While the notion that it’s “good” is nonsense, I’d call it a lesser evil, or at least something she and countless others have decided is a lesser evil, infinitely preferable over further poverty, homelessness, and other similarly demeaning and underpaid work.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you posting about it and- well, yeah. Sex work is not good, yes. But within capitalism and a wildly imperfect world, people need their bread, and this focus on the people simply trying to make the best of terrible circumstances and the terrible system they live within isn’t exactly productive, rather the opposite.
To simplify this: if you want to end sex work, stop picking on the sex worker and actively work to destroy the system that drives them into sex work in the first place. Create a system where everyone’s needs are met and their reasonable wants are achievable. Once that happens, the conditions necessary for sex work to exist will disappear.
On the scale of not good things to be doing, diligently paying taxes in a western country does more harm than any form of sex work.
100% agreed.
This issue is not as black and white as it seems. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the book Revolting Prostitutes which adresses sex-positive sexwork advocacy. I recommend reading the whole book if you want to gain a deeper understanding about the issue, I learned a lot from it most importantly that criminalizing sexwork is harmful to the sexworkers themselves and should therefore be opposed. Here’s the excerpt:
Is Sex Good?
In this context, where sex represents loss, threat, and bodily degradation, it is no surprise that some sex workers – and those who advocate for us – have responded by emphasising the value of sex. Sex work, they agree, is sex – but sex is, in fact, good. In agreeing that sex work is sex, they place commercial sex in a category with other kinds of sex which have traditionally been considered ‘wrong’ or degrading – for instance, queer sex or women having sex outside of relationships. These advocates push back against narratives that associate bodily or moral degradation with ‘the wrong kinds of sex’, instead asserting that sexual pleasure is a personal and social good. They position sex work as an adventurous, fulfilling, and sexy experience for the worker.
[…]
This discourse of sex positivity helped produce the figure we term the ‘Erotic Professional’. Easily identifiable as one of the more vocal, visible figures of the sex worker movement, the Erotic Professional positions herself as answering a vocational ‘calling’ that seems to have barely anything to do with being paid. In downplaying economic coercion and instead emphasising her pleasure and desire, the Erotic Professional attempts to make commercial sex more closely resemble the sex life that society is more ready to endorse – that for which women receive no payment. One escort, for example, is quoted in an interview as saying:
A prostitute will do everything for money. Not me … I try to forget about the money … it’s very affectionate … I don’t even think about [payment] until the very end. I don’t demand payment up front, because the guys I go with are always good people … I also adore sex. I wouldn’t be in this profession if I didn’t like it. So, I found a way to make money doing something that I like.
[…]
These sex positive politics create the illusion that worker and client are united in their interests. Both, we are told, are there for an erotic experience, for intimacy, for hot sex. Raising the subject of the worker’s needs (for safety, money, or negotiating power) would spoil the illusion that the worker and client are erotically in tune, and that she’s just as sexually invested in their encounter as he is. In this rhetoric, the focus can easily shift to the needs and enjoyment of the client. Carol Queen’s influential 1997 essay on sex positivity and sex workers’ rights describes sex work as a ‘life of sexual generosity’ and has a subsection titled ‘Why Johns Need Sex-Positive Prostitutes’ – a subtitle it is hard for us to read without wondering, who cares.
[…]
This elision is harmful. The worker’s interests are not identical to those of the client. Ultimately, the worker is there because they are interested in getting paid, and this economic imperative is materially different from the client’s interest in recreational sex. (Footnote: However, as we shall see later, criminalisation – whether of the worker, the client, or both – pushes their interests to overlap, as both will have a shared interest in avoiding police detection in order that the interaction can proceed.) Losing sight of that leads to a politics that is inadequate in its approach to workers’ material needs in the workplace. As sex workers, we sympathise with the wish to over-emphasise pleasure, freedom, or power. This narrative may feel much better than being stigmatised as damaged, an animal or a piece of meat. However, there is an obvious conflict of interest between a fantasy persona who loves their job and an activist who demands policy intervention to remedy the abuse of their human rights in the workplace. Using just one persona to assure your clients that you love your working conditions and also to highlight how inadequate they are is a difficult line to walk
[…]
The difficult truth is that harm will come to people selling sex tonight, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, for many people, doing so remains the only viable way to survive. The politics of Happy Hookers and Exited Women have no space for the existence of the unhappy sex worker, whose inconvenient truths disrupt the comforting delusion that prostitution is a sexual orientation. Instead, she is forced – usually by economic necessity – to continue choosing survival over a noble exit, and she reminds us that capitalism cannot be magicked away with liberal or carceral solutions. For this person, sex work may be sex – but it is also work, in a world that allows no alternative. Understanding what work is, however, is easier said than done.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
