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Comment by h1fra | Hacker News Reader

Hard question, and Instagram is getting abused by this. They allowed breastfeeding as a non-porn category, now you have hundreds of OnlyFans account faking breastfeeding. Effectively ruining the progress for everybody.

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It is good to challenge these arbitrary norms through what amounts to a wild combo of civil disobedience and grifting

I'm a new parent who recently stumbled into the world of Instagram breastfeeding pornography. I just wanted to say that the content I saw seemed to be almost universally published by men rather than women pushing their own OnlyFans content.

I know you probably didn't intend it that way but I often see criticism of OnlyFans specifically made when I wouldn't have seen it around traditionally male operated pornography publishing, and sometimes there's a feeling of subtle misogyny creeping in.

There's more than a subtle misogyny to the anti-OF messaging people throw around, not to label the grandparent comment as falling into this issue.

I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence.

The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.

That's exactly what I meant, I'm not sure how my meaning became reversed.

Really? I always saw that as a similar reaction to what you may see here on HN when people dismiss an article because it's written by a party trying to (subtly) push their (possibly semi-related) product. In other words, it's a defense (perhaps unjustified in many cases) against being manipulated by the poster.

The thing is that they singled out the platform known for putting the control in the hands of women rather than making the broader point about guerrilla marketing.

Would you celebrate the choice of entering sex work like, say, that of someone entering medicine or law?

“You’d make such a good porn star!”, we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between OF and Stanford.

No, we wouldn’t, because despite a weird and deliberate normalizing effort in some corners of the Internet, it’s an intrinsically degrading field run by pimps physical or digital now, and an existential history of abuse and degradation.

Would you celebrate the choice of someone entering the garbage disposal field? Sex work seems to be singled out in these arguments somehow. I would again tie that back to misogyny, in the sense that a man working a demeaning job is seen to only demean himself, but a woman is seen to demean her father and family, let down all of society, and raises these questions of "how would you feel if it was your daughter?"

But that's not actually what I was arguing. My point was that women who produce their own content to sell on OnlyFans are generally treated with a contempt that isn't applied to men who hire women to produce the same content for them.

Not every job is glamorous. Would you be proud of your child for becoming a garbage man? "You'd make such a good garbage man!", we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between sanitization engineering and Stanford.

Probably not, yet society depends on garbagemen to function smoothly. And we should be happy that in the modern era people can pursue unglamorous careers, and be accepted by society, and not suffer from the abuse and degredation of times past. Society is improving. It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.

Garbage collection is similar to other male trades - they tend to be stable, respectable (although not the level of law/med to be sure but certainly among blue collar work), often well paid for the entry reqs.

Did humans stop abusing one another and I missed it, and all the harms of being used sexually by the world are gone now?

>It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.

Women have some of the strongest opinions against sw, so you have the floor if you want to attack that half.

https://prostitutescollective.net/independent-a-quarter-of-w...

Garbage collectors sell their body to a much greater degree than many sex workers. Male-centered fields that sell their body are celebrated, but female-centered ones are degraded. It is, indeed, misogyny.

I would be much safer making porn than being in the army, or even working in a warehouse. It would be less taxing on my body.

> A quarter of women think sex work should be stigmatised, says poll

Aren't we lucky that 25% of women have a strong man like you to protect them from the other 75% of women.

A person having sex is not intrinsically degrading.

You experimented with your reduction in language such that it’s a banality now.

However, submitting to pimps is degrading, submitting to the violence and extreme sexual behavior of sex clients is degrading, and at least in most societies, losing one’s social place to perform sex work is also degrading.

Not all sw’ers, sure, some sw’ers are wealthy, sure a few are.

It’s just extreme arguments of the extremely online. Zero parents in this thread are encouraging their daughters to participate in such an industry.

None of the things you're critiquing are intrinsic to sex work and your argument is that it is intrinsically degrading. You made the point that work isn't intrinsically degrading, since you don't consider working in prestigious fields like medicine or law to be, nor do you consider working in physically demanding and less traditionally prestigious fields like garbage collection. I pointed out that sex isn't degrading either, since it isn't, sex is just something people do with each other.

So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?

It is if they do it with people who think lowly of sex workers

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