Polyamory is dangerous to society and there is a reason monogamy is what most cultures practice. Prostitution is a form of polyandry. Particularly women hate it because the prostitutes are selling themselves too cheaply. It disenfranchises women and in return men don't have to strive very hard to be satisfied. But the satisfaction they do get is a hollow one.

It's far too easy to zoom in and look at things at an atomic level. It's just two consenting adults, right? What's the harm? The harm is real, but it takes decades to manifest and that's where it can be hard to link cause and effect and properly quantify it. Birthrates across the world are declining precipitously. It's silly to blame prostitution alone, but it certainly is one of the contributing factors.

If you want to talk about rich vs poor, depopulation is one of the elites' agendas. In the past, they wanted more population to send into their meat grinder wars. But now wars are far more technological and economic than they are about soldiers, and with technology like generative AIs, labor is looking even less relevant. Promoting prostitution, like OnlyFans, is part of serving the goals of the elites.

Do you think prostitution is purely a human thing? We've seen monkeys do it for food. It's known as the oldest profession for a reason, and if it were the core of the problem, birthrates definitely wouldn't be affected after tens of thousands of years. The leading factors must be something that only started happening around the time birthrates were high, like minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, like cost of living growing too fast, like property owners using the housing market as an investment instead of a home.

If promoting prostitution was the goal of the elites, why do they keep doing their best to slow or stop it? The biggest websites have restrictions on nudity, credit card companies put pressure on sites to stop allowing nudity even in the case of artworks, and before Tumblr fell out of favor due to policy changes trying to draw in advertising it had been bought for a huge sum of money before losing almost all its value (and they never repealed the changes even after it was clear the userbase was leaving).

China's currently going through depopulation, and it's considered a crisis. Reason being, an aging population needs taking care of and there isn't enough of a younger population to simultaneously take care of them and also do enough productive work to pay for their elders retirement. The goal had been a slower growing society, now they're having to push people into having kids because nobody can afford them. Part of why they're struggling is the country was treating housing like an investment until around 2019 or so, the government changed a policy, and Evergrande started to go bankrupt, leading to banks stopping people using money in their accounts, leading to long queues to try and get their money out, leading to less sales, etc.

What you're saying doesn't reflect reality. I can't find an instance of governments supporting prostitution beyond merely allowing it. And that's the issue, the countries with declining birthrates have laws against prostitution and had them for longer than the decline. Even if it were a contributing factor, its contribution must be too minor to have any notable effect, since its illegality has done nothing to increase birth rates.

Like, I don't have my own family, why? It's a huge expense. Government tries to pay a little to encourage people to have kids, but that's not fixing the problem. A few years back people were saving up to buy a home, put off having kids until then. What happened was the market for housing grew, and it's growing so fast they will never be able to save enough quickly enough, and taking out a big loan would cost more than they can afford in monthly fees, so now they are stuck with rentals in major cities with rising living costs. If living costs rise, do rates of crime rise? Can you deal with higher rent, expensive food, more crime, and raising a kid?

Anyways, Onlyfans isn't quite the same as prostitution, because the point of the argument was that prostitution brings people under the same roof. Technically the internet community can interact, but communication alone isn't the same as seeing other people in the same space. However, it does make things a lot safer for the person on camera, and it's harder to start a physical fight over the internet (though people have managed it in the past), so if the government attempts to limit it in the same way it limits prostitution then at least we know it's not about the safety of the patrons and them, nor is it about preventing the spread of disease or any other factor that involves a physical presence.

Rats, when given access to push a button to turn on their dopamine center, will neglect all else and push that button until they die of dehydration. There are a lot of things animals do that aren't that great. Keep watching those chimpanzees that discovered prostitution. Do their birthrates increase? What happens to the extra infants? I'll wager it's not pretty.

Illegal does not mean forbidden. Our government has evolved into a nasty form of tyranny where people break laws all of the time without knowing so the government can selectively enforce them. Illegal immigration is a good example: Illegal immigrants can't complain if they're mistreated in the workplace. Businesses thus benefit more from illegal immigration than legal immigration.

There are a lot of legal barriers to porn/prostitution, but that just makes the producers easier to exploit and more desperate. But for the typical end user? Porn is plentiful and free. Some people crave companionship which is why they go to OnlyFans instead of any number of free sites, but it's still exploitative.

China is facing what a lot of the west is facing. Labor is losing it's value and labor was China's biggest asset. There's more to it, including all of China's ridiculous policies, but this is a big aspect of the issue.

I'm a fan of more of a carrot than stick model. Rather than punishing prostitution, we need strong incentives for raising a family. Negative Income Tax, particularly for married couples and especially for kids of married couples. This would go a long way to offsetting the costs associated with having kids. There's other ways to do it, but like I said, depopulation is the elite's goals so they don't want to do it.

Turns out the animal prostitution thing is probably us mis-applying human values onto animals. Penguins do it, chimps do it, but with different goals and outcomes. Chimp communities hunt meat, and females will have sex only with members in that community, but the direct exchange of meat for sex, according to wikipedia, wasn't observed. The other example was a capuchin monkey in a single incident, so we can't know for sure. Still, it would appear sex with many members in a community that has to share some kind of resource, be it pebbles or food, is a thing that happens in nature.

Porn is legal, prostitution isn't, the difference is that one's recorded and one more person's getting paid at minimum, it's still two people having sex with money involved. There was a bar that wanted to let its patrons smoke after smoking indoors was banned, they found an exception for theatre, so the bar became a kind of improv play-acting thing that ran continuously, patrons were there as actors. Are you going to imply this means the government wants people to smoke indoors, because there was an exception?

China had been losing value for labor for a while, but Evergrande was unable to cover its payments in 2021, for hundreds of billions of dollars. Chinas three red lines policy change was in 2019. They were "introduced to help rein in the highly indebted property-development sector in China". They were right, but their solution just bankrupted this company, and the ripples took out many other industries. Plus, Covid had just happened, so that's probably had more impact than losing labor value gradually.

I think the solution is a system where people can buy a house to live in, the house decreases in value over time down to the value of the land its on (once the house collapses or becomes unlivable). Any system where buying a thing and then holding on to it without using it should be punished by taxing that behavior. A land value tax would help with this, but there could also be vacancy taxes where an apartment with empty rooms is taxed on that, for example. So long as they can make money by holding on to a property and keeping the sell price high, they will do it, so adding a tax on that just adds risk, and if they feel they won't be able to make a sale by the tax imposed deadline (where they would be losing money) then they'll just lower the price at the start until the math checks out, or take the risk and lose the money.

How would that help getting people to have kids? If apartments cost less, you pay less, workers pay less, workers have more money, workers spend more money, the economy runs better, wages rise, you make more money, and you can afford a house, and then you can afford to have kids.

The study I had read involved teaching the concept of money to Chimpanzees and prostitution was one of the first things they invented in this economy. While haha funny, the experiment could not accurate follow the secondary effects of such a change. Some variables, like distributing fixed funds across the whole tribe of chimps (so more children means less funds each and thus less food each), and allowing this to continue for multiple generations probably would have eventually favored monogamy, but we would have to wait for the speed of evolution and that would take too long.

The housing market is the way it is due to a lack of economic opportunity. Too many people are investing in housing as if it's a commodity and this is wildly distorting housing costs. But they're doing this because there aren't many other sectors to invest in.

I suspect China may have foreseen this trend in the West and worked to intentionally devalue real estate to keep housing affordable. Maybe they went too crazy with it and mandated more housing than desired. But this is better than having too little housing and have a lot of industries spring up around managing the limited stock. It's important to understand how different the US real estate bubble in 2008 is vs the Chinese real estate bubble.

Velocity of money is also really important. I touched on this in your other journal about how we do a lot of dumb work just to keep the money moving, otherwise it would stagnate in the hands of a few rich and we'd have big problems. Maybe prostitution is another one of those schemes that, as you note, bridges class divides precisely because it's something for the rich to splurge on and it keeps money flowing. But as technology makes managing larger empires easier, the number of elites is shrinking and their appetite for sex is shrinking with it.

Then there's the dark side: Epstein, NXIVM, The Finders, Jimmy Savile, etc. If you have infinite money, why buy a classic whore? Why not get something exotic? Something plebs aren't allowed to do? A way to flex that wealth and power. That seems to be what a lot of the elites think and there's way too much conformation that this is what they do. This should be taken into consideration when considering prostitution as well.

So what happened in China was that they have a thing where if a city allocates more land for buildings, through some complex mechanism, then they get extra money. So cities were flattening mountains to make more building space because they were incentivized to. What happened with Evergrande was that people were pooling money to buy family members apartments as investment and a way to attract marriage partners (which, because of the one-child policy and boys being favored more than girls, means there's less women than men, and so getting a partner's harder and more costly). Because money was coming in, and companies don't usually keep emergency cash on hand, Evergrande was putting the money people gave them into projects that weren't their unfinished apartment. And that's the core issue, people were buying housing before the house was built. So when the government put in new rules, and when covid hit, Evergrande wasn't able to finish many projects, and this meant people who sank their life savings into it and took out loans to pay them now owned an unfinished room in an unfinished building being constructed by a now bankrupt company. And that's about as much of the subject as I know. China's got ghost cities where nobody lives there, people just own the buildings but live elsewhere, and now their population is shrinking and they've started tearing down some of their buildings. Thing is, property in China's only on a century long loan from the government, people don't own property for many generations, and they're getting close to the date when they have to turn it over to the government.

As to the dark side of things, the argument you're making hinges on the one thing this journal is about, which is a small group of people having more wealth and power, which in this case lets them do what they want because the law exists for the powerless but not for them. Prostitution doesn't need to be the only equalizing force, but equalizing forces shouldn't be punished unless they cause harm directly to the people involved, as with any crime.

Like, lets simplify the problem down to theft, lets make our goal ending theft forever. Does arresting thieves stop future thieves? No, it gives some thieves a reason not to do it, but some people have addictions or need food and to not get them means death for them, asking them to not steal is equivalent to asking them to die painfully. So, we change society so that asking them not to steal just means asking them not to steal and nothing else. Ensure everyone has food no matter what, ensure people have access to services that can help them end addictions, ensure therapy is available to anyone regardless of status, anything and everything that could result in a person stealing something should be accounted for and provided. And once that's all done, theft should happen far less often. To completely end theft, the concept of ownership would need to end, because there's always going to be a senile old lady who was holding a tube of toothpaste and forgot to pay when leaving the store, same way you can be on the phone telling a friend you lost your phone somewhere. We can, at most, end the intent to steal, but ending theft entirely requires extra steps.

And theft has a measurable monetary impact and definitely causes direct harm, prostitution by your description has unclear and vague negative societal impacts. Lets see, prostitution is punishable by up to 14 years in prison in Canada. Second degree murder is 10-25 years. Theoretically a prostitute could get a harsher punishment than if they intentionally killed someone in an unplanned way. As for theft, ten years, so the maximum for theft overlaps with the minimum for second degree murder, and prostitution is still treated as worse.

The problem with criminalizing anything is that the people who must resort to it to make a living will be unable to rely on the law for help. If the goal is to ensure people are protected, making it illegal is the wrong way to do so, because it ensures help will never be available when needed.

So, how do you end prostitution? Easy, you make it so jobs are not a requirement to participate in society. If nobody needs to work in order to live in a city, then why would anyone need money? And if they need money for luxuries they can get better jobs, get educated, so long as its free. If you assume nobody does it because they want to, you can easily think of a thousand reasons they might need to.