cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18475086
I’m not against those who work for sex, but the idea to earn for a living doesn’t seem nice. IMO, sex should be for 2 people (or more for others who prefer polyamory) who wants to be intimate/romantic with each other. My point is money should not be the purpose.
Sex work is work.
The people that do it deserve respect, and all the social and legal protections that attach to any other kind of work.
Your own preferred attitude to sex isn’t the point.
But should it be work?
Should we really have a society where selling your body is an opportunity to make money.
For instance, it imply that some poor women are gonna take it regardless the consequence, just because it’s the best alternative to pay the bills.
I can barely tolerate the physical straining we put on some workers. Sex work’s consequences are unacceptable to me in that same sens, sometimes worse.
So sure, no matter your opinion we should respect them, and not incriminate them!
And of course not all sex work is the same… to be acceptable it just requires better conditions. It can’t be something you choose out of need.
Regulations would help, but create their own hurdles.
True and tested.
The best help is probably indirectly having better social policies overall. Although never perfect, the best we are the lesser the problem.
I don’t approve of work.
based
I’m of the opinion that if you don’t want people performing sex work, you should be enacting measures to improve people’s quality of life to where that’s not their only option. The workers themselves should have legal protections and be permitted to perform their job like any other worker is.
I suspect some people would prefer that as a regulated option anyway, and they should be defended in their choice to do so. Sex work is work.
Moreover, if you don’t want people doing sex work, then you probably especially don’t want people to be forced into doing sex work. But that’s precisely what happens when you criminalize it: you make it so that the only way the demand can be satisfied is through a shady black market where trafficking is orders of magnitude more likely to take place, and you make it orders of magnitude more difficult for victims and witnesses to go to the authorities to report it.
I generally agree with you, but it is so complicated. I read a piece in The Nation a few years ago (written 2019) and whenever I see a question like this I have to dig it up. Sex workers in Spain applied to become a union (OTRAS, for short, full name basically means “the other women") and were approved in August 2018. Here are a few snippets:
After OTRAS was legalized, its two dozen or so members—who include women and men, both trans and cisgender—quickly found themselves engulfed in a national controversy. Prominent activists, academics, and media personalities swarmed social media under the hashtag #SoyAbolicionista (“I’m an Abolitionist”) to denounce what they saw as basic exploitation masquerading as the service economy. The union’s opponents argue that in a patriarchal society, women can’t be consenting parties in a paid sexual act born of financial necessity. They liken sex work to slavery, hence their name: “abolitionists.”
OTRAS calls this abolitionist opposition “the industry.” “They live really well off of their discussions, books, workshops, conferences, without ever including sex workers,” Necro says. “We’re not allowed to attend the feminist conventions.” OTRAS accuses “the industry” and the government—the two loudest arms of the abolitionist camp—of racism and classism, and is irked by their claims to feminism. “A government that refuses to guarantee the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest women with the highest number of immigrants? How is that feminist?” Borrell bristles. “We’re the feminists, the ones fighting for their rights.”
While advocates for legalization argue that it will make sex work safer, abolitionists counter that it could instead endanger women who, unlike the members of OTRAS, did not choose to enter the profession on their own. Abolitionists frame their anti-prostitution stance around the issue of human trafficking, specifically for prostitution. They argue that regulating sex work will simply allow traffickers to exploit women under legal cover.
“The trafficked women have no papers, so if police raid a club, the women have no choice but to say they’re there because they want to be,” says Rocío Nieto […] Once law enforcement is out of earshot, Nieto says, “none of the women tell you they want to be there. None of them tell you they want to do that work.”
A handful of smaller radical-left parties also back OTRAS, as well as one unlikely ally: the right-wing Ciudadanos party, known for its harsh anti-immigration stance, among other more traditionally conservative postures. “Experience shows us that when the State refuses to regulate, the mafias make the rules,” the party’s press corps wrote me in an e-mail.
My take is this.
I will guarantee universal basic job & income for everyone.
Once that’s guarantee I’ll see if anyone is willingly becoming a sex worker.
Without performing that “experiment” I cannot really respond.
I think you’ll find that there’s still quite a crowd that would. UBI for sure would help curb the those on the street scene just trying to pay to survive. But there’s a huge group of only fans models that do things not to survive, but rather to become ultra wealthy
Let’s take the opposite approach: look at all the top echelons of all past societies, assume that this subset of people was the most free to live in any way that they so desired, then count how many of these people did sex work. I think that we can safely assume that the amount of people that willingly engage in sex work is zero.
A very interesting take. I like that we’re questioning the root cause here.
Add universal heath care including addiction treatment. This might or might not include de-penalization of addiction, depending on the jurisdiction. Breakdown this more to make clear what I mean. Besides the obvious complementarity between UBI and universal health care, people get to do this because they are also addicted, not just poor. Some are also manipulated by means of being addicted. The current approach that punishes the addicted instead of treating them only makes this worse. Countries that have made addiction a healthcare issue rather than a criminal one have seen results.
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Pretty much perfect answer right here. This is downright encyclopedic.
Sex work is a more respectable career than debt collector, or CEO.
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Exactly. Perfect example of labor owning the means of production.
Sex work is work, and work (tying your capacity for labor to your continued survival) is bad. Sex workers should be supported like any member of the proletariat
Sex labor on the other hand? Sure as long as you have removed the exploitive element that comes with work.
Sure, I don’t see why they should be treated any different than anyone else. I think the problem is the stigma around sex in general, and for that I blame religion.
I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.
My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.
(edited for clarity)
Yes
When I see that I think both should be illegal.
At least that’s a consistent viewpoint. What I despise is demonizing sex work but not exploitative labor practices. It’s totally illogical to me that people will pride themselves on working 12+ hour days, skip breaks, come in on days off, work nights and weekends and holidays, etc but look down on people who have an OnlyFans or whatever. I don’t really understand criticizing one without the other.
Personally, I don’t give a shit about sex work. If it were fully legal and workers were protected and everything, I still don’t know that I would pay for it, but I sure as shit wouldn’t fight to take that choice away from others. It just wouldn’t really affect me. Same thing for access to safe drugs or abortions. I’m not going to advocate for other people to not have choices in their personal freedoms, so I guess I’ll fight for people to have access even for things I’m not that interested in for myself.
Oh I agree with you on sex work in the present day. I just go a step further for the future. People should work because they want to, not have to. The value of a person’s work should not determine the value of the person. One thing I do wonder though. If we didn’t have to work, many people still would because they enjoy the work. Would people do sex work in that situation? If they want to, I support thier right to do so. But it was a thought that came to me reading this post, that I haven’t fully explored in my head yet.
Excellent question. Idk, I can see indirect sex work like camming or porn still happening because that could be connected to a desire to perform for an audience. Maybe less prostitution but I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t go away completely.
Well, I suppose by the time we no longer have to work for a living, we will easily have extremely good sex robots. So it will probably be an irrelevant question.
I’ll kinda take a different approach since everyone’s covered the basics with sex work. The problem with how you’ve presented it, is you’re defining an act on how you perceive and want to regulate it. The simple question becomes, “should people have bodily autonomy?”
Everyone has a different opinion on what can be considered intimate/romantic. Some people feel a full body massage is too intimate, others a dinner with a co-worker is too romantic (not agreeing, just throwing out examples). If we start regulating based on how someone feels something should be perceived than it’s a slippery slope. I can fully understand that you believe sex to be romantic while also realizing that others don’t feel the same way or view it as a positive aspect of it. If it’s not being forced on you then it shouldn’t be a problem what consenting adults do in privacy.
Great point, thanks for bringing it up
Do you watch porn? Porn is monetized sex with the purpose of getting money, and with a high degree of abuse and exploitation might I add. You and I and any law don’t get to define the purpose of anything, we only decide wether something is allowed or not. If you want to sell your body for money you should have the freedom to do so, protected by labor laws and health assistance. This is a very good way to reduce the spreading of diseases and reduce the power of exploitative criminals
Porn is monetized sex with the purpose of getting money, and with a high degree of abuse and exploitation might I add
That’s a heteronormative statement. What you meant to say is that corporate live action porn, which is most popular with heterosexual men, is abusive and exploitative. Who is abused by the writing of an erotic romance novel with Fabio on the cover? Who is abused by aged-up Sonic The Hedgehog smut? Who is abused by a drawing of two gay dragons having sex? Who is abused by a video game about cumflation battles between cum wizards? Who is abused by two trans gay women posting their sex tape on the internet for free with no expectation of payment?
When you make a statement about all of porn, which applies only to the kind of porn straight men consume in massive quantities, you’re reinforcing the social myth that straight male sexuality is the only sexuality. You’re ignoring diversity and pretending it doesn’t exist.
I am talking about most porn, which is, coincidentally, hetero “mainstream” porn (because most people are hetero and because the most mainstream porn is of the abusive type), but only because that’s how it is in general.
Also my main point was about money being the main reason behind porn, and that applies to video games, erotica and non-abusive pornographic materials.
Money is involved in Fabio novels, but Sonic smut, gay dragon drawings, and cumflation games can all be downloaded for free. If you pay for porn from 2010 onwards, you’re either really a big fan of a particular artist and are engaging in a consensual transaction, you’re rich, or you’re a sucker.
Man, you are focusing too much on single examples, I am talking about an entire industry.
I’m not a man. There you go again normalising maleness.
I think it should be legal and regulated. It’s a service that people want and others are willing to fill. We just need laws to protect all parties, particularly the workers.
“Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn’t selling fucking legal?” -George Carlin
I approve of sex work, but I don’t approve of the abusive madams and pimps of the world. Usually, they are the problem. Protection should come in a different way.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
