one size fits all notion, although i would agree many if not most would be harmed in some way. But life in general is harmful or at least tough, even harm we may have imagined but never occurred. I suspect that helps to strengthen life forms, though too much can destroy as well.

Seems like the professor's impartiality has been compromised.