The most troubling thing, that is somewhat observable in today's threads, is that ostracizing sex work is almost entirely normalized. People favor legal structures analogous to Don't Ask Don't Tell. This tees up a system of cascading effects:
- Sex workers must now navigate a very fluid monetary system. Sex workers must be paid in cash, Bitcoin, etc. Then they have to somehow represent this money to the federal government to pay their taxes.
- Everyone around sex workers are considered criminals. Unknowingly rent a property to a sex worker? You're a criminal. Date a sex worker? Suspected to be a criminal. Lend money to a sex worker? Criminal. Use sex work services? Definitely a criminal.
This system shoves sex workers into an intentional class system that prohibits them from owning property, prohibits their use of public services, prohibits their utilization of our monetary system. All of these things, when used, don't just benefit the sex workers - they benefit you.
One of the uncomfortable conversations that many people don't want to have is that sex work is heavily used by society and yet neglected constantly, thereby making it dangerous for both sex workers and the users, even making it more dangerous at times.
>ostracizing sex work is almost entirely normalized
100%. One of the universal curses people throw at each other is implying that someone's mother is a prostitute, or that they are a product of extramarital sex, implying the promiscuity of the mother. This all is hand-in-hand with the implied comtempt towards women of course.
This is an educated, albeit only a speculation of mine that I never confirmed: in the past (medieval times) people used to describe inferior things by comparing them to dogs like "dog's weather", "you will die like a dog" and many other sayings. It's wrong to think that your mother is being insulted by being called the "son of a bitch" (it's also pointless to censor the word as you did). What it means, or at least what it originally meant, is that you came out of a womb of a dog.
In other words, if you're with your mom in a room, and someone calls you a son of a bitch, the claim is not that the woman you take for your mom is a bitch, rather, that you're wrong and your mom is actually not in the room (unless there's also a female dog in that room).
> 100%. One of the universal curses people throw at each other is implying that someone's mother is a prostitute, or that they are a product of extramarital sex, implying the promiscuity of the mother. This all is hand-in-hand with the implied comtempt towards women of course.
> Because no one's throwing around "your father is a prostitute" as an insult.
There's all kinds of things that people insult men/fathers for that they wouldn't use for women/mothers (e.g. strength, financial success, etc). It's just gender roles, not generalized contempt for women (and going that far is probably just politically motivated exaggeration).
I think the contempt is there, because we're talking about someone's parent, and for some reason, all cultures (that I know of) picked the mother as the one being out of line. As in, when there's someone that's out of line, that has to be the woman. If this would be random, or balanced, we'd curse at others like your father is a deadbeat, or that your father's sperm is weak, and therefore you are weak, or things like that. Yet that just doesn't come up much.
Edit: I do get your point though. It's not as straightforward as I implied. In fact I think that it's a complex, interwoven system, which comes up unfair for everyone. But I do observe a general hatred toward women, and if something like this curse comes up, I can't help but think that the two are in connection.
> I think the contempt is there, because we're talking about someone's parent, and for some reason, all cultures (that I know of) picked the mother as the one being out of line. As in, when there's someone that's out of line, that has to be the woman.
There's definitely contempt there, but just for the person being insulted.
I think you're analyzing those kinds of insults using the wrong framework. It doesn't have much to do with women as a class, but rather with the relationship with the insulted person to his mother. Insulting someone's mother will probably get under someone's skin more than insulting their father, because (especially historically) they probably have a warmer/closer relationship with their mother due to gender roles around child-rearing.
>I think the contempt is there, because we're talking about someone's parent
But I feel that this is more because the mother is the more 'revered' parent? People often hate their father, but it's far rarer for people to hate their mother. Cursing someone's mother is, to me, just a way to hurt someone by insulting the person they love the most.
This of course would imply the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.
cursing someone's mother not their father shows exacly the opposite attitude to women (mothers) to me: since the offender presumes people are more loving to their mothers than fathers, therefore expects that maledicting the mother hurt more.
True. In fact we’ve made televised “I’m not the father” dancing into a national pastime.
The patriarchy mentality our norms are built upon includes blaming women for everything ‘wrong’. Women are blamed for premarital sex. Men are celebrated for their scores. Women are paid less yet have less leisure time. They are the first to blame if anything goes wrong with children, including just bringing them into public spaces. Men aren’t expected to be responsible parents, and usually aren’t primary caregivers. Women are the butt of jokes, and are constantly told they aren’t funny. Some men are actively campaigning to make women property again. Women are forced to give birth for anyone that inseminates them without exception in many jurisdictions now.
Not all women are sex workers, but the fact is that female sex workers (sex entrepreneurs?!) are generally disrespected by patriarchs and their women. That internalized distain comes out in a variety of ways, but quite materially as well (ie bank policy and regulations). Male sex workers are envied by other males. “I’d love that job”.
Do yourself a favor and read "Self-Made Man". It's obvious you're only seeing this from one side of the coin and lack the perspective of the other side in some kind of crusade.
Both sexes have their problems and the status quo causes stigmas for both. To claim women are uniquely seen as "lesser beings" in a developed world is horribly naïve.
Blarg. I read the summary of it, it’s going on my list thx. I grew up with a patriarch mentality and took it into my marriage and business. It’s just plain wrong, it’s effects are severe, and it’s been a long personal journey to relearn and reinterpret stuff.
I’m not on a crusade per se, but I guess I’m at a place where I’m now sharing aggregated angst I’ve heard from women and read about. Men absolutely have unmet needs, and much of that actually comes from patriarchal values.
The phrase “I don’t see color” seems admirable but ultimately was determined by researchers to be one of the strongest indicators of racial bias. It’s a problem because it ignores or denies the struggles that minorities have and do face. It projects a meritocracy where there isn’t one. I’d love to live in a “post-racial” society, but we just don’t. In the same way, “I don’t see gender” or “it’s hard for everyone” is a polite way of lying to yourself and denying the harsh reality that women objectively experience.
I have stats and citations for everything I’ve posted here, but I’m lazy and on my phone. I hope you’ll find that most of my claims easily substantiated, not some naïve diatribe. Hit me up if something I said needs backup.
Re: the phrase I don't see colour. Do you have a reference or link for that research? That dovetails elegantly into something I'm dealing with right now.
The Legitimation of Black Subordination: The Impact of Color-Blind Ideology on African American Education
Dawn G. Williams and Roderic R. Land
The Journal of Negro Education
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Fall, 2006), pp. 579-588 (10 pages)
Published By: Journal of Negro Education
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40034659
>To claim women are uniquely seen as "lesser beings" in a developed world is horribly naïve.
Not really. The developed world barely raised a few generations since women can vote. This is not saying men don't have problems - but the field is still very often tilted against women.
The OP appears to be mostly talking about porn, but your points seem to be mostly addressing prostitution.
Prostitution has long considered an disreputable and undesirable activity, and it along with other types of sex work are often tightly coupled with involuntary exploitation. A lot of the stuff that you're criticizing derives from attempts to continue to legally discourage prostitution while preventing the legal system from further punishing women who are being exploited.
Isn’t prostitution essentially porn without the cameras? Why ostracize legal prostitution? If porn is allowed, prostitution should be too.
Yes, there are issues of exploitation and licensing. They are at both places - maybe less for porn because it’s not as much in the shadows. Bring sex work out of the shadows. Just normalize it.
> Isn’t prostitution essentially porn without the cameras? Why ostracize legal prostitution? If porn is allowed, prostitution should be too.
IIRC, porn would be illegal, except the performance aspect gave it First Amendment cover. It might also be significant that porn seems to have traditionally involved a 3rd party paying two people to have sex, so that's arguably not prostitution. It's probably arguably illegal prostitution if one person pays another to sex with them and films it. You can't videotape an illegal act to make it legal.
The camera provides a record of the transaction for tax purposes.
Prostituion is much harder to monitor, especially when the buyer also has incentive to pretend that the transaction didn't take place.
There are, perhaps, solutions that could be developed to deal the problem but if you are the lawmaker why would you go out of your way to make your job harder?
The system failed to act as intended then, and I'd honestly not be remisced if I didn't mention it creating new victims. The people staring at that data and making laws know this; it's not like they're unaware and yet these systems are still staples. At some point you have to sit back and question whether they're actually trying to solve a problem at all.
> Everyone around sex workers are considered criminals. Unknowingly rent a property to a sex worker? You're a criminal. Date a sex worker? Suspected to be a criminal. Lend money to a sex worker? Criminal. Use sex work services? Definitely a criminal.
If you feel so confidently in the laws of your country there's a simple exercise you can do: get an escort with the intended purpose of asking them about their experiences. If you feel fear, angst, etc, if you start googling legalities then I think you'll have a better perspective of the intricate web these policies have woven to trap people and accuse them of moral crimes.
> One of the uncomfortable conversations that many people don't want to have is that sex work is heavily used by society and yet neglected constantly, thereby making it dangerous for both sex workers and the users, even making it more dangerous at times.
I have heard this familiar argument made for the legalization of narcotics.
What is "funny" is that this view is held by two very different groups of people.
- Moralist conservatives which despise sex work and sex workers for ideological and religious reasons
- Progressives which think it's degrading and negative that somebody is forced to sell their sex to survive (which is a noble thought), and therefore think banning sex work will help that goal (we all know how that went wrt drugs...)
I investigated this a few years ago in Australia. Sex work is legal in Australia, kinda. It is legal to exchange sexual services for money, but supporting and assisting such a transaction is illegal. So a landlord who rents a property to a sex worker is breaking the law. A payment processor who processes the card transaction is breaking the law, and so on. There are some clauses around managing establishments that basically make brothels just, barely, within the law.
It's a ridiculous position in that it almost forces sex workers onto the street or into brothels (which often take a huge chunk of each transaction). There was no way of getting my client (I was freelancing for a sex worker to try and solve some of their tech issues) any reasonable ability to process credit cards. Or do a wide range of things that we'd consider normal for a small business (like set up a Stripe account, or even a business bank account, or rent an office).
Ostracizing sex work has become fully normalized, so unfortunately people read this and immediately think, "Why not pretend to be someone else?", "Why not just do other illegal things (like tax evasion)?"
In early modern venice, the state operated and promoted a special place for prostitutes to work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_delle_Tette - "Titty Bridge") because they were afraid that men not getting enough sex would turn them gay!
The history of sex work is fascinating and wildly diverse.
I don't think conservatives are attempting to endanger sex workers - they believe sex work is fundamentally risky and leads to abuse. There is no safe way to do sex work that doesn't result in problems. Therefore they believe it should be discouraged and made illegal, the same way many progressives believe firearms should be illegal since they are dangerous.
Tribal groups are alive and well, and even if you dislike your opposing one you should try to at least understand their motives if only for selfish reasons.
Many religious conservatives aren't worried about the safety of sex workers. They believe the act is sin and shouldn't be tolerated in any context. Nevermind the fact that many religious historical figures were themselves prostitutes.
Many conservatives, regardless of religion, believe sex work damages the traditional nuclear family structure. This is similar to the Roman decadence argument.
Many liberals believe sex work is degrading to women. Nevermind the fact that legalizing it would empower workers, make it safer, and decrease trafficking. Nevermind the entire LGBT spectrum.
There is entrenched opposition from all points on the spectrum. It's maddening that "vices" like sex and drugs that don't hurt anyone are so denigrated.
I'm not sure it is this. Instead, I think it is that conservatives think that sex work is fundamentally immoral and that therefore it cannot be accepted by society, regardless of any harm or benefit created by this policy. It isn't "hey we believe that sex workers fundamentally cannot be protected from abuse" like something like child labor but is instead "sex work is moral degeneracy and must be stopped."
“Moral degeneracy” is a problem (in their view) because of the associated harms — which we’ve learned over time and encoded into our traditions. That things they call “moral degeneracy” fundamentally are harmful to a healthy society and to the people involved.
That is, they think sex work is harmful to the people who participate and those nearby (eg, children of sex workers).
Morality isn’t merely arbitrary and capricious rules, but an evolved code of conduct which tries to avoid things that are harmful. (Or at least, were — eg, prohibitions on pork.)
> “Moral degeneracy” is a problem (in their view) because of the associated harms
You're assuming the social conservative subscribes to a consequential ethics system. But a social conservative subscribing to deontological ethics is more likely, particularly if they're a religious social conservative.
Well, the modern conservative movement is an alliance of several groups.
Some conservatives get from sex work to prohibition via moral degeneracy - perhaps they'll want strong moral fibre from their politicians and oppose all forms of corruption.
Other conservatives reason via religion - perhaps they'll also oppose teaching evolution, and support 'in god we trust' signs in classrooms.
Still other conservatives don't really care either way about prostitution, but have strong opinions on guns or taxes and kinda tolerate the rest of the conservative platform.
And there are even conservatives who think the state has no business regulating what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors, and the smaller and less intrusive a state is the better; and they're frankly embarrassed their fellow conservatives are inviting the state into the bedroom.
Not so. Consider gay sex. Conservatives consider this to be "moral degeneracy" and seek to ban things like gay marriage or even gay sex altogether. Occasionally, conservatives will claim this is about protecting gay people from disease but this is obviously a lie because
1. they never exclude gay women
2. they don't actually follow through on other policies to prevent STDs in the gay community and even frequently consider things like HIV to be divine judgement
It becomes clear that the concern about "moral degeneracy" is not at all related to a desire to keep gay people from experiencing harm.
Similarly, the concern about "moral degeneracy" related to sex work is not at all related to a desire to keep sex workers from experiencing harm. Instead it is about "protecting" society from what they perceive to be evil harlots.
The first amendment restricts congress, not voters. Voters are free to vote for whatever politician they like for whatever reason they like, including religious reasons. The constitution does not demand that religious citizens demarcate and compartmentalize their religious and civic beliefs when they go to vote.
It doesn't even do that. It restricts what kind of laws congress can create, not the reasoning congressmen use when choosing which laws to support.
Completely secular and constitutional laws may be enacted by congressmen that have religious reasons to support that law; e.g. religious legislator may vote for a law against murder because murder is against their religion. The first amendment doesn't regulate the thoughts and reasoning of legislators; religious reasoning for secular laws are fine.
And conversely, secular reasoning for religious laws doesn't make the law okay; a cynical atheist might say that religion is necessary for controlling the unwashed masses, but despite that secular reasoning, a law mandating a religion would still plainly violate the first amendment.
What argument? The point is that everybody votes based on their particular opinions of what is moral or immoral, often related to their religious beliefs, this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not at odds with freedom of religion.
The point is not that all religious reasoning leads to constitutional laws; that is obviously false. The point is that religious reasoning dos not necessarily lead to unconstitutional laws.
That is easily the most wildly inaccurate categorization of conservative positions on sex work I have ever, and am ever likely to, encounter. Conservatives (in the US anyway) view sex work as grossly amoral and sex workers as sub-human and a threat to the community. Collectively they don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about sex worker safety, they just want it banned outright through any means necessary.
Opinions vary. Certainly many people, not just conservatives would think that sex work is immoral. I don't believe I've ever met someone that believes sex workers are subhuman, that reeks of hyperbole. The perception of sex work as a threat to community is probably wider spread still, in its current form it certainly isn't conducive to safety for anyone involved.
Overall, you're simply setting up a strawman that poorly characterizes your opponents. There are many reasons why someone would oppose sex work, including concern over the safety of the sex workers. Even if it were fully legalized and regulated there would still be significant risk when you have two people who don't know each other well in a room alone together and questions of sex and money are money are involved. Especially if it is a physically stronger man with a woman. The more cogent arguments take that into consideration along with the other effects such as sex workers becoming trapped in the occupation, the poor prospects for aging workers to earn an income or be able to retire, the second order effects on the community which are poorly understood but could be far reaching, economic effects of making the occupation more available to the working age population who might otherwise pursue other careers, etc. All of that generally lines up with the conservative take on any change which is to ask "Are you sure you have considered all of the consequences?" and "Do the benefits outweigh the costs both short term and long term?".
It reeks of hyperbole you say? I invite you to attend services at the Southern Baptist church of your choosing and then try bringing up the topic of sex workers after services. Depending on where you attempt this you might make it to your car under your own power.
Your claim that I'm advancing a strawman argument here strongly suggests to me that you may not have a solid grasp on conservative attitudes on this topic. I assure you Alabama (for example) exists, and it's residents absolutely have opinions about things.
I actually grew up in a Southern Baptist church, worked in it for a few years and still ocassionally interact with that community.
First of all it's a diverse community, both in skin color and in national origin. Second, I have never seen any member of that group do any worse than engage in debate. That you "might not make it to your car" is such hilarious hyperbole that it's bordering on satire.
That sex work is dangerous, leads to the abuse of women and often times is associated with sex trafficking is their view. They will tell you that. Some of the people, at least from my families church, were sex trafficking victims. Many of them help support and house battered women, help provide rape counseling on a weekly basis, and otherwise certainly have at least anecdotal reasons for their beliefs.
You aren't the only one here who grew up in a Southern Baptist church and buddy I see you over there pretending the 700 club isn't a thing. I've seen fist fights break out during funeral services on more than one occasion so don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.
> Conservatives (in the US anyway) view sex work as...
You did not specify Southern Baptist church members, which I am sure form a part of the entire set of conservatives in the US but do not solely comprise it. I'm also sure that Alabama doesn't consist of 100% conservative leaning people nor do I believe that all of its conservatives share the same opinions. Please try to think clearly, I don't have time to correct all of your statements.
"I don't think conservatives are attempting to endanger sex workers - they believe sex work is fundamentally risky and leads to abuse."
Having established that you don't refute my claim that (at minimum) large portions of the conservative constituency take a militantly hard line on the topic of sex work that puts us a lot closer to "well, I knew this guy once who claimed to be a conservative that also said this thing once" than "the conservative position on sex work is X". If you insist I can absolutely compile a list of links of everything from "religious leaders" to pundits and politicians openly railing against sex workers. Your sassy banter doesn't impress.
Prostitution has been legal in Amsterdam since 2000, so a good percentage of the current sex workers were born into that world. Has someone done a case study on the long term effects?
Really well thought out reply. Thanks for taking the time to write this, it really helped me understand conservative positions on not legalizing prostitution
This is why so many sex workers prefer decriminalization to legalization. Because many times legalization comes with these shotgun laws that prevent anyone from helping out a sex worker in any way without facing legal consequences that were built to be severe enough to punish the worst sex traffickers.
Do you want to pay your ex-marine brother to sit in the next room to make sure you're safe?
You can't, he'd face severe penalties for supporting the transaction.
Lying to your payment processor about what you really sell typically always ends up in the same way. They catch up with you and your account is terminated.
Ask all those CBDs sellers that pretended they were selling "supplements", takes a while but eventually.. all shut down.
My point is that the "war on drugs" approach is pretty ineffective while at the same time inflicting significant collateral damage. It already is underground, and it already is almost illegal in most jurisdictions.
(Actually criminalizing the exchange of valuable consideration for sex hits the problem that things that look suspiciously like it are endemic in hetero dating and "giving money to your tinder date for a taxi" becomes an offence)
Your religion is not my religion. The law should not prevent me from doing things just because you think it'll send me to hell, anymore than the law should force you to practice my religion.
If you don't believe in freedom of religion, that's your choice, but it sort of one of the founding principles of the USA.
And yet the first amendment guarantees freedom of religion and none of these 13 colonies banned prostitution, so it seems your assumption is incorrect.
> Laws against adultery in colonial America were very harsh. Despite this, there is only one known execution for adultery in American history: it occurred in the Colony of Massachusetts in 1643, when the married 18 year old Mary Latham[118] and her extramarital lover James Britton were executed.[119][120]
This is new to me, I had no idea. But it seems that in colonial Massachusetts at least, adultery was a capital crime. Technically colonial Massachusetts isn't Massachusetts state. I don't know when this/these laws were revised, but it seems plausible that some of them lasted past the colonial era.
Which makes sense. Too many lawmakers would have to be hanged if it was actually illegal, as there were plenty of scandals around affairs made public. Hamilton for example admitted to having an affair (https://www.history.com/news/alexander-hamilton-maria-reynol...), which would of course be a crazy thing to do if he could be hanged over it.
Well, even today adultry is illegal in some states, but thankfully not a capital crime. As of 2022 It's illegal in 16 states (including a few surprising states like New York) and a felony in 3 (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma.)
But yes, enforcement is rare and probably for exactly the reason you say.
For some time now it seems moral / christian crusaders are invading HN. All those accounts have very low karma (sometimes even negative) and insist on "values" and "morals".
I wonder if it's the result of a concerted effort or the inevitable consequence of HN becoming mainstream.
It's probably the latter, but it's pretty annoying.
Basically half the US thinks this way and votes this way. If you are a conservative and upset at my comment, understand the people you vote for SIGNIFICANTLY support the religious nuts.
Billions of people still live under the framing that their religion is the only truth in the universe and think that prostitution is defined as some sort of bad thing according to their holy books. Even just limiting to Christians and Muslims, that's billions of diverse people who are limited to very against prostitution and sex out of wedlock. Why are you surprised that some of them can find this community?
Because they weren't in the past. And because HN is an international forum for tech geeks; I think social conservatives and Christians are underrepresented in tech; and I am quite certain the kind of social conservatism and "Christianity" that exist in the US doesn't exist in the same proportion, or with the same beliefs, elsewhere. In Europe for instance, so-called "pro-lifers", while they exist, make up a small minority of the public.
Fair, but if the underrepresentation is 50% say, half of a large number is not tiny. Tech nowadays is a major career path akin to law or medicine, less of the niche idiosyncratic subculture it was 20 years ago.
Anecdotally, my socially conservative church is full of FAANG developers & one of our lay pastors is a highly-cited ML researcher
A significant amount of people aren't looking at this as an issue of metrics, convenience, economics, or anything of the sort. That's a utilitarian approach. The vast majority of people opposed to legal & regulated prostitution are approaching it from a religious and moral perspective. The Christians that the article rags on believe that the Bible is truth that has been revealed to man by God and that it encourages the civil magistrates to deter sexually perverse behavior of all kinds including but not limited to pornography and prostitution.
As @a-user-you-like has pointed out, your interpretation is a common misconception about what 'freedom of religion' means. The framers certainly did not mean that the laws passed by the state and federal governments were to be completely free from moral judgement based on religion or more particularly Christianity. There is no conflict, because neither the states or the federal government are instituting a state church. Instead, you have individual citizens insisting that the laws of their land should be derived from God's law and not judged by some arbitrary and immeasurable standard such as the happiness of prostitutes and their clientele.
If I had to guess (just a guess, I don't really believe these things.)
- Lowering birthrate; people may be less likely to have a family and kids if the primary driver for these things (sex) is already taken care of.
- Higher STI rate (regulation might help here).
- More isolation; people are less likely to go out and mingle if one of the reasons to do so is easy and transactional.
- Wealth inequality; I believe men are more likely to pay for sex, and women sex workers tend to make more. So, money will move from one gender to the other unidirectionally. This may result in wealth inequality if sex work becomes wide spread.
Precisely because it feeds the destructive attitude that the "get laid" impulse is a sort of mechanical need that can be cleanly isolated from the "find a long-term partner" impulse. Sex work for someone who wants to get laid is like cigarettes for someone who wants to lose weight - it'll work (nicotine is a reasonably strong appetite suppressant), but at what cost?
Imagine you met someone who says "yeah, I used to really struggle on Tinder, so now I've uninstalled the apps and just hire a prostitute every Saturday". Does he seem like a healthy guy whose needs are being met?
It sounds like none of my or your business. Neither of us has any legitimate interest in them other than do they rob anyone? Do they burn down houses? Do they perform at some job and pay taxes? If they spend all their money on prostitutes, it's no more your business than if they spend it all on video games or cars or rare stamps.
I don't agree. A society where prostitution is welcomed and celebrated is very different than one where it's not, and it's entirely reasonable for me to say I'd like to live in the second kind of society. You mention cars, so I'd point to muffler mandates as a good analogy - an un-muffled car won't rob anyone or burn down your house, but because they're loud and annoying they've been prohibited.
I garantee without even knowing you ahead of time, that I could find 10 things about your life that you value, that I could make an argument that society would benefit if you weren't allowed those things.
I don't have to know anything about you ahead of time because this applies equally to every human on the planet.
Thus your argument is invalid.
Worse than that that, it's not merely in error which anyone can be wrong about anything, it's an ugly offensive personality trait to even want to try to make that sort of argument and rationalization in the first place.
Have you ever lived in a society that welcomes and celebrates sex work? The only one that springs to mind is Holland, and they have a great society. I would much rather Australia had Dutch attitudes to this (and a bunch of other stuff; Aussies are secretly very authoritarian)
If you enjoy the status quo on tobacco, the people you have to thank for it are strong, dedicated anti-smoking advocates who think smoking is absolutely their business and would happily ban it if that were politically feasible. It used to be that smoking was celebrated and as a consequence happened everywhere. Stepping into a restaurant, bar, or airplane meant breathing in clouds of cigarette smoke. Smokers at the time would argue, quite passionately, that because their vices are none of your business it's unfair to try and drive smoking out of public life.
I'm torn on whether it should be completely illegal, because I've seen some kinda persuasive arguments in the direction of decriminalization. In particular, you don't want people who do sex work to feel like they can't get help without going to jail. But I'm confident that "ban it all" is much closer to the truth than "none of our business".
If someone out there is actively advocating to be able to have sex with a prostitute next to you in a restraunt then I see your point. Otherwise prostitution is already not part of public life.
There are people out there (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/09/sex-work-...) advocating for prostitution as a reasonable career path which should be discussed openly with women who feel undervalued or unfulfilled in their current career.
I don't think people are gonna start plowing each other in public, but I think there's a very real possibility that in a decade or two it could be considered strange and prudish to tell your friends and family that they shouldn't make an OnlyFans. I've seen some spaces online that are already at that point, although it's always hard to know whether online subcultures represent anything in the real world.
At one time they said the same thing about exposing any skin at all even at the beach.
Every human, yes including children gasp has a body with body parts, so mere exposure to the sight of them and knowledge of their existance is not harmful. Sight of the act of sex is merely more of the same. Kids on farms see it every day from birth.
At worst it's perhaps distasteful or lacks appropriate decorum in some contexts. I find practically everyone to lack taste or decorum in most WalMarts. It's not a valid argument.
It's only worth about as much legal consequence as defecating in the wrong place. In fact defecating is worth more since it at least carries an actual public health consequence to others beyond "I don't want to see that"
"I don't want to see that" is an utterly invalid demand, since anyone can say that about anyone for any reason. They used to be able to say it about merely being a mixed race couple in public, or hell a lot of people still do say it about gay couples or trans individuals merely existing in the room. It is ever so slowly being recognized that in order to try to claim any kind of say over anyone else like that, you have to show harm, and no one can show any harm from a person merely existing as gay or trans or black or female etc. Anything you can say about how obviously depraved and harmful it would be to see naked people or sex acts in public, used to be said about all kinds of ordinary harmless things. People were imprisoned or killed over nothing but "I don't want to see that" and "I don't like it that that exists" without any actual harm to justify it.
Talking this way about sex work and evidense of sex work being visible in public, is exactly the same.
I don't think there can be a rigid distinction between "I don't want to see that" and "actual harm". We can presumably agree that it would be wrong if Google put up posters of naked women all over the office, and that the EEOC is right to prohibit such things as a hostile work environment. But what "actual harm" could you point to beyond the fact that the posters are offensive and people don't want to see them? I understand the appeal of being able to take a "live and let live" attitude without considering these kind of tricky values judgments, but I just don't see how you can avoid it.
So a buisiness that isn't any of the many that might legitimately have pictures of naked women in their offices or other public spaces where employees have to work, has them.
What makes them a hostile work environment? Hostile or harmful to who, and by what mechanism?
I'll proceed on the assumption that it causes women to feel threatened by the men in the area and/or the owners/managers who installed the posters.
This line of reasoning is essentially the same as blaming women for the rapes they endure because they should have made sure they didn't look attractive to any men, instead of holding men to a standard to be responsible for their actions.
The harm in your example is that by putting up these posters of naked women being valued only for their body, you send the message that that is how women are seen here. A woman is likely to feel she is at risk of being objectified the same as the women you've put on the wall as literal objects.
I'm confused what the analogous harm is to you when two adults have consensual sex behind closed doors where you can't see or know about it.
Who said consentual sex causes any harm? I'm arguing the opposite.
The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
The argument that women will feel threatened because the posters will cause the men to attack them, or even just low level menace them, is saying that men are helpless reacting animals and are not responsible for their actions, which is the same argument as saying women are responsible for rape by not dressing badly enough.
These theoretical posters are simply and merely inappropriate for facililitating the work being done in most workplaces. They are unwelcome but it's merely because they are a distraction and an annoyance. It doesn't cause any sort of harm that can justify any legal consequences.
There is no argument for making them illegal, and in fact they're already not because there are tons of businesses where such images are central to the business. The same image will be interpreted as porn in one room while it's just the businesses product on the wall at countless clothing manufacturers. So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
> Who said consentual sex causes any harm? I'm arguing the opposite.
The comment I'm replying to is. They are arguing that prostitution is somehow harmful to them and should be banned. I'll note the analogy of a poster on the wall of ones workplace is pretty poor, unless someone is advocating that prostitutes should be manning the hallways of Google. If you don't want to be exposed to prostitution it's easy to avoid. If you don't want to be exposed to the decoration of your place of work it's a lot harder.
> The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
You mean the women who signed up for this line of work voluntarily rather than walking into their software engineering job and finding these posters on the wall? I think there's a clear differentiation between the two. Google probably shouldn't decorate it's offices with graphic images of say, people being operated on, I think that'd arguably be just as hostile a work environment. That doesn't mean that every surgeon is being abused.
> So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
Agreed the harm is not in the inherit to the image. As with many (most?) human interactions, context matters.
> which should be discussed openly with women who feel undervalued or unfulfilled in their current career.
Why shouldn't it be "discussed openly"? Why should a person making a good living in their career not be allowed to discuss it? I'm also not getting where your getting the "women who feel undervalued or unfulfilled in their current career". It seems like your implying she's suggesting we push these women into that work, but that's not supported by your article at all.
And yeah, maybe in 10-years it'll be frowned on to tell people they shouldn't make their money the way they choose. I don't see why it should be anymore acceptable to tell fully grown adults you don't like them making their money on OnlyFans vs say joining the military or starting a risky business.
Poo pooing adult's life decisions uninvited is generally frowned upon. There's no reason we need an exception to this for OnlyFans.
I also now wonder exactly where the line is here. We were talking prostitution now the goalposts have moved to OnlyFans, so I guess nudity for money is now unacceptable? That's a pretty broad line that rules out a lot of modelling and mainstream acting as well.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't comment like you're on reddit or Facebook.
I commented like I'm on a site that values discussion over blind downvotes, but also substance over empty moral claims.
I was genuinely interested in reading some arguments for that claim. (After all nowadays it's s trope that this or that thing corrupts society. Porn, money, capital, the Internet, music, 5G, drugs, sex, millennials, conservatives, radicals, atheists. And of course DnD.)
> Despite a user base of over 130 million, OnlyFans has failed to attract venture capital
I don't get why that's a problem? They already built their platform, it works, they're the gold standard and they have a massive paying userbase! Why do they need VC money? Why would you want to dilute your stock rather than just build with your already existing, sizeable revenue stream?
It's not a problem now, but in a strictly rational economy a company that was so obviously going to acquire a massive paying userbase should have had no issue finding investors back when it would have been useful.
Adult content hosting sites face some unique (read expensive) challenges relating to both scale and content moderation. It's not like you can just run videos through a nudity detector to stop your servers from accidentally hosting terabytes of kiddie porn.
Usually it makes sense to take investor money if you want to grow faster than your revenue stream allows. It lets you potentially capture the market before your competition.
But I don't think that there's much direct competition to OnlyFans, or that there is a market which is easy to capture by copycatting them.
Hence, they can afford to not take any investment. This is similar to how GitHub operated and grew for the first few years.
It would have been useful early to pay for hosting. OF may not exist today if not for the great de-porning of Tumblr that happened about a year after they started as a business.
The Tumblr de-porning was the single most SMH business moment I may have heard of since Yahoo’s previous worst business move ever of not buying Google. I mean - my God…
Yahoo may very well be the single dumbest major tech company in history.
Just…blunder after blunder after shitty decision. Watching its history is almost the definition of seeing a slow motion train wreck. It’s almost impressive.
With regards to Tumblr - I can’t imagine what potential business decision could’ve been worth what they had to know was suicide. Why make the acquisition and then kill your user base? It’s not like they didn’t know. That’s probably one of the single biggest wastes of $1b I’ve seen. Why buy it to knowingly, fully intentionally, throw it down the toilet? So baffling.
The only reason I can think of is some executive was so morally opposed to it that they value getting rid of the NSFW stuff on Tumblr over money. Twitter had no qualms taking in the manly Tumblr users who went over there instead.
From what I recall at the time it was because Yahoo wanted to go down the standard ad serving model to monetize tumblr and the presence of porn was getting in the way of that. They didn't realize or didn't believe that one of the big reasons a lot of people were on tumblr to begin with was for smut.
Especially because it also means that potential OnlyFans competitor will come across the same fate. So there is no need to worry about them (unless the owners intended to get massive cash asap).
"It also establishes a precedent, allowing private companies to set opaque, moralizing, and arbitrary censorship terms without oversight."
Yes, this is done with other things as well.
On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others.
On the other hand, it seems that many financial things are set by international organizations, which the processors would still need to follow to be included in the central systems, such as the coding (does adult content have its own code, or is it under entertainment?).
Corporate consolidation made sure that a lot of important markets aren't free anymore. Vertical integration between corporations made that even worse - e.g. if Visa won't process your payments, people with Apple phones won't be able to pay either. These kind of things - there's too little competition across many markets so big players just itegrate with themselves and newcomers simply can't compete due to integration and network effects.
It's important to point out that this is a natural consequence of a market system, and it's exacerbated by allowing capital to rule those markets.
Until we recognize that, we're not going to be able to fix it. One can't just declare that "If only the market were truly free, it wouldn't be like this." We've seen this play out on the freest market that has ever existed (the early internet) and we ended up in the exact same place - with a few massive players buying up all their competitors and completely dominating their verticals. There was as little regulation or government interference in the early internet as there has ever been in just about any market. And we still got there.
Corporate consolidation is a consequence of free markets, not a corruption of them.
This statement is fundamentally flawed on two different core aspects.
First, the phenomenon you're referring to is "natural monopolies" which is a well understood situation which appears in every freshman-level Economics 101 class, but that only applies to certain industries. For instance, utilities are natural monopolies because it's far more efficient to run one set of wires to every house rather than try to have 10 competing companies all run their own power lines. But most products & services don't fall into this category.
Second, "free market" is a specific economic term which means markets which are free from governmental intervention in terms of price controls or subsidies, but are also free from monopolies, cartels or other anti-competitive behavior by any participant. Using the government to break up a monopoly or cartel moves the system towards a "free market". Having zero regulation which allows one or two participants to distort the market moves the system away from a "free market".
> First, the phenomenon you're referring to is "natural monopolies" which is a well understood situation which appears in every freshman-level Economics 101 class, but that only applies to certain industries. For instance, utilities are natural monopolies because it's far more efficient to run one set of wires to every house rather than try to have 10 competing companies all run their own power lines. But most products & services don't fall into this category.
I'm not referring to natural monopolies. While I concede many of the cases people would immediately think of in my description of the early internet (Google, Facebook, et al) could readily be classified as natural monopolies, we've seen plenty of consolidation in areas that most economists wouldn't classify as such - Amazon for instance, a bookstore or e-commerce site is not a natural monopoly. And we've seen the same consolidation off the internet everywhere. There are few significant verticals, at this point, that aren't dominated by a handful of giant consolidated players. Independent of how much regulation there is or isn't in that vertical.
> Second, "free market" is a specific economic term which means markets which are free from governmental intervention in terms of price controls or subsidies, but are also free from monopolies, cartels or other anti-competitive behavior by any participant. Using the government to break up a monopoly or cartel moves the system towards a "free market". Having zero regulation which allows one or two participants to distort the market moves the system away from a "free market".
And this is where economists trip over their own feet and fall face first into the mud of religion. This is a self-referential, recursive definition that allows you to pretend a major consequence of a system is not, in fact, an issue.
You realize that you just defined a "free market" to be a market that is free of regulation, but requires regulation to maintain its state as a free market?
> Amazon for instance, a bookstore or e-commerce site is not a natural monopoly
It is, in a way, because Amazon as an e-commerce site is really a fulfillment company which does tend towards a natural monopoly. It's inefficient to have dozens of companies with warehouses everywhere Amazon does to offer the same delivery guarantees.
E-commerce then trends towards a natural monopoly because Amazon has cheaper fulfillment than anyone else. AWS further cements that, by making their hosting costs cheaper than almost anyone else.
Without intervention, it's not shocking that whoever owns the natural monopoly on fulfillment would have a monopoly on e-commerce. In much the same way that whoever owns the rail lines would likely also dominate verticals largely defined by transportation costs.
>You realize that you just defined a "free market" to be a market that is free of regulation, but requires regulation to maintain its state as a free market?
Did you even read the comment? The only constraint he put on "government regulation" is that price controls and subsidies aren't allowed. That is a tiny subset of government regulation, and not equivalent to all possible government regulation.
Honestly, how long will it take people to realize that money and land are the two most distorting monopolies in the capitalist market that enforces the formation of monopolies in all other industries as only monopoly returns in the non monopoly sectors are able to get the "root" monopolists off your back?
Companies often die not because of a lack of money but rather because of too much money and the resulting profitability expectations by the financial sector that cannot be met.
The solution to those problems is very easy. You implement a land value tax and a resource based tax to allocate both land and resources properly. Once you have that you can introduce negative interest rates based on at least a dozen theories you can pick your favourite one. Allowing negative interest rates defuses artificial profitability expectations and allows people and governments to pay off their debt.
The reason why a negative interest rate works is because money is a public institution and liquidity is a degree to how well accepted this public institution is. This means the owner of the money can sell this public service just like the owner of land can sell the convenient public services near his property as a perk. So the lender will always want to get paid interest for the public services the liquidity he holds onto provides and this then forces a profitability expectation on the borrower even of it is completely unreasonable during a recession for example.
In both cases the government is providing public services without asking for compensation, no wonder governments keep running out of money and fail to collect enough taxes, they massively subsidize the holders of land and money by not taxing them in proportion to how much they benefit from the government. These indirect subsidies can be sold for a profit which then effectively turns them into direct subsidies. Getting rid of subsidies is a type of regulation that is compatible with free markets. Meanwhile capitalism is inherently incompatible with free markets as it thrives on monopoly rents.
I don't think your comment has exposed any flaws in GPs point.
The first point doesn't refute anything GP said. If Amazon, Google, Meta, etc, are natural monopolies like utilities, then have the state regulate them as such. If they aren't, have them broken up like Standard Oil. You yourself have pointed up that monopolies are bad for the users.
Second, even if "free market" is used by (some) economists to mean a specific thing, that doesn't mean that GP, or most people for that matter, use it that way. For many, many people (including elected policy makers), a "free market" is a market without government intervention, and the less intervention, the more free it is. Nobody owns the official definition of the term, redefining it and then calling the argument which used it in a different way "fundamentally flawed" is not correct.
Google owns most people's window to the internet: from the browser and sometimes even the operating system all the way to what sites they get to see, and even the content itself. Amazon handles most online shopping in the US, may have an even larger share in other countries. Meta owns most of the social networking and messaging apps of the world. I'd argue there's plenty of evidence that each is a monopoly in its own category, aggressively eliminating any competition from the market.
The problem is all the people calling whatever we have a free market. It would be more appropriate to just call it market or capitalist market because there are also social market theories. The free market represents an unattainable utopia.
What pissess me off the most is that a lot of capitalists actually like monopolies and externalities and then shout and complain that the government is ruining the "free market".
I am of the opinion that the solution is Free Market Socialism: a market economy where the businesses are governed by their workers. Capital is allowed a reasonable, regulated return on its investment (which takes the form of loans, not equity) and further financing can happen through crowd funding (since this system would naturally result in a much more even distribution of capital, an order of magnitude more people will have spare money to contribute to projects that interest them).
Workers have a much weaker incentive to consolidate than investors do, since the consolidation results in them losing voice and power and there are no big cash payments in return (no equity financing means no big equity sales). So this system would tend to work against monopolization.
In addition, workers have much deeper connections to the communities impacted by their business's operations than investors do - they usually live in them. So the tendency to externalize costs on to communities will be much lower (not gone, just reduced), since the workers will experience those costs along with the rest of their communities.
Unions become completely unnecessary in this system. The people doing the work are governing the business, they get to set their own working conditions.
And you still get all of the benefits of the free market - no government control, competition, the freedom to start new enterprises - with many of the rough edges sanded off.
> Unions become completely unnecessary in this system.
I don't think that's true. Unions exist to negotiate working conditions with management. Management doesn't disappear in the system that you're describing.
Some of the incentives for poor working conditions disappear, but not all of them. There are non-profits that have unionized due to worker abuses. Ironically, I've worked in VC-backed startups most of my career, and I've experienced much less abuse than friends who work at non-profits
Non-profits aren't usually governed by their workers. They're usually governed by an elected or appointed board.
What I'm describing is a system in which all businesses become what are currently known as "worker cooperatives". In that system, if management produces conditions that the workers don't like, the workers vote management out.
I'm not aware of any worker cooperatives that have unionized, though I believe Mondragon (one of the biggest, oldest, and most successful worker cooperatives) does have what amounts to a multicameral system with one of the councils filling the roll of the union in advocating for line workers. [1]
There seems to be no limit to the insanity people will tolerate with sufficient conditioning, so there is no reason to think there is a natural limit to how bad any economic or political system, capitalism or otherwise, can degrade.
If you can't imagine how things could get even worse, then watch some science fiction or read some history books. Tearing people's hearts out to appease the sun god, or to repossess the organ after unpaid medical bills. We're not there yet, but that could be the sort of madness we're heading into.
I agree, people can adapt to basically anything, but we have pretty clear precedents about who does what when faced with this or that.
In the face of constant legally sanctioned/mandated exploitation the frequency of outlaw group appearances increases, similarly revolts start from time to time. (Not saying their success rate was any great.)
Repossessing organs doesn't sound scary. The fanatics do scare me more, after all North Korea and every other successful oppressive regime was built on that. But it remains to be seen if it's possible to scale up totalitarianism to bigger scales.
It will get worse because the US federal government will not be able to pay debt service indefinitely. This will either mean a lowering of interest rates and acceleration of both inflation and debt accumulation (merely delaying the collapse of the dollar system) or US federal default which will collapse the dollar system. When dollars quit flowing to the states in return for federal program enforcement there will be little incentive for state governments to continue adhering to federal rules. Warriors likewise don't usually fight for free, so there's unlikely to be a large military presence to hold it all together. From many perspectives, you could consider this to be not the end of capitalism in the USA, but the end of empire altogether. Of course, the politicians, bankers, and managerial elite of the USA have kept this going far longer than I thought possible, so it may not happen that way at all.
The spectrum between yaay everything is amazing and the dollar system collapses is ... pretty big.
"U.S. interest costs won’t rise catastrophically in the short term, and there’s not really a reason to expect interest rates to stay high for decades. Furthermore, inflation will itself erode some of the national debt, reducing long-term interest costs relative to GDP."
"Right now, interest payments haven’t even begun to rise as a percent of tax revenue, and one big reason is inflation. Interest rates are set in dollar amounts, and inflation increases the number of dollars in the economy, meaning that tax revenues increase in dollar terms as well."
+ debt rollover
"the weighted average duration is only about 4 years." (so about half of the debt has to be renewed in about 4 years)
"The Fed currently predicts that it will start cutting rates in 2023. And markets expect this to happen too."
So, I wouldn't consider this late stage capitalism. I would consider it late stage republic. The government eventually attacks large commercial interests, as a result those large commercial interests purchase politicians. Any large commercial interest who refuses to bribe politicians will get attacked, so all of the large players do so. They then get entrenched, get bigger, get more powerful. Eventually, the line between government and corporation disappears. I do not believe that there is a way around this situation in any majoritarian government. In the USA, by the time McKinley was running for office, there'd already been two campaign finance reforms. It would seem that purchasing power is what always does and always will happen in majoritarianism. If you do not have regulatory capture, a monopoly should be impossible because any large amount of money being made is a signal that more resources are needed in a given market segment. If, otoh, you have a large interest purchasing politicians they can now erect barriers to entry preventing effective competition. Once those barriers are in place, people begin to accept them as necessary, right, proper, and true. Only once things begin to fall apart do people even begin to recognize how absurd it is that a license is required for a child's lemonade stand.
Unfortunately, Utopia is impossible. All systems suck because all people are flawed. Socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, monarchism; they're all bad. Additionally, they all really boil down to being either monarchy or oligarchy and every other term is just window dressing. You either vest power into a single person or a small elite group, and then people try to use magical words on pieces of paper to control those individuals. It works for a short time, and then it all starts to fall apart. Eventually, the ruling class realizes that the words on paper are just words and not magic, mos maiorum is lost and society starts to unravel. Modern governments have been better in the sense that it has taken a few hundred years for them all to become dangerous to their constituencies, but it is happening none the less.
Capitalism and free market are inherently incompatible.
>I love capitalism when it's functioning it's the greatest system ever invented.
Capitalism is never functioning. It is inherently dysfunctional. The moment there is wealth and people should be happy, it breaks completely. It only "works" if the economy is growing or in other words, it only works if the economy has been recently destroyed by a war that justifies growth. What you might love is the market that capitalists eventually distort.
>When it's just a market full of monopolies it's akin to dysfunctional communism from a consumer choice perspective.
Capitalism is a monopoly based economic system. Getting rid of the monopolies gets rid of capitalism entirely and you are left with just a market based economy. I don't know what you are even talking about.
>I don't know what the solution is.
The solution is basically an liquidity theory (you could also consider it a trade theory of money) based approach that splits interest or as the Marxists call it "surplus value", into its individual parts and once you do so, you will realize that there is actually no room to compensate the owners of capital, only the owners of liquidity and liquidity is a public good, a service provided by the government and the public combined which then deserves to be taxed to bring costs and benefits in line.
Liquidity preference was Keynes greatest discovery and nobody gives a damn, not even the Communists, so what other option than perpetual inflation did he have?
I'm not convinced of this as a universal rule, rather than the results of specific details of our economy. A core assumption of capitalism is that capital is distributed. But our economy is highly centralized by design.
Specifically the government creates a bottomless supply of money to loan out, but only to highly-legible highly-centralized entities. As such, big business has an endless source of cheap capital to draw from to invest, whether it's devouring other businesses or building out thousands of cookie cutter stores. Small businesses can only access the money trough by going through a consumer bank with its higher fees and scrutiny of business plans. Individuals can only access the money trough by taking out collateralized loans on legible assets. For the individual market we can readily observe the resulting destructive individual-disempowering dynamic for the markets that have been financialized - chiefly housing and education.
A significant raising of interest rates would reign in this effect. Unfortunately it would take a long and protracted timeline for actual reform, as our economy has come to rely on the bottomless source of easy capital. But it's still worth keeping in mind the warped foundation our specific economy is built on, rather than characterizing the current moribund state as an inevitable end result of every market economy.
Having built a neobank. It’s fact that pornography is intertwined with sex trafficking, organized crime, revenge porn and other illegal activities. Regulators crack down on financial institutions if they are caught providing services for illegal activities.
HSBC wants you to think that but anybody with wikipedia can tell you it's not true in practice. It's not that they don't want your business, it's that the end users in these cause problems. They're happy to keep cartel money, one-to-many is easier than many-to-one, it's simple math.
Yeah, and it is a fact that cartel and authoritarian statist money laundering is intertwined with banking. See just about any story about Deutsche in the last decade.
I've worked with sex-related sites before. And you're right that there are sleazy people in that industry. But it really isn't hard to distinguish, especially when you can see their payment stream.
Without moralist obsessions with sex, nobody would care.
> Without moralist obsessions with sex, nobody would care.
That is an observably incoherent claim. Sex is a subject that virtually everyone obsesses over and cares about to a greater or lesser extent and literally everyone that does is moralist about it. You, for example, evidently hold the moral position that prostitution, pornography, and other sex-related commercial activity is either good or at least not bad.
I find that much more incoherent. It's absolutely possible to believe that things should be allowed without a moral component.
I believe woodworking should be allowed. Not because it's "good" or "bad", but because people want to do it and there aren't sufficient harms to warrant trying to ban it.
Some people feel the same about porn and sex work. It's something people want to do, they believe there aren't sufficient harms to warrant regulating it. Watching or performing in porn doesn't make someone better or worse, it's just a thing they do like how some people make canoes or birdhouses.
Many people who use the word "good" to describe porn and sex work are describing it in the beneficial sense, not the moral sense.
> That’s a bit odd on account of claiming that something is morally neutral is clearly a moral assertion.
Morally neutral and being without a moral component are different. Gravity lacks a moral component; it is neither good nor bad, it just exists. Moral neutrality contains opposing good and bad effects, with neither significantly outweighing the other. Killing someone in self-defense could be seen as morally neutral. Killing someone is bad, but saving people is good, causing a wash. Someone who kills another in self-defense isn't a bad person for doing so, but it also doesn't make them a better person.
> That being said, can you imagine why perhaps sex might have greater moral significance than canoe-making?
In the context of porn, genuinely not. Canoe-making seems like it has far greater moral significance. It's a practical skill and potentially a bonding experience with others. Porn is maybe a waste of time, but it's hardly alone there. It's like playing with a fidget spinner, which I don't find morally significant either.
> That’s fascinatingly novel. Can you explain the difference or at least distinction between a “moral” “good” and a “beneficial” “good?”
A beneficial good lacks a moral component, or is morally neutral as you would say. A scooter is a beneficial good; it allows people to get places faster, so they can do what they want. It's not morally good to own and use one, and it's not morally bad to not do so. Its merits are amoral. A moral good is something that has a clear moral component; feeding the homeless is morally good, not doing so is morally bad.
If you kill someone I care about, I will want to see you punished. So many people agree with this that we have laws saying you can't kill people or else you'll be punished. But if you pay someone to have sex with them, so what? If both parties consent to everything, then who is harmed? Some people get mad because they think it's immoral, but not everyone.
This is begging the question (assuming morality must be based on harm or consent). Not everyone agrees on the morality of all sorts of things. Human sacrifice has been licit in various times and places. Lending someone a high-interest payday loan is a consensual transaction but morally suspect according to many, and so on.
> Not everyone agrees on the morality of all sorts of things.
Well yeah, of course. My point is that the overwhelming majority of people agree that murder is bad and should be illegal. That's not the case with sex work, which is why people argue about it online all the time. When I asked who is harmed by sex work, I didn't mean to imply that no one is harmed, I just meant that the answer to that question varies a lot more than the answer to who is harmed by murder.
What I find interesting is that everyone critiquing my critique completely ignores the swipe I took at banks. It appears to be utterly banal and beneath concern that banks subvert legal and moral efforts against multinational drug cartels and abusive authoritarian regimes.
I guess even with morals, people don't care about murder.
>On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others.
These already exist and are sometimes known as "high risk" processors. They charge a lot more for the privilege of accepting payments for what industry has deem high risk transactions due to larger rates of chargebacks. Typical examples are paid subscription to a porn site, but then the card owner claims it was not them that paid for it. CBD/Delta-8/Delta-10/Delta-9 sales are also considered high risk for various reasons with one due to their legality questionable in some states.
Chargeback risk in these industries is considerably higher than in other industries. If your wife/husband finds a porn subscription on your credit card bill, a lot of people take the approach of denying it and charging it back. Chargebacks are expensive, whether you fight them or accept them.
A lot of adult industry businesses also accept ACH transfers or crypto because there is no chargeback risk on either of these.
I just don't see a lot of users of porn sites submitting ACH transfers. Every ACH transfer I have ever been a part of takes 5 days for the balances to settle. What porn user subbing to a site is going to wait 5 days? Maybe brothels or similar adult businesses allow you to setup an account with them as part of their onboarding steps to allow these types of transfers?
I totally see crypto becoming more popular with the misconception of privacy.
I think the main thing holding crypto back is the instability and the ability of centralized entities to control the additon of "currency" (average people can't mine after a certain point).
"They charge a lot more for the privilege of accepting payments for what industry has deem high risk transactions due to larger rates of chargebacks."
If they're doing lower volume and dealing with higher costs related to chargebacks, then it seems it would make sense they charge more. What is it, like 3% vs 6% or worse?
Also, some charge a steep monthly fee. One that I'm familiar with charges $100/month plus the higher % per transaction. So even if you have $0 in sales for a month, you still pay them $100. So it's not the greater of % per transaction vs monthly fee. It is always monthly fee + % per transaction.
Not astronomical? That could be the entire profit margin for some lines of business. Granted, maybe not the adult entertainment business specifically. Just food for thought on how high %12 could be
> "It also establishes a precedent, allowing private companies to set opaque, moralizing, and arbitrary censorship terms without oversight."
> Yes, this is done with other things as well.
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Complain that twitter or facebook is censoring things and you'll get told that the government should not be able to dictate to private companies who can or cannot be excluded.
Allow private companies to exclude a significant chunk of the population, and those same groups will complain of censorship.
Both the Right and the Left have a common interest in forcing private companies to not exclude certain people.
Too bad that too few people see the value in regulating de-facto monopolies.
The (big) banks cannot fail because the government will bail them out. As such, the banks should be considered a de-facto government entity and be bound by the same limitations on censorship. There is no competition/market.
> On the other hand, it seems that many financial things are set by international organizations
Not organizations, governments. Financial rules set by governments to cut down on money laundering, terrorist funding and other "financial crimes" are why payment processing is rife with liabilities and why Visa and banks have such strict rules. Without these rules banks would happily work with anyone that has money.
> On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others.
how open is the payment network willing to accept a new player when a site like onlyfans with billions of dollars in revenue would rather go down in flames only to be saved by public backlash rather than implementing their own payment processing service?
You missed the reason that payment processers set these terms. It is not because they want to.
It is because there is a minority who think sex is dirty and only should be done in the family and they will take anyone who is even slightly helping sex workers to court. The only protection public companies would have is there was a law stopping these court actions but no lawmaker is going to do this as the same minority would attack them and the majority would see the company as helping sleaze and what that minority see as sin.
Note that any new payment processor would be hit in the same way.
The issue is that a minority can persuade the majority of things even if they are untrue or destructive.
The word "precedent" in that quote seems to be being used in order to deny that this is not already the case in many other contexts! Also strange that one of the examples given of this supposed "censorship" was a pornographer's difficulties in obtaining a loan due to the financial risk brought on, in part, by chargebacks, and not some supposed anti-pornography convictions held by the bankers.
All this time, and technology hasn't solved this issue? Wasn't bitcoin supposed to be applicable here - anonymous transactions? Wasn't the internet supposed to enable humans to interact at will without censorship?
Technology can’t solve primarily cultural issues. The second bitcoin tries to perform the same financial services as a bank (mortgages, lending, checking, savings, interest, etc) that institution using bitcoin will need to do the same “know your customer” behavior that makes it hard for sex workers to get the same financial services.
Exactly. Backpage took crypto for instance but ultimately if you are convicted of a crime and the government gives you a forfeiture order then it is a crime not to comply. Which is what they did to the tune of millions of dollars.
They do, but not if you use a commercial platform.
Host your own infrastructure (ftp/email/www/etc.) and use Btc, and you will have a lot more liberty but not "reach"... so you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Bitcoin actually does play a big role in the online sex industry. Many sex workers and businsses online accept bitcoin and even prefer it. But then there's the problem that the US, and other, government are actively trying to regulate the Bitcoin to fiat gateways out of existence and make it too honerous for them to run their businesses the same way that sex worker businesses are attacked by the payment processors. So once you start working in cryptocurrency not only are the payment processors attacking you now you have the government attacking you too.
But then cash becomes a storage issue. The same way marijuana shops are blocked from depositing their cash into banks, cash with sex workers becomes a problem. How to get it into the banking system without drawing the attention of the police? Even worse, try paying bills with cash.
If you'll pardon me, I think cash deposite below $1,000 should be none of the government's business without a valid, specific warrant. If someone wants to sell drugs, sex, or graphics cards on the side for cash, it's none of the government's business.
> The same way marijuana shops are blocked from depositing their cash into banks, cash with sex workers becomes a problem.
Only if sex work is illegal. Which it isn't in significant parts of the developed world.
Prostitutes (male or female) here around are taxed like everybody else. In addition they need to be health checked to perform their work. Paying them in cash is really no problem neither for the client nor for the provider.
> someone wants to sell drugs, sex, or graphics cards on the side for cash, it's none of the government's business
This is a valid opinion. But it's clearly in the minority. (Counterfactual: there is broad support for drug policy reform [1].) Particularly when one considers the tax consequences.
You have a cookie baking or massage business that covers enough to pay a modest mortgage and car. The rest you pay in cash. You give family members down payments to buy property or leases for you.
The police don’t watch cash transactions without reason. If you simply regularly deposit cash, then you only have to declare a business account and no one will take a second look at you at the bank.
yes, but for the regular person getting bitcoin is still high friction.
I mean on a world when adding one extra step on your checkout will drop your conversion rate, getting people to buy btc before probably pushes you into being unprofitable.
this will be true when and IF bitcoin gets to be ubiquitous
Why doesn't the argument "private companies can do whatever they want, so if you don't like being arbitrarily banned by the incumbents, then start your own bank and payment processor" apply here?
It's a trash argument in the first place, for starters. The people who support sex workers having an actual, functioning, non-predatory ecosystem don't suddenly flip to "freedom of speech sucks" when pressed.
This is basically what I was thinking. The argument is never actually sound, but people only acknowledge that when it's something they like that gets banned, instead pretending that it is a good argument when something they don't like gets banned.
It's not the case that the only valid position is one that is perfectly generalizable. Supporting good or necessary things is better than supporting bad things, even if they share some functional similarities.
Sex workers not having access to reliable payment methods directly puts them in danger in real, quantifiable ways. The same is not true for letting white nationalists recruit teens or whatever other free speech/market economy intersection thing you can think of.
We are not philosopher-automatons and may, should, use our moral judgement about which things specifically are worth our support and which are not. A perfectly consistent framework here is impossible and probably undesirable in any case.
It's not that sex work is better than other things and should be endorsed because of that difference. It's that forcing sex workers out of the legitimate business process gets them killed and we have a duty to prevent that outcome.
The only thing I can think of is that most of the centralized systems are highly regulated at the national and international level. Without those systems, a company would not be competitive. Even entire countries have tried to create their own systems with limited success (look at Russia trying to replace Swift recently).
Content creators are also self-censoring to avoid automatic moderation (YouTube demonetization and TikTok shadowbanning). Things like "sex" and "death" are euphemized or not said (see things like "unalive" instead of "dead", "heckmet" instead of "helmet".
the thing people try to avoid is crappy speech recognition software, with a dose of cargo-culting because of course the platforms don't tell people what exactly they don't like, so people try to find patterns in what gets demonetized.
> Excessive chargebacks plague many industries: auctions, online gaming, event ticket sales, multilevel marketing, and more. But when your business is regarded as a reputational liability—as porn is—payment processors are quick to blacklist.
It sounds like a combination of tangible and intangible stuff. There are cultural aspects behind it but also legit financial concerns.
While many people on here are glorifying the workers in certain 1st world countries, I doubt it's representative of most sex workers worldwide. There's a ton of coercion and exploitation, and most countries don't have the sort of social safety net that ensures it's actually a real choice. I would imagine that's why banks at large have generally steered away from the industry - if 90% of the business is super shady and exposes them to excess risk, it's not worth it to sort out the 10% that's not. If there were a processor targeting the industry, the fees would probably be through the roof to account for this. That's just the markets at work.
Kind of related to the financial aspects of this article: why is the housing market treated as the basis/most important part of the US economy and not, specifically, energy or finance? The article talks about financial institutions' ability to hinder or even halt growth altogether, and we saw similar actions being taken in Canada last year with the truckers. With regards to energy, I've heard that the cheaper energy is to produce in a nation, the wealthier it tends to be.
At least in the US it's because of deliberate policy decisions after WWII around home ownership. Massive government agencies are explicitly tasked with getting the percentage of Americans owning homes as high as possible.
Energy and finance are important, but don't directly involve individuals as much, and people are VERY emotionally tied into their home and it's value.
If all houses suddenly lost 50% overnight, and mortgages were slashed simultaneously to compensate, it wouldn't be that big of a deal but everyone would freak the hell out. It's much easier to inflate the currency than it is to allow home prices to drop.
The only thing special about sex workers in this situation is the politicized nature of their work. The industry they work in, and they way they conduct their business, simply doesn’t align very well with the risk management strategies of conventional financial institutions. Any form of non-conventional work is going to run into exactly the same problems.
I know this because the same thing happens to me. Nearly all my income comes from InfoSec-related contract work, and most of my customers are overseas. This is a very non-conventional working arrangement, so when conventional financial institutions apply their routine risk assessment processes to my situation, it produces a lot of “computer says no” outcomes. For instance I was recently told that I would need to provide 90% collateral in order to get a car loan, despite being able to prove having a very high income over the past 12 months.
Clearly a stupid situation, but with a perfectly rational explanation. The problem here is a tiny niche of customers not being catered to by large institutions. The reason for this is because tiny niches of customers are typically not worth the effort to large institutions. But that conclusion is unlikely to attract much outrage traffic…
The above poster has completely ignored the large religious morality groups that have made it their mission to remove porn from the internet entirely. They are the ones that took pornhub to court saying all their content was child porn and got pornhub to remove 90% of its inventory
That’s a completely different topic to the alleged discrimination from financial institutions. There are plenty of industries that have well funded lobbies working against them, and most of them don’t tend have issues opening merchant accounts.
This is about financial institutions protecting themselves from regulators. Higher risk clients get higher rates or excluded- some just aren’t worth the risk. Different banks have different risk tolerance, and certainly that varies per locale as well. Rules that are locale-specific are hard to accommodate.
Crypto is a solution if you believe that crypto is regulator-proof. I’m inclined to not think it is. Sure, Monero, etc. As soon as “Terrorists” are using it, regulators will find a way to monitor, control, outlaw, or even break it. By any means necessary.
I see 3 approaches:
- find a way to make locale-specific compliance easier for enterprises. Locale is hard with anon web traffic, and maybe other systems as well.
- make a national law for sex worker payment rights. Banks are good at complying with national laws. Our current political climate may not permit this.
- weaken the power and scope of US financial regulators. Certainly those affected by SWIFT sanctions would love to see it, I’m sure. Our current administration is very committed to keeping and enhancing its resources and reach.
In other words, a world in which payment processors and content platforms rule unchallenged is a problem not just for porn creators and consumers. It also establishes a precedent, allowing private companies to set opaque, moralizing, and arbitrary censorship terms without oversight
They've only just noticed this after years of WrongThinkers being deplatformed?
Ostracizing sex work has always been the case for thousands of years in every successful culture and religion.
In fact, cultures that allowed widespread open sex work have always failed. (No, Amsterdam’s red light district is not “widespread”).
Just because it’s 2022 does not mean things should automatically change. Even Onlyfans performers, strippers and pr0n stars are openly shunned or relegated to non “wifely” roles.
This is because there are super deep lizard brain biological reasons why cultures have always done this.
And it will still take a few more generations before no one bats an eye (25+ years).
Yes, it would be better if it were safe and legal. Would probably be better for it’s consumers and providers.
But in the end the biological imperative to “be fruitful and multiply”, which is deeper than many of us would like to admit - is going to always fight back.
Railing against this ostracism is like railing against the sky being blue.
All cultures, of any kind, have failed. That is the nature of time. Culture is constantly dying and being reformed. So an argument that "All cultures that allowed X have failed" is a really tepid argument. The vast majority of cultures that normalized eating have failed, simply because the vast majority of cultures have failed, period.
What differentiates Amsterdam's red light district from OnlyFans' red light district's, or Las Vegas's, cultures from any others? The real answer, of course, is that excluding all the examples of something you can think of makes for an easy way of framing your statements as an absolute truth, but that's certainly more than a little underhanded.
An immutable record of who paid what sex workers sounds like it has the potential for machine learning to map who did what and with whom. Could this information be abused?
Guaranteed that if they're interacting with a bank or card network, there's KYC involved (in the US and most western countries). So that defeats the whole "fully anonymous" bit.
I still don't understand the "anon" value prop of crypto. We've had anonymous payments for goods (like groceries) for a long time - cash.
I would not consider cash anonymous in a grocery store anymore. They're tracking you through other means, including using the bluetooth in your phone, hiring facial recognition companies, and other bits of data to try and have some form of identifier for you that they can put all your purchases on.
Craigslist has logs of your conversations, which they will definitely share with police when asked (which likely happens all the time) and then the police can buy your phone location data from whoever and track what happened.
Nothing is anonymous without extreme and CONSTANT effort. Any second you don't have perfect opsec, you should assume you are perfectly tracked. This is independent of any laws congress makes, because the policing apparatus does this itself.
The only way to change this is make it illegal to track transactions for anyone, including police, but the second we do that we will see significant sanction busting, money laundering, spam, scams, online casinos, fraudulent businesses etc.
All crime involves money at some point, and if you want to allow the police to fight that you have to allow money to be tracked. You don't get both options.
I think making money untraced is not useful, and instead, we should be fighting for a government that is free enough to allow your entirely tracked transactions to do what you want. Buying some drugs or sex? Whatever, just pay your sales tax. The government knows what you do, that's the modern reality, so build a government that allows you to do things that don't harm others.
Crypto is even worse, for both customers and sex workers. A wad of cash is virtually untrackable and can be protected, crypto asset flows are by definition completely public, and the government already has the tools (both legal frameworks and the technology) to associate crypto accounts with identities.
Money in, money out. The US government most definitely has the capability to do correlation tracking, not to mention you will have to exchange any kind of token into ye olde fiat currency at some point, which can and will be tracked.
As for Tornado Cash, anything that passes (or passed!) through mixers can be tracked and sanctioned as well.
In case of doubt, always assume that the US government has an ability to at least collect all traces of data, and that sooner or later it will make itself an opportunity to, as TC proved even retroactively, seize your assets or make them worthless with the stroke of a pen on a court order. And to make it worse, unlike a wad of cash that you can construct a reasonable parallel way on how you acquired it, you are automatically committing a crime by interacting with a sanctioned entity like TC.
Sex workers have already precarious lives as it is, there is no reason to entice them to even more risks.
Some industries, like sex work and cannabis sales, can be both legal and rejected by payment processors.
The law says they're legal in some places, and local authorities agree. But payment processors still want to protect themselves and their investors, so they decline to do business with such industries.
The moral hazard in this case is not that crypto may be used to avoid regulations.
The hazard is that a handful of private companies serve as de facto regulator and enforcers for all commerce.
You can tell it's a hazard because some people view any alternative payment system as possibly illegal.
You may think crypto should be criminal, but cash should be legal, based on the average age of this forum. But the younger generation has only ever used cash for illegal transactions, and there should be no surprise that governments would prefer a cashless society.
If you believe that crypto, cash, gold, and any other non-banking solution for payment remittance is likely to be viewed as criminal by regulators, then I have to wonder who the regulators are really protecting.
Here is one thing you can do with crypto that you cannot do with a credit card: use your money how you would like. There is no payment processor to decide that you are not allowed to send or receive money.
This is a weird and easily disprovable objection. The numbers are not as high as the scammers for sure, but there are a not-insignificant amount of people using crypto to move real money for its exact intended purposes today.
You know what is also good for crime? Dollars! Everyone takes then. Even worse they are harder to trace. Do you see anyone wanting to ban the dollar or claim that it's good for crime?
When you say stuff like real, non-illegal you close the door to conversation.
With crypto you can exchange money with anyone in the world without an intermediary. Visa/Mastercard cannot ban you. This in itself is huge (most people think about this as an abstract problem that has low likelihood until it happens). There are no borders, there is no censorship.
Sex work? Nope. The powers to be decided that's not allowed. Remember when OF wanted to ban all explicit content?
MJ? Legal in a lot of places at state level. But you can only buy it with cash. Think about that for a sec: you're allowed by the local laws to do something buy you cannot do it.
Does giving money to support people/orgs in underdeveloped countries that cannot afford to use the normal banking channels count as use case?
Do you know what happened in Venezuela recently when their currency crashed and how the managed to stay afloat somehow?
Do you understand inflation and how what is currently happening is just another form of taxation? Is inflation and central bank policies doomimg an economy a real use case?
Have you heard about civil asset forfeiture? Abstract af until something like this happens to you. Is that a real use case?
Among Swedish feminists and the left, sex work is completely unacceptable and prostitution is pretty much equated with rape. Is this not true for other countries?
In the far left in the States it's considered work, and something that should be well regulated and safe.
The center left/centrist (Democrats) position is more split. Some folks think it's a bodily autonomy issue and others think it's degrading.
Feminist opinion is likewise split. But most feminists I know tend to fall in the, "if it's consensual, it should be protected and regulated work. You shouldn't fear going to jail because you had sex."
Where "it's just work" often breaks down is when you get to the question "if someone can take a sex work job but chooses not do, can they get unemployment".
There's a much more important case: when a boss asks his assistent to bring coffee or run some private errands for him, she can just say no, but if a boss asks his assistent to perform sex work for him, it's considered harassment and the boss can be considered a criminal depending the circumstances.
I believe this is a good thing, but prostitution is clearly not ,,just work'' just because it's trendy to call it sex work.
Swedish feminists make different arguments, based on the inevitably gendered nature of the work and the asymmetry of sex discrimination. They make feminist arguments.
The US does not, because they wouldn't work. The average angry political American thinks that bigotry against men is at least as prevalent as bigotry against women, and thinks that institutions have conspired with each other to advance women ahead of men.
Even American feminists think that there's no element of a woman's condition in the world that can't be equally applied to anyone who identifies as a woman. Very American, if the conditions of women are a state of mind that can be corrected or experienced based on how you identify, it's basically a "law of attraction." Women can think themselves out of (or into, if they have penises) the female condition. I'm pretty sure Kanye said something about the reason for slavery being that black people identified as slaves. It's that same sort of inversion of control and blaming the victim.
Radical feminists have a more coherent perspective. It's not one that I can agree with in many aspects, but it's one that's always worth discussing.
> Even American feminists think that there's no element of a woman's condition in the world that can't be equally applied to anyone who identifies as a woman. Very American, if the conditions of women are a state of mind that can be corrected or experienced based on how you identify, it's basically a "law of attraction." Women can think themselves out of (or into, if they have penises) the female condition. I'm pretty sure Kanye said something about the reason for slavery being that black people identified as slaves. It's that same sort of inversion of control and blaming the victim.
Wait, what? I follow that 'average angry political American' is all about 'equal means equal' regardless of gender, but the next statements aren't clear: the endorsement of trans sexual identity in American feminism is, in principle, related to Kanye's statement that black people identified as slaves because both cases are basically "mind over matter" takes? Am I understanding that correctly? And these are both forms of victim blaming?
Swedish feminists probably have as wide a range of opinions on any given topic as any other kind of feminist. Also: "the left," a fraught and increasingly fluid concept.
The narrative is extremely one-sided in Sweden and there's no debate. Celebrities get unanimously cancelled for getting caught buying sex.
Here are some quotes (Google Translated) from the biggest feminist organisation (Feministiskt Initiativ):
"Prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes is a form of violence and a violation of human rights."
"Sexualization and objectification work against the principle of the human being as an independent subject and can limit women's ability to protect their bodily integrity."
"Equality cannot be achieved as long as it is possible to buy other people's bodies through prostitution, strip or sex clubs."
"Working against pornography and objectifying representations is thus an important part of violence prevention work."
This is the "Nordic model", and it doesn't seem to produce significantly different or better outcomes; sex work remains underground because it's still criminalized, just on the buyer side of the transaction.
Because the chargebacks aren't the actual problem, but merely an excuse. Anyone who offers services of any kind to sex workers, especially internet based ones, gets attacked by very specific religious based groups who have taken it upon themselves to get porn off the internet. These groups have taken visa to court multiple times, and were the reason that pornhub was forced to remove basically 90% of it's inventory last year.
Most people (not only the religious) wouldn't want their wife, husband, child, mother, close friends etc to be a prostitute or pornographic artist, in a very emotional sense that goes far beyond e.g. having a low status job.
It's completely unsurprising that it's frowned upon.
I would hope it would be. Pornographers use the courts to enforce their copyrights and other business arrangements. A good test for an anti-censorship payment processor would be handling payments for legal sex work.
There's a libertarian ethos that says anything between two consenting adults is the their business. I'm more and more skeptical not just of that principle but the self awareness of the people who purport to support it.
I know that the choices I think are correct may not be - either for myself, for everyone or for any particular person. For that reason I don't think that anyone should run my life or that I should be trying to run other people's; excepting crossing the bright line of consent.
I'm beginning to wonder though if there isn't some space short of stopping a person from doing something - even if just to stand up and say - "What you're doing is crazy. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you let someone do that to you? Why would you do that to another person?"
If you talk to people who would ask those questions though the issue is that anyone who's willing to say something is also unable to accept that that's all they can do. They'll push whatever isn't right for them to the other side of the bright line.
If I sound contradictory it's because I'm uncertain.
Let's say I, like the people running Iran, think a woman should have her head covered in public. It's good for woman, men and all of us together.
What are my options? I can decide that whatever the individuals want the overall badness of an uncovered female head is so great that preventing that is worth sending people to jail. Alternately I could decide that the goodness of letting people make decisions about their own lives is worth the damage that an uncovered female head will do to men, woman and society.
It seems like the rule almost everyone uses is "consenting adults can do things that don't harm non-consenting adults" for everything they don't have a problem with. When they have a problem with it they just flip the script by claiming it's not really consenting. It end up being the open sesame of public policy.
The other problem I have is that I don't think the view I described is right. There has to be a place we - society, the law, whatever - can sit where we can go, "This is wrong. Even if you agree with the action it's hurting you or other people but I'm not going to send you to jail. I'm not going to help you. I'm going to keep shouting from the rooftops that this this is stupid but I'll stop short of depriving you of liberty."
The problem with my idea is that people look at that and they say, why go to all that trouble for something you believe is that harmful when you have the power to take one more little step and stop that thing. All you have to do is put one person in jail. The rest will be scared.
Ever read "the ones who walk away from omelas". It's that.
> I'm beginning to wonder though if there isn't some space short of stopping a person from doing something
That’s why moral norms exist in every human society. Most people need some sort of support from society to make good decisions for themselves and their families. It’s no different than how an exercise or diet regimen is easier to stick to if you do it along with other people to provide support and yes shaming if necessary.
Intellectuals project their own capacities onto sex workers, and say that if they did sex work—which they don’t—it would be for “freedom of expression” and “economic rights.” But the fact is that sex work is like myriad other dangerous and unpleasant jobs society has seen fit to regulate or ban. Society seeks to create a floor below which people can’t sink through desperation or bad choices.
Society? You're painting an awfully broad brush. I absolutely think it should be regulated because of the reasons you name, but it's mainly particular demographics that want sex work banned, and generally these demographics don't actually care about the well-being of sex workers (re: provably negative consequences for sex workers in previous situations where such work was made illegal or otherwise deregulated and punished).
Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
> Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
There is a huge leap from "the majority of women oppose sex work" to "the majority of women oppose sex work BECAUSE if sex work was legal they would encounter social pressure to do sex work".
I have women in my life who oppose sex work decriminalization. Not a single one does because they worry they will encounter any social pressure to do sex work. Almost every single one does because they believe that coercion is very common, and the downsides to criminalization are minimal. And none of them have spent much time listening to actual sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization on their lives.
The women I know who are in favor of sex work decriminalization are very similar to the ones who oppose it but have spent more time listening to sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization. They understand that there is very little additional risk to someone who coerces another into sex work b/c of criminalization but far more additional risk to the sex worker.
> Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
I don't think that's the only reason; even a few sex providers can distort the (mostly balanced) market for sex.
IOW, if men don't feel the need to date just to get sex then there's fewer men in the market. This means that women have to pay a higher price[1] for the available men, while the available men pay a lower price[2] for any specific woman.
[1] Be nicer, be more willing to engage in sex, etc.
> "What you're doing is crazy. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you let someone do that to you? Why would you do that to another person?"
People who want to amputate perfectly healthy limbs and/or submit themselves to cannibalism are some of the first things that come to my mind here. Most of us would probably agree there should be a line somewhere, especially considering the potential of undiagnosed mental illness.
> especially considering the potential of undiagnosed mental illness.
Not a popular statement to make, but the reality is that the majority of amateur sex workers (e.g. OF models) have diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illnesses, many have been prior victims of sexual abuse. There's a strong correlation between hypersexuality and involvement in sex work, and hypersexuality is often the result of childhood sexual trauma or mental illnesses like bipolar that can result in hypersexuality as a symptom of manic episodes.
So, the question you are putting forward isn't completely limited to the most extreme possibilities. That said, I generally have taken the stance that if someone is able to turn a condition of their existence into something which makes them money and they do so consensually, it is not my business to stop them from doing so. There are definitely deeper and complicated moral and philosophical questions about that though, dealing with the nature of consent and self-actualization. Is it /really/ consensual if someone engages in sex work due to hypersexuality, which was directly caused due to prior sexual trauma? What is consent, and how does it intersect with mental state and competence?
Unfortunately, I don't think society is in a place to wrestle with these deeper questions. Mental illness is relatively commonplace, and we have created a condition of existence in the West which encourages neurosis, and often becomes clinical depression or anxiety, at minimum. Our distraction/attention economy fundamentally messes with people's minds... intentionally... to sell us more crap we don't need. It is against the nature of society to consider what the nature of consent is when you exist surrounded by various layers of coercion and depredation.
I think where the ship runs aground is that sexual things are treated as intrinsically amoral, because people feel its amoral. However, that feeling is no more legitimate than "green is the best color" (because my brain tells me it's the best).
Edit: Just want to add - Homosexuality has the same illogical hurdle. It feels immoral to many people, so therefore it must be immoral. People are largely unable to separate their lizard brain instincts from logical analysis. So we end up with gays being stoned to death.
Similar to what somebody else said, there are some reasons it's amoral outside of the cultural rules, at least generally throughout civilized history.
Many older cultural or religious rules had some root in logic (obviously some didn't). In some cases modern understanding makes those rules unnecessary. For example, cooking was not as consistent, and germ theory was basically unknown, so eating pork and becoming sick meant that pigs were unclean and not to be eaten. Obviously we now know that we can eat pork if it's properly cooked.
It's debatable as to the status of many sex rules. Things like diseases can become resistant to treatment, evolve to be more problematic (or create a new problem altogether), etc. Condoms generally protect against most but not all. Then there's the reproduction issue, which pulls in a host of other issues such as who's paying for the kid, abortion, etc. Some of this is covered by contraceptives, but not fully. And perhaps the one not talked about, is how it can influence people similar to gambling or substances. This is also up for public debate on how rules should apply to these things.
Because free sex makes disease and unwanted children, disease and unwanted children cause/suffer-from problems, disease and problems hurt society. This isn't just moral puritanism, it's for good.
Promiscuous sex and many partners irreversibly negatively influences a person's pair-bonding ability at a chemical level, this destroys the family unit and does not benefit the empowered singles and divorced 'pair-couples' we see today promoting this behavior.
Hastening the decline is not entertainment, I wish people would stop encouraging it for short term interests and look at the big picture.
Teaching safe sex is what prevents disease and unwanted children, not moralizing about sex.
There are plenty of well adjusted people who are either in open relationships or have no desire to be in relationships. Being kind and treating people with respect is what strengthens families.
The fact that you believe that casual sex affects pair bonding ability at the chemical level, but you don't believe that condoms prevent the spread of STIs and pregnancies is concerning.
Condoms (and other forms of birth control or protection) seem much more effective than conservative morals at preventing diseases and unwanted children. Take a look at teen birth rate [1] (as a proxy for unwanted or at least unplanned pregancies) and HIV diagnosis rates [2] per US state. The trend seems pretty clear: conservative, religious states do worse at these metrics than liberal, more secular states. There are of course more variables than that, but at least religion and traditional family values don't seem to be helping very much.
If there's anything affecting reproduction rates, it doesn't seem to be permissive sexual norms but rather poor economic and professional conditions that preclude the establishment of a family, in conjunction with the general decrease in fertility when a region passes a certain point of development i.e. a child becomes a financial burden as opposed to an extra pair of hands.
Ironically, the issues you list would be best solved with a professional prostitution industry and regulatory committee running the show.
As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet. "This idea feels right, and is consistent with my ideology, so it must be right".
"As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet. "This idea feels right, and is consistent with my ideology, so it must be right"."
Why do you think that? There are objective reasons for parents sticking together - success of the child and the economics of being in a pair tend to positive things. Although I will say that I don't know of any resources that investigate these on things like polygamy - they focus on the common stuff like marriage, divorce, and sometimes remarriage.
> As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet.
I just want you to know your reply with the bible pamphlet thing was really stupid.
To address you directly: It's scientifically proven, check out Oxytocin and see about the pair-bonding facilitation it does.
I'm not a dummy, but today you spoke to me like one. You won't always get someone to re-engage you, and that won't always be because you're right, sometimes we're just too disgusted to risk further entertaining your disrespect.
Condoms exist. Marital sex also makes unwanted children, I don't see why you declare this a property of "free" sex.
The second paragraph is pseudoscientific bullshit that gets parrotted by conservatives. People have been and will continue to have casual sex, and society is, and will be doing fine.
Your last sentence reveals the real reason you're against casual sex.
This. Prostitution needs to be carefully regulated or else lots of non consenting situations become possible and incentivized. Prostitution should be legal as it violates basic rights not for it to be, but at the same time there should be safeguards.
I think that is friends/family/social pressure is for. We don't forbid it, but people will look at you sideways if you drink beer at 9 am on a weekday.
> but people will look at you sideways if you drink beer at 9 am on a weekday.
This is interesting because it assumes everyone's day to day is exactly the same. When I worked 3rd shift, drinking beer at 9 am wasn't an issue to me because my 9 am wasn't the same as your 9 am. At that point, drinking beer at 9 pm would be odd because that was my morning. Also, my workweek was shifted so my weekend was Monday/Tuesday, so trying to fit everyone into one way of living is simply never going to work.
Ty for pointing that out, my example was bad. I think this is a good illustration of why being judgemental is not helpful. I completely missed why this is a perfectly normal choice for a lot of people who don't operate like I do.
Social pressure seems sufficient to produce most if not all of the problems described in the source article. Why are chargeback rates so high? Because the customer's spouse found out about the purchase and now they have to pretend it wasn't them. Why won't VCs invest in Onlyfans? Because it would be extremely embarrassing for a partner to attend a board meeting about all the great porn the company's producing.
There are countless situations where that sort of pressure simply doesn't exist, and likely won't in the future.
I also don't think the example you provided is a very good one. Perhaps a better example might be extreme cosmetic surgery (&/or body modification) addicts. Or maybe I should say 'enthusiasts'.
> There's a libertarian ethos that says anything between two consenting adults is the their business. I'm more and more skeptical not just of that principle but the self awareness of the people who purport to support it.
The issue at hand is not a law. They have issues too, i.e. abortion debacle in US, but at least they are subject to democratic scrutiny,
It's the fact that an arbitrary and capricious decision by two private corporations or perhaps moralistic CEO gets to dictate cultural norms for entire society.
If visa and mastercard decide to block you, your business / income is dead.
Sometimes they will do it at a loss to themselves - like what happened with Tumbler - it was sold and new owners removed porn, started shadowbanning, etc. It is now mostly dead and was sold mutiple times at lower and lower value. Hundreds of millions were wiped out for the sake of marality police.
> There's a libertarian ethos that says anything between two consenting adults is the their business.
IMHO, that's one of the libertarian oversimplifications that can make it a supremely seductive ideology. It's basically: throw out all the hard stuff and admire a toy model where all the pieces fit perfectly.
With regard to the charge back problem, it seems that this could be addressed by using cash or maybe Bitcoin. Something that cannot be charged back, and maybe can't be traced.
Reading about E-Pimps changed my whole perspective on OnlyFans. History tells us where this is going and it’s very likely things are not going to get any better unfortunately.
Go read Foucault's "A history of sexuality". He spends the whole world debunking the idea that the victorian's were especially sexually prudes.
He spends the majority of the work trying to figure out why modern people are still convinced that the victorian's were uniquely prudish. He thinks this belief is deeply connected to many other strange sexual beliefs.
I think Foucault is frequently overrated but at least volume 1 of a history of sexuality is pretty neat.
If you have something to say, it would be more effective to just say it, rather than pose vague, unanswerable rhetorical questions that rely on us being able to read your mind.
> We also know that the vast majority of people who work in the "industry" are either coerced by others or forced into it by life circumstances.
Most people are forced into work by life circumstances. That's how society operates: work or starve.
Sex trafficking is a genuine issue, but it's not at all the majority of the industry. I don't see what makes consensual sex work uniquely coercive or evil when compared to other physically or emotionally intensive labor.
And civilized society routinely sets a floor for that “work or starve” dynamic, ensuring that there isn’t a race to the bottom and desperate people aren’t forced to take certain kinds of jobs. That’s because we understand that the legality of certain kinds of jobs creates social pressure on people in tough circumstances to do those jobs.
Such regulation inherently requires society to make decisions about what sort of work should be off limits to reduce social pressure to do those jobs. You might not agree that sex work falls in that category, but women themselves decisively do: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me...
And as to your own view, do you think unemployment offices should tell women to look for jobs in sex work before they can get unemployment benefits? After all it’s just another job right?
> And civilized society routinely sets a floor for that “work or starve” dynamic, ensuring that there isn’t a race to the bottom and desperate people aren’t forced to take certain kinds of jobs.
No, not certain kinds of jobs, that's absolutely the wrong way to think about it. People shouldn't be forced into certain kind of working conditions. That's an entirely different perspective. If impersonal sex doesn't bother you, sex work is a perfectly legitimate form of labour as long as the working conditions are just as safe and regulated as any other job they could choose.
> And as to your own view, do you think unemployment offices should tell women to look for jobs in sex work before they can get unemployment benefits? After all it’s just another job right?
The notion that unemployment benefits should be contingent on anything is a notion you've carried into this, but even if we go with it, if a woman could not stand the thought of being a sanitation worker, then she has every right to reject that kind of job. The same argument applies to sex work.
You overlook the inherently collective nature of labor regulation. Labor regulation seeks to prevent individual choices from creating market-wide pressures and a societal race to the bottom. It doesn't matter if being asked to pitch in on weekends without extra pay "doesn't bother you." We ban you from even voluntarily agreeing to do that because we don't want to be pressured to do that too. Individual choices are restricted to create a floor for everyone.
From that perspective, any difference between "type of work" and "working conditions" is wholly artificial. People don't want to be pressured to work on weekends, they don't want to be pressured to do sex work, etc., so we ban those things to eliminate those pressures.
> From that perspective, any difference between "type of work" and "working conditions" is wholly artificial.
It only looks artificial because you cited an example of working conditions, not type of work. The right to refuse certain kinds of work is a perfectly cogent concept and does not require artificially restricting other people's choices.
This is begging the question. It is plainly worse to be forced into some kinds of work (e.g. serving on Russia's front line) than others (e.g. picking apples).
I would think the moral calculus is different when the non-consensual activity is sex vs. eg. cutting timber or cooking fast food. A single rape is a lot more traumatizing then a decade of physical labor. I don't know anything about how common involuntary sex work is, so I won't argue a broader point; I just think the equivalency doesn't hold up.
Okay, but banning or further criminalizing sex work is not going to reduce human trafficking, but increase it, for the same reason that banning drugs doesn't reduce illegal drug sales. The demand is pretty inelastic. HRW has a decent primer on the topic here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-d...
I think you're making the same point. While biology would require your 8-year-old to work to survive, the social structure of your family (followed by your broader social network and eventually the state) is such that that's not the case. Blaming society for hunger is similar to blaming charity for poverty. X is probably not the problem if the solution is more X.
My point is not that society is bad because people hunger, but rather that we should structure our society such that they don't. Society itself is emergent and has no moral character. It's our leaders and to some extent ourselves that are at fault, at least in democracies.
That means that someone have to work to make the food that is given to other people. So get food, someone has to work. If there is no food, someone starves. Society can just redirect who is working and who is starving.
I would argue that being contracted to kill other people other people is very different from other jobs. But we still provide them with insurance, healthcare, acceptance, etc, why not sex work?
I think this is such a progressive view because many religious and some secular people still uphold the belief in the sanctity of marriage. To them sex never stopped being the most intimate and precious thing to share with a spouse and no one else. Add the fact that the rebranding of prostitution into sex work is still a very recent thing plus some things falling under the umbrella of sex work being very illegal in many places means that outside of twitter and extremely progressive spaces like universities no one wants to associate with someone that has turned the most socially taboo act possible into a business.
That said, it's important to remember that "sex work" includes prostitution, but is not limited to prostitution. It's a broader umbrella term for porn, stripping, camming, etc.
You're absolutely right. Some people think sex should be limited to married couples, and some of those people also think they're within their rights to force other people to adhere to their moral code. They are wrong. What other consenting adults do with each other is not the province of anyone's morality but their own.
Something can be both "simply a job" and different than most jobs. The argument is that sex work isn't inherently immoral, so deserves to be supported by our financial infrastructure. It's "simply a job" in the sense that it deserves legitimacy, not that it's exactly like most other jobs.
Institutional support instead of prosecution also comes with the benefit of at least partially undermining the black market of the work, and the additional crimes that are frequently associated with sex work.
Most people in the industry, at least in the West, are not coerced or forced, they simply do it because they can make an order of magnitude more money than they can make waiting tables.
> I would argue that renting out your body in the most intimate way is very different from most jobs.
When would you do this? I do not see this argument.
> We also know that the vast majority of people who work in the "industry" are either coerced by others or forced into it by life circumstances.
We also know this about 95% of employed people, and 100% of those who don't have savings adequate for retirement or sponsors. You don't work, you don't eat.
> Internet porn makes this even worse, since even if they decide to stop, their material will stay online forever.
It would be irrelevant if the material were online forever if large minorities didn't feel it was their duty to punish people indefinitely for ever having done this job.
I think the progressive label comes from two angles: there’s a lot of history of religious moralizing and policing around this which these days identifies strongly with conservatism (note especially how that often shifts blame from the patrons to the workers), and that starts with the idea that there’s something uniquely degrading about this in way that there isn’t about, say, physical work which might leave you damaged for life or jobs which are basically lying or harassing strangers. It might be interesting to think about exactly why you think that’s worse than, say, working in a meat processing plant with a high rate of injury or being a collections agent for a hospital.
The second is having empathy for the worker, a key progressive position. That says, for example, that if you do think that there’s something truly degrading about the work the answer is to have economic and social policies which reduce the number of desperate people without good alternatives, or to have better regulation of the middlemen profiting from the situation, etc. rather than traditional approaches focused on punishing workers.
I know more than a few people who engaged in sex work simply because they’d rather do that for 1 hour rather than make the same money working an entire week at Starbucks, for example. You would be shocked at the kinds of people doing it. Nobody was coerced. If you’re worried about coercion, providing legal protection to sex workers will help eliminate stigma and drive underground operators out of business.
> I would argue that renting out your body in the most intimate way is very different from most jobs.
A coal worker or someone working a similaily harsh job is also renting out their body in ways that might ultimatly proof to be far more destructive to their lives. Whether someone can perform a sexual act for money or not is on a base level purely a question of personal preference. Just like some people enjoy acting or being on stage and others don't. The question is if you are forced into doing it or under which conditions you have to do your work. For sex workers it is pretty clear that their working conditions are coupled to how accepting society is of that job. If it is basically criminalized, you will have criminals run the business hidden from society. If you have it accepted and strictly regulated, there might still be criminals, but the individual sex workers have a greater agency in how, when, with whom they work.
Puritan religious ideas in that context are powerful if you believe in them, but meaningless if you don't. Sexuality comes in many forms and not everybody feels a strong connection between sexuality and love (which is e.g. why many sex workers would rather have sex with someone than kissing them).
I recall some studies showing even just folks at strip clubs enduring a lot of emotional pain and etc. Is it the job, is it the folks who take those jobs? I don't know but I'm skeptical about "It's simply a job." kind of blanket deceleration.
Human sexuality is hardly like typing on a keyboard or etc... I don't buy into just declaring it like any other job. Granted I don't care to stigmatize those folks either, but that statement seems somewhat dangerous / off the mark.
Well there are many jobs, not all of which are comfortable keyboard jobs.
If you work with the elderly, especially in dementia care, included in your job description is mopping up piss and shit. You'll also receive all manner of verbal and physical abuse.
This can be a consistent position if you can do two things: 1. Propose what to replace sex work with for those engaging in it voluntarily or as a way to make ends meet (i.e. the same duress that we accept as normal in capitalism) and 2. draw a distinction between "sex work" renting out your body and a bunch of other jobs that share characteristics:
- actors (non-porn, but sex scenes, full or partial nudity, kissing etc)
- gastronomy (hooters as an extreme example, hostesses at conferences/buffets less so, the emotional and physical expectations placed on normal waitresses)
- modeling
- construction, truck driving, health care and other "will wreck your body and possibly mental health" professions
- butchers, executioners, soldiers and other jobs which are "voluntarily" doing things which in current norms are not acceptable to do in public or regularly
I'm personally not convinced we should target sex work per se if we want to save people being forced into it by circumstances or people, but we should target the circumstances or people that cause the duress. If people still want to do sex work then, hey, it's a free country.
Legitimizing the industry helps make cases of coercion more obvious, as people gain more legitimate means to report things without self-incrimination.
Physical laborers rent out their bodies in a way that often causes permanent damage. It's literally degrading their bodies. Some construction workers live with chronic pain for their entire lives.
There's a psychological component as well, which is more vulnerable in sex work, but there are no shortage of people who also end up with psychological damage from their jobs outside of sex work either. Another commenter pointed out military work — being ordered to kill results in absurd levels of trauma, but it's a completely legitimate career path in the eyes of most societies. Why is that?
I find it fairly hard to distinguish sex work from other work. There's a different balance of upsides and downsides, but you can find similar impacts in other legitimized lines of work.
> but there are no shortage of people who also end up with psychological damage from their jobs outside of sex work
Not to labour the point but: cf Soldiers.
Men can take the emotional and physical toll but women can't?
edit: just to expand on this, talk to people who have been on military tours about the horrors of draging dead bodies (that they might have killed) from the road side, the pain of loosing friends, being away from your family etc.
Not sure if you're intentionally stopping before the obvious elephant in the room.
The army has always been glorified as a country without soldiers is free pickings. It's practically a necessity, as current day tensions show.
Sex work isn't a necessity. Worse, regarding prostitution and porn, most of it's clientele remains secretive to avoid shame. Even if sex was considered a necessity, the stigma alone would prevent individuals from persuing services.
The fact you specifically discriminate between men and women gives it away (women can be soldiers, men can be sexworkers). We consider both the purity of women and the willingness for men to sacrifice themselves and be assertive as virtues. Now turn it around and you have your answer as to the status quo for almost our entire existence across the entire globe.
> The army has always been glorified as a country without soldiers is free pickings
That is your own conlcusion. Historically armies were "staffed" by nobles. You couldn't be a soldier if you didn't have land or title, so it started out as something of prestigious and exclusive (as an alternative explanation why it was/is glorified).
My point isn't that we should see sex work as important as being a soldier (though this is still somewhat subjective). My point is that people do things _as jobs_ that can have psycological impacts. Soldiers are not treated in some different class to other jobs. They are treated essentially the same: people have contracts, insurance, pensions, etc.
why is sex work different?
> The fact you specifically discriminate between men and women gives it away
Thank you for pointing this out.
> We consider both the purity of women and the willingness for men to sacrifice themselves and be assertive as virtues.
Who is we?
> Now turn it around and you have your answer as to the status quo for almost our entire existence across the entire globe.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
>That is your own conlcusion. Historically armies were "staffed" by nobles
If you as a man weren't willing to fight, be it the army or your home, good luck attracting a mate for most of history. Similar dynamics exist today.
>why is sex work different?
Already answered. History and cultural virtues.
>Who is we?
The far majority of your male and female ancestors, for one. The majority of cultures globally, for two.
>I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
The opposite of purity is lust and promiscuity. The opposite of being assertive is passivity and avoiding conflict. The opposite of wanting to fight is running away or freezing up.
The vast majority of women aren't attracted to weak men who won't stand and fight for their hypothetical children.
The vast majority of men aren't attracted to promiscuous women looking for the next meal ticket.
No amount of reasoning changes dynamics that have existed for millions of years. Culture too originates from something.
Now look back at what soldiers do and what sex workers and their clientele resemble. It has nothing to do with emotional burdens.
> If you as a man weren't willing to fight, be it the army or your home, good luck attracting a mate for most of history
Most men, for significant parts of history, weew explicitly excluded from joining the army (e.g. Roman armies were only "staffed" by citizens). Where are you getting the idea that most men had to fight at home? Do you have any relevant sources for this?
> The vast majority of men aren't attracted to promiscuous women looking for the next meal ticket.
Ew. I generally prefer not to pass judgement, but this is an unpleasant turn of phrase in the exposition of your idea.
> No amount of reasoning changes dynamics that have existed for millions of years
Anatomically modern humans have only been around for ~300k years, civilisation ~5k. What millions of years of dynamics are you talking about exactly?
Examples of reasoning changing dynamics that have "existed for millions of years:"
- Money
- Democracy
- Contracts
- etc.
> what sex workers and their clientele resemble
What do they resemble to you? Is this a modern conception or one that has existed for millions of years?
Er, no. It was a path to citizenship. The Tartship Strippers quote "service guarantees citizenship" had real antecedents, and is even now a benefit of military service in the US.
It's not hard to argue that sex is a necessity. There are physical mechanisms that create a desire for sex in most humans. I'm sure just about any therapist would attest to the impact of sex on mental health (both positive and negative impacts).
Being gay used to be taboo and shameful too, it still is in many places... but this is changing. Sex work is already a little less taboo in places where it's regulated. Societal norms are much easier to change than biological compulsions.
Sex isn't a necessity the same way geopolitically showing you'll fight back the moment someone decides to invite your country is. Laws and mandatory drafts reflect this.
Despite being recognized as a necessity in many countries (mine included), you won't get subsidy or sexual assistance as an otherwise capable individual. For obvious reasons, this affects guys the most (the problems for women come after, generally). You'd need a really severe case for governments to make the wet dream of specific circles come true. The equivalent of your country's leader being at gunpoint by an opposing invading army.
If your country gets attacked, you bet mandatory draft will be reinstuted ASAP and executed. It's obvious, just look at Ukraine and Russia.
It's not the same. Actions speak louder.
That's not to mention, sex usually isn't the only thing lacking, making sex work a horrendous substitute or even exasperating the problem.
Honestly I think this weird binary comparison of a country's need for a military to an individual's need for sex (and/or other intimacy) has run its course... this isn't really making sense to me anymore, and it's off course from the original context.
To try to bring things back from this extreme tangent; my point was that on an individual level, trauma from sex work is no worse than trauma people face on the front lines, yet one is acceptable and one's not. That's a somewhat arbitrary construct.
As individuals both sex (and/or some adjacent intimacy) and safety are very low on the hierarchy of needs.
> trauma from sex work is no worse than trauma people face on the front lines, yet one is acceptable and one's not. That's a somewhat arbitrary construct.
I think you've missed the point here. The poster is saying that sex work is vulnerable to psychological damage, but isn't considered as legitimate as military-related careers which are also vulnerable to psychological damage. The poster is questioning society which determines sex work to be less legitimate as a career than military work or any other career.
So with military work, it's not about being required to kill as much as getting it that the killing needs doing. An overpowered army like the Americans conquering Iraq will induce trauma, but if you're outnumbered and alone, and you win? In my case unarmed. Five times, Thursday was my first 4-on-1, not a scratch. They threw a rock at me, 505 grams (I just weighed it), it hit a lamppost. Holy shit, screamed at the stoner QUE CHUCHA PERRA!! FUCK YOU, which is what you're supposed to say in the circumstances, being ganged up on and all, but standing your ground. It's my turf. I told them never to come back, the rapist said he'd come back any time he wanted, no respect. That's what he said! I told him there'd be consequences! I was within my right, not the initiator by any means, I've been a Roman Law hero for ten years by this point, that's gotta add up to something!
So things are getting crazy violent. A little too violent. More than would be entertaining for a neighborhood, too much. American Embassy in Santiago said I should pack my shit and go back stateside. But you know what? Where? Stanford has worse rape extortion. California...Canada same, all about the straight white male Christian, like...no I'd rather be a totally hated minority where I can actually claim to be a minority and defend myself (and the rest of the minority obviously, I'm the only gringo who could have realistically retaliated for that sodomistic screaming catcall, nobody else literally nobody), but all the same...the fetish for lynchings is even worse in California. The rape extortion is the motor of the Californian economy, or should I say, the Fornicalian economy? Fornicalia. Women open up to me about rape extortion in California all the damn time, just the rent is insane pervy rapey landlords taking all wages (and frequently colluding with employers hearing about you getting a raise before you do). One woman was working in a Hispanic Supermarket, just said the rent is disgusting, while knowing full well (exact) what she made. Literally rape extortion. Her landlord, like most Californian landlords, was a rape extortionist because she feared and he know and now I know and I vouch the first thing that happens upon eviction is rape. Landlords threaten with rape. That's how they make money for nothing. Like yeah bring in a handiman every now or never, nah. Another one, this is damning, I was in a psych ward (as I frequently am), and one of the staff opened up about the rape extortion. Didn't actually say rape! But complained, it's all so competitive, rent is so disgusting, meaning she never profited from her work, and she was telling an inmate in the asylum! Because at the end of the day, they see me and know I'm not a bullshit guy who wants to barge through the door without saying hello, fuck as infectiously as he think he can get away with, and jump out the window without saying goodbye. A good man, a man who wants to be a husband and a father, a Christian, the absolute only true monster.
Really beautiful women trust me, I kind of hate that trust but oh well. Particularly when they tell me they've been raped, I hate that! That burns all bridges forever, because that means a greater than 1 in a million chance of accusing me of rape! And frankly having heard enough by this point, all beautiful people get raped. All of them. It's inescapable, they're targeted the most. The bitchvictim media sabotages their defenses because it wants them to get raped. Stanford feminists argue not, say it's about power, but they're chock-full of dogshit, it is partly about power but it is mostly about genetic reproduction. Get real. My accusers are so gross, I turn my phone off around them because I wouldn't touch them with a photon! Just gross, Ariel and Ashley, nothing so gross as betrayal, not glamorous at all, each synonymous with ten thousand instances of rape dungeon punishment. Dude can't go to Stanford reunion to talk to my witnesses because my accusers are very empowered and lying in wait under a bridge. When I returned to Stanford years later all I could think about was switching classes to something with no women, two female professors was terrifying because of the disgusting gullibility of the deans thirsting for a pretext to extort me with sodomy. Neither of them stood upright the whole meeting when they accused me of rape, because they couldn't they both had erections and both had eyes glazed. Witnessed the meeting of the minds, I arrived last to a meeting meant for me alone with the dean, and there were three other people there, you think they spoke before I arrived? What a complete gang-rape. Perfect crime because they knew if they accused me of rape at maximum speed with all the most disgusting ejaculations implying my guilt, off a script, and didn't let me open my mouth at all until the double bind where I was expected (being under coercion after all, sodomy extortion already being declared) to confess. Yeah never figure that one out.
But with this screaming sodomist, this Thursday, no post-traumatic stress disorder. More rather, losing my shit, as many on this forum said I was, but wasn't at the time, got it vetted by my doctor mind you, now it's like...am I living in a society that only wants to rape and murder me? It all started when a flamboy with 5 inch platforms screamed at me "gringo culiao" meaning calling me cooperative with being raped, ie by him, it was rape extortion, dude...without me saying anything to him, just walked down the street, being white, being tall, being straight, being a stranger to homosexual sex, and THE WORSE OF ALL having a fully straight backbone, from winning 33 conflicts before then. How am I supposed to hunch after 33-0? It's an animal status thing, dogs raise their tail, men raise their backs. Very visible when I'm also 6'2" (188 cm) (but for real, not like men who tell women they're 2 or sometimes up to 4 inches taller than they actually are, in person at least, on a dating app who gives a shit 6 inches taller). Specifically determined my height at the doctor's office because I kept getting asked what it was at castings, and while I could say it was 190 cm and they bought it, I said 189 cm (didn't round up), my best estimate, until a checkup where I asked for it exact. 188 cm is very tall, I don't know, only seen one woman taller than that in my life. So all that, and I guess people read my having been a straight model, and in some cases (teenage women especially can tell, I hate this about them) that I'm a hero (strictly according to Roman Law, got called a hero meeting all the criteria), then that's when I get targeted. It's a combination of their being 4 of them and 1 of me, the impunity, the feeling of power that I can be accused of being a violent homophobe for retaliating against a homosexual with 5 inch platforms screaming rape extortion at me, and of course his 5 inch platforms guy was like 5'5" without them, they uplifted him. They made him feel big, and it was the first time I encountered a flamboy dressed as a goth with such high shoes, hard to compensate in my mind, it was like he was 5'10". Besides being sexual display, ordinarily of being a homosexual, but in the context, of being proposing sodomy. Specifically had to do with my being white. So "gringo culiao" refers to my whiteness, like he wanted to stain me with his superior sodomist genetics...like what is he then going to buy my children, with his DNA, a gift for their first birthday? Will he go to their baseball game? Put food on the table? Give that daughter a generous allowance so she can buy outfits freely, which I heard one beautiful girl say once, and made me want to someday be the father who could come up with the money for that. Alimony? Pay for the wedding? Go to prison if he's behind on child support? Because he's screaming that he's straight, everybody's straight, he wants to have babies alright, he just doesn't want paternity himself, he wants to spread his genes through me. Wants to infect me with thousands of sexually transmitted infections, which in addition carry his human genome as a reward for spreading them, that's the endgame. I've been getting these threats for decades, and I'm just fed up with this shit, they always get mulligans and it's sodomy extortion, it's just wrong. And I'm realistically the only gringo who could retaliate for that, no other American could go back and give him a chance to back down on the sodomy threat. And follow through when he arrogantly upheld his threat of sodomy.
Dude I'm a Roman Law hero, I just won my 34th street fight, I'm taking the stairs now because I see too many smiling faces on the elevator, I was scouted many times and eventually actually went to get photos taken--I was a straight model, and the tallest model at all the castings.
Nobody ever talks about this black hole. No man has ever--apparently--come forward first of his own accord to denounce how destructive these lynchings are. Not all of them can take place in court--certainly not mine, maybe next week I don't know, any day now I'll get my trial. Someone has to win in the court of public opinion.
And frankly I really do want the Mark of Cain, it's wrong for women to be like "oh great look who's crossing the club to talk to me" then we hit it off, then ten minutes later (it takes longer for the most attractive women though) I start losing my nerve and deliberately reveal my fear. They deserve to know the reason I can't go home with them UNCONDITIONALLY EVER FORGET IT is because I got lynched. They deserve to know I went through a decade of rape extortion, caving into demand after demand so I wouldn't end up in the abyss. Dude I couldn't sit down with a lawyer for ten fucking years. Is that what you mean by someone in my life that I trust that I can talk to? It was extortion the entire time up to that. And I have nowhere to come up with the $25000 it costs to mitigate the lynching. No Stanford student except the kids of billionaires does. Lessig put it best, "it's a rich kid school.".
This is it. Besides it's largely bots on this site, and nobody reads the walls of text, in fact in part III this forum was the only document that didn't get destroyed along with most of the other evidence. I'm telling this to myself, I'll read this, I'm the intended audience.
Like I treat your gratuitous response like the bots accusing me of being mentally ill and a bot, same as I was called a rapist and a virgin. It's like a prompt from a book of writing prompts. You don't actually give a damn.
I don't mind reading walls of text. Why kind of mitigation costs $25000? This is something maybe I'm unaware of. (Also are there a lot of street fights where you live? I'm not sure I could handle that myself)
If you get accused of Rape and get a trial, it costs $25000 for the lawyer. A lawyer quoted me that when I asked, post-lynching, when I finally got counsel like 11 years later. That's the price! Guess the price of college has been going up a bit fast! And by the way, financial aid won't cover that. Lawrence Lessig put it best when I asked him to help me lawyer up, "it's a rich kid school." Although in that case it's no better, there's extortion, feminist professors with hundred million dollar diamonds hidden in their house they covetously look at. Billionaires kid? You don't want this hitting the papers right? And like they specialize in getting the billionaire father to doubt his son. They got my father doubting me screaming why did you harass her and I told him a tiny bit of the evidence to get him to stop threatening me. And he instantly went and told the dean, which meant I couldn't tell my own father any of the disgusting wanton slut evidence I had way too much of.
Yeah there's lots of street fights here. So one way of communicating it is I used to wear flip flops but after two aggressions (one of them rape extortion) I hate myself for having backed down on--strictly because I was wearing flip-flops--I never wore flip-flops again. I like running shoes, those are much better. Dude never wear uncomfortable shoes not even to meet the President of Russia. Suit yeah but with sneakers. Of course! Once you get whacked, you never go back!
Oh wow, maybe I'm reading into it too much... but your billionaire father turned on you due to a rape allegation? that seems like a very difficult situation.
I wear flip-flops often myself, but they're definitely not good for fighting or running, I can see that.
> We also know that the vast majority of people who work in the "industry" are either coerced by others or forced into it by life circumstances.
Well, the latter part is valid for almost every "bottom of the ladder" style precarious job. Be it agriculture, meatpacking, construction, flipping burgers, hauling trash, handing out Amazon parcels or sex work - all of these don't require much education or training, they're fairly risky (in terms of danger of accidents or other harm) and there's an abundance of potential workers which means the wages are very low.
> Internet porn makes this even worse, since even if they decide to stop, their material will stay online forever.
The irony is, there are so many people shaming anything sexual from erotic art over r/gonewild nudes to full-service sex work, but almost everyone of the shamers is jacking off to porn regularly.
In a decent society without religious bullcrap, there would be no stigma attached and that's it - and we're thankfully heading that way, given that "having an onlyfans" is basically the norm for young women these days employers simply can't afford to shame women for enjoying sex as they won't find staff otherwise.
Again with the denigrating of sex work. It's a pervasive and ancient part of human society, but it should not be studied, because? We study bookmaking and banking and families and art, but not this because, it's naughty? it's taboo? it makes some uncomfortable?
All that is a clear sign to me, that we need more such scholars.
I would imagine it's because classic family values are incompatible with "hookup culture" and unfettered access to sex for money, and it seems that society is sitting on the fence as to which they want for the long term.
Sex work has been around forever, as has hookup culture. There just happen to be now better alternatives than putting the female party in a Magdalene laundry until she gives birth.
1) Pornography studies can be an aspect of sociology, and it's not uncommon for sociologists to specialize in a narrow area.
2) The study of pornography isn't all that narrow to begin with. It's something that has driven technology to a great extent, in particular media and web functionalities. It's something with thousands of years of history and with literally billions of people involved as producers or consumers. There are probably very few people reading this thread who have never viewed a form of it.
3) A job can have a poor financial outlook even if its subject matter is worthwhile.
Pornography is a constant part of human culture. "Pornography studies" is not meaningfully different from "music studies" or whatever. There is a rich history of both the thing itself and society's interaction with the thing that can be mined for insight and understanding.
NB: Being against sex work isn’t being against sex workers.
Edit: You know, I was going to moan about the downvotes - but I think I’ll leave it as when ultimately [flagged] it’ll be some kind of a testament to the mentality so devoid of empathy it can’t imagine how the business of sex for money can be worthy of denigration, even when given direct evidence of the grim reality of it from an actual prostitute.
> Have a read of this from an actual day-to-day UK prostitute:
So all factory work should be denigrated and is an abuse of another human being because Amazon workers have to shit in buckets and piss in bottles to meet their quotas?
Or, crazy thought here, maybe some regulation can make working conditions humane no matter the kind of labour you're doing. But first you have to give up this crazy notion that sex is
intrinsically different from any other physical act you can voluntarily do with your body.
One unsubstantiated anecdote from one person doing one kind of sex work is enough to completely condemn it? I could just as easily point to someone like Aella_girl who is a vocal proponent of escorting and sex work.
We're really seeing a counterrevolution around sex and sexuality. From Row vs Wade to crackdowns on pornography to this, America is getting back to its puritanical roots...
I don't want to push back too much against what you're saying, but this is a bit complicated, at least in the US, I think?
First, some of the stuff like Roe v Wade I think is more the result of political strategy than public opinion. If the electoral college were eliminated, for example, and US political process were more representative, you'd see very different patterns over the last couple of decades. I'm not all that surprised to see studies showing that Americans misunderstand the opinions of their peers on many topics, because of a discrepancy between political representation and public opinion. Basically electoral college and senate politics, combined with gerrymandering, has distorted certain things somewhat.
Second, my sense is this is a bit of rose-colored glasses with regard to looking at the past. Anyone who looks back at the politics around the AIDS crisis, and remembers the congressional hearings around music lyrics (!) might be a little reluctant to characterize things like porn financing controversies as a norm regression. Onlyfans leveled porn distribution in a way that previous years didn't have to deal with, so to some extent this is just the same-old blocs responding to new technology. I also think to some extent this is more due to hard cold financial risk modeling than the article admits -- I don't think it's all of it, but some of it (the article implies, for instance, that all those chargebacks are due to regrets rather than, say, it being a common charge with stolen credit information; I'm sure it's a bit of both but the latter possibility isn't really acknowledged at all in the piece, even if to refute it).
My understanding is that payment processors find themselves enforcing the Overton Window lest they run afoul of present legal trends. There's a sliding scale on what is or is not acceptable for them to be facilitating and it changes constantly.
Within sex work, where on the sliding scale of acceptability does enabling a "self employed cam model", vs facilitating a "trafficked cam model" fall, especially when a payment processor has no idea what is going on behind the scenes? Is the payment processor supposed to watch the stream and recognize a gang tattoo and conclude that one is trafficked while another is not?
I can see people on the political right in the US saying they shouldn't process payments for pornography at all, and people on the left saying "I can't believe that <company> facilitates trafficking or victimization". I'd see the payments processors saying "It's not worth it to process any payments for any pornography at all".
And with it a large part of the western world is following suit, sadly. Britain for example is regressing to the Victorian era. And the rest of Europe is heading the same way. Not having any serious competitors for VISA/MasterCard doesn't help.
The majority of the west isn't 'following' the US. Sex workers and their consumers have always been seen as 'lesser' or 'tainted', across most cultures.
It's never been easier to sell your body and find an audience to applaud you for it. It's just not the majority.
Here in Europe I also see a much stronger moral conservatism. Like I said Britain is the strongest example. But also the Netherlands, and it really is highly influenced by American culture. Even the language on the street is half Dutch half American now :)
In the 80s it was totally normal for (regular non-porn) Dutch movies to contain exposed boobs for example. No way that happens now without very restrictive ratings. And countries like Ireland have outlawed prostitution and Spain is thinking about it.
Of course the west has always been the most open in this kind of thing, probably because we're not as religious. In the Middle East there is almost no difference between government and religion whereas we try to separate them.
Real talk. As someone who was raised Catholic, I just sort of assumed that sexual repression was a by-product of strong religious beliefs, and now I'm both fascinated and dismayed to discover that religion is in no way a requirement for this.
America has managed to reinstate sexual repression, and it's odd how there's no clear "source" for it beyond "habitual capitalism" or something like that.
What makes you say this? Roe was tossed aside by a largely reactionary Catholic bench[1]. State-level anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, and anything else dealing with sexuality is largely pushed by Evangelicals or other fundamentalist Christian politicians.
That's probably true, but as somebody on the other end of the political spectrum, I'm not sure it matters that much if the reason is actually "because Jesus" or really "Jesus is just an excuse". Either way, voters and the politicians they elect self-identify as conservative Christian while ramming through policies that are largely not the will of the people (at a national level).
The irony is that Saint Augustine said prostitution was a necessary evil. So it just seems like modern moralists have refused to operate within the real world where some things we find repugnant are legal and protected.
It'd be really interesting to study sexual repression in chimps or bonobos. Might have some underlying game-theoretic roots, and not actually be unique to humans
The French writer Houellebecq had a pretty compelling explanation for this. With religious norms ebbing away or being transformed (even among right-wingers), sexuality becomes another market parallel to the standard economic one. This was always the case, but the shifting norms speed up and formalize the process. All else being equal, in a scenario where sexuality exists but restrictive norms don't, the natural conclusion is that people with sexual capital will have a rich and varied sexual life whereas those without much appeal in that spectrum will only know lifelong frustration. This mirrors economic inequality in a surprisingly close fashion: desperate swiping through a dating app for an average person is starting to look a lot like copypasting resumes on a job site.
One consequence of this is that people with little sexual capital will try to recreate norms anyway they can. Therefore we end up with a hodgepodge of ideas, religious or not, that have as their only link to one another the desire to enforce sexual restrictions and quell anxiety surrounding sexual prowess as much as possible. The extreme form of this is the incel desire to legally enforce monogamy and erase women's rights, but the less ambitious equivalents take on the form of the counterrevolution you are describing here.
>One consequence of this is that people with little sexual capital will try to recreate norms anyway they can. Therefore we end up with a hodgepodge of ideas, religious or not, that have as their only link to one another the desire to enforce sexual restrictions and quell anxiety surrounding sexual prowess as much as possible.
I've never seen this logical jump but it makes perfect sense. Thanks!
Yes 100%. The U.S. has a scary apparatus of control and oppression directed at women, queer, LGBTQ+ folks. Even in the age of the internet, it feels like we take more steps back than forward...
I don't personally, but society (even liberal society) still has structural reasons to disincentivize this kind of behavior.
Even as someone who doesn't think the government should tell you how to live, you can't pretend to be blind to the fact of why the government doesn't want to promulgate this kind of promiscuity / lack of family structure. It's ironic, given they think it's completely okay to explicitly target firearms companies who make devices and implements protected by the constitution - however cry wolf when acts that may cause far more psychological or societal harm are also given a scarlet letter. To be clear, even as someone far-left leaning I'd acknowledge pornography, more specifically sexually driven parasocial relationships (onlyfans) as far more integral to incels and anti-social males than firearms.
Sex work is commonly targeting at arms-length as "sex trafficking" - many sex workers commonly complain of this law enforcement "trope". However, the bright line of what is/isn't sexually predatory or supporting aspects of pedophillia are becoming more gray with sites like onlyfans. For instance, do we really want young women to only see immediate value in exposing their bodies on the internet for $5 a mo? (Ironically, less money than you'd donate to a charity to feed a child in africa)
> Even as someone who doesn't think the government should tell you how to live, you can't pretend to be blind to the fact of why the government doesn't want to promulgate this kind of promiscuity
I can. Make the argument, rather than saying "it's obvious -- you know. Come on, you know. It's obvious." Until the argument is actually made, it can't be engaged with. This just terminates discussion.
It’s a little too easy to be nude on the internet and make money off it compared to being a prostitute irl. There needs to be some moral policing in my opinion so online pornography doesn’t become normalized. I’m all for completely legalized prostitution, but the balance is it still needs to be on the margins to have an upstanding society.
Too easy to be nude? Wtf are you talking about? A lot of tech we have today may not have existed or flourished if not for porn.
There needs to be moral policing? No. There is no need for this. Let the market decide. If people want porn give em porn (you need a reality check btw. Most internet traffic is porn. Even today). Also, puritan moralistic misguided people need to get with the program. You don't like it? Don't do it. You don't hold the absolute truth (in fact you are just recycling garbage that was created out of thin air millenniums ago and does not apply) and you don't get to decide how everyone lives their lives.
Upstanding society my ass. An upstanding society is one where you are free to do whatever you want to do and you are polite and tolerant of other people that don't fit your ideas. That's upstanding!
- Sex workers must now navigate a very fluid monetary system. Sex workers must be paid in cash, Bitcoin, etc. Then they have to somehow represent this money to the federal government to pay their taxes.
- Everyone around sex workers are considered criminals. Unknowingly rent a property to a sex worker? You're a criminal. Date a sex worker? Suspected to be a criminal. Lend money to a sex worker? Criminal. Use sex work services? Definitely a criminal.
This system shoves sex workers into an intentional class system that prohibits them from owning property, prohibits their use of public services, prohibits their utilization of our monetary system. All of these things, when used, don't just benefit the sex workers - they benefit you.
One of the uncomfortable conversations that many people don't want to have is that sex work is heavily used by society and yet neglected constantly, thereby making it dangerous for both sex workers and the users, even making it more dangerous at times.