Comfort Women: Getting Down to the Root of the Issue

          There seems to be a general consensus among the different articles that the idea of comfort women is only bad when it is thought that the women had no choice in the matter and were not paid for their work, and what is unclear is whether this was the case in every single comfort women related situation. The reason that I find these articles difficult to agree with in its entirety is because of the blurred line between whether I find it morally permissible to sell one’s own body for sexual pleasure or not. I believe that like similar cases previously discussed in class this case has a threshold. The threshold in my viewpoint is at the point of which that individual chooses not to perform sexual pleasure but is forced to against his/her consent to do so. At this point, I believe that the event is deemed morally impermissible and should be legally impermissible. The example that helps me to come to this conclusion is one of a stripper and a back room. A stripper is sometimes willing and other times forced for economically related reasons to perform in a sexual way to obtain money. There is also ways outside of simply stripping in which one is able to obtain a pay increase. If the manager of the strip club asks him/her to take a client to a back room and sexually pleasure them or else they will lose their job, then the entire situation would be morally wrong. However, if the stripper decided to sexually pleasure the client without coercion and with 100% consent, then the situation would be morally permissible. I find this viewpoint rooting from the ideals of human rights and autonomy. If one was to argue against me and say what if, in the case for comfort women the women that were recruited were recruited without coercion and with the women’s complete consent to the job of being a prostitute for the men in the army.  Also, what if like many cases the women were not allowed to pick and choose their own partners, is it still morally permissible? I would argue back that the idea of prostitution would be like the strip club analogy, where each client is its own job. The inability to pick one’s own client is what goes against morality because it takes away the person human right to choose for themselves and if the person had the choice to turn down a client without repercussions, then that would make being a comfort woman morally permissible.