The whole thing: The girls doing it NSFW content and selling it, the dudes buying into it mostly because they won’t have any of it in real life, the way society sees it… Thoughts?
Personally I think every adult woman can do whatever the fuck she wants with her body and sexuality, even sell it. But obviously there will be consequences later in life if she wants to became a mother… And it shouldn’t be like that anymore.
The dudes buying “their girlfriend” there is complicated. At first I made fun of them but now I realised for many men, myself included, is that fake sexual relationship (or even fake sentimental relationships) or NOTHING. I won’t buy any of that for myself, since the fake part kills any allure for me, plus preferring to keep that little money I got left in my wallet but I understand more why more men do it. Is their only shot to a reality close to a relationship, is that or AI girlfriends.
Thank you for the reflection and acknowledgement! That is a rare and good thing and a very good thing to cultivate. Nobody is perfect and I also try to engage in this as early and often as possible. Eventually, it becomes something that is preemptive rather than reactive and you won’t have to look back on things very often and say, “I don’t like what I said” (something I’ve had to do many times myself!). I also think that online environments cultivate a maximalist approach to personal agitation even when it is a situation where that shouldn’t need to happen, so cultivating reflection like this helps us remain socially adept here and elsewhere. We also lose resolution of expression in this format.
In terms of resources, left perspectives on abolition are actually about as old as a discernable left re: capitalism. Early works took sex work being negative for granted and extended their analysis of marriage to include this commodification of (usually women’s) bodies, synthesizing an early form of feminism. Marxist analysis - from Marx and Engels themselves - of the family under capitalism describes the core of this idea of commodification and of women as a marginalized subclass whose marginalization serves a function within capitalism and is therefore maintained by it (and has mores that were invented by it, despite the pretense that “traditional” views towards interpersonal relationships are ancient). It is actually quite revealing to look into even just how relationships among European serfs worked differently.
So there are a few ways to begin approaching this issue and diving down into it further and further. If you prefer to build “from the ground up”, which is better for understanding what these positions are referring to because they use Marxist and anarchist language, you’d want to start with Marx, Engels, Goldman, etc as background and then look at their writings on women, families, and prostitution. For example, Engels’ On The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, while flawed, will lay out some key concepts and the angle from which this was and largely still is approached. Reading Das Kapital is challenging but would provide this with very useful context. Instead of going straight into Das Kapital, for most people I would recommend a companion guide like that written by Heinrich, you could read it side-by-side with any Marxist work and it would be helpful. The ideas expressed there constantly reappear under Marxist feminism (and not all “Marxists”, to their shame, have been feminists!). You will find the same core logic presented in later socialist projects. There are many examples, but Sankara was particularly outspoken about this and women’s liberation more generally, and seeing how it embeds in the conditions of Burkina Faso are revealing.
From the angle of a “liberal-friendly” introduction: there is a somewhat liberal but still materially-embedded abolition organization that lays out the core ideas borrowed from this left tradition here: www.demandabolition.org. As an NGO it suffers from tying one hand behind its back in terms of taking action and hiding any semblance of radicalism, but it has many of the ideas and presents them in a “liberal-friendly” way.
From the angle of a modern article summarizing the position (though citing no sources): https://medium.com/@ihla/on-the-necessity-of-sex-trade-abolition-as-a-revolutionary-marxist-line-2516bb9516db
From an anarchist perspective: Emma Goldman’s On The Traffic of Women. Anarchists who cite this work will often go in the same direction. Unfortunately this is less common in the West in modern times, as the label of anarchism itself has often become diluted into a vulgar horizontalism that doesn’t know its real theoretical and historical grounding. But there are still real anarchists out there that do actually read and know these things and will cite these works.