Happy ? New Year

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?

So far, 8 days in, 2026 has given us one invasion involving the kidnapping of a head of state, threats of invading a NATO ally, and a murder by Trump’s ICE Gestapo. I thought 2025 was bad, but Trump’s mental decline coupled with his narcissism will allow the fascists who support him to make 2026 just so much worse. So, let’s start with some comic relief!

What is the worst problem we’re facing now? Health care costs? Housing? Inflation? Climate change? War? Rising fascism? If you ask Richard Hanania, the real problem is too many men are jerkin’ the gherkin. Instead of flogging the bishop, young men should be going to brothels and paying prostitutes.

The prostitute is a hero. For natural reasons, men lack confidence and feel inferior if they don’t have any sexual experience. But most women don’t want to be as promiscuous as men would like them to be. The sexes have divergent interests here, and this is a dilemma that will never be wished away. So, for a market price, the prostitute elevates men while protecting her fellow women. Due to her unique psychological makeup and the fact that she treats it as a job, she is able to decouple sex from emotional involvement. Yet the prostitute, unless she plays the role of victim, is subject to political prosecution in our society, while the enablers of masturbation face few legal restrictions and ever decreasing social stigma on account of their behavior. This is unjust, and indicative of what has gone wrong in a culture that is increasingly retreating into the digital, so much that it is having trouble reproducing itself.

So much of the ‘intellectual’ Right is like this — stupid people offering laughable opinions without any evidence to support them — that it inspires a tendency among normal people to just ignore it. That would be a mistake. Ridicule is the only correct response, and ridicule should include some analysis of why opinions like this one are so idiotic.

Hanania’s argument, such as it is, can be summarized as ‘young men spend too much time on-line and should be forced to have sex with paid strangers.” In the quoted passage, he claims that: 1. Men feel inferior because they’re sexually inexperienced; 2. Women don’t want to be promiscuous; and 3. Prostitutes protect other women through some vague mechanism of ‘elevating’ men. At no point does he cite anything supporting his conclusion that all sex workers¹ have a ‘unique psychological makeup’ that allows them trade sex for money without any emotional harm. More importantly, h never discusses how anyone ends up in the sex industry, including whether they do so voluntarily. Instead of evidence, he provides an assertion that human trafficking is a ‘moral panic’ like Satanic daycares or gay comic book characters.

You would think that with the rise of OnlyFans, prostitution might become more morally and legally acceptable. And it is true that the libertarian logic of the time seems to demand such an outcome. Yet this hasn’t happened as, more and more, what used to be called prostitution is labeled as “trafficking.” The idea that consenting adults can do what they want has won out over traditionalism as a general matter, which creates complications for continuing to criminalize the selling of sex. A new word is needed to be able to pretend that prostitution – a term which implies that the woman has agency and is a willing partner in the transaction – doesn’t exist. Once a woman has declared herself a victim, it is considered indecent, if not re-traumatizing, to question what actually happened to her.

Contrary to Hanania’s assertion, the phrase “human trafficking” encompasses a lot more than sex work. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children defines human trafficking as

Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs... The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth [above] shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth [above] have been used.²

As that quote makes obvious, human trafficking is a labor issue, not a sex one. Participating in the labor market without coercion and to receive reasonable compensation is a basic human right.³ Much sex work is done under coercion and does not provide a living wage. Further, it’s not a career with many long-term prospects. There are no pensions for sex workers who’ve passed their 30th birthday and have become unemployable. Hanania thinks that some women just have to ruin their later lives so that loser men can get their rocks off without the need of a relationship.

This complete indifference to the lives of the people he wants to see exploited extends to more than just sex. He hates labor unions. He ignores completely all pernicious power relationships between people, which allows him to praise relationships between much older men and the younger women they purchase. He sees no purpose to any human activity that doesn’t produce an object, whether that object is a product to sell, a baby, or an orgasm. Life is, to Richard Hanania, purely and entirely transactional.

Because he reduces everything to a transaction, he ignores the fact that there are other reasons for human relationships than buying and selling. That means that his recommendations for sexual relationships will fail as well. He wants young men to go to brothels because that will at least get them outside and with another person. This assumes that the sex worker has no choice but to accept every single male who wants to pay her. If she has the option to reject a customer, which I sincerely hope Hanania thinks she can, then she will sometimes reject a customer. If the purpose of going to a brothel is to help young men obtain confident, then how does having to pay someone to like you going to help your self-confidence? What if even the people you’re offering money to like you say no? Is he going to suggest that some brothels advertise that they serve the most hopeless losers? How is that going to work?

There IS a problem with loneliness in our society, but it’s not just young men and it its worst consequences have nothing to do with the birth rate. We need institutions and organizations that are not families and not workplaces so that people can form friendships and learn how to get along with others away from parents and the HR department. (Hanania complains that even nice guys risk getting in trouble if they try to form a romantic relationship at work. He thinks this is a problem with human resources rules; I think it’s a problem from a lack of other places. It is not at all unreasonable to demand that a person keep his mind on his job at work.) Organized labor, to use one example, can require contracts that limit work hours so that people have time to hang out and form friendships, as well as providing actual social events. People need time for activities that aren’t work or school related; they need a place for those activities; and they need rules to make socializing smooth and orderly. Those relationships should, mostly, not be romantic, but if romance flourishes, it would be better in environments of equality than hierarchy.

I want young people to— and old people, too — to have healthy and happy social lives. Having a network is absolutely essential to human flourishing, and can actually save people’s lives. Hanania doesn’t care if the sexual liaisons he wants lead to actual happy marriages or long term relationships; he just wants more women to be broodmares. That is exactly the way to produce more miserable people, who have miserable children, who in turn won’t want to marry or have kids lest they end up like Mom and Dad. Hanania is, actually, just another Trumpy idiot.

But at least he gave me someone to laugh at today.

1. I’m going to use the Woke phrase from this point because it would annoy Richard Hanania and anything that annoys him is a noble pursuit; and also because it is a lot clearer in that it emphasizes the word work with all its implications of ‘chore’ and ‘transaction.’

2. United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime, link here: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/organized-crime/intro/UNTOC.html. Known informally as the Palermo Protocol, this document was adopted 5 November 2000 and became effective 29 September 2003. In addition to human trafficking, the document covers trafficking in drugs, endangered wildlife, arms, and money laundering. I am not going to spend a lot of time proving that criminal gangs are involved in coerced sex work because that one should be obvious to anyone. Legalizing sex work is a good goal, but ONLY if such legalization excludes anyone who was involved in the criminal version and ONLY if the traffickers are harshly punished.

3. I accept the basic Marxist contention that labor in capitalism is alienated and not entirely free, but there is still a big difference between the coercion of needing money to live and the coercion practiced by a slaveowner. The passive coercion of being poor kills and maims, but the process is a lot slower and provides more exit ramps than the coercion applied by a dude with a large gun who steals passports.