My opinion is that sex work should be legal. It would enable involuntary virgins to get a good sex experience for payment; they will be guaranteed a good sex experience with a sex worker: no harassment, good education, and a fun time.
Sex work gets shamed by ~~people~~ puritans because of payment for sex and it's "sinful"; yet these same ~~persons~~ puritans get and have sex for free out of "passion" or marriage; they also discriminate against minorities in sec.
EDIT: Apparently there is an implied difference between sex work and prostitution. I mean sex work.
EDIT 2: I messed up the writing of my post. My real opinion is located in this comment:
Oof. I didn't realize there was way more exploitation than just sex traffickers. It totally makes sense though; sex trades are a product of capitalist exploitation and the existence of private property. (Naturally under communism, the prevalence of sex trades would be heavily reduced.)
It seems like I couldn't communicate my ideas properly beforehand. I don't want people in the sex trade to be criminalized; I want pimps and johns to be criminalized.
Only a few hours ago: I wanted to support a sex trade industry that didn't involve rapes or rely on economic coercion. I just wanted disabled people, who keep getting discriminated out of sex,^[Sexual Ableism]^[Dating With Disability: How to Rise Above Sexual Ableism]^[Dating with Disability: Choose Your Dreams Over Sexual Ableism] to be able to feel better about their lives; a lack of sex can cause mental health issues in some people (even though this shouldn't happen). (However, having sex probably won't fix the issue, it will just hide the problems until later). Now I feel like shit...
elaborate?
I think the rest of the thread has good arguments on the topic, but the main idea is that regulations around sex work mostly impact sex workers and not the client. Even the criminalization of clients results in bad outcomes for the workers, so if you'd like to frame prostitution as a question of workers rights and public health, it's important to center the debate around the experiences and problems of sex workers themselves.
To paraphrase someone else, as long as money exist there will be sex work. The question is what kind of labor conditions do we want for the sex workers?
Of course regulation comes to both ends: only allowing prostitution to be legal leads to situations like in Thailand or Madagascar, where child prostitution is rampant. In European countries for example, brothels (I use this term for lack of an official one) have strict costumer rules about behaviour, health and hygene.
totally agree: in fact when I say "health" I include psichological support.