In recent days, we have read various media commentaries on "legalising" the professional title of whore or prostitute (buying and selling sex is, of course, already legal in Finland) and above all, on how it should be normalised, since it would supposedly offer greater protection to men and women who sell sex.
Many may flinch at the word used in this text — whore — because it is considered degrading or even a slur, but that very flinch tells you all you need to know about whether such a professional title should genuinely be legalised.
Historically, the Finnish word huora has been both a legal and a moral term. In medieval and early modern legal texts, it was used as an official term to describe a woman who engaged in sexual intercourse outside marriage or sold sexual services.
@Ottomeri takes the position, shown below, that selling sex is work like any other profession. Are you saying, @ottomeri, that because selling sex is a perfectly ordinary, everyday matter, it should logically also be available in school career counsellors' offerings as one "ordinary" profession?
Studies show that 89 per cent of prostituted persons began as minors, often at 13–14 years of age, so by that logic the normalisation of this work should begin as early as the seventh grade.
This kind of gradual normalisation of the sex trade is not a random cultural shift but a meticulously orchestrated process in which the violation of human dignity is disguised as workers' rights and freedom of choice. This linguistic alchemy — where words are stripped of their original meanings and filled with new, distorted content — reveals a deeper agenda: What we are witnessing is the systematic construction of moral decay, a process in which the deviant is first normalised, then the wrong is legalised, and finally the destructive is glorified.
Language is the first battlefield in this ideological war. Advocates of the sex trade deliberately use misleading rhetoric when they speak of "sex work," as though it were any other profession — baker, teacher, nurse — as @OttoMeri does. This semantic manipulation seeks to erase the reality that what is at stake is the transformation of a human being's most intimate essence into a commodity.
Linguistic camouflage does not, however, change the facts: sex work — that is, acting as a whore — is a genuine choice for almost no one. It was not a choice for @annakontula either; by her own account, she drifted into selling herself because she saw no other options for survival.
The chasm between reality and rhetoric is exposed in devastating fashion by a large-scale nine-country study conducted by Melissa Farley and colleagues.
The study showed that 68 per cent of prostituted persons suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder — the same figure as combat veterans and torture victims. This is no coincidence but the inevitable consequence of systematic traumatisation.
Is this, then, what our decision-makers truly want to legalise? The traumatisation of human beings — which, research confirms, has not diminished even in countries where prostitution is classified as "work."
A Canadian study revealed an even grimmer truth: the mortality rate among prostituted persons is 40 times that of the general population. Murders, suicides, overdoses and violence form the fabric of daily life from which few emerge alive. The average life expectancy in prostitution is 34 years! An age at which most of us are only just building our lives.
Rachel Moran and Andrea Heinz, both survivors of prostitution, strip away the last illusions about the nature of this "profession" in their writings. Moran's words cut through the lie:
"Every day as a prostituted woman is a mental rape. We learn to dissociate and detach from our bodies in order to survive."
Heinz describes her experience even more starkly:
"Prostitution kills the soul. It destroys the ability to trust, to love, and to feel. I was a living corpse."
Their testimonies reveal a harrowing truth: almost without exception, behind "voluntary" prostitution lies childhood sexual abuse that has normalised the exploitation of one's own body. The statistics confirm this: 89 per cent of prostituted persons began as minors, often at 13–14 years of age. This is not a career choice but a stolen childhood — trauma that breeds trauma.
Neuroscientific research reveals how the brain and body attempt to cope with ongoing abuse. Prostituted persons develop the same dissociative mechanisms as torture victims: the brain literally disconnects consciousness from the body to protect the psyche from collapse. Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard identifies in this a complex form of PTSD that is harder to treat than single-event trauma, because the torture is repeated daily.
Physical destruction walks hand in hand with psychological disintegration: chronic infections, sexually transmitted diseases, permanent injuries, tears and pain conditions form everyday reality. Many permanently lose the capacity to enjoy sexuality. Substance use is near-universal — not for pleasure but for survival. 95 per cent of prostituted persons would stop immediately if they had an alternative.
The digital age has brought new forms of slavery disguised as empowerment. OnlyFans and "Sugar Baby" culture sell young people the illusion of easy money, while algorithms form an invisible prison guard, forcing ever more extreme content just to maintain earnings. The digital footprint is indelible — the internet does not forget, and intimate material shared even once can destroy a future for decades. Successful content creators now speak openly about severe depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Money does not compensate for lost human dignity, nor does it restore the capacity for genuine intimacy.
Many admit to having lost the ability to form normal human relationships. Once you have learned to see yourself as a product, it is hard to believe you are worth loving as a person.
The economic reality of "voluntary" sex work reveals systematic exploitation. The vast majority of the money flows to middlemen, platforms, pimps — the architects of modern slave trade. Prostituted persons are trapped in a cycle of debt where the only way to survive is to sell ever more of themselves. Pimps, human traffickers and the pornography industry harvest billions from the suffering of women and children. Legalisation does not eliminate criminality — it normalises it. The experiences of the Netherlands and Germany demonstrate beyond dispute that legalising prostitution increases human trafficking and the abuse of minors. The women standing in Amsterdam's red-light windows are not liberated entrepreneurs but victims of modern slavery.
When a society accepts human trafficking as "work," it sends a profound message: your body is a commodity, your value is determined by the market, intimacy is for sale. This poisons the relationship between the sexes at its very foundation. Young men learn that women's bodies can be bought; young women learn that their worth is tied to sexual marketability. Genuine love and commitment become outdated concepts in a world where everything is for sale.
The normalisation of the sex trade is part of a broader ideological project aimed at dismantling all traditional moral and biological boundaries. The same ideology that drives the erasure of sex-based distinctions and the teaching of "gender diversity" to children also seeks to normalise the total commercialisation of sexuality. Behind it lies a radical individualism in which the human being is seen as an atomistic individual with no ties to community or moral order — a fully manipulable consumer or product. This hyper-sexualisation and boundless gratification of personal desires leads, step by step, to the acceptance of paedophilia and the sexualisation of younger and younger children.
This leads naturally to child marriages, where even six-year-olds are deemed fit to be wives and nine-year-olds fit for the marriage bed. This happens from Finland as well, since these unions — accepted within Islam — are not solemnised in churches or registry offices but within the community.
The moral standing of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable. By accepting human trafficking as "work," we reveal a profound moral bankruptcy. It is a satanic illusion to speak of freedom and empowerment while trafficking in what is most sacred and deepest in humanity. Sexuality is not a detached bodily function but a profound part of human identity. Selling it breaks something fundamental — something whose repair demands deep healing.
True freedom is not the right to sell oneself but the moral strength to refuse to sell — with society supporting that choice! True equality is not a world where everyone has the "right" to buy other people's bodies, but a society where no one needs to sell their body to survive. Every one of us knows the truth in our heart. We do not want the reality of prostitution for our children or for those we love. No one rejoices when their child's dream career is to be a whore or a prostitute. These instinctive reactions reveal the truth that propaganda tries to bury!
Or would you weep tears of joy when your child came home from their eighth-grade work-experience day at a brothel and told you their dream career was to work as a whore?
The way forward does not lie through normalising the sex trade but through abolishing it.
We need exit programmes, trauma therapy, alternative livelihoods and educational opportunities. Above all, we need a society that recognises the inviolable dignity of every human being. These were the very things @annakontula was never even allowed to consider, because according to her no alternatives existed — and so the only option left was to sell herself, as a young girl, a child still growing up, to ministers and others who now hold positions of power. If anything is proof of a colossal failure of society, this is it — for there are surely too many children selling themselves at this very moment. Even one child who learns to regard themselves as a commodity is a radical failure of society and of families.
The very fact that we have arrived at this debate is a serious warning of our moral decay. The destruction of morality is unfolding before our eyes, as everyone can now see: first the deviant is normalised, then it is made acceptable, and finally everyone's approval is demanded. We must recognise this process and resist it at every stage — truthfully, boldly, and without compromise.
P.S. The word whore also appears in the new @pipliaseura NT2020 Bible translation, so if the word is good enough for the Bible, it should be good enough for this text:
