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.
selling your body
i hate that phrasing to describe sex work. no one is “selling their body”, as they are still in control of it. sex workers provide a service, same as a masseuse or hair stylist (except their service involves genitals) and it should be treated as such.
Otherwise one could argue that all (physical) labour is “selling your body”
It seems to me like joining the military is arguably more deserving of the phrase “selling your body”; you’re basically signing up to get injured or killed.
I think the “body” in that expression is quite specifically referring to genitals, or the selling of your intimacy.
Because that’s what’s different from any other physical labour, the part of your body involved. That’s the specific problem of sex work no?
It’s not even an argument really, it’s the undeniable logical conclusion that trading your labor and/or time for compensation is work, period.
It is a high risk job along the lines of coal mining and such, since it will result in an increase in transmitted disease risk. It’s important to acknowledge that, but I am on the side of it being work. I just think we need strong protections in place and regulations to handle it akin to other dangerous jobs. Like, a sex work branch of OSHA.
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.
How is this principally different from a poor person taking any shitty job to pay the bills? Like garbage collector or similarly unpleasant/disrespected jobs. The system always forces poor people to settle for shitty jobs. Sex work is not the issue there, the system is.
It’s different in nature. No other jobs infringe on your intimacy in this way.
I do agree the system is the problem, i also would advocate for better conditions for any difficult jobs.
Therapist, hospice, nursing , sports medicine, massage… a lot of jobs require some level of physical or mental intimacy.
Therapist is another topic, with problems of mental intimacy indeed.
The rest is the patient’s intimacy that you have to deal with. It is a vastly different intimate experience to wash a genitalia and be penetrated. And so, vastly different consequences for your well being.
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
Sex work is going to happen whether it’s legal or not. Might as well regulate it and provide sex workers with a legal framework, healthcare, retirement funds, etc.
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.
Sex work is a more respectable career than debt collector, or CEO.
Or president
Exactly. Perfect example of labor owning the means of production.
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.
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Pretty much perfect answer right here. This is downright encyclopedic.
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.
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.
A very interesting take. I like that we’re questioning the root cause here.
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.
Can you elaborate on the work vs labor dichotomy?
I’m not familiar with the concept, especially because in my language the two would be almost exact synonyms in this context (unless you are Hercules or what not). And Latin languages just get the one.
Labor is when you do a thing that has value to society.
Work is like, a job, where you do labor (or not) and that pays you so that you can spend money to sustain your existence. If you get disabled you can be fired and not have money long term to continue existing.
People, ironically enough, are more efficient laborers when they aren’t doing it in the trappings of work, so there isn’t any reason for work to exist.
Are you the only person using that definition?
Because traditionally English speaking Marxists use them the other way around, as far as I remember, (work is useful, produces use value, labor is economic, produces economic value) if they make that distinction at all.
See for example:
(Posted without endorsement)
EDIT
Apparently the English edition includes a footnote by Friedrich Engels:
As has been stated in a previous note, the English language has two different expressions for these two different aspects of labour: in the Simple Labour-process, the process of producing Use-Values, it is *Work; *in the process of creation of Value, it is *Labour, *taking the term in its strictly economic sense. — F. E.
Which reads very much like you are using them wrong.
They are not the only person who uses the words for each other. When I was doing my undergrad I found that myself and my fellow students used them pretty loosely goosey. As a native English speaker I’ve never had any difficulty telling which way a speaker intended labor and work to mean. The context provided enough. I can see how for people who are not native English speakers, but this isn’t an academic institution. In casual conversation either or are appropriate.
This isn’t in the context of utility value vs exchange value. This is separating value creation from the mode of production. Work as in workplace not work as in physical process
Be that as it may, your ad hoc definition in your first comment was spurious and finds no basis in English language Marxist literature.
Can you phrase this as constructive criticism for which are the proper words to use in this seperate use case or do I need to refer you to the constructive criticism handbook?
Also, establishing working definitions for use in casual conversation is a thing. Please note that I established definitions for their use.
Friend of mine used to be a whore. She says it has been the most fulfilling and fun job she has ever had. She got to meet many interesting people. And she also has a lot of funny stories to tell.
It was also fun for her that she could get tax breaks for underwear and other sexy clothes.
Yes, but ideally there should be regulation to prevent pimping, predation, trafficking, and STI spread. At the very least, decriminalization protects sex workers from fear of prosecution preventing them from seeking healthcare, legal help, etc.
Trafficking is heinous, but it also gets irreverantly thrown around as a whataboutism by people who are against it for personal instead of rational reasons.
The root of the problems with sex work, as always, is tying means of survival to productivity, which I am against both personally and rationally :P
Agreed. If they decriminalise and regulate it, sex work is much safer for all involved. People gotta pay bills and if sex work is their chosen profession, good for them.
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)
I think a great example is OnlyFans. Pornography is close to full sex work, so it’s a fair comparison. Here was a field that was dominated by predatory companies and people in the worst places. Actors and Actresses frequently talked about how they were abused, pushed beyond what they thought was acceptable, underpaid, hurt, raped, and honestly still worse.
Enter OnlyFans, a more legitimate way for workers to create their own content, their own pricing, set their own rules and their own boundaries. By legitimizing pornography and pornographic actors it made the entire thing safer for the workers themselves.
It’s natural that sex work would follow this. It’s wildly known that sex work is not a safe business, and it’s extremely predatory. Taking our opinions out of it completely, if the options are A) let the extremely terrible and predatory underground business continue as it has or B) legitimize the business, add protections, and allow them to set their own rules - well then, isn’t the moral option obvious?
Pornography is
close tofull sex workFTFY
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
Its been said in this thread better than I can - but I wish the people who argue sex work is immoral because you’re “selling your body” would apply that same logic to labor.
For most of us, our body is the only capital we have and we’re taught to devalue that capital into oblivion so those who deplete that capital the most make the smallest possible piece of the pie.
People who argue such things from a “morality” standpoint (translation in this context = religious), they don’t really employ logic or reason. They’re obliged to follow a thousands-year-old book, which tells them it’s a sin and filthy and so they’re miserable, and so why should anyone else have any enjoyment.
