ravi wrote: > > On May 19, 2009, at 5:13 PM, raghu wrote: > ? On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 1:41 PM, ravi [email protected]? wrote: > ?? This thread has already yielded new information and proved > ?? its worth to me ;-). > ? > ? Likewise. I had no idea that the prevalence of exploitation in the sex > ? industry was even controversial before this exchange. > ? > > It is not so much that the prevalence of exploitation in porn/ > prostitution is controversial but that some have adopted a particular > counter-critique based on an arguably small set of counterfactuals.
I'm going to ignore the gibberish in the sentences quoted immediately below. Your X's and Y's are utterly empty. But I think you and raghu are playing games with the word, "exploitation." On this list exploitation _MUST_ mean economic exploitation, the extraction of surplus value, unless other uses of it are made wholly clear and distinguished from the basic economic use. Now in that basic use, OF COURSE employees of a brothel, for excample, whether they are prostitutes or janitors, are being exploited. If they are exploited in some other sense of the word, you and raghu need to explain how and why. I would claim that any other use of the word here would be a moralistic attack on the women themselves. Show me that you are not attacking them. (And it is irrelevant whether they work there because of desperate need or be ause they like the work better than they would like work as a housecleaner or baristat. I suspect you can't do it. Ravi contineus: > The sort of reasoning seems to follow this line: > > Claim A: X is a Y. > Counter-argument B: I know M who is an X but not Y. Therefore no X is Y. > > The counter-argument B's soundness rests entirely on interpreting > Claim A to imply "for all X", which is a sort of universal > quantification that is not available or meaningful outside Mathematics > (or perhaps some parts of Physics). This is foolishness of which I can't make head nor tail, and I ignore it. raghu] > Another aspect of this exchange I find very fascinating is the > ? tendency to look at every activity from the one-dimensional > ? perspective of labor theory. This leads to some frankly absurd > ? oversimplifications e.g. comparing sex work with factory labor. > ravi] > Indeed. So you and raghu _are_ on a moralistic crusade against the laziness of women who work in brothels. They are nasty, while those in factories are proper girls. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
