Asklemmy

I understand the sentiment, but "buying consent" is a difficult line of thinking when you follow it all the way through.

CW: SA

There's sex workers who are sexually assaulted by clients, some brothels have panic buttons in their rooms for this reason. So if you follow the "prostitution is legalized r*pe" line of thinking, what's that then? Wasn't the sex worker in question already violated when they entered the contract with the client? Is that a case of double sexual assault?

I don't think that idea holds much water in all cases. It often does, but you cannot apply it universally to all sex work. That's because you can't just "buy consent", a sex worker still has very specific conditons for giving you conditional consent that only extends to a select number of specified acts, to certain time frames, certain areas of their body and so on, and they can revoke that consent when things turn south because the john starts to behave badly. And ultimately, all consensual sexual acts are in some ways conditional, even if it's the unspoken agreements in vanilla heteronormative relationships. It takes a massive level of trust and the knowledge that your partner will always intuitively accept your boundaries to allow them to do what they want with you and actually mean it. And when i look at it that way, i do not think that you can just override somebody's ability to consent by giving them money. There is already some form of consent to these acts involved when somebody agrees to pick up that line of work. It's difficult to say where that ends, moreso than in sexual realtions outside of sex work, i'd fully agree to that, and that's highly problematic, but it's not as clearcut as "all sex work is a form of SA because you bought consent the sex worker normally wouldn't have given to you".

(rest of the post is just general musings not directed at you, comrade, i'm only putting them here because i think this works better in one post).

That said, i'm very much not a fan of people buying sex work, and yes, that includes porn. Sorry guys, i know that most of you can't nut on your own without this stuff, for reasons i've always failed to understand, but it's how it is. The reason for my attitude isn't that i disagree with sex work per se, my support actually always lies with the workers and puts their concerns first, which is why i DO NOT support failed approaches like the "Nordic Model", which aims to only punish buying sex work, but effectively worsens risks for sex workers, increases deportations of sex workers without papers etc. My concern rather lies with the inherent coerciveness of all transactional relations under capitalism. When you listen to a typical socdem SWERF like German SPD member Leni Braimeyer (surprise, she's also a massive terf), who is pushing for the "Nordic Model" instead of the legalized prostitution we see in Germany today, there is not only a total, ultra-patronizing lack of recognizing the agency of sex workers, there's also a complete obliviousness to the economic conditions that determine how prostitution works in Germany, as yet another form of exploiting the economic imbalances in the EU and supplying German capital with a constant supply of workers who have to take increasingly awful deals out of pauiperization and desparation, as well as an increasingly precarious situation for the lower incomes among the German working class. It's these conditions that give rise to prostitution as an area of mass exploitation, and ending capitalist relations is the only way to amend the problem that a majority of sex workers are in a lopsided economic situation that is the actual threat to their agency and their ability to fully consent.