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Comment by thn-gap | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of employees devote already 1/3 of their life doing a work they despise just so they can avoid starving.

Getting literally fucked to save 40 years of bad work doesn't sound too bad.

Except that most sexual assault victims just get literally fucked and don't save 40 years of bad work.

People generally perceive winner-take-all economies like the music industry through this same fallacious lens: they assume that the star experience is the norm and ignore the long tail. The music industry is a high-profile but economically tiny; it is not representative of the wider economy, and the star experience within it is even more unrepresentative.

It's comments like this which remind me that HN has minuscule female participation. Because so many more women have experience with sexual assault than men, and because people who have experienced sexual assault would downvote this comment into oblivion, the fact that it survives is a testament to how screwed up HN demographics are.

Yeah, this shit didn't happen with a fucking contract - the entire sexual assault probably took place without the offender ever even mentioning a quid pro quo, you just heard from someone else that it was the only way. You can't sue the fucking guy if you don't get a callback.

And to be honest there are people here who loudly won't even do a three-hour whiteboard interview for a high-paying gig that isn't a sure thing.

I just watched Fran Lebowitz's Netflix special and according to her you couldn't even get a job as a waitress in NYC in the '70s without sexual favors. Basically a generation of service industry management looked at sexually assaulting job applicants as a perk.

> Except that most sexual assault victims just get literally fucked and don't save 40 years of bad work.

But sexual assault is offtopic in this thread. OP discussed voluntary exchange and not sexual assault.

The generic term "abuse" would have been more precise, and I have used it elsethread. However, it is common for these incidents to take the form of sexual assault: see Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, etc. In any case, "voluntary exchange" is a spectacularly inapt way to characterize sexual coercion by entertainment industry executives.

I thought so. At 20 I used to go out dancing every night for fun. After being repeatedly groped I decided I should get paid for dancing. It was a perfect decision. But not for the money. The thing is it's not the 'getting literally fucked' that is bad. It's that when you choose that as a way to avoid starving their is a social cost: You are a fucking dirty whore. And it follows you the rest of your life. I became a sex worker activist because in Toronto being a stripper/sex worker meant no protection from the law (if cops found you doing a lap dance or on the street they arrest you if you don't give them a hand job (stripper) blow job (hooker).

It's a race to the bottom though. Once one person does it, everyone else has to do it too, just so they don't fall behind. In the end you are back to where you started, except you have to sell yourself in addition.

>It's a race to the bottom though. Once one person does it, everyone else has to do it too, just so they don't fall behind.

See also: growth hacking which is rampant in the tech startup industry