Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
- Sex workers must now navigate a very fluid monetary system. Sex workers must be paid in cash, Bitcoin, etc. Then they have to somehow represent this money to the federal government to pay their taxes.
- Everyone around sex workers are considered criminals. Unknowingly rent a property to a sex worker? You're a criminal. Date a sex worker? Suspected to be a criminal. Lend money to a sex worker? Criminal. Use sex work services? Definitely a criminal.
This system shoves sex workers into an intentional class system that prohibits them from owning property, prohibits their use of public services, prohibits their utilization of our monetary system. All of these things, when used, don't just benefit the sex workers - they benefit you.
One of the uncomfortable conversations that many people don't want to have is that sex work is heavily used by society and yet neglected constantly, thereby making it dangerous for both sex workers and the users, even making it more dangerous at times.
100%. One of the universal curses people throw at each other is implying that someone's mother is a prostitute, or that they are a product of extramarital sex, implying the promiscuity of the mother. This all is hand-in-hand with the implied comtempt towards women of course.
How so? Not all women are prostitutes.
There's all kinds of things that people insult men/fathers for that they wouldn't use for women/mothers (e.g. strength, financial success, etc). It's just gender roles, not generalized contempt for women (and going that far is probably just politically motivated exaggeration).
Edit: I do get your point though. It's not as straightforward as I implied. In fact I think that it's a complex, interwoven system, which comes up unfair for everyone. But I do observe a general hatred toward women, and if something like this curse comes up, I can't help but think that the two are in connection.
There's definitely contempt there, but just for the person being insulted.
I think you're analyzing those kinds of insults using the wrong framework. It doesn't have much to do with women as a class, but rather with the relationship with the insulted person to his mother. Insulting someone's mother will probably get under someone's skin more than insulting their father, because (especially historically) they probably have a warmer/closer relationship with their mother due to gender roles around child-rearing.
As the saying goes: "mother's a fact; father's an opinion".
But I feel that this is more because the mother is the more 'revered' parent? People often hate their father, but it's far rarer for people to hate their mother. Cursing someone's mother is, to me, just a way to hurt someone by insulting the person they love the most.
This of course would imply the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.
The patriarchy mentality our norms are built upon includes blaming women for everything ‘wrong’. Women are blamed for premarital sex. Men are celebrated for their scores. Women are paid less yet have less leisure time. They are the first to blame if anything goes wrong with children, including just bringing them into public spaces. Men aren’t expected to be responsible parents, and usually aren’t primary caregivers. Women are the butt of jokes, and are constantly told they aren’t funny. Some men are actively campaigning to make women property again. Women are forced to give birth for anyone that inseminates them without exception in many jurisdictions now.
Not all women are sex workers, but the fact is that female sex workers (sex entrepreneurs?!) are generally disrespected by patriarchs and their women. That internalized distain comes out in a variety of ways, but quite materially as well (ie bank policy and regulations). Male sex workers are envied by other males. “I’d love that job”.
Both sexes have their problems and the status quo causes stigmas for both. To claim women are uniquely seen as "lesser beings" in a developed world is horribly naïve.
Not really. The developed world barely raised a few generations since women can vote. This is not saying men don't have problems - but the field is still very often tilted against women.
How long ago were women in America able to apply for a mortgage?
I’m not on a crusade per se, but I guess I’m at a place where I’m now sharing aggregated angst I’ve heard from women and read about. Men absolutely have unmet needs, and much of that actually comes from patriarchal values.
https://www.nextgenmen.ca/blog/why-patriarchy-hurts-men-too
The phrase “I don’t see color” seems admirable but ultimately was determined by researchers to be one of the strongest indicators of racial bias. It’s a problem because it ignores or denies the struggles that minorities have and do face. It projects a meritocracy where there isn’t one. I’d love to live in a “post-racial” society, but we just don’t. In the same way, “I don’t see gender” or “it’s hard for everyone” is a polite way of lying to yourself and denying the harsh reality that women objectively experience.
I have stats and citations for everything I’ve posted here, but I’m lazy and on my phone. I hope you’ll find that most of my claims easily substantiated, not some naïve diatribe. Hit me up if something I said needs backup.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Has written on the topic for many years. This is one of his more cited works: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000276421558682...
And full text of a more recent article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/233264922094102...
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
I found this recent dissertation which cites the earlier papers I shared, and has some very specific insights into race and gender in engineering education, which seems relevant. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1698...
The Legitimation of Black Subordination: The Impact of Color-Blind Ideology on African American Education Dawn G. Williams and Roderic R. Land The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 75, No. 4 (Fall, 2006), pp. 579-588 (10 pages) Published By: Journal of Negro Education https://www.jstor.org/stable/40034659
In other words, if you're with your mom in a room, and someone calls you a son of a bitch, the claim is not that the woman you take for your mom is a bitch, rather, that you're wrong and your mom is actually not in the room (unless there's also a female dog in that room).
Prostitution has long considered an disreputable and undesirable activity, and it along with other types of sex work are often tightly coupled with involuntary exploitation. A lot of the stuff that you're criticizing derives from attempts to continue to legally discourage prostitution while preventing the legal system from further punishing women who are being exploited.
Yes, there are issues of exploitation and licensing. They are at both places - maybe less for porn because it’s not as much in the shadows. Bring sex work out of the shadows. Just normalize it.
IIRC, porn would be illegal, except the performance aspect gave it First Amendment cover. It might also be significant that porn seems to have traditionally involved a 3rd party paying two people to have sex, so that's arguably not prostitution. It's probably arguably illegal prostitution if one person pays another to sex with them and films it. You can't videotape an illegal act to make it legal.
Prostituion is much harder to monitor, especially when the buyer also has incentive to pretend that the transaction didn't take place.
There are, perhaps, solutions that could be developed to deal the problem but if you are the lawmaker why would you go out of your way to make your job harder?
I have heard this familiar argument made for the legalization of narcotics.
- Moralist conservatives which despise sex work and sex workers for ideological and religious reasons
- Progressives which think it's degrading and negative that somebody is forced to sell their sex to survive (which is a noble thought), and therefore think banning sex work will help that goal (we all know how that went wrt drugs...)
Only in those third world countries where prostitution is still illegal. In the modern world not. https://prostitution.procon.org/countries-and-their-prostitu...
It's a ridiculous position in that it almost forces sex workers onto the street or into brothels (which often take a huge chunk of each transaction). There was no way of getting my client (I was freelancing for a sex worker to try and solve some of their tech issues) any reasonable ability to process credit cards. Or do a wide range of things that we'd consider normal for a small business (like set up a Stripe account, or even a business bank account, or rent an office).
This needs to change.
People do stuff like this. I too wonder how they get away with it for as long as they do.
Ask all those CBDs sellers that pretended they were selling "supplements", takes a while but eventually.. all shut down.
Exactly. It makes sex work more dangerous, not less.
To progressives: "See how progressive we are, not criminalizing sex work!"
To conservatives: "See how conservative we are, endangering sex workers and making life hard for them!"
Tribal groups are alive and well, and even if you dislike your opposing one you should try to at least understand their motives if only for selfish reasons.
Completely secular and constitutional laws may be enacted by congressmen that have religious reasons to support that law; e.g. religious legislator may vote for a law against murder because murder is against their religion. The first amendment doesn't regulate the thoughts and reasoning of legislators; religious reasoning for secular laws are fine.
And conversely, secular reasoning for religious laws doesn't make the law okay; a cynical atheist might say that religion is necessary for controlling the unwashed masses, but despite that secular reasoning, a law mandating a religion would still plainly violate the first amendment.
Overall, you're simply setting up a strawman that poorly characterizes your opponents. There are many reasons why someone would oppose sex work, including concern over the safety of the sex workers. Even if it were fully legalized and regulated there would still be significant risk when you have two people who don't know each other well in a room alone together and questions of sex and money are money are involved. Especially if it is a physically stronger man with a woman. The more cogent arguments take that into consideration along with the other effects such as sex workers becoming trapped in the occupation, the poor prospects for aging workers to earn an income or be able to retire, the second order effects on the community which are poorly understood but could be far reaching, economic effects of making the occupation more available to the working age population who might otherwise pursue other careers, etc. All of that generally lines up with the conservative take on any change which is to ask "Are you sure you have considered all of the consequences?" and "Do the benefits outweigh the costs both short term and long term?".
Your claim that I'm advancing a strawman argument here strongly suggests to me that you may not have a solid grasp on conservative attitudes on this topic. I assure you Alabama (for example) exists, and it's residents absolutely have opinions about things.
> Conservatives (in the US anyway) view sex work as...
You did not specify Southern Baptist church members, which I am sure form a part of the entire set of conservatives in the US but do not solely comprise it. I'm also sure that Alabama doesn't consist of 100% conservative leaning people nor do I believe that all of its conservatives share the same opinions. Please try to think clearly, I don't have time to correct all of your statements.
"I don't think conservatives are attempting to endanger sex workers - they believe sex work is fundamentally risky and leads to abuse."
Having established that you don't refute my claim that (at minimum) large portions of the conservative constituency take a militantly hard line on the topic of sex work that puts us a lot closer to "well, I knew this guy once who claimed to be a conservative that also said this thing once" than "the conservative position on sex work is X". If you insist I can absolutely compile a list of links of everything from "religious leaders" to pundits and politicians openly railing against sex workers. Your sassy banter doesn't impress.
First of all it's a diverse community, both in skin color and in national origin. Second, I have never seen any member of that group do any worse than engage in debate. That you "might not make it to your car" is such hilarious hyperbole that it's bordering on satire.
That sex work is dangerous, leads to the abuse of women and often times is associated with sex trafficking is their view. They will tell you that. Some of the people, at least from my families church, were sex trafficking victims. Many of them help support and house battered women, help provide rape counseling on a weekly basis, and otherwise certainly have at least anecdotal reasons for their beliefs.
Many conservatives, regardless of religion, believe sex work damages the traditional nuclear family structure. This is similar to the Roman decadence argument.
Many liberals believe sex work is degrading to women. Nevermind the fact that legalizing it would empower workers, make it safer, and decrease trafficking. Nevermind the entire LGBT spectrum.
There is entrenched opposition from all points on the spectrum. It's maddening that "vices" like sex and drugs that don't hurt anyone are so denigrated.
The time is overdue for moving past these taboos.
Perhaps there’s a reason that past societies invented the taboos to begin with.
“Moral degeneracy” is a problem (in their view) because of the associated harms — which we’ve learned over time and encoded into our traditions. That things they call “moral degeneracy” fundamentally are harmful to a healthy society and to the people involved.
That is, they think sex work is harmful to the people who participate and those nearby (eg, children of sex workers).
Morality isn’t merely arbitrary and capricious rules, but an evolved code of conduct which tries to avoid things that are harmful. (Or at least, were — eg, prohibitions on pork.)
Some conservatives get from sex work to prohibition via moral degeneracy - perhaps they'll want strong moral fibre from their politicians and oppose all forms of corruption.
Other conservatives reason via religion - perhaps they'll also oppose teaching evolution, and support 'in god we trust' signs in classrooms.
Still other conservatives don't really care either way about prostitution, but have strong opinions on guns or taxes and kinda tolerate the rest of the conservative platform.
And there are even conservatives who think the state has no business regulating what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors, and the smaller and less intrusive a state is the better; and they're frankly embarrassed their fellow conservatives are inviting the state into the bedroom.
You're assuming the social conservative subscribes to a consequential ethics system. But a social conservative subscribing to deontological ethics is more likely, particularly if they're a religious social conservative.
1. they never exclude gay women
2. they don't actually follow through on other policies to prevent STDs in the gay community and even frequently consider things like HIV to be divine judgement
It becomes clear that the concern about "moral degeneracy" is not at all related to a desire to keep gay people from experiencing harm.
Similarly, the concern about "moral degeneracy" related to sex work is not at all related to a desire to keep sex workers from experiencing harm. Instead it is about "protecting" society from what they perceive to be evil harlots.
More like they believe sex work is inherently immoral and therefore sex workers deserve abuse.
(Actually criminalizing the exchange of valuable consideration for sex hits the problem that things that look suspiciously like it are endemic in hetero dating and "giving money to your tinder date for a taxi" becomes an offence)
If you don't believe in freedom of religion, that's your choice, but it sort of one of the founding principles of the USA.
And adultery was a capital crime, read between the lines.
Look, if your daughters came to you and said “we want to be whores for a living”, you’ve got bigger issues than arguing on this website.
Uhhh... No, no it was not.
> Look, if your daughters came to you and said “we want to be whores for a living”, you’ve got bigger issues than arguing on this website.
Better throw them in prison then. That'll solve the problem.
Are you confusing Islam with Christianity? Adultery is a capital crime in traditional Islamic jurisprudence.
> Laws against adultery in colonial America were very harsh. Despite this, there is only one known execution for adultery in American history: it occurred in the Colony of Massachusetts in 1643, when the married 18 year old Mary Latham[118] and her extramarital lover James Britton were executed.[119][120]
This is new to me, I had no idea. But it seems that in colonial Massachusetts at least, adultery was a capital crime. Technically colonial Massachusetts isn't Massachusetts state. I don't know when this/these laws were revised, but it seems plausible that some of them lasted past the colonial era.
Which makes sense. Too many lawmakers would have to be hanged if it was actually illegal, as there were plenty of scandals around affairs made public. Hamilton for example admitted to having an affair (https://www.history.com/news/alexander-hamilton-maria-reynol...), which would of course be a crazy thing to do if he could be hanged over it.
But yes, enforcement is rare and probably for exactly the reason you say.
Is sex outside of marriage immoral? Are you citing biblical proof to justify your claim?
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't comment like you're on reddit or Facebook.
I was genuinely interested in reading some arguments for that claim. (After all nowadays it's s trope that this or that thing corrupts society. Porn, money, capital, the Internet, music, 5G, drugs, sex, millennials, conservatives, radicals, atheists. And of course DnD.)
- Lowering birthrate; people may be less likely to have a family and kids if the primary driver for these things (sex) is already taken care of. - Higher STI rate (regulation might help here). - More isolation; people are less likely to go out and mingle if one of the reasons to do so is easy and transactional. - Wealth inequality; I believe men are more likely to pay for sex, and women sex workers tend to make more. So, money will move from one gender to the other unidirectionally. This may result in wealth inequality if sex work becomes wide spread.
Imagine you met someone who says "yeah, I used to really struggle on Tinder, so now I've uninstalled the apps and just hire a prostitute every Saturday". Does he seem like a healthy guy whose needs are being met?
I'm torn on whether it should be completely illegal, because I've seen some kinda persuasive arguments in the direction of decriminalization. In particular, you don't want people who do sex work to feel like they can't get help without going to jail. But I'm confident that "ban it all" is much closer to the truth than "none of our business".
I don't think people are gonna start plowing each other in public, but I think there's a very real possibility that in a decade or two it could be considered strange and prudish to tell your friends and family that they shouldn't make an OnlyFans. I've seen some spaces online that are already at that point, although it's always hard to know whether online subcultures represent anything in the real world.
At one time they said the same thing about exposing any skin at all even at the beach.
Every human, yes including children gasp has a body with body parts, so mere exposure to the sight of them and knowledge of their existance is not harmful. Sight of the act of sex is merely more of the same. Kids on farms see it every day from birth.
At worst it's perhaps distasteful or lacks appropriate decorum in some contexts. I find practically everyone to lack taste or decorum in most WalMarts. It's not a valid argument.
It's only worth about as much legal consequence as defecating in the wrong place. In fact defecating is worth more since it at least carries an actual public health consequence to others beyond "I don't want to see that"
"I don't want to see that" is an utterly invalid demand, since anyone can say that about anyone for any reason. They used to be able to say it about merely being a mixed race couple in public, or hell a lot of people still do say it about gay couples or trans individuals merely existing in the room. It is ever so slowly being recognized that in order to try to claim any kind of say over anyone else like that, you have to show harm, and no one can show any harm from a person merely existing as gay or trans or black or female etc. Anything you can say about how obviously depraved and harmful it would be to see naked people or sex acts in public, used to be said about all kinds of ordinary harmless things. People were imprisoned or killed over nothing but "I don't want to see that" and "I don't like it that that exists" without any actual harm to justify it.
Talking this way about sex work and evidense of sex work being visible in public, is exactly the same.
So a buisiness that isn't any of the many that might legitimately have pictures of naked women in their offices or other public spaces where employees have to work, has them.
What makes them a hostile work environment? Hostile or harmful to who, and by what mechanism?
I'll proceed on the assumption that it causes women to feel threatened by the men in the area and/or the owners/managers who installed the posters.
This line of reasoning is essentially the same as blaming women for the rapes they endure because they should have made sure they didn't look attractive to any men, instead of holding men to a standard to be responsible for their actions.
I'm confused what the analogous harm is to you when two adults have consensual sex behind closed doors where you can't see or know about it.
The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
The argument that women will feel threatened because the posters will cause the men to attack them, or even just low level menace them, is saying that men are helpless reacting animals and are not responsible for their actions, which is the same argument as saying women are responsible for rape by not dressing badly enough.
These theoretical posters are simply and merely inappropriate for facililitating the work being done in most workplaces. They are unwelcome but it's merely because they are a distraction and an annoyance. It doesn't cause any sort of harm that can justify any legal consequences.
There is no argument for making them illegal, and in fact they're already not because there are tons of businesses where such images are central to the business. The same image will be interpreted as porn in one room while it's just the businesses product on the wall at countless clothing manufacturers. So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
The comment I'm replying to is. They are arguing that prostitution is somehow harmful to them and should be banned. I'll note the analogy of a poster on the wall of ones workplace is pretty poor, unless someone is advocating that prostitutes should be manning the hallways of Google. If you don't want to be exposed to prostitution it's easy to avoid. If you don't want to be exposed to the decoration of your place of work it's a lot harder.
> The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
You mean the women who signed up for this line of work voluntarily rather than walking into their software engineering job and finding these posters on the wall? I think there's a clear differentiation between the two. Google probably shouldn't decorate it's offices with graphic images of say, people being operated on, I think that'd arguably be just as hostile a work environment. That doesn't mean that every surgeon is being abused.
> So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
Agreed the harm is not in the inherit to the image. As with many (most?) human interactions, context matters.
The comment I'm replying to is."
Doh, right, sorry.
Why shouldn't it be "discussed openly"? Why should a person making a good living in their career not be allowed to discuss it? I'm also not getting where your getting the "women who feel undervalued or unfulfilled in their current career". It seems like your implying she's suggesting we push these women into that work, but that's not supported by your article at all.
And yeah, maybe in 10-years it'll be frowned on to tell people they shouldn't make their money the way they choose. I don't see why it should be anymore acceptable to tell fully grown adults you don't like them making their money on OnlyFans vs say joining the military or starting a risky business.
Poo pooing adult's life decisions uninvited is generally frowned upon. There's no reason we need an exception to this for OnlyFans.
I also now wonder exactly where the line is here. We were talking prostitution now the goalposts have moved to OnlyFans, so I guess nudity for money is now unacceptable? That's a pretty broad line that rules out a lot of modelling and mainstream acting as well.
I don't have to know anything about you ahead of time because this applies equally to every human on the planet.
Thus your argument is invalid.
Worse than that that, it's not merely in error which anyone can be wrong about anything, it's an ugly offensive personality trait to even want to try to make that sort of argument and rationalization in the first place.
And adultery was a capital crime.
Outlawing whoring and the founding principles of the country are not at odds.
I wonder if it's the result of a concerted effort or the inevitable consequence of HN becoming mainstream.
It's probably the latter, but it's pretty annoying.
Anecdotally, my socially conservative church is full of FAANG developers & one of our lay pastors is a highly-cited ML researcher
I don’t think this is a new phenomenon at all. I would guess it’s the norm through much of history.
The history of sex work is fascinating and wildly diverse.
Do you want to pay your ex-marine brother to sit in the next room to make sure you're safe? You can't, he'd face severe penalties for supporting the transaction.
I don't get why that's a problem? They already built their platform, it works, they're the gold standard and they have a massive paying userbase! Why do they need VC money? Why would you want to dilute your stock rather than just build with your already existing, sizeable revenue stream?
But I don't think that there's much direct competition to OnlyFans, or that there is a market which is easy to capture by copycatting them.
Hence, they can afford to not take any investment. This is similar to how GitHub operated and grew for the first few years.
Yahoo may very well be the single dumbest major tech company in history.
Just…blunder after blunder after shitty decision. Watching its history is almost the definition of seeing a slow motion train wreck. It’s almost impressive.
With regards to Tumblr - I can’t imagine what potential business decision could’ve been worth what they had to know was suicide. Why make the acquisition and then kill your user base? It’s not like they didn’t know. That’s probably one of the single biggest wastes of $1b I’ve seen. Why buy it to knowingly, fully intentionally, throw it down the toilet? So baffling.
I posit this as an explanation. I think "go big or go home" is a terrible mindset.
Adult content hosting sites face some unique (read expensive) challenges relating to both scale and content moderation. It's not like you can just run videos through a nudity detector to stop your servers from accidentally hosting terabytes of kiddie porn.
Yes, this is done with other things as well.
On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others.
On the other hand, it seems that many financial things are set by international organizations, which the processors would still need to follow to be included in the central systems, such as the coding (does adult content have its own code, or is it under entertainment?).
Until we recognize that, we're not going to be able to fix it. One can't just declare that "If only the market were truly free, it wouldn't be like this." We've seen this play out on the freest market that has ever existed (the early internet) and we ended up in the exact same place - with a few massive players buying up all their competitors and completely dominating their verticals. There was as little regulation or government interference in the early internet as there has ever been in just about any market. And we still got there.
Corporate consolidation is a consequence of free markets, not a corruption of them.
The biggest players gobbling up all of the competition and essentially having a monopoly.
All you have to do is drive through middle america to see the Ruby Tuesday/Strip Mall-ification effect on most of the United States.
I love capitalism when it's functioning it's the greatest system ever invented.
When it's just a market full of monopolies it's akin to dysfunctional communism from a consumer choice perspective.
I don't know what the solution is.
It's going to get so much worse. Years from now you'll look back at the 2020s and think "I though THAT was the late stage? Boy I had no idea."
If you can't imagine how things could get even worse, then watch some science fiction or read some history books. Tearing people's hearts out to appease the sun god, or to repossess the organ after unpaid medical bills. We're not there yet, but that could be the sort of madness we're heading into.
In the face of constant legally sanctioned/mandated exploitation the frequency of outlaw group appearances increases, similarly revolts start from time to time. (Not saying their success rate was any great.)
Repossessing organs doesn't sound scary. The fanatics do scare me more, after all North Korea and every other successful oppressive regime was built on that. But it remains to be seen if it's possible to scale up totalitarianism to bigger scales.
"U.S. interest costs won’t rise catastrophically in the short term, and there’s not really a reason to expect interest rates to stay high for decades. Furthermore, inflation will itself erode some of the national debt, reducing long-term interest costs relative to GDP."
"Right now, interest payments haven’t even begun to rise as a percent of tax revenue, and one big reason is inflation. Interest rates are set in dollar amounts, and inflation increases the number of dollars in the economy, meaning that tax revenues increase in dollar terms as well."
+ debt rollover
"the weighted average duration is only about 4 years." (so about half of the debt has to be renewed in about 4 years)
"The Fed currently predicts that it will start cutting rates in 2023. And markets expect this to happen too."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/us-government-debt-is-not-... [sorry paywall]
"a growing surplus of savings worldwide."
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/i/70962695/aging-populati...
> end of empire
that's unlikely though
Workers have a much weaker incentive to consolidate than investors do, since the consolidation results in them losing voice and power and there are no big cash payments in return (no equity financing means no big equity sales). So this system would tend to work against monopolization.
In addition, workers have much deeper connections to the communities impacted by their business's operations than investors do - they usually live in them. So the tendency to externalize costs on to communities will be much lower (not gone, just reduced), since the workers will experience those costs along with the rest of their communities.
Unions become completely unnecessary in this system. The people doing the work are governing the business, they get to set their own working conditions.
And you still get all of the benefits of the free market - no government control, competition, the freedom to start new enterprises - with many of the rough edges sanded off.
I don't think that's true. Unions exist to negotiate working conditions with management. Management doesn't disappear in the system that you're describing.
Some of the incentives for poor working conditions disappear, but not all of them. There are non-profits that have unionized due to worker abuses. Ironically, I've worked in VC-backed startups most of my career, and I've experienced much less abuse than friends who work at non-profits
What I'm describing is a system in which all businesses become what are currently known as "worker cooperatives". In that system, if management produces conditions that the workers don't like, the workers vote management out.
I'm not aware of any worker cooperatives that have unionized, though I believe Mondragon (one of the biggest, oldest, and most successful worker cooperatives) does have what amounts to a multicameral system with one of the councils filling the roll of the union in advocating for line workers. [1]
Unfortunately, Utopia is impossible. All systems suck because all people are flawed. Socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, monarchism; they're all bad. Additionally, they all really boil down to being either monarchy or oligarchy and every other term is just window dressing. You either vest power into a single person or a small elite group, and then people try to use magical words on pieces of paper to control those individuals. It works for a short time, and then it all starts to fall apart. Eventually, the ruling class realizes that the words on paper are just words and not magic, mos maiorum is lost and society starts to unravel. Modern governments have been better in the sense that it has taken a few hundred years for them all to become dangerous to their constituencies, but it is happening none the less.
Specifically the government creates a bottomless supply of money to loan out, but only to highly-legible highly-centralized entities. As such, big business has an endless source of cheap capital to draw from to invest, whether it's devouring other businesses or building out thousands of cookie cutter stores. Small businesses can only access the money trough by going through a consumer bank with its higher fees and scrutiny of business plans. Individuals can only access the money trough by taking out collateralized loans on legible assets. For the individual market we can readily observe the resulting destructive individual-disempowering dynamic for the markets that have been financialized - chiefly housing and education.
A significant raising of interest rates would reign in this effect. Unfortunately it would take a long and protracted timeline for actual reform, as our economy has come to rely on the bottomless source of easy capital. But it's still worth keeping in mind the warped foundation our specific economy is built on, rather than characterizing the current moribund state as an inevitable end result of every market economy.
>I love capitalism when it's functioning it's the greatest system ever invented.
Capitalism is never functioning. It is inherently dysfunctional. The moment there is wealth and people should be happy, it breaks completely. It only "works" if the economy is growing or in other words, it only works if the economy has been recently destroyed by a war that justifies growth. What you might love is the market that capitalists eventually distort.
>When it's just a market full of monopolies it's akin to dysfunctional communism from a consumer choice perspective.
Capitalism is a monopoly based economic system. Getting rid of the monopolies gets rid of capitalism entirely and you are left with just a market based economy. I don't know what you are even talking about.
>I don't know what the solution is.
The solution is basically an liquidity theory (you could also consider it a trade theory of money) based approach that splits interest or as the Marxists call it "surplus value", into its individual parts and once you do so, you will realize that there is actually no room to compensate the owners of capital, only the owners of liquidity and liquidity is a public good, a service provided by the government and the public combined which then deserves to be taxed to bring costs and benefits in line.
Liquidity preference was Keynes greatest discovery and nobody gives a damn, not even the Communists, so what other option than perpetual inflation did he have?
First, the phenomenon you're referring to is "natural monopolies" which is a well understood situation which appears in every freshman-level Economics 101 class, but that only applies to certain industries. For instance, utilities are natural monopolies because it's far more efficient to run one set of wires to every house rather than try to have 10 competing companies all run their own power lines. But most products & services don't fall into this category.
Second, "free market" is a specific economic term which means markets which are free from governmental intervention in terms of price controls or subsidies, but are also free from monopolies, cartels or other anti-competitive behavior by any participant. Using the government to break up a monopoly or cartel moves the system towards a "free market". Having zero regulation which allows one or two participants to distort the market moves the system away from a "free market".
I'm not referring to natural monopolies. While I concede many of the cases people would immediately think of in my description of the early internet (Google, Facebook, et al) could readily be classified as natural monopolies, we've seen plenty of consolidation in areas that most economists wouldn't classify as such - Amazon for instance, a bookstore or e-commerce site is not a natural monopoly. And we've seen the same consolidation off the internet everywhere. There are few significant verticals, at this point, that aren't dominated by a handful of giant consolidated players. Independent of how much regulation there is or isn't in that vertical.
> Second, "free market" is a specific economic term which means markets which are free from governmental intervention in terms of price controls or subsidies, but are also free from monopolies, cartels or other anti-competitive behavior by any participant. Using the government to break up a monopoly or cartel moves the system towards a "free market". Having zero regulation which allows one or two participants to distort the market moves the system away from a "free market".
And this is where economists trip over their own feet and fall face first into the mud of religion. This is a self-referential, recursive definition that allows you to pretend a major consequence of a system is not, in fact, an issue.
You realize that you just defined a "free market" to be a market that is free of regulation, but requires regulation to maintain its state as a free market?
It is, in a way, because Amazon as an e-commerce site is really a fulfillment company which does tend towards a natural monopoly. It's inefficient to have dozens of companies with warehouses everywhere Amazon does to offer the same delivery guarantees.
E-commerce then trends towards a natural monopoly because Amazon has cheaper fulfillment than anyone else. AWS further cements that, by making their hosting costs cheaper than almost anyone else.
Without intervention, it's not shocking that whoever owns the natural monopoly on fulfillment would have a monopoly on e-commerce. In much the same way that whoever owns the rail lines would likely also dominate verticals largely defined by transportation costs.
Did you even read the comment? The only constraint he put on "government regulation" is that price controls and subsidies aren't allowed. That is a tiny subset of government regulation, and not equivalent to all possible government regulation.
Honestly, how long will it take people to realize that money and land are the two most distorting monopolies in the capitalist market that enforces the formation of monopolies in all other industries as only monopoly returns in the non monopoly sectors are able to get the "root" monopolists off your back? Companies often die not because of a lack of money but rather because of too much money and the resulting profitability expectations by the financial sector that cannot be met.
The solution to those problems is very easy. You implement a land value tax and a resource based tax to allocate both land and resources properly. Once you have that you can introduce negative interest rates based on at least a dozen theories you can pick your favourite one. Allowing negative interest rates defuses artificial profitability expectations and allows people and governments to pay off their debt.
The reason why a negative interest rate works is because money is a public institution and liquidity is a degree to how well accepted this public institution is. This means the owner of the money can sell this public service just like the owner of land can sell the convenient public services near his property as a perk. So the lender will always want to get paid interest for the public services the liquidity he holds onto provides and this then forces a profitability expectation on the borrower even of it is completely unreasonable during a recession for example.
In both cases the government is providing public services without asking for compensation, no wonder governments keep running out of money and fail to collect enough taxes, they massively subsidize the holders of land and money by not taxing them in proportion to how much they benefit from the government. These indirect subsidies can be sold for a profit which then effectively turns them into direct subsidies. Getting rid of subsidies is a type of regulation that is compatible with free markets. Meanwhile capitalism is inherently incompatible with free markets as it thrives on monopoly rents.
The first point doesn't refute anything GP said. If Amazon, Google, Meta, etc, are natural monopolies like utilities, then have the state regulate them as such. If they aren't, have them broken up like Standard Oil. You yourself have pointed up that monopolies are bad for the users.
Second, even if "free market" is used by (some) economists to mean a specific thing, that doesn't mean that GP, or most people for that matter, use it that way. For many, many people (including elected policy makers), a "free market" is a market without government intervention, and the less intervention, the more free it is. Nobody owns the official definition of the term, redefining it and then calling the argument which used it in a different way "fundamentally flawed" is not correct.
What pissess me off the most is that a lot of capitalists actually like monopolies and externalities and then shout and complain that the government is ruining the "free market".
These already exist and are sometimes known as "high risk" processors. They charge a lot more for the privilege of accepting payments for what industry has deem high risk transactions due to larger rates of chargebacks. Typical examples are paid subscription to a porn site, but then the card owner claims it was not them that paid for it. CBD/Delta-8/Delta-10/Delta-9 sales are also considered high risk for various reasons with one due to their legality questionable in some states.
If they're doing lower volume and dealing with higher costs related to chargebacks, then it seems it would make sense they charge more. What is it, like 3% vs 6% or worse?
A lot of adult industry businesses also accept ACH transfers or crypto because there is no chargeback risk on either of these.
I totally see crypto becoming more popular with the misconception of privacy.
Marginal costs are near zero, so the risk of giving immediate access is pretty low.
I've worked with sex-related sites before. And you're right that there are sleazy people in that industry. But it really isn't hard to distinguish, especially when you can see their payment stream.
Without moralist obsessions with sex, nobody would care.
This is begging the question (assuming morality must be based on harm or consent). Not everyone agrees on the morality of all sorts of things. Human sacrifice has been licit in various times and places. Lending someone a high-interest payday loan is a consensual transaction but morally suspect according to many, and so on.
Well yeah, of course. My point is that the overwhelming majority of people agree that murder is bad and should be illegal. That's not the case with sex work, which is why people argue about it online all the time. When I asked who is harmed by sex work, I didn't mean to imply that no one is harmed, I just meant that the answer to that question varies a lot more than the answer to who is harmed by murder.
I guess even with morals, people don't care about murder.
That is an observably incoherent claim. Sex is a subject that virtually everyone obsesses over and cares about to a greater or lesser extent and literally everyone that does is moralist about it. You, for example, evidently hold the moral position that prostitution, pornography, and other sex-related commercial activity is either good or at least not bad.
I believe woodworking should be allowed. Not because it's "good" or "bad", but because people want to do it and there aren't sufficient harms to warrant trying to ban it.
Some people feel the same about porn and sex work. It's something people want to do, they believe there aren't sufficient harms to warrant regulating it. Watching or performing in porn doesn't make someone better or worse, it's just a thing they do like how some people make canoes or birdhouses.
Many people who use the word "good" to describe porn and sex work are describing it in the beneficial sense, not the moral sense.
That’s a bit odd on account of claiming that something is morally neutral is clearly a moral assertion.
That being said, can you imagine why perhaps sex might have greater moral significance than canoe-making?
> Many people who use the word "good" to describe porn and sex work are describing it in the beneficial sense, not the moral sense.
That’s fascinatingly novel. Can you explain the difference or at least distinction between a “moral” “good” and a “beneficial” “good?”
Incidentally, talk of “beneficial” “good” makes me think of the classic Windows 2000 tagline: “New NT Technology.”
Morally neutral and being without a moral component are different. Gravity lacks a moral component; it is neither good nor bad, it just exists. Moral neutrality contains opposing good and bad effects, with neither significantly outweighing the other. Killing someone in self-defense could be seen as morally neutral. Killing someone is bad, but saving people is good, causing a wash. Someone who kills another in self-defense isn't a bad person for doing so, but it also doesn't make them a better person.
> That being said, can you imagine why perhaps sex might have greater moral significance than canoe-making?
In the context of porn, genuinely not. Canoe-making seems like it has far greater moral significance. It's a practical skill and potentially a bonding experience with others. Porn is maybe a waste of time, but it's hardly alone there. It's like playing with a fidget spinner, which I don't find morally significant either.
> That’s fascinatingly novel. Can you explain the difference or at least distinction between a “moral” “good” and a “beneficial” “good?”
A beneficial good lacks a moral component, or is morally neutral as you would say. A scooter is a beneficial good; it allows people to get places faster, so they can do what they want. It's not morally good to own and use one, and it's not morally bad to not do so. Its merits are amoral. A moral good is something that has a clear moral component; feeding the homeless is morally good, not doing so is morally bad.
how open is the payment network willing to accept a new player when a site like onlyfans with billions of dollars in revenue would rather go down in flames only to be saved by public backlash rather than implementing their own payment processing service?
it's obviously not that simple.
Not organizations, governments. Financial rules set by governments to cut down on money laundering, terrorist funding and other "financial crimes" are why payment processing is rife with liabilities and why Visa and banks have such strict rules. Without these rules banks would happily work with anyone that has money.
> Yes, this is done with other things as well.
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Complain that twitter or facebook is censoring things and you'll get told that the government should not be able to dictate to private companies who can or cannot be excluded.
Allow private companies to exclude a significant chunk of the population, and those same groups will complain of censorship.
Both the Right and the Left have a common interest in forcing private companies to not exclude certain people.
Too bad that too few people see the value in regulating de-facto monopolies.
But they won't come together because it's good if I do it to you, but bad if you do it to me.
It is because there is a minority who think sex is dirty and only should be done in the family and they will take anyone who is even slightly helping sex workers to court. The only protection public companies would have is there was a law stopping these court actions but no lawmaker is going to do this as the same minority would attack them and the majority would see the company as helping sleaze and what that minority see as sin.
Note that any new payment processor would be hit in the same way.
The issue is that a minority can persuade the majority of things even if they are untrue or destructive.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/21-ashley-mathews-aka-...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-porns-silliest-new-tren...
If you'll pardon me, I think cash deposite below $1,000 should be none of the government's business without a valid, specific warrant. If someone wants to sell drugs, sex, or graphics cards on the side for cash, it's none of the government's business.
Only if sex work is illegal. Which it isn't in significant parts of the developed world.
Prostitutes (male or female) here around are taxed like everybody else. In addition they need to be health checked to perform their work. Paying them in cash is really no problem neither for the client nor for the provider.
Of course, if you make ten deposits of $1000 to avoid this rule, that’s called “structuring” and is considered a federal offense.
This is a valid opinion. But it's clearly in the minority. (Counterfactual: there is broad support for drug policy reform [1].) Particularly when one considers the tax consequences.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/50th-anniversary-war-dru...
Host your own infrastructure (ftp/email/www/etc.) and use Btc, and you will have a lot more liberty but not "reach"... so you can't have your cake and eat it too.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Some do not, but they typically have issues interfacing with the traditional banking environment.
Accepting bitcoin is all well and good, but it doesn't help you much if your customers aren't able/willing to pay with it.
I mean on a world when adding one extra step on your checkout will drop your conversion rate, getting people to buy btc before probably pushes you into being unprofitable.
this will be true when and IF bitcoin gets to be ubiquitous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar_(private_curren...
Sex workers not having access to reliable payment methods directly puts them in danger in real, quantifiable ways. The same is not true for letting white nationalists recruit teens or whatever other free speech/market economy intersection thing you can think of.
We are not philosopher-automatons and may, should, use our moral judgement about which things specifically are worth our support and which are not. A perfectly consistent framework here is impossible and probably undesirable in any case.
It's not that sex work is better than other things and should be endorsed because of that difference. It's that forcing sex workers out of the legitimate business process gets them killed and we have a duty to prevent that outcome.
I mean people invented cryptocurrency for this reason. Then the bans started
It sounds like a combination of tangible and intangible stuff. There are cultural aspects behind it but also legit financial concerns.
Energy and finance are important, but don't directly involve individuals as much, and people are VERY emotionally tied into their home and it's value.
If all houses suddenly lost 50% overnight, and mortgages were slashed simultaneously to compensate, it wouldn't be that big of a deal but everyone would freak the hell out. It's much easier to inflate the currency than it is to allow home prices to drop.
I know this because the same thing happens to me. Nearly all my income comes from InfoSec-related contract work, and most of my customers are overseas. This is a very non-conventional working arrangement, so when conventional financial institutions apply their routine risk assessment processes to my situation, it produces a lot of “computer says no” outcomes. For instance I was recently told that I would need to provide 90% collateral in order to get a car loan, despite being able to prove having a very high income over the past 12 months.
Clearly a stupid situation, but with a perfectly rational explanation. The problem here is a tiny niche of customers not being catered to by large institutions. The reason for this is because tiny niches of customers are typically not worth the effort to large institutions. But that conclusion is unlikely to attract much outrage traffic…
Crypto is a solution if you believe that crypto is regulator-proof. I’m inclined to not think it is. Sure, Monero, etc. As soon as “Terrorists” are using it, regulators will find a way to monitor, control, outlaw, or even break it. By any means necessary.
I see 3 approaches: - find a way to make locale-specific compliance easier for enterprises. Locale is hard with anon web traffic, and maybe other systems as well.
- make a national law for sex worker payment rights. Banks are good at complying with national laws. Our current political climate may not permit this.
- weaken the power and scope of US financial regulators. Certainly those affected by SWIFT sanctions would love to see it, I’m sure. Our current administration is very committed to keeping and enhancing its resources and reach.
They've only just noticed this after years of WrongThinkers being deplatformed?
In fact, cultures that allowed widespread open sex work have always failed. (No, Amsterdam’s red light district is not “widespread”).
Just because it’s 2022 does not mean things should automatically change. Even Onlyfans performers, strippers and pr0n stars are openly shunned or relegated to non “wifely” roles.
This is because there are super deep lizard brain biological reasons why cultures have always done this.
And it will still take a few more generations before no one bats an eye (25+ years).
Yes, it would be better if it were safe and legal. Would probably be better for it’s consumers and providers.
But in the end the biological imperative to “be fruitful and multiply”, which is deeper than many of us would like to admit - is going to always fight back.
Railing against this ostracism is like railing against the sky being blue.
What differentiates Amsterdam's red light district from OnlyFans' red light district's, or Las Vegas's, cultures from any others? The real answer, of course, is that excluding all the examples of something you can think of makes for an easy way of framing your statements as an absolute truth, but that's certainly more than a little underhanded.
It’s clear I mean fail more quickly and easily. Of course everything eventually ends.
I still don't understand the "anon" value prop of crypto. We've had anonymous payments for goods (like groceries) for a long time - cash.
Nothing is anonymous without extreme and CONSTANT effort. Any second you don't have perfect opsec, you should assume you are perfectly tracked. This is independent of any laws congress makes, because the policing apparatus does this itself.
The only way to change this is make it illegal to track transactions for anyone, including police, but the second we do that we will see significant sanction busting, money laundering, spam, scams, online casinos, fraudulent businesses etc.
All crime involves money at some point, and if you want to allow the police to fight that you have to allow money to be tracked. You don't get both options.
I think making money untraced is not useful, and instead, we should be fighting for a government that is free enough to allow your entirely tracked transactions to do what you want. Buying some drugs or sex? Whatever, just pay your sales tax. The government knows what you do, that's the modern reality, so build a government that allows you to do things that don't harm others.
Let's cherrypick one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Also CC fraud that impacts all of us is done using crypto. Silly me.
With crypto you can exchange money with anyone in the world without an intermediary. Visa/Mastercard cannot ban you. This in itself is huge (most people think about this as an abstract problem that has low likelihood until it happens). There are no borders, there is no censorship.
Sex work? Nope. The powers to be decided that's not allowed. Remember when OF wanted to ban all explicit content?
MJ? Legal in a lot of places at state level. But you can only buy it with cash. Think about that for a sec: you're allowed by the local laws to do something buy you cannot do it.
Does giving money to support people/orgs in underdeveloped countries that cannot afford to use the normal banking channels count as use case?
Do you know what happened in Venezuela recently when their currency crashed and how the managed to stay afloat somehow?
Do you understand inflation and how what is currently happening is just another form of taxation? Is inflation and central bank policies doomimg an economy a real use case?
Have you heard about civil asset forfeiture? Abstract af until something like this happens to you. Is that a real use case?
As for Tornado Cash, anything that passes (or passed!) through mixers can be tracked and sanctioned as well.
In case of doubt, always assume that the US government has an ability to at least collect all traces of data, and that sooner or later it will make itself an opportunity to, as TC proved even retroactively, seize your assets or make them worthless with the stroke of a pen on a court order. And to make it worse, unlike a wad of cash that you can construct a reasonable parallel way on how you acquired it, you are automatically committing a crime by interacting with a sanctioned entity like TC.
Sex workers have already precarious lives as it is, there is no reason to entice them to even more risks.
the regulators might view that as criminal.
* What the law allows
* What the payment processors allow
Some industries, like sex work and cannabis sales, can be both legal and rejected by payment processors.
The law says they're legal in some places, and local authorities agree. But payment processors still want to protect themselves and their investors, so they decline to do business with such industries.
The moral hazard in this case is not that crypto may be used to avoid regulations.
The hazard is that a handful of private companies serve as de facto regulator and enforcers for all commerce.
You can tell it's a hazard because some people view any alternative payment system as possibly illegal.
You may think crypto should be criminal, but cash should be legal, based on the average age of this forum. But the younger generation has only ever used cash for illegal transactions, and there should be no surprise that governments would prefer a cashless society.
If you believe that crypto, cash, gold, and any other non-banking solution for payment remittance is likely to be viewed as criminal by regulators, then I have to wonder who the regulators are really protecting.
The center left/centrist (Democrats) position is more split. Some folks think it's a bodily autonomy issue and others think it's degrading.
Feminist opinion is likewise split. But most feminists I know tend to fall in the, "if it's consensual, it should be protected and regulated work. You shouldn't fear going to jail because you had sex."
So, it's a mix of opinions out here.
I believe this is a good thing, but prostitution is clearly not ,,just work'' just because it's trendy to call it sex work.
Here are some quotes (Google Translated) from the biggest feminist organisation (Feministiskt Initiativ):
"Prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes is a form of violence and a violation of human rights."
"Sexualization and objectification work against the principle of the human being as an independent subject and can limit women's ability to protect their bodily integrity."
"Equality cannot be achieved as long as it is possible to buy other people's bodies through prostitution, strip or sex clubs."
"Working against pornography and objectifying representations is thus an important part of violence prevention work."
The US does not, because they wouldn't work. The average angry political American thinks that bigotry against men is at least as prevalent as bigotry against women, and thinks that institutions have conspired with each other to advance women ahead of men.
Even American feminists think that there's no element of a woman's condition in the world that can't be equally applied to anyone who identifies as a woman. Very American, if the conditions of women are a state of mind that can be corrected or experienced based on how you identify, it's basically a "law of attraction." Women can think themselves out of (or into, if they have penises) the female condition. I'm pretty sure Kanye said something about the reason for slavery being that black people identified as slaves. It's that same sort of inversion of control and blaming the victim.
Radical feminists have a more coherent perspective. It's not one that I can agree with in many aspects, but it's one that's always worth discussing.
Wait, what? I follow that 'average angry political American' is all about 'equal means equal' regardless of gender, but the next statements aren't clear: the endorsement of trans sexual identity in American feminism is, in principle, related to Kanye's statement that black people identified as slaves because both cases are basically "mind over matter" takes? Am I understanding that correctly? And these are both forms of victim blaming?
It’s legal in Germany and the Netherlands.
Seems like there are some different views.
It's completely unsurprising that it's frowned upon.
I know that the choices I think are correct may not be - either for myself, for everyone or for any particular person. For that reason I don't think that anyone should run my life or that I should be trying to run other people's; excepting crossing the bright line of consent.
I'm beginning to wonder though if there isn't some space short of stopping a person from doing something - even if just to stand up and say - "What you're doing is crazy. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you let someone do that to you? Why would you do that to another person?"
If you talk to people who would ask those questions though the issue is that anyone who's willing to say something is also unable to accept that that's all they can do. They'll push whatever isn't right for them to the other side of the bright line.
That’s why moral norms exist in every human society. Most people need some sort of support from society to make good decisions for themselves and their families. It’s no different than how an exercise or diet regimen is easier to stick to if you do it along with other people to provide support and yes shaming if necessary.
Intellectuals project their own capacities onto sex workers, and say that if they did sex work—which they don’t—it would be for “freedom of expression” and “economic rights.” But the fact is that sex work is like myriad other dangerous and unpleasant jobs society has seen fit to regulate or ban. Society seeks to create a floor below which people can’t sink through desperation or bad choices.
Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
I don't think that's the only reason; even a few sex providers can distort the (mostly balanced) market for sex.
IOW, if men don't feel the need to date just to get sex then there's fewer men in the market. This means that women have to pay a higher price[1] for the available men, while the available men pay a lower price[2] for any specific woman.
[1] Be nicer, be more willing to engage in sex, etc.
[2] Be less committed, less involved, etc.
I agree, but that still reduces the number of available men in the market, which was my point.
There is a huge leap from "the majority of women oppose sex work" to "the majority of women oppose sex work BECAUSE if sex work was legal they would encounter social pressure to do sex work".
I have women in my life who oppose sex work decriminalization. Not a single one does because they worry they will encounter any social pressure to do sex work. Almost every single one does because they believe that coercion is very common, and the downsides to criminalization are minimal. And none of them have spent much time listening to actual sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization on their lives.
The women I know who are in favor of sex work decriminalization are very similar to the ones who oppose it but have spent more time listening to sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization. They understand that there is very little additional risk to someone who coerces another into sex work b/c of criminalization but far more additional risk to the sex worker.
Your second paragraph contradicts first and third.
I have no idea what the fourth paragraph is trying to say.
Let's say I, like the people running Iran, think a woman should have her head covered in public. It's good for woman, men and all of us together.
What are my options? I can decide that whatever the individuals want the overall badness of an uncovered female head is so great that preventing that is worth sending people to jail. Alternately I could decide that the goodness of letting people make decisions about their own lives is worth the damage that an uncovered female head will do to men, woman and society.
It seems like the rule almost everyone uses is "consenting adults can do things that don't harm non-consenting adults" for everything they don't have a problem with. When they have a problem with it they just flip the script by claiming it's not really consenting. It end up being the open sesame of public policy.
The other problem I have is that I don't think the view I described is right. There has to be a place we - society, the law, whatever - can sit where we can go, "This is wrong. Even if you agree with the action it's hurting you or other people but I'm not going to send you to jail. I'm not going to help you. I'm going to keep shouting from the rooftops that this this is stupid but I'll stop short of depriving you of liberty."
The problem with my idea is that people look at that and they say, why go to all that trouble for something you believe is that harmful when you have the power to take one more little step and stop that thing. All you have to do is put one person in jail. The rest will be scared.
Ever read "the ones who walk away from omelas". It's that.
Edit: Just want to add - Homosexuality has the same illogical hurdle. It feels immoral to many people, so therefore it must be immoral. People are largely unable to separate their lizard brain instincts from logical analysis. So we end up with gays being stoned to death.
Promiscuous sex and many partners irreversibly negatively influences a person's pair-bonding ability at a chemical level, this destroys the family unit and does not benefit the empowered singles and divorced 'pair-couples' we see today promoting this behavior.
Hastening the decline is not entertainment, I wish people would stop encouraging it for short term interests and look at the big picture.
There are plenty of well adjusted people who are either in open relationships or have no desire to be in relationships. Being kind and treating people with respect is what strengthens families.
- Open relationships do not strengthen "families".
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbi... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/257734/us-states-with-hi...
The second paragraph is pseudoscientific bullshit that gets parrotted by conservatives. People have been and will continue to have casual sex, and society is, and will be doing fine.
Your last sentence reveals the real reason you're against casual sex.
As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet. "This idea feels right, and is consistent with my ideology, so it must be right".
Why do you think that? There are objective reasons for parents sticking together - success of the child and the economics of being in a pair tend to positive things. Although I will say that I don't know of any resources that investigate these on things like polygamy - they focus on the common stuff like marriage, divorce, and sometimes remarriage.
I just want you to know your reply with the bible pamphlet thing was really stupid.
To address you directly: It's scientifically proven, check out Oxytocin and see about the pair-bonding facilitation it does.
I'm not a dummy, but today you spoke to me like one. You won't always get someone to re-engage you, and that won't always be because you're right, sometimes we're just too disgusted to risk further entertaining your disrespect.
I wholeheartedly apologize to giantg2. However for the record, other guy above can beat it.
Many older cultural or religious rules had some root in logic (obviously some didn't). In some cases modern understanding makes those rules unnecessary. For example, cooking was not as consistent, and germ theory was basically unknown, so eating pork and becoming sick meant that pigs were unclean and not to be eaten. Obviously we now know that we can eat pork if it's properly cooked.
It's debatable as to the status of many sex rules. Things like diseases can become resistant to treatment, evolve to be more problematic (or create a new problem altogether), etc. Condoms generally protect against most but not all. Then there's the reproduction issue, which pulls in a host of other issues such as who's paying for the kid, abortion, etc. Some of this is covered by contraceptives, but not fully. And perhaps the one not talked about, is how it can influence people similar to gambling or substances. This is also up for public debate on how rules should apply to these things.
I also don't think the example you provided is a very good one. Perhaps a better example might be extreme cosmetic surgery (&/or body modification) addicts. Or maybe I should say 'enthusiasts'.
This is interesting because it assumes everyone's day to day is exactly the same. When I worked 3rd shift, drinking beer at 9 am wasn't an issue to me because my 9 am wasn't the same as your 9 am. At that point, drinking beer at 9 pm would be odd because that was my morning. Also, my workweek was shifted so my weekend was Monday/Tuesday, so trying to fit everyone into one way of living is simply never going to work.
The issue at hand is not a law. They have issues too, i.e. abortion debacle in US, but at least they are subject to democratic scrutiny,
It's the fact that an arbitrary and capricious decision by two private corporations or perhaps moralistic CEO gets to dictate cultural norms for entire society.
If visa and mastercard decide to block you, your business / income is dead.
Sometimes they will do it at a loss to themselves - like what happened with Tumbler - it was sold and new owners removed porn, started shadowbanning, etc. It is now mostly dead and was sold mutiple times at lower and lower value. Hundreds of millions were wiped out for the sake of marality police.
This while thing reeks of Feudalism.
People who want to amputate perfectly healthy limbs and/or submit themselves to cannibalism are some of the first things that come to my mind here. Most of us would probably agree there should be a line somewhere, especially considering the potential of undiagnosed mental illness.
Not a popular statement to make, but the reality is that the majority of amateur sex workers (e.g. OF models) have diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illnesses, many have been prior victims of sexual abuse. There's a strong correlation between hypersexuality and involvement in sex work, and hypersexuality is often the result of childhood sexual trauma or mental illnesses like bipolar that can result in hypersexuality as a symptom of manic episodes.
So, the question you are putting forward isn't completely limited to the most extreme possibilities. That said, I generally have taken the stance that if someone is able to turn a condition of their existence into something which makes them money and they do so consensually, it is not my business to stop them from doing so. There are definitely deeper and complicated moral and philosophical questions about that though, dealing with the nature of consent and self-actualization. Is it /really/ consensual if someone engages in sex work due to hypersexuality, which was directly caused due to prior sexual trauma? What is consent, and how does it intersect with mental state and competence?
Unfortunately, I don't think society is in a place to wrestle with these deeper questions. Mental illness is relatively commonplace, and we have created a condition of existence in the West which encourages neurosis, and often becomes clinical depression or anxiety, at minimum. Our distraction/attention economy fundamentally messes with people's minds... intentionally... to sell us more crap we don't need. It is against the nature of society to consider what the nature of consent is when you exist surrounded by various layers of coercion and depredation.
IMHO, that's one of the libertarian oversimplifications that can make it a supremely seductive ideology. It's basically: throw out all the hard stuff and admire a toy model where all the pieces fit perfectly.
"Sex" as fine as long as it's not too explicit and mostly not actually about sex, but about keeping you insecure to buy stuff.
- Oscar Wilde
[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/24106 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Michels
America has managed to reinstate sexual repression, and it's odd how there's no clear "source" for it beyond "habitual capitalism" or something like that.
What makes you say this? Roe was tossed aside by a largely reactionary Catholic bench[1]. State-level anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, and anything else dealing with sexuality is largely pushed by Evangelicals or other fundamentalist Christian politicians.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Co...
Point is, repression can still exist and manifest without it. See e.g. "thirst traps."
Also, because white identification from Latinos is skyrocketing.
It's never been easier to sell your body and find an audience to applaud you for it. It's just not the majority.
In the 80s it was totally normal for (regular non-porn) Dutch movies to contain exposed boobs for example. No way that happens now without very restrictive ratings. And countries like Ireland have outlawed prostitution and Spain is thinking about it.
Of course the west has always been the most open in this kind of thing, probably because we're not as religious. In the Middle East there is almost no difference between government and religion whereas we try to separate them.
One consequence of this is that people with little sexual capital will try to recreate norms anyway they can. Therefore we end up with a hodgepodge of ideas, religious or not, that have as their only link to one another the desire to enforce sexual restrictions and quell anxiety surrounding sexual prowess as much as possible. The extreme form of this is the incel desire to legally enforce monogamy and erase women's rights, but the less ambitious equivalents take on the form of the counterrevolution you are describing here.
I've never seen this logical jump but it makes perfect sense. Thanks!
First, some of the stuff like Roe v Wade I think is more the result of political strategy than public opinion. If the electoral college were eliminated, for example, and US political process were more representative, you'd see very different patterns over the last couple of decades. I'm not all that surprised to see studies showing that Americans misunderstand the opinions of their peers on many topics, because of a discrepancy between political representation and public opinion. Basically electoral college and senate politics, combined with gerrymandering, has distorted certain things somewhat.
Second, my sense is this is a bit of rose-colored glasses with regard to looking at the past. Anyone who looks back at the politics around the AIDS crisis, and remembers the congressional hearings around music lyrics (!) might be a little reluctant to characterize things like porn financing controversies as a norm regression. Onlyfans leveled porn distribution in a way that previous years didn't have to deal with, so to some extent this is just the same-old blocs responding to new technology. I also think to some extent this is more due to hard cold financial risk modeling than the article admits -- I don't think it's all of it, but some of it (the article implies, for instance, that all those chargebacks are due to regrets rather than, say, it being a common charge with stolen credit information; I'm sure it's a bit of both but the latter possibility isn't really acknowledged at all in the piece, even if to refute it).
Within sex work, where on the sliding scale of acceptability does enabling a "self employed cam model", vs facilitating a "trafficked cam model" fall, especially when a payment processor has no idea what is going on behind the scenes? Is the payment processor supposed to watch the stream and recognize a gang tattoo and conclude that one is trafficked while another is not?
I can see people on the political right in the US saying they shouldn't process payments for pornography at all, and people on the left saying "I can't believe that <company> facilitates trafficking or victimization". I'd see the payments processors saying "It's not worth it to process any payments for any pornography at all".
Even as someone who doesn't think the government should tell you how to live, you can't pretend to be blind to the fact of why the government doesn't want to promulgate this kind of promiscuity / lack of family structure. It's ironic, given they think it's completely okay to explicitly target firearms companies who make devices and implements protected by the constitution - however cry wolf when acts that may cause far more psychological or societal harm are also given a scarlet letter. To be clear, even as someone far-left leaning I'd acknowledge pornography, more specifically sexually driven parasocial relationships (onlyfans) as far more integral to incels and anti-social males than firearms.
Sex work is commonly targeting at arms-length as "sex trafficking" - many sex workers commonly complain of this law enforcement "trope". However, the bright line of what is/isn't sexually predatory or supporting aspects of pedophillia are becoming more gray with sites like onlyfans. For instance, do we really want young women to only see immediate value in exposing their bodies on the internet for $5 a mo? (Ironically, less money than you'd donate to a charity to feed a child in africa)
Just my 2c.
I can. Make the argument, rather than saying "it's obvious -- you know. Come on, you know. It's obvious." Until the argument is actually made, it can't be engaged with. This just terminates discussion.
There needs to be moral policing? No. There is no need for this. Let the market decide. If people want porn give em porn (you need a reality check btw. Most internet traffic is porn. Even today). Also, puritan moralistic misguided people need to get with the program. You don't like it? Don't do it. You don't hold the absolute truth (in fact you are just recycling garbage that was created out of thin air millenniums ago and does not apply) and you don't get to decide how everyone lives their lives.
Upstanding society my ass. An upstanding society is one where you are free to do whatever you want to do and you are polite and tolerant of other people that don't fit your ideas. That's upstanding!
Let's just hope that the morality police that you want to instate does not disagree with you and bans you out of existence.