Kal Penn, this week’s guest host of The Daily Show, talked about the need to legalize sex work and highlighted how in Nevada they have done so with good results. Apparently Maine has also just decriminalized sex work. Let’s hope the movement spreads.
Although strippers are not sex workers, they too suffer from considerable stigma and hence are deprived of some of the protections that other workers enjoy and thus can be exploited and abused by the management of the places they work in and also by the clientele. Adam Conover, a big advocate of unions, had an interesting discussion with two strippers who unionized their place of work so that they could address these abuses.
Strippers are for voyeurs — a visual art. Basically, artists, dancers, teasers.
Sex work includes (ahem) a fucklot more than that. It’s the sweaty, physical stuff.
Sex work is the result of social inequality. We should work towards a equitable society instead of perpetuating the industry. Read Siddharth Kara’s ‘Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009).
Ah, this old one again. What strippers are not is prostitutes. And the word “prostitutes” is seen nowadays as unacceptable, with “sex worker” being the preferred term… but that term does not refer exclusively to people who actually have sex for money. From the Wikipedia entry:
Of course, the prudish, ignorant or ashamed sometimes like to pretend that “sex work” can only mean specifically the having of the actual sex in exchange for the actual money, but in order to persist in that delusion you need to close your eyes REALLY hard and whistle REALLY loud.
And that it should be legal and destigmatised should go without saying in any rational society. Amazing that it’s allowed in the religious conservative US, but hey, hypocrites gonna crit hippos I guess.
In recent times:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2023-06-26/states-are-loosening-child-labor-laws
Well that’s not true. There are many people who choose to be sex workers (of various kinds) because they enjoy it, or because the money is good, or because they find it rewarding for other reasons. Yes some people end up in sex work because they don’t have other options, but even if we solved all social inequality, there would still be sex work.
I think you’d struggle to find a professional dominatrix who didn’t want to become a professional dominatrix.
^ It’s true for the heavy majority of prostitutes, the subject of the OP.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/17/host-clubs-in-tokyo-force-women-into-sex-work-to-pay-off-huge-debts
@4, John Morales, the USA has a sorry history going back more than a century of hiring immigrants, women, and children to do dirty, dangerous work because they can pay them less and those groups have had fewer options. For example,when the textile mills were booming in the 1800s -- 1900s, mill owners would hire women and children because they could pay them less than they would have to pay adult men, and also because these groups would be more compliant because they so desperately needed the money. In current times, fast food is one industry that’s notorious for getting caught violating child labor laws by keeping minors under 18 working longer hours and doing dangerous jobs. And just recently some slaughterhouses were caught employing 10-year-old immigrant children.
The Republican politicians want this because they know it won’t be *their* children doing this work. a few years back, one R politician suggested saving money by firing school janitors and having children from low-income families doing the work, because sure, you want a 5-year-old who hasn’t eaten that day to handle bleach and other cleaning chemicals.
In short, they want a permanent underclass they can exploit. A child who’s working 60 hours/week on a cutting room floor isn’t going to absorb schoolwork.
@8 SailorStar
Business loves the law of supply-and-demand when it works in their favor, but will fight tooth and nail when it doesn’t. As the American baby boomers retire, there is a contraction of the workforce. Normally, that would mean having to raise wages. Can’t have that as it would negatively impact profits. Answer: increase the workforce pool by robbing the cradle.
People might not be aware of this, but in many places there is a push to get high school kids into occupational studies programs offered at local junior colleges well before they would graduate from HS. The lure is that the student can obtain an Associates degree or certificate by the time they are 18 (and often, the tuition and other costs are taken care of via state programs or grants). I have seen this first hand and it seldom works out well. It has been my experience that you cannot place the average HS sophomore or junior into a college setting and expect them to be academically successful, let alone easily slide into that social environment.
@jimf; yes, we saw the boo-hoo’ing after the pandemic culled an admitted 1.4 million people (and likely much, much more because of states like Florida that called any Covid death “pneumonia”). Fewer workers, plus a number of workers who took the down time to add on to their skillsets and upgrade to better jobs, leaving a dearth of bottom-level workers. Instead of raising the salaries to attract more people, businesses whined and cried about how “nobody wants to work”. In fact, if the pay matched the work expected, they would have willing workers.
@Holms #6,
Hmm, weird, on my screen the OP is about “sex work,” and does not include the word “prostitutes.” I wonder why you have a different OP on your screen…
In any case, even if we’re strictly talking about prostitution (which can be hard to define -- does a professional Domme count? or an erotic masseuse?), how would you measure the “heavy majority of prostitutes” and whether their work is the “result of social inequality?” If you have data to share, I would like to see it. Otherwise, I don’t think your comment carries any value.
@11:
It doesn’t need to. The OP explicitly states the falsehood that “strippers are not sex workers”. In the universe of the OP, therefore, only prostitutes qualify as “sex workers” -- the two are synonymous. The fact that this is wrong is immaterial to the point here.
@sonofrojblake #12,
“Strippers are not sex workers” = “only prostitutes are sex workers” is a very weird argument to make. I guess you think that sex workers must be either strippers or prostitutes, and nothing else. Which is weird because I already named two other types of sex work.
Meh. All strippers are sex workers, but not all sex workers are strippers.
We all have a functional ontology, implicit or otherwise. Know it when we see it, kinda thing.
For example, is appeasing and placating prurience to be considered sex work?
Depends on one’s definition.
cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=sports+illustrated+swimsuit
(Dolly Parton once played a role as a prostitute. Was that sex work?)
[meta]
invivoMark @13, I think you’re misrepresenting SORB there, who is writing about his apprehension of the implication of that claim by the claimants, not his own apprehension.
(“In the universe of the OP” makes that obvious)
From my perspective, you are both in agreement as to the issue at hand.
I’m not sure whether to be encouraged that some of you think sex work is such a non-issue that we can trivially derail the conversation into child labor or annoyed that the whole conversation gets brushed aside in favor of something not really related. It’d be like talking about retirement funds and different ways to setup money accounts only to have someone derail into talk about something like bank robberies or fake ATM machines.
I think however you want to think about strippers they’re operating under the same social stigma (or at least a very similar stigma -- let’s not split hairs for no reason) as someone who performs sex acts that require touching the client. Mostly because our culture still promotes godawful stupid nonsense as if it makes sense. Like abstinence only sex-ed or the idea that jealousy proves love instead of just being a display of insecurity or the bonkers idea that a male having sex means they’re doing well while a woman doing the same means she’s compromised on some BS morality. There’s also a weird tendency to blame the other person if your partner cheats on you. Which I think is very relevant to how people think about sex workers.
I’m hoping the legal protections for sex work as a job will function as a wedge. Similar to how entertainment that included homosexuals did for that group of people. Ultimately I think sex work is going to have a hard time being accepted without people being willing to get rid of some illusions about romance. Like everything I mentioned above, for example. If you’re still holding onto some of those wrongheaded ideas I don’t see you could end up being okay with sex work unless you have some big compelling reason in your life which promotes that idea. And most people won’t.
I’m not so sure you grasp the point, lanir. Perhaps I was too subtle.
If it’s just a job, just work one does, no stigma, then it is just another vocation.
(We have no problem with children acting, or singing, or dancing, or suchlike.
So, a bit of fucking, what’s the prob? But hey, maybe just stripping, or doing fetish pr0n)
@invivoMark, 13:
Then I suggest you address your comment to someone who made that argument. I didn’t. In fact, I was rather clear about meaning much the opposite -- that sex work is considerably more diverse in its application as a term. You didn’t understand that, but it’s OK, I forgive you.
Did you guess that AFTER you read post 3? You know, where I quoted the Wikipedia article which explicitly states that sex work can include, and I quote AGAIN FOR THE HARD OF THINKING:
“prostitution, stripping or lap dancing, performance in pornography, phone or internet sex, or any other exchange of sexual services for financial or material gain”
I mean… the most charitable explanation I can think of is that you’re just really bad at guessing, I suppose.
What’s even more weird is that before you did that, I listed FOUR other types of sex work, but that didn’t seem to impinge on you. Did you even read post 3 at all?
@lanir:
Decoupling sex from love is what it will take. Good luck with that.
#11 invivo
“Sex work” can be used to broadly refer to all avenues of titillation for money, it can also be used to refer to prostitution in particular. Given that much of sex work in the broad sense is already legal, and given that the maine bill deals especially with prostitution, and given that the first video explicitly uses sex work in this narrow sense… did you watch the video at all? Anyway, it seemed reasonable to use clear language to make a point in reply to your broad brush statement. So very sorry if you weren’t aware of the subject of the post to which you replied.
sonofrojblake @19,
sonofrojblake @12,
sonofrojblake, if someone is responding to a comment that you wrote, you might want to re-read that comment before you object to their response. If you conclude that “only prostitutes qualify as ‘sex workers'” [those are your words verbatim] based only on the premise that strippers don’t qualify, then you made precisely the argument that I commented on: “Strippers are not sex workers” = “only prostitutes are sex workers”
I get that we’re not talking about your personal definition of “sex workers” [you were commenting on Mano’s exclusion of strippers] but I guess you forgot that. It’s okay to be forgetful. Your words are still on this page for you to refer back to at any point. You could’ve saved us both a bunch of trouble and sour words by just re-reading the damn thread.
@Holms #20,
Still waiting for any amount of data you would like to provide to give your original comment any value.
@21:
Excellent, we can clear this one up very simply now. I don’t conclude that. I was very clear that I do not conclude that. I was equally clear that it was my interpretation that the OP did conclude that -- hence the words you quoted verbatim, without bothering to understand the difference between me saying something I believe to be true, and me observing something that someone else appears to believe to be true. I stand by that interpretation, an interpretation, for the avoidance of doubt, that I do not agree with.
Good grief.
#22 invivo
Likewise for your #5, Mr. Snitty.
Sex work is the result of social inequality.
WHICH social inequalities, exactly, result in sex work being a thing, and how? If you can’t be more specific about this, then you’re not saying anything useful.
We should work towards a equitable society instead of perpetuating the industry.
We’re not talking about “perpetuating” the industry, we’re talking about making it safer and more fair for its workers. So why not do both — work for a more equitable society AND make sex work more equitable, at least until the end of all inequality somehow makes sex work disappear?
Read Siddharth Kara’s ‘Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2009).
Slavery is a separate issue: not all sex-workers are enslaved, and not all slavery is sexual.
Oh, and yes, strippers are sex-workers, just like porn actors: their work is about sexual arousal, and strippers, at least sometimes, engage in sex acts, either to make a few extra bucks or because they’re coerced to do so.
@sonofrojblake, who continues to fail to read things,
“I get that we’re not talking about your personal definition of “sex workers” [you were commenting on Mano’s exclusion of strippers]”
^^This is what you failed to read the first time, so I’m posting it a second time for your benefit.
Spaghetti monster! I am astounded by people’s ability to argue over absolutely nothing.
Person A is in discussion with another person B about the classification of hamburgers, while person C is talking about something else tangently related, how to stop hamburger related injustice (too much mayo on that steamed ham).
Abruptly, Person A turns and addresses person C about hamburgers.
“I wasn’t really talking about hamburgers.” Person C says, nonplussed.
“I was merely saying if you conclude about hamburgers-”
“Again, I wasn’t talking about fucking hamburgers, but injustice. I was saying you should address the person who actually said that which you disagree about, and saying that I do not want to talk about hamburger classification but things I consider more important.”
“I knew that you idiot!” says Person A. Bonus points if A now goes into how hamburger classification and injustice are deeply related, really, so their tangent and insult was super necessary, and Person C is the asshole for not wanting to talk about hamburger classification.
Person B stares with a WTF expression on their face.
If your conclusion is that you don’t actually disagree with a person on a topic, stop fucking arguing with a person on that topic, especially if the person explicitly said they don’t want to talk about the topic. And especially don’t descend into name calling.