this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
229 points (91.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43943 readers
624 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IMO the more that money is involved in anything, the less actually voluntary it is, because we need money to live and plenty of people don't have a lot of options for making money. With sex it's really important for everything to be actually consensual, but paying for it makes that ambiguous, they can't really know, so I see it as creepy and unethical.
Right, if you pay to have sex with a person that's utterly destitute, completely desperate, and has no other options, is that REALLY consensual?
There are plenty of examples of sex workers that are NOT in that situation, but there are just as many (I would guess more) examples of people that ARE in that situation.
I'd be curious to see whether sex workers increase/decrease in a region that implements a universal basic income.
I've known people who are sex workers and they're some of the most talented and intelligent people I've ever met. Replace sex-worker with marketing and that's who they are. There's nothing involuntary about what they do. Unless you consider that my work is non-consensual because I don't want to do it if I could just survive without it.
Yeah, pretty much, it's one of the worst things about our society and needs fixing in general. It's just potentially extra bad when sex is involved because of its emotional, cultural, etc. significance. I don't mean to suggest all sex workers are desperate victims, I'm sure some of them are well off, have options, and are doing it because they want to, but they all have a business incentive to try to appear that way, so someone looking to hire them can't really be confident what they are doing isn't ultimately exploitation.
I couldn't really pin down exactly what my problem with sex work was until reading this. I try not to judge, but I've always found it problematic and I do find myself feeling like it shouldn't have to be a thing. Anecdotally, every person I've interacted with who brought the topic up always joked about wanting to do it just for the money.
The fact that it's paid for as a service makes it inherently open to exploitation, and thus unethical.