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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

The problem is going to be drawing a clear line around "coercion" in an unequal capitalist society. In a very real sense I am coerced into working at all. I have lucrative paths of work available to me other than sex work, but if I didn't and I did sex work because it was the best pay available, would you consider that coercion?

I would, and do. Let's remove that coercive pressure on labor and then see who wants to do sex work. I mean this seriously, I'm sure people will still choose it. But probably in different numbers and different forms than they currently do.

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If there are no other options, then selling your body for sex is coercion.

Same is true in capitalism, and I will die on that hill too.

If you work in a company town and you’re forced into manual labour then I see that as quite similar honestly.

That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.

But yes, it gets muddy when you have to contend with the idea of your free will not being your own, but I don’t get the impression that girls on onlyfans are forced, that they are unsafe or that they are being put in tenuous situations (like people trafficking them and keeping their passports).

It makes a difference who is doing the coercing, though. Is it the person offering a solution (employment), or the universe in general for imposing scarcity?

You may be "coerced" into working by the general human condition of needing to earn money somehow to survive, but that doesn't mean your employer is coercing you. That relationship is still voluntary. You can choose to work for them on mutually-agreeable terms, or not—and they can choose to hire you, or not. Neither party is forcing the other to do anything.

> That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion.

On that point we agree.

You are so right.

Honestly a big reason I read hackernews is to see the hilarious cognitive dissonance some people have here when trying to twist their ideologies so that the state of capitalist society makes rational and humanitarian sense. There are so many extremely intelligent people here that put all that intelligence into the stupidest box.

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