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Comment by 9x39 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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