You’re Not

A liberal.

France’s decision to criminalise one half of the sex trade is highly illiberal. In a civilised society – a liberal, society – what happens between two consenting adults is no business of the state.

But it’s not quite as simple as that, and, as a liberal, I have to swallow hard to support what the French have done. I would not usually be in favour of criminalising any activity that takes place in private between consenting adults.

But. There’s always a “but” with these faux liberals who are nothing of the sort.

In Nordic countries and Northern Ireland, where paying for sex has been made illegal, there are now fewer women on the streets.

Well, no, there are fewer women on the streets anyway. The rise of the Internet has made it easier for the trade to be plied without hanging about on street corners. It is still happening though. It always will.

It’s true that they may simply have been driven underground – with even less protection – but, at the very least, this marks a change in legal body language: it treats the sex worker as victim rather than criminal.

So, never mind that it has gone underground, it sent a “signal”. Well, blow me down. These vile people are all about sending signals,  never mind who they damage in the process, their puffed-up sense of self-righteousness has been satisfied by signalling that their version of morality must be forced upon everyone else.

Of course, the sex industry runs on the principles of supply and demand, and as this is indeed the world’s oldest profession, we can be fairly certain that there will always be men who want to pay for sex, and women who are prepared to sell it. What right does the state have to restrain their trade?

None.

But while most of us haven’t been looking, a sexual revolution has been taking place. The overwhelming influence of hardcore pornography, now only a click away on your computer, has changed people’s perceptions, actions and, not least, appetites. Sex, through porn, is depersonalised and women are objectified, and both these attitudes come together in prostitution. The demand for real-life enactment of the images that bombard us from cyberspace will only get greater. Mix this in with the growing desperation of young women from poor backgrounds elsewhere in Europe to find a better life in countries such as France or Britain, and you have the perfect conditions in which sex trafficking will thrive.

Ah, yes boilerplate leftist evidence-free fuckwittery. Still, despite there being precious little evidence that prostitutes are being trafficked in any great numbers, we get the mantra. And this moron’s evidence?

One of the plot lines in the recent series of the magnificent BBC drama “Happy Valley” involved young Eastern European girls who, having been trafficked to Britain, were forced to live effectively as slaves and, left to work on the streets, at the mercy of dangerous men.

A fucking television programme. Just because it is the plot of a TV show, doesn’t mean that it is happening, and if it is, it certainly doesn’t mean that it is happening in sufficient numbers to justify criminalising a mutually agreed transaction that is no one else’s business.  It’s a TV show, not real life. You do not make draconian law on the basis of one. Nor should you try to justify your illiberal bullshit with it, either, because it doesn’t wash and makes you look like a prize jerk.

Prostitution comes in many forms, but what these women are subjected to is slavery. Nothing more, nothing less. Which is why all modern, liberally-minded people should support the French initiative.

What utter nonsense. There are women (and men) who choose to sell sex because it suits them, because it pays well and they like it. But this just doesn’t fit the narrative. And the narrative that Simon Kelner is a liberal in any shape or form is laughable. A liberal takes a laissez-faire approach to other people’s choices and lets them get on with it.

Prohibition does not work. Unless you consider providing a nice little market for criminal gangs as working out just dandy.