Ok here’s a weird one but it does count as a shower thought because it was a realization I woke with today out of nowhere. (long read)

Yesterday I had wikid a list of things that made headlines around the world and one was a gangrape on a bus in india. I had also just removed all the men from the game I’m making because looking at them was stressing me (yes im a weak person like ‘scared to walk alone on a street at night’ type). So today I woke up with an interesting thought. “if anyone could have sex whenever they wanted, I bet there would be waaay less scary predators”.

I started by googling comparisons of rape and prostitution and sure enough “Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase.” Tho I would also go further and say the women I know that go around having tons of sex and ‘dirtily’ calling themselves ‘sluts’ shouldn’t have to have that dirty connotation. Thus Temple Prostitutes. Return to the waaaay old days where a woman could have tons of sex and be seen as sacred for it instead of dirty. I personally would fund it via the state so there are no barriers. I BELIEVE (since i woke up totally thinking all this today it must be true) that there will be waaaaay less of those horribly horny men we all see online doing awkward facepalm things, and the legitimate fear of being violently raped going away will help tons of people and maybe even let me add male characters to my game. It’s like lots of ppl currently are being starved sexually with playing the social game being their one avenue to solving it… or to use force. I think that’s wrong. I see the bad effects. And suddenly I know the superanswer, which is Temple Prostitutes.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
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    16 days ago

    That sounds all well and good until you realise that “temple prostitutes” are people, and by taking away their agency to say “no”, they are now being raped.

    Maybe “temple fleshlights” :D

    • Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      Even if temple prostitutes were completely voluntary, it still wouldn’t solve these underlying issues. When discussing rape with rapists, it isn’t about sex, it is about raping someone. Sex isn’t going to sate the urge to commit the act of rape. Are there people out there that may not have raped someone if they had access to sex? Sure, but those are edge cases. Also I think OP is misidentifying the lashing out of horny men, like incels, to be about sex alone. Sure, it may put a bandaid on the situation, for them, for a bit. However, the underlying issue is that they are lonely, have no intimate companionship, and have to no access to that form of relationship. Getting their dicks wet might cool them off a bit, but there will still be these communities of angry, dejected, men who do not have that type of relationship.

      • CameronDev@programming.dev
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        16 days ago

        I mean, to play devils advocate, maybe they’ll make some friends at the communal temple fleshlight :D

        But yeah, there are a multitude of motivations, and this concept doesn’t really solve any of them.

  • SGforce@lemmy.ca
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    16 days ago

    I don’t think they rape because they "need sex*. They rape for the power of it. If it was a gang beating, they would have participated too.

    • Lyre@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      Hey listen I’m not trying to read too far into this or anything but if op’s source is actually accurate then doesn’t that pretty well refute what you’re saying?

      • SGforce@lemmy.ca
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        15 days ago

        I agree that SA in general would decrease, but specifically violent and especially gang rapes are a completely different problem. This is unlikely to stop men from beating their wives for example. Those men would beat prostitues instead.

        • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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          15 days ago

          Your point isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t invalidate OPs point. There are many exceptions,but the majority reason for rape surely is a lack of sex. For some,prostitutes probably aren’t sufficient. Or they’re too weak and need to dominate. Or their lust outweighs their wallet in quantity. And some simply can’t afford them at all.

          I would argue that if everyone would have access to sex whenever needed, rape would be veeeery noticeably down. It won’t eradicate it sadly,but help a lot.

          In the end, we’re just a sexual species.

  • spujb@lemmy.cafe
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    16 days ago

    You’re actually among a lot of “great minds” in coming to this conclusion! The earliest person I’m aware of to write this down was St. Augustine:

    Remove prostitutes from human affairs, and you will unsettle everything because of lusts

    Simone de Beauvoir writes about societies who implement this concept to varying degrees, from a simple “sex work is a necessary evil but we will still treat sex workers as subhuman” to at least a few socities who treated sex workers as near a legitimate labor force as you can imagine, with the ability to deny consent, maternity leave, wages high enough to make them upper middle class, and other things like that.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    This is actually the reason behind the institute of christian marriage by the way. Since as a species we’re roughly 50:50 in terms of ratio, the idea behind 1 man having 6 wives, ultimately ends up with men that don’t have families. This is used by religions for war (die and you’ll get 12 virgins in heaven!) as well. By using religion and ultimately trying to pin it to 1:1 - that ultimately leaves men “providing” for their families, and by providing - I mean being a part of the workforce and “being productive” in the grand scheme of things. You’ll see lots more of this violence in cultures where there 1:many relationships. Most men strive for reproduction as an instinctual goal, and when that instinct is restricted or repressed, you get outbursts and violence.

    Prostitutes kind of short-circuit this reward mechanism, the same way games cause many people to fail at achieving their own potential.

    Ultimately, policies like this just end up allowing people to have more outlets to choose to not have children. That’s why you’re seeing attacks on reproductive rights right now; because population is leveling off and number must go up. So long as we continue to rely on number-go-up as a baseline for our society, things like this won’t be put into place.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    16 days ago

    You know, I’ve used the idea in one of my fictional universes.

    Which is, unfortunately, where it needs to stay.

    See, a temple prostitute is just a prostitute with a big organization pimping them out, which leads to the same kind of abuse prostitutes already face.

    Any pimp, no matter how wonderful they might be, is taking money out of the pocket of the person opening their body up for others for money. When that’s a thing, abuse is inevitable (and I’d encourage anyone doubting that to go look into the actual reality of temple prostitutes). Prostitutes already exist. Any of those rapists that would actually rape for sexual satisfaction only can already access a sex worker with minimum effort. So why would they be any less likely to rape just because the sex worker is in a temple?

    Which, btw, my town is kinda mid sized, but rural. So not exactly a place with a stroll to pick up street level hos. But if I wanted to pay for sex, I know of three women that will gladly take the money and the cock. We have prostitutes even out here in the hills. So availability is not the problem.

    You also forget that we don’t have any religions that are devoted to a deity or principle that venerates sex in that way. Even the closest ones aren’t going to be setting up brothels of faith.

    So, how would you staff the temple brothel? If the faithful don’t exist in enough numbers to fill the jobs, then the people sucking off johns for the temple are just regular prostitutes. So you’d essentially need to create or revive a religion, then convert sex workers to it, or recruit non sex workers and convince them to fuck and suck for god. You know what a church that does that gets called nowadays? A cult.

    The only way it would work and actually be an improvement would be in an ideal world, which is impossible.

    We’d be better off legalizing prostitution, regulating it with safeguards to reduce harm (and it would be reduce, nor eliminate, even in places with legal hos, there’s abuse and sex trafficking and disease) and making sure that the sex workers have full access to whatever they need to protect themselves and be able to opt out with zero consequences.

    Because if the sex worker can’t quit at will, they aren’t a sex worker, they’re a victim. And yeah, legal sex workers aren’t being held against their will for the most part, but do they have unemployment if they quit suddenly? Can they easily access public services to retrain? How about housing, do they have access to stable housing while they’re between professions?

    It isn’t that the rest of us have all those things, it’s that we aren’t being literally fucked involuntarily out of fear of poverty and homelessness. It’s just a figurative fucking.

    As it is, people that genuinely believe sex is sacred, and will perform sex acts with strangers exist. They’re just incredibly rare. You likely couldn’t staff a single temple from just those in a given city. And I’ve known some people that genuinely believe that way, that will have sex damn near at will with anyone willing to condom up and be nice during the sex. But I’m fifty, and have met four. Four in all that time. I don’t see that being very successful as a world changing thing lol, they’d never be able to sleep and still wouldn’t be able to drain the poison from a tenth of a percentage of incels.

    It’s an interesting shower thought, but you aren’t the first to explore the idea. And it simply doesn’t stand up on its own outside the shower.

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    16 days ago

    it’s not weird, it’s accurate like your own googling told you: there are LOTS of bad effects to involuntary celibacy and i’m convinced that i would be one of the most red pilled incels if i were straight too.

    having access to sex on demand 24/7/365 has done WONDERS for my psychological well being and it makes me keenly aware that there aren’t enough tops to go around; effectively leaving 2 large groups of sexually frustrated people who each have the things the other needs to satisfy each other were it not for homophobia. in this case, however, the temple is replaced with a bathhouse (sex clubs are much better) and, instead of temple prostitutes, there are community bottoms and i’m 500% certain that the scale is MUCH larger.

    i suppose i should consider myself lucky for that homophobia since i likely wouldn’t do well with all the new competition if it were to suddenly disappear and i probably wouldn’t have sex on a tap anymore. lol