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We should accept that there’s both people for whom sex work is just like any other job, and people for whom it implies renouncing to an element of privacy they’d rather to share only with their partner/s. Should it be legalized? By criminalizing it you’re screwing over a lot of people who do want to perform that work and don’t provoke any issues in the world, but legalizing it might have ramifications that are horrendous.
For instance, say your country has an unemployment system where you’d lose your unemployment benefits if you receive a job offer and reject it, and immediately after getting fired you receive an offer to work at a brothel. That’s great if, for you, there’s no emotional element attached to sex, but for a lot of people that would be a nightmare, especially if they need either a job or the unemployment benefits.
So, my take: decriminalize sex work but don’t regulate it yet. Once we have either socialism or UBI or both, and no one gets under risk of suffering personal misery for not having a job for a while, legalize it like all other jobs.
Wait, if you get offered a job that is dangerous or can scar you mentally, you have to accept it or lose your benefits?
Depends on the country’s legislation. Conservatives parties often tend to make these regulations such that it’s easier to terminate your benefits with a more ample range of job offers.
It’s no more degrading than other work. I wouldn’t tell a cashier they’re degrading themself by having to work to live, and I wouldn’t say that to a sex worker either.
I am for sex work, I am against sex abuse.
Capitalism makes work degrading
Being a worker is degrading.
Being an owner is empowering.
Being a worker is empowering if you abolish Owners.
What does that even mean in the context of sex work? People no longer own their own bodies? Sounds disempowering to me. A dystopia!
Collective ownership, no individual ownership.
Sex work would still be fundamentally different though, it isn’t the same as regular labor.
Collective ownership? So I can hop on your laptop and do whatever I want?
No.
You can use your laptop to start the next TikTok. Your laptop is a means of production.
You can’t really abolish ownership. Only transfer it. Abolish all private enterprise?
Congrats, the elite political class that rules your government now owns you. :)You can abolish ownership and make decisions democratically. It’s better than Capitalism where the wealthy few own the majority without democracy.
an argument against regulating sex work is that it would place government control on what we do with it bodies
That’s also happening with banning it, of course, but I’m not sure if the jump we necessarily want is legalization plus regulation. Just a thought, no stance yet
It would only regulate bodies in regards to labor, which is something we already do in other industries. We allow or even mandate drug tests for employment, something that is occasionally justifiable for certain professions. We already regulate out of work activities that could affect job safety, so prostitution wouldn’t introduce anything new. Most of the harmful things that could arise from regulation aren’t unique to sex work
that’s totally something Jessica would say
Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.
To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.
We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.
But the girls’ presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada’s legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.
They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they’re just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman’s autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.
In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I’ve never looked at it the same way since.
Read this as “sex at work” and the second point was very confusing
Well, technically this is correct
I’m pro sex work, however:
I have mixed feelings about the current ubiquity of online sex work like onlyfans. In theory I’ve definitely got nothing against it but I’m worried that a lot of young women are faced with shitty economic prospects vs potentially lots of money on onlyfans. The alternatives are so poor sometimes that it feels like coercion.
I just wish young people had better options all together.
I have good news for you! The income distribution of OnlyFans creators like many other platforms follows a power law, where the top 1% earn 33% of all revenue, and the average creator only earns $150-180 each month. Don’t think young women doing it tough are likely to be coerced by that.
Most of the high earners are those who already have an established audience, e.g. ex porn stars.
OnlyFans Income - How Much Do OnlyFans Creators Make? - https://supercreator.app/academy/guides/how-much-do-onlyfans-creators-make/
Only fans is an MLM scheme, and watching “content creators” brag about how awesome it is to groom the next generation is… At least ick.
Nothing wrong with sex work, as any work, when done within a healthy ecosystem. But it is still a very murky area due to the very nature of human sexuality. The lines can get blurred very easily. Not as bad as Wall Street though. That’s where the real abuse is.
Wait, how is onlyfans a MLM? Is there something about how onlyfans is structured that makes it like Amway?
From what Ive heard about customer service jobs in the US, sex work sounds way less degrading than that.
On the flipside, you can make most jobs, including most types of sex work, not degrading
Nah. Sitting around waiting for a check in the mail and wacking off all day is degrading.
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts
But some people choose jobs that DO satisfy their intrinsic nature. I worked my arse off to have a job like that.
A lot of the hookers out there don’t do black guys and other guys of poc. Sex work needs to be regulated so such things don’t happen.
well this is a delicate area because people have the right to be attracted to whoever they want to be. It’s not racism to not be sexually attracted to a certain race. Just because a woman is a prostitute doesn’t mean that she is required to say yes to every man.
But wouldn’t that be an argument for not treating sex work as a form of labor like any other? I wouldn’t have any problem saying a plumber or store owner or photographer or basically any other type of worker should not have the right to refuse service to people based on race or not being attracted enough to the person trying to get services. I agree that I wouldn’t be comfortable applying that same standard to prostitution, but that feels like an argument that there’s a fundamental difference between sex work and other, more typical, forms of wage labor.
If you can’t see that these two different types of labor are apples and oranges, then I don’t know what else to tell you. If a prostitute is forced to service anyone they DO NOT WANT TO, then it becomes sex trafficking, which is exactly the conundrum we’re trying to solve here.
I wasn’t arguing that sex workers should be forced to have sex with anybody. In fact, I was saying that the way sexual labor involves these conversations about consent and bodily autonomy in a way that no other form of labor does suggests that it’s not a form of labor like any other and conversations about it shouldn’t start from the premise that it’s a conventional forms of labor if treating it like one would lead to horrific consequences like arguing that sex workers should be forced to take on clients.
I guess I was half replying to your post, and half tying it back to the OOP image to say that given the concerns about sex and consent, I don’t think I agree with the “all work is degrading, so sex work is no different” position.
Wait? Sex work should be regulated to prevent freedom of choice in clients? That seems a little counter-intuitive if you ask me
I mean it’s the same as literally any other business. There’s a reason businesses aren’t allowed to discriminate based on things like race/ethnicity, national origin, sex, and in civilized parts of the world, gender and sexuality.
Reminder to keep it chill in the comments. Discussion is fine as long as you aren’t personally attacking others or saying misogynistic shit. Double check the rules pinned at the top if you need a refresher
Long as it isnt forced on them, let them work
I’m pro sex work because I am all for the idea that if you do what you love, you won’t have to work a day in your life and, boy, do I love having sex. 😎
