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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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