The whole thing: The girls doing it NSFW content and selling it, the dudes buying into it mostly because they won’t have any of it in real life, the way society sees it… Thoughts?
Personally I think every adult woman can do whatever the fuck she wants with her body and sexuality, even sell it. But obviously there will be consequences later in life if she wants to became a mother… And it shouldn’t be like that anymore.
The dudes buying “their girlfriend” there is complicated. At first I made fun of them but now I realised for many men, myself included, is that fake sexual relationship (or even fake sentimental relationships) or NOTHING. I won’t buy any of that for myself, since the fake part kills any allure for me, plus preferring to keep that little money I got left in my wallet but I understand more why more men do it. Is their only shot to a reality close to a relationship, is that or AI girlfriends.
Think of how you look at it when the coercion is overt.
I’m sure we both forced laborand rape (overtly coerced labor, overtly coerced sexual contact). Do you think one is more harmful than the other and takes a unique psychological toll? Edit: what about for a person who endures both?
There are some subtleties due to the different kinds of content that count as porn, but hopefully this explains why many left feminist organizations advocate for the abolition of the sex trade.
In addition, remember that one in seven people in the sex trade in the US are trafficked.
Yeah of course I oppose those things but I don’t see it as comparable at all. Something being included as an option in the job market is very different from forcing people to do it. There are far more harmful jobs that risk severe physical and mental injury that aren’t even paid particularly well.
A very serious topic worthy of discussion in it’s own right but I don’t see how that’s related. If anything this would be a good reason to legalise and regulate wouldn’t it?
EDIT: also important to note that people of any gender can work in the sex trade.
Under most anti-capitalist conceptions it is well understood that you must either work or die, and there is naturally an element of coercion. Wage slavery isn’t just hyperbole. Capitalism drives down wages to bare subsistence and even below. The exceptions tend to be in imperialist countries that provide a relatively higher income by extracting from other countries’ workers and resources. But even then we all know you have to work or die, in the end. You are always threatened with the example of the difficult lives of the unhoused. They help remind you of how little you have to back you up. Housing is the first to go. Or maybe health.
This naturally makes it comparable, as there is the element of coercion. We are left to argue about the extent of the coercion.
I invite you to familiarize yourself with how trafficking works. Just guessing in the dark does not do the people affected justice.
Cool well leftist feminist organizations still often the abolitionist perspective I mentioned. This is because women are far more impacted by the sex trade and other organizations tend to have bad positions or no positions at all because they are ignorant. Let me know when other organizations have as developed of a political like on this, as I know of none other than ruling communist parties that were influenced by the women within them.
This is not an argument against sex work, this is an argument against all work under capitalism. Fair play, but not what we are discussing here.
If you want to make an argument against sex work you need to provide a justification for selecting it specifically over other work. I don’t think you have really done that other than to suggest imagining the toll sex work must take on an individual. Do you have any way to show that it is particularly harmful or any other reason why it should be singled out?
I have, in fact, pointed out the core argument for the abolition of sex work made by leftist feminist organizations.
I already did. I made a comparison that you’ve avoided thinking about. You declared it an invalid comparison based on absolutely nothing, but it isn’t.
Who said I was imagining? You seem to be taking a lot of liberty with my thoughts.
I already did and already pointed out the trafficking aspect. You seem to be interested in avoiding what I’ve laid out. Perhaps you should do some self-criticism as to why you are uninterested in approaching this in good faith.
I didn’t mean to misrepresent what you were saying so I’m sorry that I have. When I said you suggested imagining the difference I was referring to the statement you made asking me if I thought sex work was uniquely harmful compared to other work. I interpreted that as you asking me to imagine what harm a sex worker might experience. Are you able to clarify that? It seemed to be the core of your argument from what I could tell.
The issue I have with your last argument which I articulated is that it does not apply to sex work, but all work. Should we abolish all work given your reasoning or is there a specific reason why sex work should be targeted? Maybe I missed it but I didn’t see it in your argument about work under capitalism amounting to forced labour. If it applies to all work, I don’t see it being a useful argument for the abolition of sex work.
The trafficking aspect is not an issue with legalisation of sex work. It exists whether sex work is legal or not. To me this is akin to saying people are trafficked for slave labour therefore we should abolish labour. Unless I am missing something, it doesn’t seem follow.
I’m asking you, by analogy, to consider the difference between a forced laborer and a forced laborer that is also subject to rape. Think of it as part of the same coercive system. Historically, it has been.
The leftist feminist consideration looks at work under capitalism as its own coercive entity. Not identical to slavery, but still having its own coercive nature. If one must work to live and one’s sexuality is to be sold (and in a heavily gendered way), it is different than online working to live. It is a commodification not just of one’s labor, not just of the body, but also one’s sexuality and with downstream detriments due to its embedding in a patriarchal society. These things are not separable. “Men can also be X” also does not change this calculus, it just provides another facet that differentially impacts a minority.
The commodification of bodies for sex is also the driver of human trafficking.
The left anti-capitalist position is the end of capitalism itself. It is not simply a reform within the capitalist system that leaves the fundamental driver of this social context intact. Left advocates of abolition may offer reformist policies but they understand them in this other context.
Hopefully this plus the prior answer addresses the question. There is also plenty of abolitionist literature from communist, anarchist, and syncretic perspectives.
Under this framework, trafficking emerges from the aforementioned commodification. Legalization is considered expansionist under this framing, it opens up the labor pool and normalizes this commodification, even telling kids and young adults that this is a profession to pursue rather than something harmful to them. A larger sex trade. More brothels. More “massage” parlors.
Abolitionists tend to advocate for keeping the behavior of “John’s” illegal, making the industry itself illegal while not punishing prostitutes.
Per this framework we should abolish the capitalist labor system. Abolishing the patriarchal sex industry is something that can be achieved as part of this movement. Same as child labor was abolished (although not for everyone). We punish the employer not the child. We know that the right position is to provide economic support to families and children, not to legalize sending children to the abattoir where we know undocumented immigrant children work.
Ok thank you. I understand your argument better now I think, at it’s core it is an argument for abolishing the capitalist system of labour, including sex work. I can get behind the idea of introducing a new system of labour, the current one certainly doesn’t seem to be working very well for the vast majority of people. I don’t find it a convincing argument for the abolition of the sex industry though, because I don’t think you’ve demonstrated that this work is more harmful than other work. It seems like a selective application of the ideas you put forward. Like saying tiling roofs is dangerous, therefore we should ban all red rood tiles. Using the word rape feels like an appeal to emotion to me, there are ways we could demonstrate that sex work is objectively harmful that would convince me but I haven’t seen that.
Thanks for the interesting discussion though.
You can just answer this simple question yourself: is it more harmful to have a system of forced labor or to have a system or forced labor and rape?
If you say it’s the second one you will now have an idea for why it is singled out rather than lumped in with all labor.
Re: things like “appeal to emotion”, that is absurd. This is social theory, not modus tollens. It will all be about impacts in humans, systems, harms, basic empathy, and challenging yourself. There is no equation or deduction. The mere idea is philosophically outdated by at least several thousand years.
You are free to read the literature on this topic or to take this seriously enough to actually engage with it. So far we haven’t been able to get past the very first thing I said, a simple comparison, seemingly stuck on the difference between a comparison and equation. I think you’re perfectly capable of understanding it and then moving forward. But I’m not going to force knowledge into a combative person’s head. You’d need to pay me for that.