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Comment by drno123 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. Twitter can ban whomever they wish, and doordash can refuse orders however they wish. Simple as that.

That's obviously not true as there are laws in the US making it illegal to discriminate against certain classes. Sex workers are not one of those classes, though they should be.

>Sex workers are not one of those classes, though they should be.

Please explain your reasoning.

Sex work is near-universal in human society and sex workers are arguably among the most vulnerable of all working people, with an uniquely high risk of abuse and discrimination, hence the acute need for special protections.

Cooking and food service is near universal in human society and is a hard job that often pays absolute garbage while working people very hard.

Yet another "they're so vulnerable, let's re-order society" push that throws around all of the right buzzwords (vulnerable, discrimination) but fails to make any real sense in a broader context.

If you want to protect sex workers then legalize and tax it

"If you want to protect sex workers then legalize and tax it"

Yes, obviously we need to stop making consensual sex a crime. But that alone won't protect a type of worker that is obviously at a higher risk than food works, which is a nonsensical comparison.

I think morality plays into it. If morality wasn't an aspect of this, you could say the same thing about rapists: they're universal in human society, they're at a unique high risk of abuse and discrimination. But criminal history is not a protected class because society's morality says we shouldn't protect them. This isn't to say that sex workers are like rapists, but only to illustrate that the spectrum of morality influences what is considered a protected class. And despite what people might want it to be, sex work has pretty consistently been in a gray area of morality: both desired and rejected. I don't think it is at the threshold to make it a protected class, at least in the USA

"sex work has pretty consistently been in a gray area of morality"

So was slavery, but we don't pretend that past moral failings should make us question our modern moral understanding, as you have just suggested we do for sex work.

Classifying sex work as immoral (or at best, amoral) is not the same as classifying slavery as moral, so I would find a better example for "moral failings"

Most of that discrimination is legally required. If im using ur airbnb to commit a crime and you know about it and do nothing ur are also likely committing a crime.

The classes that are protected are those that are intrinsic to each human and are unable to be changed - sex, age, race, looks, health e.t.c

Anything that can be changed (like a job) is not considered a protected class.

> that are intrinsic to each human and are unable to be changed

This isn't universally true.

E.g. pregnancy is a protected class under many laws.

Religion is a frequent one, too.

And in e.g. California, political affiliation is one.

> E.g. pregnancy is a protected class under many laws.

I think that falls under "health" in OP's post.

That is absolutely false. Religion is a protected class and it is not intrinsic or unable to be changed. Did you not know this?

Religion is a proxy for culture, which is generally a protected class for the most part since you don't chose the culture that you grow up in.

Furthermore, companies are allowed to discriminate on aspects of religion/culture - not allowing time for prayers, requiring certain dress code, e.t.c.

Maybe to you as an outside observer. Many devote followers of religions express that it is a fundamental part of their identity. Many around the world are willing to die for it. Does this sound like something that isn't intrinsic?

“intrinsic to each human and are unable to be changed”

In other news, the State Department announced the release of passports with “x” as the gender.

“Sex work” is just the commodification of women & does not deserve to be legitimized as a profession.

And no men do sex work? Seems like your worldview is too narrow to really understand this issue.

A small minority by comparison who aren’t exploited in the same way.

The only way to reduce exploitation among sex workers is to stop making consensual sex a crime. If you actually care at all about actually people, and not just about wishing we lived in a world that suits your specific morality, you support decriminalization of sex work. That is the only path towards reducing exploitation and protecting sex workers.

Legitimizing it as a profession might be one of the few ways which allows the people that are caught in the vicious circle of abuse as sex workers to actually make it out. I would be very cautious in using any moral stance into forbidding anyone full autonomy about how to use their body.

Tell that to women on onlyfans platform earning millions.

...or to the 99% of them who earn peanuts.

It is a commodification of sex. Women are more than just sex, and therefore not interchangeable.

It’s turning womens bodies into a product to be purchased. You can try to lawyer it however you want but it’s obvious to anyone with a degree of common sense that it’s not a good thing. Not for the women directly involved or women who aren’t & have to live in a world where they are frequently reduced to sex objects.

It doesn't bother me any more than a man using his body to do construction. People are often reduced to their objective and instrumental uses: building, cooking, coding, cleaning, and sex.

I think is it silly to carve out sex as different and sacred, and the one thing that cant be bought and sold.

Relevant interesting article I saw recently. Also interestingly the author has since deleted it, this is the cached version:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vlJ80i...

What an interesting but odd article. It seems to flounder at so many seemly obvious questions.

>However, it is economically nonsensical for a consumer to buy a commodity in the market if a qualitatively identical ‘product’ is freely available to him in the domestic sphere.

Clearly sex with a prostitute is not the same as sex with a lover. How does Marxist thought deal with the pricing of a good like a painting? Are they all worth the time put into them?

> if the sexual acts are the same, what is the difference which compels men to pay for sex which they could feasibly access through personal, private relationships?

This glaringly ignores transaction costs and availability on demand. If a man only wants sex, there is an enormous cost to obtain it via private relationships.

People boycott oil companies all the time, why should the class of sex workers be different?

You have it backwards. Boycotting is a consumer decision, de-platforming is a business decision. We generally have few rules about how consumers make their decisions. We have tons of rules about how businesses operate.

...doordash can refuse orders however they wish. Simple as that.

Yes, so simple. Let DoorDash not deliver to minority neighborhoods for a few weeks, and observe the simplicity.

As others have stated, legally, minorities are a protected class. Discrimination on the basis of race is illegal.

Doordash already does this in some neighborhoods where dashers get robbed consistently.

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