The crossover between Polyamory, Swinging and Sex work

[Scott]

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

Yeah, I too find it difficult to make a clean distinction between them all.

I'm glad some people agree with me on that :-)

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

Especially because, to me, there is always some level of feeling to sex, and vice-versa.

I agree. This is what I was headed towards when I talked that the main issue is defining love. How you define it can change how we think of many things. I define it as caring for someone, but I care for many people.. so then it becomes how much you care.. and how can you really measure this? At what point does caring for someone become love for someone?

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

Easy though to make a distinction in terms of emphasis: polyamory - relationships; prostitution - work; swinging - casual sex.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

I also seem to identify some sex-negativity in swinging too, though, believe it or not. Or, to put it another way, it`s very gendered sex-negativity whereby, understandably, male libido is held in scorn and female libido is put on a pedestal...If for no other reason than the law of offer and demand.

So, to a man, the rhetoric is that you should be looking for "friends", that it isn`t "all about sex", etc.

Interesting. I think that, as you say, it has a lot to do with supply and demand, and perhaps that women are more interested in friendships with sex as a component then sex alone.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

Also, extreme hypocrisy concerning prostitution. As I later found out, prostitutes posing as wives are the lifeblood in many a swinger club, yet kept hush hush.

Very interesting.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

So, since we`re talking about married couples mostly in search of unicorns, the female is your price of entry (as it is in porn). In my 20s, I tried to "penetrate" the swinging world as a lifestyle single man; I felt I was basically denied entry without trial. Although, I am admittedly uncompromising concerning gender double-standards and passive-aggressiveness around sex.

Yes, I've heard about this; I think it's safe to say that more men are interested in the swinging lifestyle then women.

[Scott]

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

I`m sorry, but I`d rather conclude the discussion here, Scott. As I feel we would be going around in circles. I simply wanted to present a scientific argument I was exposed to that seemed to go against SBD; and I summarized it to the best of my ability when you asked me to.

Alright.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

Like I said, at this juncture I am more interested in the specifics of my experience and my feelings. To the extent that I needed those feelings explained by outside evidence, I have done research to my heart`s content.

Ok.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

I am actually trying to be polyamorous, rather than establish whether or not humans in general are polyamorous. And, that in-itself has been a lifelong struggle.

Ok.

Originally Posted by feelyunicorn

If ever I feel I need more research done, or if my experience contradicts what I`ve researched at some latter date; I`ll pick it up again and take your points into consideration.

Fair enough.

[Vinccenzo]

Originally Posted by Scott

Did you read the article excerpted from and linked to in the OP of the thread?

Yes.

Originally Posted by Scott

(Sex) it's great, but in order to be in a place where it's great, you have to do hard work; you need money.

No you don't. Seen it go down without those things many a time. People like to fuck.

Originally Posted by Scott

I think that for many in today's society, finding a woman that wants to be with them sexually without a money inducement can be difficult if not impossible. As you say, some of the reasons for this may be a crap attitude, an unkempt body or them just not being attractive to women. People can certainly improve in these areas.

And if they do not, I don't have enough sympathy to promote the buying of someones' body for them any more than I would give a baby to every couple who is physically incapable of doing so naturally but decides they want a child anyway. Some people are just not parent material and no amount of money should compensate for that lack.
I don't think prostitutes should be arrested for making money via sex but that isn't what makes this tacky to me. Its the buying side of things. Even in places where prostitution is legal, human trafficking still happens. Comparing this to relationships of any kind involving consenting sex is a gloss over to make it more palatable. Saying someone not being able to get sex as easily as someone else should be a problem to solve with money sounds a whole lot like thinking a banker pulling loan fraud to get the same car his buddy who didn't resort to fraud is sound logic.

Originally Posted by Scott

I think that a large part of the problem is our society itself, with all these notions that you can only be in love with one person. Personally, the fear that a woman will become possessive with me is a large part of the reason that I frequently don't even try with most women.

But you wouldn't be with the woman you fear wants to possess you if she sweetens the deal with some money would you? What if you were desperate? Would you do it then? What if this was always an option people offered for consideration to you in times of monetary strife? Or are we joking about retaining the ability to pay a prostitute to leave rather than for the sex? Is it poor form if the sex worker lets the client know the sex act is one done of desperation or do they usually wait for the client to ask? Do you ask?
I have lurked on here for over a year and never seen this purchaser and purchasee element fondly remembered when people talk happily about their relationships and I find it odd for it to be compared to them.

[Scott]

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

Yes.

Alright. So what do you think of the passage that I just re-quoted from it?

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

No you don't. Seen it go down without those things many a time. People like to fuck.

I agree with that, but you cut that quote off mid sentence. The rest of it went: "you need money (or commodities) in order to survive and work has to be done to get them."

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

And if they do not, I don't have enough sympathy to promote the buying of someones' body for them any more than I would give a baby to every couple who is physically incapable of doing so naturally but decides they want a child anyway. Some people are just not parent material and no amount of money should compensate for that lack.

I agree that not everyone who wants to be a parent should be one, but having sex is not the same as becoming a parent. I believe I saw a program on TV that spoke of a program run in the Netherlands that has a program wherein a nurse actually engages in sex work for old men who really don't have much of a chance of getting a girlfriend at their age.

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

I don't think prostitutes should be arrested for making money via sex but that isn't what makes this tacky to me. Its the buying side of things. Even in places where prostitution is legal, human trafficking still happens. Comparing this to relationships of any kind involving consenting sex is a gloss over to make it more palatable.

I think you're conflating various things that shouldn't be. For starters, let's define human trafficking. Wikipedia defines it as:
"Human trafficking is the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, or a modern-day form of slavery."

These are all clearly harmful things. But many have argued that criminalizing prostitution actually makes the problem worse. Here's an excerpt from an article at liberator.net titled Legalized Prostitution - Regulating the Oldest Profession:

***********************
Benefits of Legalization

Currently most everywhere in the United States, our legal system penalizes prostitutes and their customers for what they do as consenting adults. Money is still spent on law enforcement efforts to catch prostitutes and their customers. Once caught, justice departments have to process these people through very expensive systems.
What are the end results? Police personnel and courtrooms are overburdened with these cases, having little or no impact on prostitution. The prostitutes and their customers pay their fines and are back to the streets in no time in a revolving door process. Catch and release may work for recreational fishing but it has no deterring affect on prostitution.

Making prostitution legal will allow the act to be managed instead of ignored. Pimps and organized crime figures, who regularly treat their workers on subhuman levels, would no longer control women. In some countries, prostitute rings buy and sell women on the black market, force their women to comply through violence and create unhealthy working conditions. When prostitutes operate independently and in secret, many times they become abused by their own customers.

Legalizing prostitution would prevent underground prostitution that occurs today. When men want to pay for sex, they find prostitutes. These people work in massage parlors, escort services, strip bars and modeling agencies or still work corners as traditional streetwalkers. There are legitimate parlors, dating services, bars and agencies but of the hundreds that exist within newspaper classified advertisements and telephone directories, there are a large number that provide sexual services. A routine search through Google's Internet news engine for 'prostitution' routinely reveals connections between prostitution and these falsetto agencies (Google, 2004).

It is estimated that 100,000 to 3 million teens are nearly invisibly prostituted per year in the United States (Walker, 2002). If we allow prostitution to remain hidden from view and basically invisible to the law as it is today, we allow a number of teens to be swept up into prostitution every year. When adult women decide to exchange money for sex, it is a personal choice open to them under the philosophy of a free, democratic society. When troubled minors who do not yet have the social survival skills decide to prostitute, they are often manipulated by opportunists who exploit these teens, typically leading to horrific ends. Legalizing prostitution will help prevent these instances through regulation.

Legalized, regulated prostitution has many benefits. Encounters can happen within controlled environments that bring about safety for both the customers and the prostitutes. Prostitutes would no longer be strong-armed by pimps or organized crime rings. Underage prostitution would be curtailed. There would also be health-safety improvements.
***********************

Is the author being too optimistic? Perhaps. That being said, some countries have decriminalized and even legalized it and I think the results have been positive. Here's an paper on Australia's decriminalization of it:
http://action.web.ca/home/catw/attac...n_proof_01.pdf

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

Saying someone not being able to get sex as easily as someone else should be a problem to solve with money sounds a whole lot like thinking a banker pulling loan fraud to get the same car his buddy who didn't resort to fraud is sound logic.

I think that money doesn't have to be inherently bad. I'm also sure that there are decent people who wouldn't mind having sex with even difficult people if they were properly compensated. I've said it before and I stand by it; sex can and is a form of therapy. This is why sex surrogates exist.

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

But you wouldn't be with the woman you fear wants to possess you if she sweetens the deal with some money would you?

Laugh :-). That really depends. I know that today, sexual surrogacy is a very complicated process, but I think that it could be streamlined in the future. Basically, if society at one point decides that sex really can be a form of therapy (and assuming that I wanted to become a sex surrogate), I could see it happening, so long as the woman understood that her feelings of possessiveness were something to be worked on instead of something that is well and good.

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

What if you were desperate? Would you do it then? What if this was always an option people offered for consideration to you in times of monetary strife?

For me, some things are more important than survival, so to answer your question I'd have to say that it really depends on what exactly would be involved.

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

Or are we joking about retaining the ability to pay a prostitute to leave rather than for the sex?

To leave? Can you elaborate on this?

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

Is it poor form if the sex worker lets the client know the sex act is one done of desperation or do they usually wait for the client to ask? Do you ask?

The one and only time that I hired a sex worker in Mexico was about 16 years ago. I was 20 years old and I had been a virgin up until that point. She did mention that she was doing it to pay for a sick relative after the act took place. I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. I didn't mind her telling me and I would have been open to the idea of having her as a girlfriend instead of simply being her client, but I was there on vacation and I never went back.

Originally Posted by Vinccenzo

I have lurked on here for over a year and never seen this purchaser and purchasee element fondly remembered when people talk happily about their relationships and I find it odd for it to be compared to them.

I agree that it's not that common, but it seems clear that you just didn't meet enough people. Vinceenzo, meet feelyunicorn :-). I know atleast one other person in this forum who feels this way, but he hasn't yet posted in this forum.

[Derbylicious]

I'm sure that prostitutes do fall in love with their clients from time to time. The issue that I have with the idea of prostitution is that women are a commodity to be bought and sold. Just the very nature of paying a woman for the use of her body makes her less of a person than the man who is paying for the service.

If there were close to or equal numbers of male prostitutes servicing women there might not be that connotation of women being property. Prostitution feeds back into the ideas of patriarchy and misogyny.

As a woman I object to romanticizing prostitution. Of course it can be argued that there are women who chose to be sex workers but the vast majority of them are not there by choice but rather because there is no other option for them that they can see. Many sex workers are abused by their pimps and johns. I believe that every person has the right to pursue whatever profession they wish. From my experience prostitution is less frequently a choice of career but rather something that is done for survival out of desperation.

[Scott]

Response to post #35, Part 1

Dividing my response up, as it was too large to fit in a single post...

Originally Posted by Derbylicious

I'm sure that prostitutes do fall in love with their clients from time to time. The issue that I have with the idea of prostitution is that women are a commodity to be bought and sold. Just the very nature of paying a woman for the use of her body makes her less of a person than the man who is paying for the service.

Many prostitutes, or SPs (Service Providers) don't feel the same way. I think the following article from a former SP makes some very good points concerning sex work:
http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2...for-everybody/

Originally Posted by Derbylicious

If there were close to or equal numbers of male prostitutes servicing women there might not be that connotation of women being property. Prostitution feeds back into the ideas of patriarchy and misogyny.

The book Sex at Dawn doesn't think that this is the problem. Rather, they believe the problem to be:
**************
...we argue that women’s seemingly
consistent preference for men with access to wealth is not a
result of innate evolutionary programming, as the standard
model asserts, but simply a behavioral adaptation to a world
in which men control a disproportionate share of the world’s
resources. As we’ll explore in detail, before the advent of
agriculture a hundred centuries ago, women typically had as
much access to food, protection, and social support as did
men. We’ll see that upheavals in human societies resulting
from the shift to settled living in agricultural communities
brought radical changes to women’s ability to survive.
Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter
their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and
protection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different from those in which our species had been
evolving previously.
**************

I agree with this; the problem is the distribution of resources, not prostitution itself.

Originally Posted by Derbylicious

As a woman I object to romanticizing prostitution. Of course it can be argued that there are women who chose to be sex workers but the vast majority of them are not there by choice but rather because there is no other option for them that they can see.

Where are you getting your statistics from? I haven't found any hard numbers on this issue. However, I do have the aforementioned linked article from a former sex worker. Here's the article:

***********
One of the central goals of this blog is to help people realize that prostitution is completely natural female behavior; it actually predates marriage in human development and similar behaviors appear even in non-primate species. Most women will not hesitate to use their “erotic capital” (as Catherine Hakim calls it) to get ahead, and many have no qualms about openly using sex for material gain. About 10% of all women have directly taken money for sex at least once, and about 1% have actually worked as prostitutes at some time in their lives. As George Bataille put it, “Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude”; in other words, full-time professional prostitution occupies one end of a whole spectrum of female behaviors on which it is impossible to draw a line separating the whore from the non-whore.

Obviously, only about 5% of all women (the historical percentage of the female population involved in the trade at any given time) feel comfortable enough with formal, professional prostitution to be able to actually make a living at it; in my column of one year ago today I discussed Amanda Brooks’ theory that such women, who often feel drawn to the profession from an early age as I did, might actually be genetically predisposed to it. In other words, there might be a “hooker gene”, and harlotry might be a sexual orientation just as homosexuality is. The comparison is an apt one: just as some men find ecstasy in homosexual activity while others are utterly repulsed by it, so for some women whoring is a dream job while others find it a total nightmare.

Those who consider homosexuality “unnatural” might be inclined to use the comparison to argue that prostitution is equally unnatural (despite this view flying in the face of facts); for those who are so tempted, let me point out that motherhood is as natural a role for women as one could ever imagine, yet I doubt any sane person would disagree that there are some women who are totally unfit for it. No life-path or career is suitable for everyone, and as long as those who are unsuited to a given role avoid it there is no issue. But when a woman who is repulsed by motherhood becomes pregnant, or one who has difficulties dealing with people is forced into a job in which public contact is unavoidable, nobody should be surprised when serious problems ensue. And if a woman who dislikes men or has sexual hang-ups (or both) is forced by circumstance into prostitution, the result can be an unmitigated disaster.

I’m not talking about women who simply aren’t cut out for whoredom; there are lots of those, which is why 10x as many women have tried hooking as have actually stuck with it for a time. The majority of women who directly take money for sex once or a few times simply decide it’s not for them (for whatever reason) and find some other way to make a living. But there are a small number who should never have even tried it in the first place, yet are driven by necessity, desperation or actual coercion to practice it for weeks, months or even years; such women are among the worst enemies our profession ever had. Because they hate the work, they tend to see and remember only the negative aspects. And because many of them are emotionally damaged even before entering prostitution (due to whatever trauma caused them to hate men and/or sex), and virtually all of them became even more damaged by having to endure what for them was a loathsome existence, they either become fanatics on their own or are easily driven to fanaticism by the prohibitionists. These are the women who call themselves “survivors” and learn to “reframe their experiences” (i.e. lie to make their stories more lurid and to more closely conform to anti-whore rhetoric). They are the mainstays of “john schools” and provide ammunition to prohibitionists who represent their highly-embroidered claims as typical of sex work and even multiply the accounts by changing small details so as to make them sound like different-but-similar tales rather than one repeated ad nauseum. The very worst of them (as typified by Somaly Mam) are so obsessed with their own darkness that they are willing to utterly destroy the lives of any real human beings who get in the way of their quixotic crusades against private behavior that is literally impossible to eradicate as long as humans remain human.

In a world where individuals were allowed control over their own bodies and the decisions of adults (however strange those choices might seem to others) were always respected by the “authorities”, fanatics who were harmed through ill-fortune or harmed themselves through their own poor choices would have no power over other, less damaged individuals. But unfortunately we do not yet live in such a world; even in jurisdictions which have legalized prostitution to one degree or another, governments believe they have the authority to abrogate the rights of individuals for whatever excuse strikes their collective fancy (provided they can convince the masses to lie still for it). As we saw in Rhode Island two years ago, a small group of vocal fanatics can easily convince the “authorities” to strip away rights held without challenge for decades, and one of the chief weapons of such fanatics is the emotionally-damaged “reluctant whore” who refuses to accept that her feelings or experiences are anything other than typical.
***********

[Scott]

Response to Post #35, Part 2 (last part)

Originally Posted by Derbylicious

Many sex workers are abused by their pimps and johns.

I covered this issue in post #34. The excerpt below is from an article from liberator.net, titled Legalized Prostitution - Regulating the Oldest Profession:
***********************
Benefits of Legalization

Currently most everywhere in the United States, our legal system penalizes prostitutes and their customers for what they do as consenting adults. Money is still spent on law enforcement efforts to catch prostitutes and their customers. Once caught, justice departments have to process these people through very expensive systems.
What are the end results? Police personnel and courtrooms are overburdened with these cases, having little or no impact on prostitution. The prostitutes and their customers pay their fines and are back to the streets in no time in a revolving door process. Catch and release may work for recreational fishing but it has no deterring affect on prostitution.

Making prostitution legal will allow the act to be managed instead of ignored. Pimps and organized crime figures, who regularly treat their workers on subhuman levels, would no longer control women. In some countries, prostitute rings buy and sell women on the black market, force their women to comply through violence and create unhealthy working conditions. When prostitutes operate independently and in secret, many times they become abused by their own customers.

Legalizing prostitution would prevent underground prostitution that occurs today. When men want to pay for sex, they find prostitutes. These people work in massage parlors, escort services, strip bars and modeling agencies or still work corners as traditional streetwalkers. There are legitimate parlors, dating services, bars and agencies but of the hundreds that exist within newspaper classified advertisements and telephone directories, there are a large number that provide sexual services. A routine search through Google's Internet news engine for 'prostitution' routinely reveals connections between prostitution and these falsetto agencies (Google, 2004).

It is estimated that 100,000 to 3 million teens are nearly invisibly prostituted per year in the United States (Walker, 2002). If we allow prostitution to remain hidden from view and basically invisible to the law as it is today, we allow a number of teens to be swept up into prostitution every year. When adult women decide to exchange money for sex, it is a personal choice open to them under the philosophy of a free, democratic society. When troubled minors who do not yet have the social survival skills decide to prostitute, they are often manipulated by opportunists who exploit these teens, typically leading to horrific ends. Legalizing prostitution will help prevent these instances through regulation.

Legalized, regulated prostitution has many benefits. Encounters can happen within controlled environments that bring about safety for both the customers and the prostitutes. Prostitutes would no longer be strong-armed by pimps or organized crime rings. Underage prostitution would be curtailed. There would also be health-safety improvements.
***********************

[Tonberry]

Honestly, I think the answer to the question can be achieved by asking oneself another question:

If someone sees a sex worker, or sex workers, but only one at a time, and never has another relationship at the same time, does it fall under monogamy or not?
If so, adding more people to it makes it polyamory. If not, then adding more people does not make it polyamory.

The question is really whether the type of relationship there is between a client and a sex worker falls under the kind of relationship people usually thing of as intimate relationships, or if it is something else due to the commercial nature of it.

Then of course, it becomes trickier to find the line. For instance if you have a partner, and that partner has financial difficulties, and you pay for them, does it become prostitution?
If an ex suggest an arrangement akin to friends with benefits, in which they have sex with you but you pay for a meal first, is this prostitution?
The same thing with money directly would probably be considered prostitution by pretty much everyone, but would it be considered a true relationship due to previous history?

Also, someone in an otherwise monogamous relationship isn't usually considered monogamous anymore if they also see one or more prostitute(s). Which means it would fall under nonmonogamy at the very least if a traditional relationship exists as well.

Finally, I would like to ask about the sex worker's point of view. If they don't have a traditional relationship on the side, they most definitely have several sex partners, and that would make them nonmonogamous.

Now for my personal opinion: I don't think sex work is inherently monogamous or nonmonogamous for the client, it depends on what other relationships they have. Similarly, a sex worker might very well have a single very wealthy client.

As a result, I don't think prostitution is a type of nonmonogamy. I think it is a practice that overlaps all other types of relationships, and therefore not something that fits on the same scale.

For instance, I believe you could have say, a relationship that is:
- same sex, opposite sex, or a mix of sexes
- with one partner or with more partners
- open or closed
- BDSM or vanilla
- commercial or not

and there might be other options. I think with polyamory and swinging, the only two criteria that directly affect polyamory are the second and third (as in, how many partners, and is the relationship closed or open).

So I don't deny the overlap but I don't think it's relevant to polyamory or swinging as a whole, or to polyamory or swinging exclusively.

[Scott]

Originally Posted by Tonberry

Honestly, I think the answer to the question can be achieved by asking oneself another question:

If someone sees a sex worker, or sex workers, but only one at a time, and never has another relationship at the same time, does it fall under monogamy or not?

If so, adding more people to it makes it polyamory. If not, then adding more people does not make it polyamory.

Good point. To answer your question, I think we should look at the definition of monogamy. I took wikipedia's introduction to the term:
"(monos+gamos) - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time.[1] In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction. The term is applied also to the social behavior of some animals, referring to the state of having only one mate at any one time."

This made me think of a few things:

1- Society has pretty much abandoned the classical definition of monogamy, which required actually getting married. That being said, I think that many people wouldn't consider the relationship between a sex worker and one of their clients could be considered to be monogamous. This doesn't mean that clients and even sex workers feel this way. I think the real test is, how much do the sex worker/client care for each other? I think that, if it reaches a certain level, the relationship moves from what I'll call "casual" and into the "serious" realm. This being said, some people, both monogamous and poly maintain casual relationships and yet still define them as monogamous/polyamorous. So the real issue, then, is that people don't think that a relationship can happen if money is exchanged for sexual services. Personally, I don't feel this way, although I think that relationships work better if money isn't exchanged directly for sexual services, as I think that sexual activity and money should be something like the reward for a relationship that works well, rather then money/sexual services as goals in and of themselves.

2- This made me think of serial monogamy in a new light. If Jane dates David, then stops seeing David and sees Paul instead, then stops seeing Paul and goes back to David, is she truly monogamous? People may scoff and say "Ofcourse she is, because she stopped seeing one partner before seeing the other". But if this is done very quickly (within the course of a few days, say), the line between polyamory and monogamy begins to blur, as some people who identify as poly technically only see one person at a time.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

The question is really whether the type of relationship there is between a client and a sex worker falls under the kind of relationship people usually think of as intimate relationships, or if it is something else due to the commercial nature of it.

Then of course, it becomes trickier to find the line. For instance if you have a partner, and that partner has financial difficulties, and you pay for them, does it become prostitution?

A very good point. In essence, I think it goes to what, precisely, the money is going for. If David says "I'll pay for your phone bill, but first you need to have sex with me", it seems like prostitution to me. However, if David says "I'll pay for your phone bill" and only -hopes- that he'll be rewarded in a sexual way (without making his hope too explicit), then it can be seen as simply helping out one's partner.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

If an ex suggest an arrangement akin to friends with benefits, in which they have sex with you but you pay for a meal first, is this prostitution?

I believe so. While food isn't technically money, you're essentially bartering a good for a service; this is the realm of commerce. However, again, if a meal is given and there is only the hope that a sexual act may take place afterwards, I think it can be taken out of the commerce category.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

The same thing with money directly would probably be considered prostitution by pretty much everyone, but would it be considered a true relationship due to previous history?

Nicely put. However, I still think that if money or something else of value is exchanged directly for a sexual service, it has to fall into the commerce department. This doesn't mean, however, that feelings can't be involved.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

Also, someone in an otherwise monogamous relationship isn't usually considered monogamous anymore if they also see one or more prostitute(s). Which means it would fall under nonmonogamy at the very least if a traditional relationship exists as well.

Again, a very good point. It reminds me of a family friend who says that many people say that a relationship doesn't have that much to do with sex; and yet, if one partner "cheats" on another, then all of a sudden sex becomes an enormous issue.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

Finally, I would like to ask about the sex worker's point of view. If they don't have a traditional relationship on the side, they most definitely have several sex partners, and that would make them nonmonogamous.

Wait a second there; why does having a traditional relationship on the side alter whether or not they're monogamous. I think that if a prostitute has a traditional relationship on the side it would definitely make them nonmonogamous, as they would, at the very least, have their traditional relationship and atleast one client; if we agree that being sexual with someone makes them "gamous" (which nowadays seem to mean "with someone sexually" instead of married to them, in the mono sense of the term at any rate), then being with 2 people in this fashion would forcibly remove them from the "monogamous" (sexual with 1 person) category.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

Now for my personal opinion: I don't think sex work is inherently monogamous or nonmonogamous for the client, it depends on what other relationships they have. Similarly, a sex worker might very well have a single very wealthy client.

Aye.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

As a result, I don't think prostitution is a type of nonmonogamy. I think it is a practice that overlaps all other types of relationships, and therefore not something that fits on the same scale.

You're right in the sense that a few prostitutes and/or clients may be monogamous. However, I didn't say that -all- sex work was polyamorous. Far from it, I'd only asked if there was some crossover. I personally strongly believe that there is.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

For instance, I believe you could have say, a relationship that is:
- same sex, opposite sex, or a mix of sexes
- with one partner or with more partners
- open or closed
- BDSM or vanilla
- commercial or not

Agreed.

Originally Posted by Tonberry

and there might be other options. I think with polyamory and swinging, the only two criteria that directly affect polyamory are the second and third (as in, how many partners, and is the relationship closed or open).

You start off with polyamory and swinging, then single it down to polyamory. Can you explain this a bit more?

Originally Posted by Tonberry

So I don't deny the overlap but I don't think it's relevant to polyamory or swinging as a whole, or to polyamory or swinging exclusively.

You think that there's overlap/crossover between swinging and polyamory? Swinging, polyamory and sex work?

[Tonberry]

Originally Posted by Scott

Wait a second there; why does having a traditional relationship on the side alter whether or not they're monogamous.

Typo on my part. I meant to say, if they DO have a traditional relationship and do sex work, they have more than one partner, while if they only do sex work, they potentially have a single partner, or they have several partner but no "serious" one. In the latter case, people might argue that it doesn't fall under polyamory, swinging or open relationships because none of the sexual relations fall under the common definition.

I guess I got tangled up and started typing one sentence and finished with another one. My apologies.

Originally Posted by Scott

You start off with polyamory and swinging, then single it down to polyamory. Can you explain this a bit more?

Here, I rephrased my sentence and forgot to fix it. I meant for it to apply to both, the singling down was accidental and due to changing my sentence and accidentally leaving some of the old one behind.