@SengokuKronos,
you mean “Thanks”, not “Tanks”.
Everybody else, Your welcome…Except for you SengokuKronos 'cause you said tanks instead of thanks.
@Zed Thanks Zed. We really should have created this thread earlier, but none of us I believe realized how lengthy or wordy the discussion would get. And I was no doubt the wordiest.
Now just don’t go so Kanye on us that you start storming the VMA’s and making young girls cry… 
I can’t pronounce “th” I’m a rabbit for crying out loud!!
Pyon~ !_!
Can you pronounce ‘Preheat the oven to three hundred and fifty’? And while your at it can you preheat the oven to three hundred and fifty? 
about lucindas situation I dont see anything wrong about it, she was already a dancer, making enough to cover her interest and a bit more, so taking the bathhouse seems like an economic choice
If you ask Lucinda why she’s now working at the Big Jim’s bathouse while talking to her at the pastry shop, she tells you:
“Oh, I still dance at the Kitten Club most nights,” she replies, “but I had to borrow three hundred bucks for my mother’s operation a few weeks ago, and what I have left over from my salary and tips from the club barely covers the interest each week. To pay off the principal, I needed another job, so now I work two or three days a week at the Bathhouse. I can’t say I enjoy it much, but I couldn’t dance real good with busted kneecaps . . . And Joey DeGrazio sure ain’t one to wait for his damn money.” She shrugs as if it’s of little concern, but clearly it weighs very heavily on her mind."
So she went into debt with a loan shark to pay for her Mom’s operation and she’s not making enough as a dancer to pay it back. Her choices are basically to either
- sell her body or
- have both her knees broken, leaving her unable to ever dance again
Her choices are no better than Carina’s. At least nobody is threatening Carina personally with physical violence. Furthermore, despite Lucinda’s attempt to make light of it, the paragraph clearly states you can tell it weighs heavily on her mind.
If you offer her $300 to pay off the loan shark then her response is:
At first reluctant to accept it, Lucinda finally relents when you insist, saying that you know Gina would have helped if she could, so you’d like to do this for her.
Lucinda leans over the table to give you a grateful kiss, her moist, luscious lips tasting faintly of apple and cinnamon, and with her hair brushing your face like soft strands of golden sunlight.
“You know, you’re really a very sweet guy,” she says while taking her seat again, “not like people are saying, at all . . .” She gives you a careful, measuring look, noting the amused twinkle in your eye, then borrows a pencil from the passing waitress and scribbles a number on a napkin, while shaking her head to herself. “I may regret this–” she pushes the napkin across to you “–but call me sometime, if you’re free. I won’t be going back to the Bathhouse again, if that makes any difference.”
Lucinda rises to depart, but flashes a dazzling smile when she looks back over her shoulder in time to catch you watching her leave. You chuckle to yourself. Truth is, you could watch her leave all day, every day, and never grow tired of that particular view.
Notice how once you pay off her debt, she tells you she’s won’t be returning to the bathouse. Just because she is much more comfortable with sex than Carina, and takes a liking to you personally, doesn’t mean she wants to be a prostitute either.
Basically neither Carina nor Lucinda wants to be a prostitute. Both choose to do it only because something dire will happen to them or their family if they don’t. It is however less of a drastic transition for a non-virginal stripper like Lucinda than the virginal Carina who strongly believes that she needs to save herself for her wedding night. So Lucinda deals with it better. The fact that she also takes a liking to you also makes it easier for her. Does that make it any more right to take advantage of Lucinda than it does to take advantage of Carina? For those who believe that it’s never consentual if the woman feels that either she or her family is under threat of harm, it shouldn’t matter even if she’s smiling.
@P_Tigras: you made my case pretty well, for someone who probably disagrees with what I’m about to say. But yes, from the excerpt you gave, she reads to me like an unwilling sex worker, who’s there because her only alternative is to be beaten up. The smile doesn’t matter. Anyone who knowingly exploits her situation is knowingly having non-consensual sex.
Back to the game…
@Havenstone I respect your consistency, although I certainly wouldn’t have minded had you changed your mind based on my superlative reasoning. This exchange of views has been both thought-provoking and enjoyable. Thanks.
@SengokuKronos,
It doesn’t matter that you’re a rabbit, you can use a voice-box to talk.
@Everyone,
So should i close the Thread now?
I thought someone would realise, I’m typing not talking.
Usagi !_!
EDIT: Erased the thanks >:)
@SengokuKronos,
I knew you were typing, i was just waiting for you to accept my DOMINANCE over your SOUL and say thanks!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! :-))
@Zed I don’t have an issue with leaving it open. Someone else, like @dragonfly or perhaps @reaperoa, may wish to comment. There’s also the possibility of someone new arriving and the subject flaring up in the other thread again. It thus might be useful to simply point them here.
cool just wondering
I wrote:
“BTW, I encourage you to play through her scenario if you haven’t. It’s one of the more interesting ones, both at the bathouse, and later.”
I just realized that the game was already down when I wrote that. So I’m going to go into a bit more detail why I brought Lucinda up as a comparison. For those who are curious, to get Lucinda you have to choose “I’ll wait for the gorgeous, willowy blonde I just noticed entering a room.” What makes her very different from Carina is that she takes an immediate liking to your character and appears to genuinely enjoy having sex with him. That doesn’t necessarily mean she likes having sex with everyone however, and it isn’t until after you’ve slept with her, and only if you ask, that you discover the debt to the loan shark that forced her into prostitution.
So @Havenstone & @Reaperoa would argue (gentlemen, please feel free to clarify if I’ve misunderstood you) that her situation was non-consentual because she felt she had no other option. They would not call it rape however because your character didn’t “knowingly exploit” her situation. If on the other hand your character knew she was there because she needed to make money quick so her kneecaps wouldn’t get “busted”, then it would have become a rape situation, regardless of how much it looked like she was enjoying having sex with your character. And it certainly appeared that she enjoyed her time with you.
My position is that people consent to things they don’t want to do all the time, like surgery. Very few people would allow someone else to cut them open if they felt they had other viable options. Sometimes they deal with the situation more gracefully (Lucinda), and sometimes not so gracefully (Carina), but unless someone points a gun to their head or otherwise specifically coerces them into having sex, it’s still a choice that they’ve made, albeit a tough one, and thus consentual. It’s not the character’s fault that Lucinda owes money to a loan shark, and it’s not the character’s fault that Carina’s father can’t work. He didn’t place either of them in that situation, and he didn’t pressure either of them into making a decision to sell their bodies. Neither of them told him at any time that they had changed their minds and did not want to go through with it. Lucinda even seemed eager to sleep with him, and even Carina tried, albeit awkwardly and ineptly.
This is not to say that I don’t feel any discomfort over Carina’s situation, particularly when you discover after offering her a job that you need to break her out to gain her freedom. Apparently just like quite a few other jobs of the time that had nothing to do with sex, once you show up to work, your boss felt entitled to lock you in and pressure you until the work day was done. If you want to see a famous example of what I’m talking about, look up the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911 which caused the deaths of 146 people and injured 71 others. Of the 146 deaths, 129 were women, some as young as 14. When the job that has you locked into the building is prostitution, it effectively strips you of your ability to change your mind and say no.
So my position is basically that Lucinda’s situation is consentual, and that Carina’s is open to interpretation, depending on whether or not she’s changed her mind and felt that the bathouse staff would punish her if she told the player that she had changed her mind. I certainly don’t consider having sex with an eagerly willing Lucinda rape, and I don’t consider sex with Carina to be necessarily rape either as written. This is because:
- It is reasonable for a customer at a brothel to expect that the sex worker he is dealing with is willing to do the job he has paid her for.
- Carina did try to have sex with the character despite being very inexperienced and inept at it.
- Carina never said no, or otherwise stated that she had changed her mind.
- Her apparent fear and discomfort could easily be ascribed to it being her first time.
- The character was not aware that bathouse management would try to prevent her from leaving until the workday was over.
From my perspective, it all comes down to how one interprets (4) above, and those who share @Havenstone and @Reaperoa’s more limited definition of consent are likely to set a lower bar for (4) before assuming rape, and that’s understandable. I am reminded however of why so many people consider prostitution morally evil. There are likely a lot of hard luck stories in prostitution, and many women involved in that business have been historically treated as little better than a pimp’s property. Nevertheless in the cases of Carina and Lucinda, prostitution didn’t create their problems, and once the day was done, they were free to never return. If that choice or option weren’t available, and Carina’s family died of starvation, while Lucinda had her knees broken and became a cripple for life, then the outcomes for those 2 young women sound even worse to me, not better.
Damn, that was long. 
@P_Tigras: I tried not to be drawn back into textwalling on this one yet, as I’m actually making some headway on my own game. But I’ve got one major qualm, which comes at the very beginning of your logic chain:
“1. It is reasonable for a customer at a brothel to expect that the sex worker he is dealing with is willing to do the job he has paid her for.”
Given the dynamics of international sex trafficking – the (significant) proportion of prostitutes who are physically coerced into the job – not to mention the even larger number who are there due to duress of circumstances, I think sex-buyers have a greater moral responsibility than you’re suggesting. If you knew that 30% of the coffee shops in your town used slave labor, you’d have an ethical responsibility to do some due diligence in choosing where you bought your coffee.
Say you were morally lazy, and just went in and bought a cappuccino without first bothering to check whether the staff there were slaves. If during the purchase you then get any indication that things aren’t kosher – let alone a “red flag” like a visibly terrified barista who breaks down sobbing while trying to pour your coffee – you don’t proceed with your purchase according to justifications 2, 3, and 4. You stop.
Given your background knowledge of the market that you’re dealing with, from that point forward it’s not reasonable to assume that you’re dealing with someone who’s a willing participant in the exchange. The burden of proof immediately flips; it’s no longer reasonable to assume that they’ve consented just because they’re trying to do the job, don’t explicitly refuse you, etc. You certainly don’t try to rationalize away their fear and say, “They’re probably not really slaves, they’re just struggling with the pressure of being inexperienced staff doing a tough job.”
What you then actually do, after you discover you’re facing someone who’s there non-consensually, depends on the circumstances. You may or may not be able to “save” them; the extent to which you can even help them will vary. But continuing to exploit them is not a morally acceptable option.
The norms and mores of the time don’t change what’s fundamentally going on. However common it may have been back then, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was criminal manslaughter, and coerced prostitution is rape.
@Havenstone Good point. The otherwise normal expectation that you’re entitled to get what you pay for may not hold if you have reason to suspect that it’s common practice in the industry for the contracting party to be coercing their employee. At a minimum you aren’t entitled to get it from that employee. I should have left that one off the list of reasons. Thank you for pointing that out.
This is why I’d really have liked the opportunity to ask her if she wanted help in leaving even if you couldn’t offer her a job.
@P_Tigras Okay, two points.
-
Haven and I are arguing two (subtly) different points about Carina. Haven (to my understanding) is (primarily) arguing the point that she is coerced, and therefore any consent she gives is rendered invalid. I am arguing that she is not giving consent in the first place.
-
About that fact that “…so many people consider prostitution morally evil.” I agree. Legalization would reduce the number of individuals forced into such situations against their will, along with lending them the ability to defend themselves against abuse.
@Reaperoa
- Ah, I must have misunderstood you earlier. I recall your clarifying that you never said Carina couldn’t consent at the tail end there, just that she didn’t. Nevertheless I thought you also had an issue with the coercive nature of her situation rendering her unable to give consent.
Please correct me if I’m still misunderstanding you, but It sounds as if from your perspective, that sex with Lucinda is consentual.
- I’m reminded of the Colombian escort who recently complained to the police in her country when an American secret service agent who used her “services” tried to get away with not paying her afterward. Contrast that with the US where an escort would rarely even think of going to the police even if seriously abused. So I agree that legalization would improve their situation greatly.
Of course there are still people who consider prostitution morally evil for reasons that have nothing to do with the mistreatment of women who ply that trade. And because of them, it’s unlikely that we’ll see legalization occur any time soon. The Colombian escort never desired for the man who stiffed her to be fired, or the big media circus in the US that followed, she just wanted to get paid. In the US, the case was less about bad behavior and non-payment, than about the moral terpitude of the secret service. How dare they embarrass our nation by hiring escorts while off duty!
If a gun is pointed at your head, you choose not to die, according to your logic.
Also, prostitution is, even the USA, in some circumstances, legal. For example, in Nevada, controlled brothels are allowed. There’s one just a few miles from Area 51, so if it were illegal, they’d have been caught by now.
Darn, I forgot who that first sentence was to.