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Comment by wheelerof4te | Hacker News Reader

You won't find many "cam girls" from the wealthy western countries.

Which tells you everything you need to know about this kind of dirty work.

Moral judgement aside, what makes this "dirty work" in your estimation?

It’s a soul crushing job over time. Feeding the lizard brain of guys jerking off to whatever instructions you get gets old, and the money is usually just good enough to keep people around.

> It’s a soul crushing job over time.

As opposed to waiting tables, selling finance products, working to deny people insurance coverage programming on surveillance on websites, working in retail, nursing, or any other activity where you're working hard barely scraping so some rich guy can buy 37th private jet?

Most jobs are soul crushing.

Why single out camgirls?

because -- for many humans, actual sex is intimate and touches the "soul" much more than those other activities. Repeated defense of ugly and abusive sex comes from a vocal minority on the Internet

Yes, that is what I was expecting. The anti-sex people claim they are interesting in stopping exploitation or whatever, but in the end it is about regulating other people's sex lives and pushing their morality on them.

Read my other comment but this is honestly a weird take conflating a broader puritan anti-sex pattern with pushback on sex work.

It is not a wholly positive thing. There are advantages (remote work from anywhere, etc.) but it doesn't do any favors to the actual people doing this to place sex work on a pedestal.

How is taking nude photos of yourself "ugly and abusive sex"? I feel like you're regurgitating stale anti-porn talking points rather than actually engaging with the topic at hand.

A cam girl is her own boss, picks her own hours, works from home, sets her own boundaries as to what she's comfortable doing, and does not have to be involved in any office politics. All of the things which normally put the "soul-crushing" in "soul-crushing job" are absent. It's a great deal for a lot of people.

I find your appeal to spirituality shallow and unconvincing, especially given that lots of people engage in casual sex and don't end up with their souls crushed.

Because it really is a psychological mindfuck in a way those other professions aren't. My wife is a former camgirl. After six years of it, she was a mess. I was very pro sex-work before I met her, even during our first year or two together then she started needing therapy and then I just offered to support her because watching your wife's mental health deteroriate every day was pretty rough.

I know the kind of people who frequent HN are very pro sex work but there is another side of it that is hushed or pushed aside and that is former sex workers speaking out. It is psychologically punishing to turn yourself into a sex object, repeatedly in front of the unslaking thirst of thousands. It changes how you view men, it changes how you view your own body, it changes how you value this "thing" out from which you peer.

What’s the alternative? Give government more power to tell people what they can an can’t do?

Probably reducing wealth inequality, offering free education and health care would be a good start but I am neither a sociologist or political theorist.

People in poor countries working for people in rich countries is how wealth is equalized. That's how developing countries develop and how developed countries stagnate. So the existence of an international market for this is probably already part of the solution. After they have enough wealth, they can give themselves free healthcare and education without being a basket case forever depending on foreign charity.

Your argument is orthogonal to free healthcare and education being offered by the state. You don't need to be an immigrant to be poor in your country of birth, such as the US.

Well, seeing that the US is the only industrialized or even 2nd world country that doesn’t offer free healthcare. ..

> Probably reducing wealth inequality, offering free education and health care would be a good start but I am neither a sociologist or political theorist.

Nor an economist?

I’m all for offering free education and health care. But if everyone got an education, how would that reduce inequality?

Besides, not everyone has the desire of ability to go to school.

Go listen to what old construction or steel mill workers will tell young kids about how their bodies are physically shredded to nothing. Entire joints literally ground down & deteriorated to dust. There is zero recovery from this, not to say that there also aren’t cases where there’s zero recover from mental damages.

Are you anti-any of these professions? They for the most part definitely knew what they were getting into as well.

I did a short stint of continuous improvement engineering at a steel mill in Pittsburgh… it was an arguably decent place, but so many those labor workers gave zero fucks about the money they were making & would’ve left so long ago if they didn’t have family completely reliant on them.

I specifically called out the psychological harm that is a frequent companion of sex work. I have no doubt that manual labor, day in and day out, breaks down the body: I have my fair share of stories doing such tasks when I was younger.

The mistake is in making like for like comparisons as you just did. Sex is not a simple commodity. We would do better to listen to the stories of the sex workers who have left the industry or who are offered therapy through orgs specifically created to help sex workers like Pineapple Support as part of workers' contracts with Streamate et al.

The shittyness of jobs are not mutually exclusive.

I would not advise anyone to be a stripper or to stick with some building trades for a long time.

There's no need for whataboutism. The issue raised is that this work is seen as empowering and liberating, and the message that it can take an enormous mental toll is not similarly publicised, or is dismissed as right wing moralising. No one's doing that to stories about steel mill workers.

I suspect if one did look at the statistics, construction workers who are victim of human trafficking do not generally end up with wife's/husbands that write on HN. A social study about what happen to those people would likely be a quite depressing read.

Leave the straw man alone.

I was responding to a specific question, “what makes this dirty work” and specifically made no moral judgement or assertions.

Obviously, there’s a chip on your shoulder about the topic. Camgirls have a shitty job and aren’t nurses. That doesn’t mean that camming is uniquely shitty or that it’s some sort of act of personal liberation.

The obvious danger of injury or infection.

Plus, sex is just a dirty thing. You have to keep clean and shower a lot. Monitor your health more.

That kind of stuff.

What, like a virus? Or a Trojan?

How exactly is a person going to injure themselves by getting naked on camera? Oh, maybe they'll get hypothermia from the chilly air in their bedroom! I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about.

Wouldn't be especially dirty either — nothing a few tissues couldn't wipe away, frankly, not as a solo performer. You get dirtier than that just by using the bathroom.

So, again — how is it "dirty work"?

Isn't there a huge support on HN for living in low cost area while working high pay remote job? How is being a camgirl different?

"Support on HN" isn't a factor in anyone's life choices.

What is your point exactly?

Err, that western girls are not so desperate to sell their body for a living?

You seem to be forgetting the porn industry if filled with women from Western countries. Not to mention the large number of US, Canadian, British and Australisn creators on OnlyFans.

Actually, for Western countries with very high wealth equality such as the Nordics you really see comparatively few. The US in particular has very high wealth inequality and a lot of performers.

Fun fact: Denmark was an early pioneer in legalizing porn and in its production credited with the US "Golden Age of Porn" between 1969 and 1984. There are many more variables to look at.

I think most Danes are aware of our history here. Trailblazing porn because we as a country (and more broadly Scandinavia) were interested in the outer limits of free expression has almost nothing to do with the problems I've highlighted and even less to do with the number of people entering the industry.

Two eras portraying pornography is about as much as you can say is similar between then and now.

For more on the kinds of films Denmark was producing, have a read of this article [1] by Jack Stevenson who used to hold little events of porno history at a local art theater here in Copenhagen.

[1] https://brightlightsfilm.com/porno-to-the-people-the-danish-...

> Western countries with very high wealth equality such as the Nordics

"High wealth equality such as the Nordics"? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Gini_Coe...

I couldn't believe it so googled a bit but yes you're right. I pay top tax here and was certain that was leveling the field in terms of income but apparently not. For what it's worth DK does appear to be a shade paler than the US and Norway two shades.

I hope you can explain your point more. Coincidentally you won't find many nannies from the wealthy western countries. Which doesn't tell me very little about this kind of work. But maybe it does to you.

No nannies = less children born.

Which is easy to figure out once you realize how outdated marriage has become in the West. Everything is done for the money, kids are an afterthought.

> Coincidentally you won't find many nannies from the wealthy western countries

Probably because they can find other work which pays more while non western nannies do the job because they cant find other work due to their English language issues.

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