What's Wrong with Selling Sex?

Mr Holdsworth attacks the left-wing movement, led in part by Amnesty International, to legalise prostitution world wide.

A loose transcript:

There’s a growing push to legitimize the practice of selling sex for money. Amnesty international voted to push countries around the world to decriminalize prostitution and has been insisting on the phrase “sex workers” in order to destigmatize the practice. We’ve since dispelled similar stigmas around pornography which has given us a world in which the average age that someone is introduced to porn is 11, in which over 50% of divorces can be traced back to porn use, and in which 69% of women in the sex industry suffer from post traumatic stress disorder- a rate equivalent to veterans of combat war. You can do your own research and find countless shocking statistics about the damage of porn on our society but even without those statistics an appeal to a very common moral principle should be enough. Selling sex is wrong for the same reason that slavery is wrong. Nobody has the right to own another human being. Not for a lifetime, not for a year, and not for an hour. When you pay someone for sex, you’re not buying a service or a product, you’re buying a person under the premise that they will give you their body as a means to an end. Authentic sexual intimacy is an experience where someone else offers themselves entirely to you in an extreme moment of vulnerability made possible by the knowledge that they can trust you because you love them. When you pay money for the same thing, you’re buying a person. Some people will argue that they’re not selling themselves, just their body. But what are we if not our bodies? It’s not like you can give someone your body and then go shopping for an hour while they use your body. We are our bodies. If someone buys another person’s body, they are buying another person. Then some people will argue that unlike slavery, the sex trade is consensual so that makes it ok. Well, actually, historically, people used to sell themselves into slavery all the time. Modern law recognizes that to do so is to negate your human rights which is why it’s typically illegal. I’d like to think that the same moral reasoning is why prostitution is usually illegal. This also ignores statistics that say that the overwhelming majority of women in the sex industry wanted out but felt trapped. Even still, the argument from consensus has always struck me as being really confused. It seems to be based on the idea that if two people (or more) make the same decision then it can’t be immoral. Of course, that’s doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. Like ingesting strychnine doesn’t suddenly become a good decision because two people decide to do it together.