The other day I got into a debate on twitter about the morality of sharing ebooks. Someone was posting free copies of Roger Zelazny’s books on kindle, and I replied that I was entitled to ebooks of the printed books I own. This writer challenged that assertion and asked for an argument. I refused to engage in his Empire-inflected moralizing, that the writer owned the medium his story is printed on, and used the Ship of Theseus example to deconstruct the notion of ownership.
I think prostitution is a private business transaction, and should not be considered in other terms. The prostitute (male or female) is free to enter into contracts. The claim that it is merely an exploitative service where the client is interested only in the prostitute’s services, not them personally is tantamount to the claim that the client seeks only the services of a professional (lawyer, doctor, professor) and not them personally. The prostitute is not a victim, nor a wage laborer – the contract is with a client, not an employer. Continue reading Praising Prostitutes