I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.
Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.
I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.
> A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run.
This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.
But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?".
I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.
Probably bad for the mental health of the men too. As the thread ancestor noted - sometimes "'fan[s]' [go] nuclear and was waging all out digital war.".
I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance; that could foreseeably lead to some spectacular meltdowns for men who were already mental health edge cases when it dawns on them that their time is being wasted.
> aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded ordinance
That's why in places like strip-clubs you usually have at least a couple of strongly-built bodyguards who can address this issue right there on the spot, on the Internet there is no such thing.
This is in no way exclusive to porn. After running a B2C business for a while I realized that if, as an owner, you should be wary of some people, it needs to be your biggest, most vocal fans. They are the most emotionally attached, feeling they’ve personally invested their money, time and faith into your brand and they are the most violent when disappointed. At some point they all expect special treatment, which makes disappointment that much easier.
Of course not all fans are like this but it just takes a very vocal minority to create a big problem.
But then again, it takes some insanity to become a brand fan in the first place.
I’m sure that when trading desires and emotion like on OnlyFans, the things I’ve mentioned become 100x worse.
> Your vocal B2C fans go digitally nuclear on you? What B2C industry are you in?
I've never experienced it as a target but I've seen fan rage explosions (not necessarily direct customers, depending on the particular industry, but entitled downstream fans targeting the upstream objects of fandom) in all of these non-sex-work industries:
film/television, music, video games, tabletop hobby gaming (particularly RPGs), sport, software (particularly open source), ...probably some that I am forgetting.
Any non-utilitarian B2C market with enthusiasts is like that - photography, fishing, drones, mountain biking… there’s endless drama in discussion forums, brand loyalty, flame wars and all of that reaches the vendors (especially the smaller ones which directly participate in communities).
There was the (hilariously unsuccessful) attempt to review bomb Factorio a few weeks ago, after some fans got upset about a video the lead dev linked to in a blog post. It seems to be most common in creative industries, eg. Video games, music, movies, etc. Probably because those are the products that people get the most emotionally attached to.
The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they're automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren't even remotely in the video. It's become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it's just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame.
Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.
>the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me.
It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.
This is so much true. It's almost like swearing in English is not swearing at all, even in semi-formal context. You can tell the worst swear in English you can think of, and it just sounds harmless compared to swearing in local language.
I'd posit English doesn't have swear words anymore.
I'm a native English speaker and I've noticed that swearing no longer feels like a big deal. Our media and online discourse are saturated with the worst swears our language has to bear, to the point none of it hits with gravity.
I also think some of it has to do with changing generational attitudes. Millennials and Gen Z use swearing as friendly banter. You can call your casual friend a "fucking asshole", and as long as you're smiling and laughing, it's an endearing gesture. And if it were truly meant as a jab, it doesn't even sting.
The only words you can't (and shouldn't!) say are racial epithets. Those are untouchable. It's almost like what swear words themselves felt like when I was a child and knew I would be punished for saying "shit" or "damn".
> In medieval Bristol, one casually referred to a glade called Fuckinggrove, while up in Chester, one could proudly sport a name like Roger Fuckbythenavel. Only later did fuck become a word so dirty that generations of lexicographers pretended that it didn’t exist. And just as a word can attain the power of profane status, it can lose it....
> More broadly, while the sacred status of most of the words Carlin mentioned has weakened considerably, new words have arisen that occupy the same place in the culture. Aunt Ruth might have walked out of the room rather than listen to Carlin's disquisition when her nephew Craig played it on his record player. She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n[*****] and f[*****]?
Edit: in reply to dead comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896373: I'm pretty sure your comment is dead because you didn't "prudishly" redact the words I did, but I can add the brackets if it makes you happy.
> She seems so old-fashioned today, but how many of us would be up for watching a hot new comedian on Netflix gabbing cockily about how we need to get over n*** and f***?
If you are using symbols indicating quotations, then you don't do unmarked editorial alterations. The quote from the article is “...get over nigger and faggot?”
By making the changes without marking them as editorial alterations (e.g., “...n[*****] and f[*****]”) you are misattributing your prudishness to the source article.
no there are still words that are definitely forbidden to that degree. the reasons they are swears just are different due to cultural context. The worst swear you can say in english does not start with an F. It starts with an N.
It does, it just depends on your register, and they also change regularly.
Shit and damn used to be taboo, but they haven't been now for a while. However (in the American dialect, I think) "cunt" is pretty taboo, as well as the various racial terms, and "fuck" can be taboo depending on the context (i.e. you wouldn't use it to address your server at a restaurant).
I made the mistake when learning a second language of thinking that because those people were so comfortable swearing in English that they were just comfortable with swearing in general. So I threw around their swear words the same that they did mine.
I was astonished at their offense and didn't understand it for a long time.
I speak a non-European language and my experience is exactly the same. Swearing in my native tongue just sounds extremely vulgar. Swearing in English - no problem.
I'm learning Russian and I seriously have to think twice if I want to swear in Russian because I feel like I'd be crossing a line, there's nothing casual about it.
I don't feel quite the same about Spanish, although the expletives that are more layered in metaphor amuse me more than anything else. Me cago en la leche!
I'm turned off of the whole thing by how easy it is to end up watching something I would rather not, without knowing it.
For example, if you're just browsing for thumbnails that look good, and you click forward to the action, there's a decent chance you're unknowingly watching some kind of rape or exploitation scenario. Some are just silly, like stepmom's arm is stuck in the couch, but others are sleazy and many would be crimes in real life. I don't think such content should be censored, but it doesn't make a great fantasy for me, and I don't like the undercurrent of wondering if my engagement with whatever video I'm watching is contributing to some marketing drone saying, "The stepdad-punishing-teen-daughter-with-sex genre is trending, let's push it hard today!"
Another thing that vividly stuck in my mind was seeing a photo of an actress I recognized in a news headline: teen victim of car accident identified as 19-year-old runaway. The reason it stuck in my mind was the realization that I had been jerking off to her videos for easily four years, maybe longer. Such a thing shouldn't be shocking. If people will obtain forged proof of age documents to win Little League tournaments, they'll do it to make money, right? But that was pretty sobering and made it hard to look at young attractive women on my laptop without wondering how old they are and if maybe I should watch something else instead.
Don't get me wrong; I don't abstain completely. I've just developed a distaste that keeps me away a lot of the times when otherwise I would gladly partake.
I feel like titles - both on PH and Youtube - tend to get optimized either automatically or by the uploaders themselves. It has overlaps with marketing and SEO, linkbait and optimizing page / article titles to draw in the most views.
Youtube also - sometimes - translates video titles, which in some cases is convenient (like Japanese videos). But that's the thing, from a Dutch standpoint you can read English titles just fine, but sites like Pornhub, Youtube are international affairs, and assuming everyone knows some English, while fair enough, is not actually a global truth and there's plenty of non-western countries where English is a lot more uncommon. I do believe 'our' generation (in NL) knows good English because we grew up with the early internet, which was a lot bigger if you could read and write English. But the current generation is landing in a much more internationalized internet.
> The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse.
I don't agree. Even the most misogynistic stuff there doesn't actively try to draw in the viewer to the same degree, and most importantly, it allows the women a much clearer separation of what they're doing before the camera and who they really are. They don't have to advertise it and tell random strangers "you can have that too!".
> Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen.
It was, but the last couple of years have accelerated the process significantly beyond where it would otherwise have moved in this amount of time.
The pandemic had created changes in both the supply (people jobless without support, or at least support that fully covered their living costs, people at home and bored, etc.) and demand (people working at home taking breaks in a way they couldn't at the office, people at home not working and bored and able to pay for it (supported by furlough schemes for instance), and people unable to pay but similarly bored and so future "I spent my savings and got into dept on porn" stories.
> now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like
That sounds like the good ol' "call to action" of the advertising world, it engages the mind, even if only subconsciously, especially if the wording means it could be directed personally, and gets more attention. If course when most titles follow the pattern the benefit will drop off precipitously but the pattern will stick around until the next big idea comes along and saturates the market.
> and reinforcing toxic attitudes
Including the "abuse of power" fantasies, either directly or through "she made me do it" inversions. Though porn has always had these there seems to have been a mad scramble towards "step family" crap in the role play as porn makers have realised it is legal in most places and recent (or recently surfaced) big scandals have made their previous go-to options (like the casting couch) less palettible. All the mainstream providers pushing the same thing, and the smaller/independent ones following so they appear in "related content" lists, poses a threat of normalising these dynamics in some minds which can put already vulnerable people at greater risk.
Personally addressing the reader makes them engage more, tempts them into engaging with the author in comments or, if they're thirsty, DMs. It's like youtube videos where a repeated pattern is direct questions to answer in the comments, invitations to share your thoughts, or even games like including "hidden words" in the video. There's not even a reward or anything for finding it, but it's apparently enough for some people to feel involved.
I was always under the impression a video with more comments does better in YouTube's algorithms, so those schemes seemed more about pumping up the comment count rather than attempting to artificially engage people.
Is this wrong at all? I like YouTube, particularly creators like Gamers Nexus/ Hardware Unboxed for example, and like it when they engage in discussions on reddit or discord.
The internet connects people, sometimes 1:1, sometimes 1:N.
It's wrong when it deliberately creates a promise of closeness that is completely illusionary.
A Youtuber asking for comments they may or may not have the time to read is one thing, a camgirl writing 200 subscribers "Haven't seen you in a while, touching myself now imagining your dick inside me" is a very different thing.
I would argue that the same thing happens on Twitch, a completely fake "emotional" bond with your subscribers is created by live interacting with them. You also have whales tipping thousands of dollars.
It's "wrong" (in the sense we're discussing here, that is, morally) if the invitation to engagement isn't an honest desire to communicate with viewers, but merely a marketing strategy to lure in more viewers to maximize ad spend.
> viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?".
I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.
I believe since this is HN, it isn't a radical claim to suggest reading/ comprehension isn't the problem. But since I can't make guarantees I'll give a succinct answer in the interests of time.
> there are mental health costs that are often not talked about
On the contrary, everyone is talking about mental costs, implying that they do not know what they are doing. I know a person who changed her work from being a cashier at a supermarket to a sex worker. Mentally, she benefited a lot. In one job, she felt like an automaton serving people. I other she had personal relationships with her clients. You can guess which is which.
Or another one, also from a sex worker:
"We don’t ask the barista, the plumber, or the mail person whether they really like their job as a measure of whether their industry should be criminalised. Imagine criminalising the whole clothing industry because of bad working conditions in some factories. Or health care. No, we understand that people who work under bad conditions need labour rights. That that is going to help them much more than criminalising their jobs. Why is this so difficult to understand when it comes to the sex industry?"
To make it clear - yes, there are risks, short and long-term. I guess some underestimate long-term risks (e.g. revealing one's face online, which is a point of no return; or if they ever do unprotected sex). Yet, "sex workers don't know what they are doing" is a patronizing approach.
My wife who is a sex worker is in therapy provided by her camsite because the work is so toxic. She was as pro-sex-work as you can be when she first started five years ago. It's majority trauma and I have to hear the stories every day.
The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usually it's just singulars as imperatives), cum, then leave.
She's started keeping a list of clients who say thank you. Almost none.
The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. Mostly what they're getting is trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
However, I think it’s dangerous to shape the conversation about sex work solely around such cases. A person from my old flat share was a nurse on a terminal cancer ward for mostly children. > 90% of the patients died. They burned out within two years on the job. My aunt had to quit her job as hospital nurse because it physically ruined her body. She’s still suffering from that, decades later. A friend of mine spent his (then mandatory) social service caring for a quadriplegic person who deliberately tried to destroy my friend mentally, sort of their revenge for what happened to them. It took less than half a year for my friend to end up in stationary therapy, due to risk of self-harm and suicide. Yet, we don’t discuss these cases in terms of “being a nurse is a ruinous job. It needs to be banned.” - nor should we. Those cases need to be discussed in terms of “how can we ensure these jobs are safe and receive the support needed.” I believe that making sex work illegal and driving it back underground is not helping that conversation.
> I believe that making sex work illegal and driving it back underground is not helping that conversation.
I never indicated either of these would be solutions. I don't believe elevating sex work to a pedestal in the cultural consciousness is right or ethical. That is primarily what I am taking issue with. It can be lucrative but the toll on young women, often very young women, can be great. It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.
Banning it will not stop it. What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.
This sounds about right. I think there's a growing consensus that making criminals of the workers doesn't help (you might lightly criminalize the buy side in some cases, but criminalizing the sell-side makes it harder to help workers who get in trouble), and I appreciate the discussion from any political corner that helps make that point.
On the other hand it's also weird to me to see progressive elements talk of normalizing such a personal commodification -- perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification. But nobody talks of normalizing or glorifying the former! On the other hand, no one stigmatizes being a cog in a commercial operation. Maybe what's going on is that it's hard to argue for the dignity of removing personalized stigma without overcorrecting.
So the solution is probably conversations (like this one) elaborating on the dynamics of the ways it can go wrong. No one's freedom to choose or dignity if they choose sex work is hurt by clear-eyed explanations of the hazards.
> perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification.
There is! In the first case, you work with colleagues who may become friends, you learn how to treat people and build stronger relationships. The "cog in [a] commercial operation" quip is an abstraction. Generally, people have relationships with their peers and are not "cogs."
Whereas on the other hand, the sex worker deals with people who treat them badly precisely because they've paid to do that. They even enjoy it. This is a twisted model of human relations, and the sex worker is both the enabler of that awful exchange and has a target on his or her back.
So the progressive "view" of this thing is absolutely insane. It's constructed from a position of privilege where the reality constructed by toying with such ideas need never be encountered.
In some conventional jobs, you have the opportunity to make friends with colleagues and otherwise build relationships. If you've never worked for an enterprise badly suffused with exploitative and adversarial interactions or known anyone who has, then you may want to re-examine the idea of who is constructing their opinions here from a position of privilege. And there is likewise a distribution of conditions under which sex work is done.
Speak to statistical distributions within each if you must (preferably from well-researched statistics including polls of people involved) but what's actually less than sane is the construction of a rigid dichotomy in which the abuse happens over here in this sex-work-bad-place and the positive-human-interaction stuff happens over here in happy-commercial-peer-space.
Sigh. So I'm writing from a position of privilege (I'm often accused of this).
However, if MY attitudes are adopted, then the locus of control returns to the individual. Who will do better in the end: the one who goes home every night feeling that the "enterprise [is] badly suffused with exploitative and adversarial interactions" or the one who takes personal responsibility for each interaction in which he or she is involved?
I know who I think will do better. Who will have a more positive impact on their surrounding environment. This may be unsophisticated.
> I don't believe elevating sex work to a pedestal in the cultural consciousness is right or ethical.
It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.
> It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators.
There are far more damaging professions that are well respected and accepted in the modern world. However, because the stigma attached to them is generally positive, they get more assistance and help with that damage. Sex workers don't get that benefit.
> What we need is to have a frank discussion about what it entails and stop the trend of fetishizing or glorifying it as a desirable career. It is by and large ugly and violent.
That starts by not treating it like it's "by and large ugly and violent." If you want to have meaningful change, start by respecting it. Otherwise, you are really just part of the problem.
Have you read my original comment upstream? If not, please understand the position I'm coming from first.
My wife is a sex worker. She has been for five years, four of those together with me. Before I met her, I was a part of a community of sex workers I had known since I was in my twenties so add 5 years more of direct experience with the lives and minds of those workers. My friend who has worked as a domme for the last decade once called me "a friend to sex workers". I deeply care for the people who choose this profession. Ten years ago, five years ago I would say you were right. But I have seen the damage first, second, and third hand.
> It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters.
There is nothing to "pull up". To touch it is to touch a viper that will bite and hold on until you let go. The vast network of clients, which I hear of every day objectifies, commits violence, and minimizes the humanity of the people engaged in sex work.
Yes, it is "by and large ugly and violent". Violent to the prostitutes who risk their lives every time they meet a client, violent to the peace and stability of the mind. Ugly to peel back the spectacled layer and discover the worst of ourselves: covetous, vain and brutal.
I do not make this observation as one uninitiated. I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people I call my wife and friends.
> If not, please understand the position I'm coming from first.
This doesn't change anything I said. Nor change the fact that your attitude is part of the problem. You are not unique in your point of view, but having that point of view doesn't mean your opinions are immediately valid.
> I do not make this observation as one uninitiated.
But you are. You are just an observer. You are not a SW yourself.
> I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people
If that's true, then it should come as no surprise that there are more people in your position that disagree with your attitude. Otherwise, you don't know as much as you think you do.
Edit: In fact, I'll say that by using your position to push the narrative that what your wife does is "ugly and violent," you are doing more to support the idea that people should treat those like her in an "ugly and violent" way. If you don't respect what she does, why should others?
I encourage you to read and listen to the stories of sex workers who are speaking their experience directly. Here's a former sex worker I really like on TikTok who is part of a wave of Gen Z'ers who are pushing back on the narrative that sex work is somehow liberating, good, or healthy. [1]
> I encourage you to read and listen to the stories of sex workers who are speaking their experience directly.
I could say the same thing to you.
Because I have. I've been doing it for 20+ years now.
But also because you literally admit to ignoring sex workers. You can't just pick and choose those that support your narrative.
I'm done with this conversation. It's clear you aren't interesting in having a real discussion, and just pushing an agenda while at the same time insulting your friends, your wife, and ignoring the people you pretend to support.
> But also because you literally admit to ignoring sex workers. You can't just pick and choose those that support your narrative.
I never admitted to this, anywhere. In fact, I stated I've been listening for the last decade. Sex workers, especially women, experience extraordinary levels of violence, daily. [1] Sex work is violent, one of the most violent professions in the world.
My father used to drive prostitutes between their appointments to keep them safe because the level of danger to their person was so high. This is in Denmark, one of the safest countries in the world to live in. My friend who works as a domme in the Bay Area was stalked and physically harassed for a year by one particularly obsessive client.
I don't appreciate you using accusatory language to describe me or my relationship to my wife or friends. I never did anything of the sort to you, so please treat me with respect.
> It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators
With age and life experience, I'm actually finding it increadibly difficult to agree with this statement. Sex work might be damaging for many providers, that's for sure (although, as others mentioned, so are other professions deemed essential); but damaging for consumers, I don't know. If it were so bad, it wouldn't be "the oldest profession". (Male) society undoubtedly needs periodic release, and sex work is one of such valves.
I spent my early twenties in Buddhist monasteries. What I learned at the foot of these peaceful, shockingly kind monks was that the mind is all habits spun on the flywheel of action.
"Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with sensuality, abandoning thinking imbued with renunciation, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with sensuality."
We have a choice every time a thought, a desire, a feeling comes to us. We can follow it, pursue it, foment it. Or we can see it, acknowledge it, and drop it. People will do what they want and never have I advocated we tell people they can't do with their bodies whatever they want to do with them. But we can encourage a wiser eye in our consumption.
> Sex work might be damaging for many providers, that's for sure (although, as others mentioned, so are other professions deemed essential); but damaging for consumers, I don't know.
As Online sex work as increasingly adopted the 'influencer' mentality to it's marketing, I think it is damaging to consumers. Maybe you think things like NLP don't have an impact on you, but they certainly do on others. As other comments on this thread have mentioned many of the ads/content have become a lot more targeted.
I feel it’s dangerous shaping conversations around individual anecdotes. I can tell you multiple positive anecdotes from the nursing side as well. Another friend of mine did long-term individual care for a disabled person and they got along extremely well, even traveling and such. That friend considered that his dream job. My father’s current partner volunteers at a hospice. She considers that an important part of her social work. There’s sex workers talking on public record about how liberating that was to them.
What I’m saying is that deriving policy from anecdotes is dangerous.
You seem to misunderstand my point, despite me spelling it out. I don’t consider anecdotes dangerous. I consider basing policy discussions/decisions on anecdotes dangerous, because anecdotes cannot capture sufficient data. What policy should we derive from my anecdote about my friend who was deliberately targeted by the person they were caring for? Ban nurse work because it’s unhealthy? Ensure sufficient oversight so that clients get filtered? Ensure mediation for volunteers in that space? It’s impossible to derive a reasonable policy in the individual level.
> You denounce anecdotal evidence and then cite it, as evidence for your views.
My explicitly expressed view is “do not base any policy discussion on anecdotes, even the ones I cited.” Recounting the anecdotes only shows that I can pick sufficient anecdotes to support both sides of the argument and as such, basing any reasonable discussion on them is futile.
> What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.
The point was that most people know that medical care at the RN and below levels is a shitshow of over-worked employees and understaffed facilities but if you pick anecdotes you can make it look like it's all unicorns and rainbows.
> Just because normal jobs suck, doesn’t mean sex work is good.
Just because sex work sucks doesn't mean that you improve sex workers conditions by criminalizing their work while creating no legal opportunity.
Criminalizing sex work just makes it suck more, and the reduces the best case for people for whom it was their best available option (whether or not it still is.)
Well, no, because most illegal trades aren’t illegal to protect people voluntarily engaging in one side or the other of the trade.
> Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?
No one argues for criminalization of murder to protect people who would be murderers if it was legal, but people do argue for criminalization of sex workers to protect people who would be sex workers from exploitive labor conditions (but tend to fail to have a narrative, when so doing, about how narrowing their options to include only options that they would, were legal sex work available, see as worse than legal sex work—including illegal sex work—does that.)
Lots of things are not “good” but we don’t make them illegal. Maybe it would be a lot better with legal protections afforded to workers in other industries.
> The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible
This cannot be true. Anyone can find ample porn online (definitely enough to cum) for free. Therefore it follows that people engaging with OnlyFans and other paid-for porn services must be getting something else out of it - the illusion of an intimate (two-way) relationship, the feeling of dominance (uttering commands that the performers then act out), novelty (a bit far-fetched, there's almost certainly more free porn online than anyone can watch in a lifetime, except maybe extremely niche interests...), or something else...
I'm not so sure that novelty is far fetched, speaking from my own experiences.
My porn tastes are not fully mainstream, but not far off the path either. You can definitely hit a point where it feels like every clip that matches your interests is one you've seen before. Every actor is one you've seen before. When visiting Pornhub or similar I noticed myself going straight for the "sort by newest" option more often.
And that's why I went to Chaturbate for the first time, because it's live video I've never seen before.
Chaturbate and other live cam sites have their own issues...the two-way stuff can be pretty creepy in both directions. But it is always fresh video and that is its own attraction, even with what seems like an endless sea of porn available.
She's my wife, please don't speculate on my (or her) honesty. The last thing sex workers need is more people mansplaining what their customers are looking for.
Camsites are expensive, especially camsites catering to the one-to-one format. Per minute the rate is extremely high and most men can't afford it so they take what they can get. The ones who pay for longer shows often have both specific fetishes not easily catered to and disposable income exceeding what most clients come prepared to spend. Or else the peak experience gets them cumming earlier than they expected and their guilt and shame drives them to leave as soon as they finish.
> She's my wife, please don't speculate on my (or her) honesty
Arguing that the facts seem to contradict your (or your wife’s) interpretation (an argument I am observing, not endorsing) of the situation is not questioning either of your honesty. People can draw false conclusions without lying.
I don't see how you are replying to the above comment. When has ever an exploited work force been thanked for their job?
When there exist no labor protection, the traditional approach when someone died on the job was to replace them with a new desperate person. Livestock in, livestock out.
Becoming a sex worker today in most countries is like becoming a coal miner of old. The only thing that matter is what you produce, and if you get hurt you will be replaced by someone just as desperate.
This isn't going to be a welcome question or politically correct, but why do you let your wife continue to engage in something that is "majority trauma" and that makes her need therapy?
There was a time when family members intervened when they saw loved ones engaging in self-harm. This husband is watching his wife expose herself to trauma so great that she feels compelled to seek therapy, a therapy provided by the same corporation that is profiting off her trauma. The easy conclusion is that the corporation provides this therapy to keep the traumatized people who drive the company's profits from quitting the trauma, which would be the obvious solution.
Loving someone does not mean supporting their every decision, especially when everyone involved seems to realize that the decision is harmful.
I firmly agree the OP should encourage his wife to stop engaging in self-destructive behavior.
(I also believe sex work is necessarily self-destructive, as it commodifies, commercializes and depersonalizes the closest, most intimate way of relating to and bonding with another human that we have.)
Your phrasing of "why do you let your wife..." implies OP can and should control whether his wife does this self-destructive behavior.
He can't, literally, and he should not try to.
He is responsible for his choices, not hers.
Yes, if he sees this as hurting her and he's not trying to persuade her to stop doing it, he's responsible for that inaction on his part, and I'd say he should take action.
But, he needs to always remember he does not and should not control her.
I agree that the question further up did come off as rather paternalistic in a bad way but their central point has merit: by continuing to support his wife's decision to work in that environment, doesn't that make him an enabler for the abuse?
I think your question presumes among other things that the wife has better career options and/or no need for money, or we have a better idea than the wife what career is best for her.
I don't think any of us have any idea what the facts of the situation is. So it's not clear to me anyone is "enabling" anything.
It's not clear to me how the OP has interacted with his wife in reality, and I don't have interest in judging them.
In the abstract, though, I think yes, if you see someone being abused repeatedly and you support and encourage them to continue going back to the abusive relationship, you are enabling the abuse.
I hear this a lot and I feel that often people making this statement are being disingenuous. My wife and I are a team, if she is doing something that I don't like then I can ask her to stop, she can do the same for me. An extreme example but if your wife / husband was cheating on you, could you not ask them to stop as they "a human and gets to make their own decisions"? Same thing applies to work, a job can take over your entire life and affect everyone around you. My wife had a terrible job that she hated and I had her quit it, take a massive pay cut and do something else, she is much happier now. People are so much on their high horse of letting everyone do whatever they want but people don't exist in a void, their actions affect everyone around them.
Obviously you should not use violence or force to cause a change but if my wife was working in a profession such as this I would absolutely give an ultimatum of either stop or the kids and I are leaving. Sometime tough love is still love. With that said I don't know OP's situation and they will do whatever they think is best in a situation.
Oh good grief, why not use the same argument for heroine addicts? If someone you love is involved in something that is ruinous for them, you help them out.
But you can't make them stop choosing to take the next hit.
All you can do is try to persuade them to stop.
Sometimes defining boundaries of what you'll tolerate is part of that, as I've described elsewhere in the thread.
That's about knowing what you will do and when, then communicating it to the others in the situation. It's not about controlling what they choose to do.
The median OnlyFans account makes something like $180 gross, $136 net, per month. https://xsrus.com/the-economics-of-onlyfans
Any minimum wage job provides more income. Selling cheeseburgers at McDonalds would be much more profitable than working OnlyFans for the majority of OnlyFans accounts.
OnlyFans creators aren't all from the US, or even the developed world, and minimum wage isn’t a global constant; also, the stat on median income you cite excludes tips, so it understates things potentially quite significantly.
If you’re in a bad financial place, $100/mo means keeping your car insurance current.
Being able to make some money with a self-defined schedule is appealing, and the idea of selling your own porn probably starts out as a thrill.
Like anything else, any job turns into a grind. A gig where you’re essentially a circus animal performing sex acts for a crowd probably becomes fairly numbing.
Most of the sex workers I've known personally started as strippers and for those who came away from it traumatized, the issues were mostly from either rape or drug addition.
Never being thanked never came up, but I suspect most people dealing with the public could relate to how shitty people can be. I wish we made a bigger deal about the mental health of folks working regular service/hospitality jobs and that companies made a better effort to protect their employees from rude customers and abuse.
Webcam stuff at least seems somewhat ideal in terms of safety and in reducing exposure to drugs. It also gives people the ability to instantly drop anyone making them uncomfortable or being obnoxious. I can't imagine most people going that route will have any lasting harm, especially as we move toward a society that wont judge and condemn men and women who do that kind of work. Right now, there are still risks to people when their employers or others in their lives find out they do sex work, but eventually I'd like to think that'll be a thing of the past.
> The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs.
No, it hasn't. The far left is anti-capitalist, and includes both pro-and-anti-sex-work factions; the attitude you describe is more that of the pro-sex-work portion of the pro-(possibly somewhat tamed)-capitalism center-to-center-left.
The pro-sex-work portion of the anti-capitalist (including far) left sees sex work largely as just work, and agrees with many of the (not explicitly gender-based) popular arguments about harms associated with sex work as accurate of sex work within a capitalist system, but not as particular too sex work, but rather as endemic to labor within capitalism.
I wouldn't describe the far left today as having anything to do with its foundations. What I've observed is a political group largely held together with an obsessive compulsion to root out any element not in line with its own brand of correct thought, which contains a variety of maximalist interpretations on everything from sex and gender to race and institutions.
It's a far left I've experienced both in the US and here in Denmark and I think it's largely the far left people think of when it is mentioned.
> I wouldn't describe the far left today as having anything to do with its foundations.
I wouldn't describe you as having any useful knowledge of the left (even to the extent of being able to identify the part that is the “far left”.)
> What I've observed is a political group largely held together with
The far left isn’t “held together” at all, but riven with fairly deep internal divisions. Whatever group you see that seems unitary and held together by anything is a much narrower faction than “the far left”, even if it happens to coincidentally overlap with it. In the particular case of the one held together by:
> an obsessive compulsion to root out any element not in line with its own brand of correct thought, which contains a variety of maximalist interpretations on everything from sex and gender to race and institutions.
It’s mostly a fairly narrow vocal largely petit-bourgeois faction of dilettantes inspired mainly by a weird blend of identity politics messages concocted by center-right groups to look progressive while preventing class solidarity occasionally (but not consistently; a lot of them are pretty much exclusively focussed on non-economic-class identity politics) mixed with progressive economic slogans that that are, at best, dubiously compatible with their particular brand of identity politics.
Being extremely generous based on the subset incorporating, however poorly, leftist economic messaging as a component of their platform, one might consider this group to overlap with the far left, but it certainly is not the same as the far left.
Yes, they have. The problem with the far left is that they demand everyone have the right to do whatever they want whenever they want, free from judgment, prejudice, responsibility, repercussions, and accountability.
Problem is that is in direct conflict with actual reality.
> The problem with the far left is that they demand everyone have the right to do whatever they want whenever they want, free from judgment, prejudice, responsibility, repercussions, and accountability.
No, they don't.
I mean, if you stop before “free from” that’s almost a good, though somewhat exaggerated, description of extreme libertarianism (whether left, right, or center) but even far left libertarians don’t believe in that being free from judgement, responsibiliry, repercussions, or accountability (but would probably agree with free from prejudice.)
And the non-libertarian far left doesn't even approximately match the description even before the “free from” part.
Can anyone who downvoted comment on the reasons? I actually found this post insightful and particularly level-headed so I'm curious if it's something I've missed.
Have not actually read the comment yet (and also not voted, of course), but the name of the commenter appears to intentionally provide for certain priors.
Edit: After reading, I agree with your assessment of the post though!
1. At a quick skim, the opening sentence can seem critical of "leftists".
2. The opening sentence a couple of paragraphs down seems critical of "capitalism".
Hacker News is better than most forums on the contemporary Internet. But even here, I believe that most readers are just skimming most of the comments. And at a quick skim, keywords that make you angry jump off the screen more prominently than ideas you might agree with.
There was a time in which expressing critiques of "all sides" made one sounds more reasoned, or credible. But today, if you seem to be throwing shade on the left AND on capitalists in the same comment, then it's kind of a crapshoot. Either someone will upvote it, and a hive will follow suit, or the opposite. You're as likely to just piss everyone off as you are to seem balanced.
It largely is insightful, but absolute statements such as "All work under capitalism is exploitative" are debatable and often indicative of further nonsense coming up.
An important distinction is that if you think that work under capitalism isn't exploitative you take on assumptions that make it very hard to argue that sex work is. It's hard to argue that being a coal miner for example isn't exploitative despite irreversible and severe, often deadly, harm to your body, but selling pictures on onlyfans is exploitative.
Ultimately the vast majority of work requires you trade away your health and youth in some way or another. If you're going to say that only some work is exploitative, you need to draw an arbitrary line, and I think if you're drawing that line to begin with you're going to include most people in the exploitative category.
Or you can take the voluntary association position and then you're back to absolutes.
So I'd argue that whatever your position is the argument is repairable. FWIW the argument that working for someone else and being their subordinate is always somewhat exploitative is not a bad one.
Coal mining and sex work are hardly representative examples of "all work."
We all lose our youth and our health, it's inevitable whether we work or not.
Yes ultimately your employer feels that they are getting more value from your work than it is costing them, otherwise there would be no point in employing you. It's a real stretch to argue that is exploitative even in most cases (to say nothing of all work).
Most work in the world is closer to Coal Mining I'm afraid.
Losing your health by working 40+ hours a week is much worse than the baseline.
As far as the extraction of value not being exploitative, this argument simply applies to literally every condition of exploitation, and it is very possible to be employed without having a dominant superior. It would be good for you to arrive to a better definition of exploitation, otherwise plainly most relationships of employment do involve some sort of exploitation.
> plainly most relationships of employment do involve some sort of exploitation
Well, that's already a much more defensible statement than "All work under capitalism is exploitative".
But I'd want to add that not all relationships (and that includes work relationships) fall neatly into a oppressor vs. oppressed or exploitative "dominant superior" vs. exploited worker scheme. (Who'd have thought that you find me deconstructing binaries, but here we are...)
> All work under capitalism is exploitative and all work that involves emotional labor (e.g. all service work) can be particularly damaging, but sex work is its own separate beast [...].
Instead of reading the first part of the sentence as a statement of some kind of general truth, I read it as an axiom to the rest of the sentence in which it relatively made very good common sense.
I guess this difference in reading might explain the downvotes I was wondering about.
There are good reasons for this HN guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
After watching the first linked video (and finding it to be mostly unsubstantiated meta-rambling and call to arms), I'm assuming hnbad might actually consider the "all work under capitalism is exploitative" as some truth they rally behind. That's something I disagree strongly against, and thus would be tempted to blindly downvote. Yet, by taking a "favorable" (for me) interpretation of the post, instead of trying to guess what side the poster aligns on, the point of the argumentation remains and I'm enriched from having read it.
I would recommend that you watch the second video. The first one is not something you can get anything out of without a lot of baggage and even then there is much to disagree with. The second is much better.
I don't think anyone actually believes that literally all work under capitalism is exploitive outside of very specific definitions of work, exploitative, and capitalism. It is meant as common sense.
All work relationships of employement fit into a relationship of subordination. Actually, where I live here they are legally recognized in the framework of a relationship of subordination. They're fundamentally a relationship where the worker is subservient to the employer.
There are exceptions, yes. But they are the exceptions that proves the rule.
Of course if you work for yourself or if you work as the owner of a company then you're not oppressing yourself, but that's not what people mean when they say "work under capitalism".
All in all I think it is a fine starting point for the argument they made, and it can be "repaired" even if you precise a lot more.
While I agree it definitely has some disadvantages, these influencers turning OFs understand the trade off: my reputation, my private photos / videos for millions earned passively.
All influencers hoping to make decent money on OFs already need to have some kind of platform, so they already massively traded away their privacy. Selling a nudie is the next step if you're struggling to make money.
This guy (a fellow Software Engineer actually) is a growing YouTube channel who's doing a sort of vlog / reality show about his family and friends. Once he started approaching 1mln subs by consistently putting out great content, his friends and family launched their own social channels as well to benefit from the clout.
His mom and his girlfriend have their own YouTube channels but they're not as popular. Still, their onlyfans passed his YouTube's channel revenue in a very short time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE
I would say every culture around the world before the last 20 years or so understands this perfectly well. It's just the conclusions that this vast majority have come to do not agree with the current society.
That leads us now to express misunderstanding and bewilderement.
All valid points. I guess it’s difficult to simultaneously de-stigmatize and urge caution. Instead what happens is we encourage new people to try it, and then some of the people who have tried it share their experiences with the community. That’s how people end up learning about problems with it. Since it is an experimental phase there are more failures (went poorly for some folks).
We might say the same thing happens with bad crypto schemes. Young people get excited and they can lose a lot of money. Though the stakes are potentially higher when you lose your reputation.
And then the cycle of stigmatization begins again… Almost as if there is a purpose to it.
Is stigmatization always an objectively bad thing? I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. I don’t think any person should be stigmatized for what they do, but certain activities may well deserve it. I suppose that’s also a recurrent theme in the New Testament.
One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction. Similar with porn and “sex-work adjacent” things (on the consumer side).
Every thing that is used by the lower class to escape reality get stigmatized, and the more effective it is the more problematic society view it.
The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I also personally prefer people who are addicted to games over those addicted to alcohol, and long term it is much safer for everyone involved.
> [0] "Descriptive data showed no general decline in binge drinking across European countries. In contrast to our prediction, the association between binge drinking and computer gaming was not negative [b = 0.26, one-sided 95% confidence interval (−∞, 0.47), P = 0.98, Bayes Factor = 0.21]. We found the same pattern of result in a secondary analysis on six Nordic countries that have experienced declines in adolescent drinking recent years. In analyses with covariates reflecting engagement in other activities, we only observed statistical evidence for an effect of going out."
> [1] "Low-level gaming was positively associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use in the crude analyses; these associations became non-significant when controlling for demographic variables. High-level gaming was inversely associated with patterns of problematic alcohol use when controlling for demographics, personality, and mental health covariates."
Interesting, I have seen the link being discussed several times on national news, in particular to the decrease in teenage drinking. Some people also link this with lower amount of sex. There is also studies showing that heavy investment in gaming reduces the risk of excessive alcohol use and alcohol-related harm.
While I have not seen a study on it, I would expect to see a correlation between the need to escape reality and the use of tools that allow escaping. With this follow also a link with social status and class. It is why alcohol use traditionally was associated with the lower classes, and laws directed at consumption of alcohol was basically laws direct at the lower classes.
> One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction.
Why stigmatize something instead of the addiction itself? I knew someone who poured themselves into music production and fantasy to the detriment of everything else. Would you stigmatize music?
Perhaps if something is almost always destructive then some social or legal regulation is warranted. I don't see that with gaming, despite the damage caused by outliers.
That said, perhaps there are some activities which are not addictions which are still destructive and should be stigmatized mainly to protect the person performing the activity (such becoming an "OnlyFans creator").
I believe you, but honestly I think most jobs in modern society come with metal health costs, especially those in the "unskilled labor" category. Maybe sex work is worse, but maybe it isn't, at least for a certain kind of person.
> I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing,
I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage.
I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ...
We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections of the Women's Lib movement are particularly to blame for this, and it is right to heavily censure them.
Sites like OnlyFans exploit lonely young men who are poor at making connections with women. It's morally wrong to engage in exploitative behaviour. Period. I don't care if they're "beta cucks", "incels", "losers", or whatever de-humanising manshaming words one cares to use, exploitative behaviour is still wrong.
Sure, if you bounce your tiddies over on OnlyFans then it doesn't make you literally worse than Hitler, but these people should be discouraged from what they're doing.
But what about me? I'm not a beta cuck, incel or a loser (last one could be debatable). Yet I love OnlyFans, I love the amateur porn videos on PornHub, I love live webcams and all that stuff. I love that I actually pay for a lot of it! I certainly enjoy these things much more than traditional porn videos. My partner enjoys viewing some of these things with me. We may or may not have even partook a few times ourselves!
I don't see why I should be denied access to all of this fun paid sex stuff (consuming and producing) just because other people can't handle themselves. Should I also not be allowed to drink or gamble or play video games just because some other people abuse these hobbies in a dramatic and harmful fashion?
Sex work is empowering because it gives opportunities to people that they wouldn't have otherwise.
It's also very exploitative and risky, both for workers and clients.
In an ideal world, we would find a way to make sex work less exploitative and risky. In the real world, prostitution is a complex problem as old as humanity itself...
You're making the implicit assumption that sex work is always inherently exploitative.
That is a common assumption shared both by social conservatives who think any sex outside marriage is wrong anyway, and certain feminist circles who seem to have a problem with seeing male sexuality as anything but a threat.
But I don't think that assumption is correct. Sure, sex work can be exploitative, and it often is. But it doesn't have to be. Just like the hospitality industry has an endemic problem with workers being exploited financially and tolerating verbally abusive behaviour from customers - yet nobody suggests restaurants in general are morally wrong and should be discouraged.
It is possible to do sex work in a non-exploitative way that maintains respect and boundaries between sex worker and client.
The problem is that you can increase short term profits by blurring boundaries, and the network effects of online platforms probaby magnify that.
The problem with sexwork is that it is based on the persistent and dangerous illusion that there are NO boundaries, either emotionally or physically, between the client and the customer. In many cases, the boundary is enforced by physics (time-space) but often it is not.
The appeal of sexwork products is that they can be used to simulate a needful human interaction, one that implies the highest degree of intimacy even when intimacy is explicitly not present.
The necessary deception inherent in the consumption of sexwork products is normally voluntarily performed by the consumer of the product, but even so, failure to successfully self deceive shifts the onus of deception onto the performer, either with or without their knowledge.
The complex and inherently (usually consensually) deceptive nature of sexwork makes it a minefield of misadventure and unintended consequences. Add some unstable people in there, and you have all of the necessary elements for extreme negative outcomes.
I think there is an argument to be made that for the 30 percent of the population on the backside of the bell curve of intelligence, emotional agency, or socialization there is a high probability of an inherently exploitative interaction with most live sexwork.
You could say all the same things about video games. Serious mental health costs. Reinforce bad behaviors (like procrastination and inability to delay gratification). There are even almost nude characters in video games, mainstream ones like League of Legends. So very much reinforces objectification of women. And that’s okay, but if a bonafide woman wants to dress up as that character, suddenly Twitch’s audience complains.
> stigmatizing… rebranding…
People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans.
That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.
I don't see sex work as "drug dealing with intimacy and attention" any more then, say, twitch streaming; or podcasting. The whole media environment has been retooled to incentivize super-unhealthy (but perhaps unsurprising given our decades long trend towards individualism and isolation) parasocial relationships
"A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run."
Um, blaming the victim much? Those men have full agency not to be psychotic jerks towards them. No one is forcing them to abuse, harass, and/or threaten sex workers.
But I agree sex workers are being groomed and subsequently exploited by sites like onlyfans with unrealistic promises of quick money for relatively little work. But so are tech workers by sites like this and other VC funds, so should we ban venture capital too? It's once again the inclusion of sex that makes sex work distinct, no?
I wish we had a society that provided better preparation and opportunity to everyone, but we don't right now, and sex work beats living on the street or getting stuck in an abusive household IMO.
"I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply."
Which is an entirely new subject wherein societies that experimented with total legalization got a better outcome than societies that hyperfocus on drug wars. Neither choice seems ideal, but one does appear to be unambiguously better given the available data.
I think it all reflects badly in how unsophisticated society still is with handling the most natural thing in the world--sex. The ridiculous morals of yesteryear still carry the day.
I started using a cam-girl's services when I was dealing with a break-up.
Where things went wrong was, this worker happened to be local to me, and happened to know the person who I broke up with. When I said I wanted to find someone with a personality like theirs but in real life, they offered to meet me in person.
The short version? I was catfished for 2 years while helping them build their career (their partner, who I never knew about despite asking if they had one before trying to enter a 'relationship', didn't want to be active in helping her, since he was a pre-med student and was worried about the social fallout between that and his family.)
I got to learn a lot about the industry, more specifically around Reddit. I also got to deal with the pain of trying to get my videos removed, polite requests didn't work and I had to go right up to legal threats to finally make it happen.
What I was able to figure out:
- There are cases where this line of work results in a grooming 'feedback loop'. A surprising number of these girls had partners, many times said partners were successful individuals in other careers. And also involved in various other scenes (BDSM comes to mind.) It often struck me as a cover for predatory behavior; some of these workers will find it hard to shy away from the money that can be made, yet at the same time the constant barrage of misogynistic behavior from clients almost certainly has an effect on them. Their partner gets someone conditioned by the environment.
- My abuser, last I was aware, was fairly resigned to working small office jobs and/or sticking to camming until they finally decide to have a child. When I first met them they wanted to be a teacher. Make of that what you will.
- There were cases of extremely controlling behavior within the communities themselves. I heard stories of one of the more successful workers having a sort of 'ranch' for workers that wanted to come by and up their game (and, of course, play with them and their partner.) The ranch itself was almost cult-like with it's management of time and tasks.
- A lot of these workers have serious mental health issues, often unresolved. Some of these women are abusive and manipulative towards their clients. I experienced this firsthand, and when I made the mistake of trying other camgirl's services long after the incident noted above, I had my consent regarding hypnosis violated by more than one. Unfortunately, the common case of stalkers/creeps means that predators are usually able to get away with their actions, because any attempts to call them out results in the perception that the victim is a stalker/creep for trying to pierce the corporate veil behind a bad actor in the industry.
FWIW, yeah, I went to a -lot- of therapy over what happened and in a much better place.
Before getting super vocal, please consider that HN is a global community and hence your critique might be very irrelevant to GP or other readers.
Sex work is very different in Australia for example, where it is regulated, with regular testing, mandated security at venues, and no risk of criminalisation. Full access to banking. And while assaults are always a risk, there are "camgirls" who have been doxxed and raped too.
This is why I think people should stop being outraged by words especially in mass media. Context is key, and context is local.
There is no clear definition of a sex worker, but usually, it includes more than prostitution.
Here is from Wikipedia:
> Not to be confused with prostitution. Sex work is "the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation.[1][2] It includes activities of direct physical contact between buyers and sellers as well as indirect sexual stimulation".[3]
Here is from Merriam-Webster:
> a person whose work involves sexually explicit behavior
Here is from Oxford Reference:
> Is paid employment in the sex industry, comprising prostitution and pornography
So by these definitions, camgirls are sex workers.
Why do you feel it's necessary to gatekeep this general term? We already have a word for people who literally have sex for money, and it seems perfectly reasonable to place it under a broader "sex worker" umbrella.
Also, not that it matters, but you really seem to be minimizing the issues that camgirls etc. face. Sure, a prostitute may be putting themselves in more physical danger, but the downsides to these jobs do have a lot in common. See all over this thread for examples.
> You (generally speaking) cannot get infected with STIs, pregnant, assaulted, raped, drugged, stabbed, murdered, convicted, jailed - for being a camgirl.
Yes, you can. Plenty of camgirls who start off doing exclusively solo work progress to other types of shows involving other people, which involve all the risks of in-person sex work (because it is that) as well as all the special risks of online sex work (because it is that, too), and presumably they do so because of the systematic incentives of the industry.
> Camgirls - and models - calling themselves "sex workers" is like calling yourself black when you had a great-grandfather who was black.
Given the continued influence of the one-drop rule on views of race by race essentialists on the White side, and that from the Black side the shared identity is mostly one of shared experience of white racism, that's perfectly normal.
My wife did literal prostitution before camming, which was exceedingly more dangerous and traumatic. Many camgirls come from similar backgrounds or else do physical prostitution/sugardating on the side to high-rollers.
So no I don't think the label is misplaced by and large and I think making a racial analogy is offensively off the mark.
Sorry if I step on some toes here since I know very little about this topic (feel free to correct me!) but isn't this turning things on their head? Normally in discussing other topics I see people arguing that a quicker/earlier stigma leads to less people going further. Is this wrong?
Right now, certain media outlets have been promoting a "debate about sex work". As usual, this is meant to shutdown any productive debate on the subject. You seem to start with a preconceived notion that "sex work" is harmful and people need to be prevented/protected from engaging in it. As with any aspect of our society, there are too many feedback loops involved here for anyone to have an opinion which is not based on anecdotes and propaganda, except the sex workers themselves (maybe!)
So let's discuss the general case instead.
Stigma and ostracism are very ancient tools for ensuring compliance within a social group by threatening members with social exclusion; however, quicker/earlier stigma prevents non-conformity earlier, but it also locks people out "on the outside" quicker/earlier. Stigma is also easy to abuse - it's the perfect excuse for hurting someone who you see as "less than human" due to their stigma, and then blaming them for it.
If you're betting on a civilization collapse scenario where in-group cohesion is the decisive factor for survival, it would be rational for you to uphold stigmatization of any behavior that diverges from the established rituals of your in-group. Our present civilization, however, has decided that social exclusion is harmful in the general case, and (quite haphazardly) is trying to remedy _that_.
As our systems become stable enough to support people safely "going further" with their diverse, even mutually incompatible lifestyle choices, the logical conclusion would be to eradicate stigma and replace it with a more humane way of nudging people away from potentially harmful actions.
> You (generally speaking) cannot get infected with STIs, pregnant, assaulted, raped, drugged, stabbed, murdered, convicted, jailed - for being a camgirl.
If the topic was different, the comments would be different. The burden is therefore on you to draw the parallels, not on the reader to imagine swapping one for the other while you point out how the conversation would be different.
There are no arguments around free speech that can actually be compressed into a one liner. They all have at least a paragraph of nuance and how edge cases need to be handled.
Nobody is talking about it because there is not much censorship on porn or sex work in the West. I agree I'd prefer there were no rules about it but I don't think it affect that many people on HN.
If you live in many Muslim countries or in a socialist regime like North Korea, China or Cuba, you'll have stronger limits to what you can do.
Sexualisation is a reflection of society. Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup.
In my view, onlyfans is a net positive for society. Would you rather like sex trafficking? Because face it, humans have hormones, and our social norms encourage men to go for status and women for appearance.
My observations are that it's typically other women who make comments about women not wearing makeup, not men. Or more generally speaking, it's other women who comment most on women's appearance (dress, makeup, hair, etc.) than men. Honestly, from what I've observed, most men seem rather oblivious to it most of the time (though obviously, not all the time).
I agree with this on you.
But subconsciously women that look nice and have their apperence on point have bigger effect on me than women with "regular" apperence.. so I might not comment on it but it is a difference
Well sure, but that's also true of how you treat men (you may just not realize it consciously). To deny that appearance plays a role in how other people perceive you and treat you is to deny reality. It may not be fair, but it's a reality that's probably literally baked into our genes.
You can still have sex trafficking with OnlyFans in the mix, that's where the paying customers are and gangs will exploit that. Especially if it's easy to sign up.
Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply.
I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.