I don’t think I’ll ever understand why women who choose to enter the sex trade are demonised. It’s a job, some enjoy it and some don’t, but everyone enjoys getting paid. Though the comparison between people who rent their bodies (sex workers do get to keep their own bodies after work) and people who gamble their bodies (soldiers don’t always get to come home as part of the job) is a little off.
Sex “work” is not work. Work is selling your labor power. Prostitution is selling access to your body and not your labor power and therefore isn’t work
Is sex just mutual “body access” by passive objects without labor being performed by any participant? Are dancers, models, actors, or performers more broadly working, or are they simply being paid for access to their bodies?
What are the producing through selling their labor value? Nothing productive. You could make the argument that prostitution is unproductive work (if they were indeed doing work) but I’m not sure that’s a better argument. The very basis of prostitution is about one’s body and not about one’s labor.
Unproductive labor would be my understanding of it. Sex work generally doesn’t create productive value, but neither does “nonsexual” modeling, dancing, massage, film acting etc. I wouldn’t see any of those occupations gaining or losing their quality of “work” based on whether the genre of activity involved simulating sexual intimacy.
According to my ex, who prides herself to be a social worker and a conflict solver, relationships are built solely on sex, not on interpersonal connections. But then again, she also thinks that you shouldn’t ever apologize because it shows a lack of self-esteem, called the police on her best friend because she was jealous of her hooking up while she didn’t and regularly posts “memes” about how terrible everyone else is on Facebook. Maybe she’s just a nutcase.
That may just be her, and I kinda feel bad for her. That sounds like a lot of maladjustment and projection. My friends say they had some regulars who’d start the sessions telling them about their lives and showing them pictures of their kids. Touch and validation can be a form of medicine. Everyone needs to feel wanted. We are social creatures. Incels are one example of those starved from such things.
I’d compare sex work to sex work. War is war whether or not you want to include women or not. It just happens to be that most straight people prefer not to have unnecessary wars without personal benefit. If we created conscious war machines with their own minds, autonomy and conscience, then we would probably have trouble. Especially with all the anti-war memes and how peace loving myself and the vast majority of humanity is.
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