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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

> 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?"

https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart...

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.

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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.

I’m sorry for your wife.

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]

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@profitfromtrauma/video/6926281617094...

> 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.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2725271/

> 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.

Two anecdote from different sides of the spectrum and you feel the one you disagree with is dangerous.

Just because normal jobs suck, doesn’t mean sex work is good.

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 seemed to focus only only positive anecdotes, and then claim the negative ones are dangerous.

Anyone can cherry pick data and present a few cases to support their world view.

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.

What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.

> 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.

Exactly.

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 stopped to say reality-wise..."The plural of anecdote IS data".

> 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.)

This logic could apply to any illegal trade.

Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?

Because there are negative effects to individuals and societies at large.

Sex work is not the only way for people to support themselves, anymore than professional killers who can also find other means of work.

> This logic could apply to any illegal trade.

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.

> I don't see how you are replying to the above comment. When has ever an exploited work force been thanked for their job?

You are narrowly focusing on a single sentence from a larger rebuttal to the notion that sex work is a healthier pursuit for women than retail.

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?

At a guess, because his wife is a human and gets to make her own decisions?

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.

"There was a time when family members intervened when they saw loved ones engaging in self-harm."

Some people would call removing you loved one's agency to make their own decisions abuse.

Those people are stuck in a legalistic framework that privileges labels above reality.

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.

Yes, defining a boundary of what you're willing to put up with is vital when someone you love is being self-destructive.

That is knowing what you are going to do, and when, and communicating that to your partner.

It is not about controlling what they do, which is what the wording of "let your wife" implies (whether intentionally or not).

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.

You should try, for sure.

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.

Why do people sell cheeseburgers at McDonalds? They need the cash.

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.

> 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.

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.

My best friend is a cam model and could really use therapy, but she has no insurance. What cam site provides therapy?

My friend works for MFC, and is a "contractor", not an employee.

Can you give me a method of contacting you? Can be a throwaway email.

gdrew686 at gmail dot com

Thanks so much. Its awesome to know there is a site that cares enough about their models to provide support for therapy.

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