- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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It’s really simple:
when you “sell your body” by taking pictures without clothes, you might make money out of it BUT investors won’t get a dime from it! Which is bad for the economy, so you shouldn’t do it.
Also, think of the children, blah blah…
Actually no - sex work is literally like any other work, with pimps extracting the surplus value from your labor instead of proper capitalists. The pimp can be a pornographic website hosting your videos, so investors can literally get money for it.
The one’s demonizing it often do so out of opportunism, to appeal to the traditionalist voters, not because it doesn’t produce profit or something.
But on the modern web, there are too many options for how to distribute your content. Thereby empowering each sex worker.
Yes, and what do you think those distribution sites do in exchange of distributing your content? Perhaps extracting surplus value from the profit they generate for housing sex worker’s videos? It’s literally the thing I’m talking about - the website is acting as a pimp in this case.
If you mean self-hosting or starting a small business selling your “sex work” on sites that you own, then that would bypass this exact point. However, that’s pretty much impossible given two things:
- How the fuck are you going to get discovered by people not aware of who you are
- Who the hell would visit a separate site entirely just for one porn star when a gazillion centralized alternatives that already contain thousands of videos exist
It’s a non-solution, and there is absolutely a reason why the biggest porn stars out there just use onlyfans or phub or whatever to host their content, even if it means getting exploited as a result.
And they’re slowly chipping away at access to those means where people can freely and independently operate.
Except you’re basically guaranteed to have your content pirated, and most low level sex workers won’t have the client base to turn a profit. The vast majority of people on OF and similar make very little money.
Keep in mind too that taxes can be fucked up for independent contractors, that many payment vendors can fuck you over (very common for PayPal to freeze funds), and also again, the low barrier to access means you are competing with a ton of other people. Unless you are very skilled at marketing or can fill a specific niche, it’s not going to make you enough to pay rent.
Full service can make you a lot more and has less of the immediate competition aspect, but at least in places where it is illegal, you are going to be raped at some point. You can’t exactly call the police if they don’t pay you or if they do something worse. There will be a heavy pressure to not use condoms, and stealthing is unfortunately extremely common.
Sex work is not “easy money.” Maybe it’s empowering to some, but for many it’s extremely traumatizing and dehumanizing.
You cant call the police - exactly the problem
It certainly doesn’t stop the police from calling you though…
One thing constantly left out of the “sex work is work” conversation is that sex workers have PTSD rates that rival combat veterans. It’s not the glamorous, fun, easy money that people want to fantasize it is.
What do you mean? Im sure OnlyFans investors aren’t complaining.
Sex is the reward of a capitalistic patriarchy. You bust your ass to get all the shinies, to then get the sexy.
Selling sex is a shortcut, and those aren’t allowed for the proletariat.
Plot twist: it’s the same, it’s just that the rich elites have normalized their kinks, while villainizing sex workers for doing honest work.
They prefer all sex workers to be disempowered.
The picture thing is only “selling your body” if you are a woman, otherwise it’s “exercising your freedom” /s
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As a labourer, I’m not sure I get the point of this post. Is the point that my job is bad? I lift things with a forklift, not my back. I also get paid more than the national average thanks to my union. Sex work can be normalized without putting down labourers.
No, the point is that in both cases you are selling your body, but only one is looked down as something filthy and bad. Either both are bad or none is.
Unfortunately, I fear that physical labor does not have a very good reputation in most societies either - at least not if you take remuneration as an indicator, because despite the outstanding value of the work for society, it is often significantly lower than the remuneration for office work, for example.
Fundamentally, it seems to me that one of the most serious issues of our time is that value creation is not adequately remunerated. Instead, the highest salaries are paid to those who manage or regulate the work of others - whether they are pimps, porn producers, lawyers, or CEOs of a corporation: strangely enough, the highest salaries are almost always paid to those who do not create any value themselves, but merely organize the actual creation of value in some way.
This has been the case for quite some time, of course, but the imbalance is becoming increasingly severe - especially when you consider issues such as LLMs (where corporations benefit massively from the work of others without paying them anything at all).
The point is we are all whores, just wearing different makeup. Line must go up.
Oh, my line goes up.
Vertically.
From the center of my hand.
In the direction of my employers.
Yeah you didnt get the point of the post.
Forklift licenses are great though.
I think the shaming of sex workers is more of a sexual strategy than one based in wealth. I know Lemmy is (luckily) very anti-capitalist, but I think in this case poor people do the same shaming as rich people.
Well. It’s not. Your not selling anything. You’re being used, and abused and paid enough to barely keep you alive. You know. Slaves.
Selling your body is more profitable. And under your control. Can’t have that , can we?
It’s bonded servitude with extra steps.
Feudal serfs were more valued than we are, but then they had a (dire) labor shortage. Now the system is maintained to assure there’s a surplus.
At least until AI and robots take our jobs.
Speakibg of which, autonomous freight trucks are being tested in Texas. Talk about great replacement
Taking pictures of yourself without clothes on is piracy.
Piracy of what?
corporations own your body, it’s not your right to sell it for your own profit
I disagree.
Your opinions are also owned by corporations. It is not your right to disagree.
Your speech pattern has been detected to be the property of Google, LLC. Sending a cease and desist letter…
Is this trying to bait people to take pictures of themselves?
damn, i’m feeling seen and it wasn’t noods…
Is change of profession something that’s feasible for you?
It happened in '93, back’s been shit since tho :)
We should change to “selling orgasms and related services” instead, is truer and sounds better.
Orgasmonger
I’m keeping this to a side of my head and start a random debate at a later date
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Actually no, both have been normalized to a somewhat equal level, though being employed and selling your labor power is a bit more accepted given how essentially every prole has to do it, and how the entire early life is preparation for it.
The defenders of such concepts though are coming from the exact opposite sides though - exploitative jobs where you sell your labor power is seen as virtuous by the right, where it’s the natural state of things or whatever. Porn industry, prostitution and whatever is seen as virtuous by the left, giving freedom to women to use their bodies how they want and self-expression, plus it’s an easier way to make money.
The correct position here though is the centrist one - both sides are morons and should be killed with hammers.
For selling your labor power, you have no practical choice in the matter - you have to be employed for some capitalist to extract surplus value from your work while they actively fight against workers rights using that gained capital. If you don’t, you don’t get money which is a commodity used to buy other commodities to survive, meaning you’re risking becoming homeless and without food if you have no support net holding you, and if you do then the wage you get is usually just enough for you to survive + thrive enough to reproduce, bringing more workers into the world. As edgy as it might sound, this is literally just slavery with an illusion of freedom.
Same applies to sex work - it’s commodified labor like any other, surplus value is extracted by pimps, be it actual physical ones when it comes to prostitution or porn websites with their own cut. A major issue is consent - if what you gain for this kind of work is money which is necessary for one’s survival, how can one truly be sure that what the woman does is out of her own will and would have done it regardless if concept of money didn’t exist? What about tens of thousands of desperate women who aren’t as big as the well-known porn celebs not having an option to say “no” to sex on porn, or being deliberately hooked on drugs to be dependent on their pimp? It’s commodified rape.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Sex work is not exclusive to women. The dependency you speak of is like one step removed from health insurance provided by an employer imo.
how can one truly be sure that what the woman does is out of her own will and would have done it regardless if concept of money didn’t exist?
You can ask them.
You can ask them.
The problem isn’t individual preference or whatever - there are definitely people who’d love to bang around, money or not. The problem is the structural coercion, the fact that you’re doing it for an essential resource required to survive in today’s society, so there’s absolutely no way. It isn’t done purely out of free will or for fun as some people would suggest.
? The post literally points out that this is true of every job. Sex work isn’t some unique evil.
The post is ambiguous enough where it could very well be pro sex work, and there’s a surprising amount of comments here having this reading too like sex work being some liberatory, empowering thing as opposed to a form of commodifying yourself
Porn industry, prostitution and whatever is seen as virtuous by the left, giving freedom to women to use their bodies how they want and self-expression
You almost lost me there! However:
The correct position here though is the centrist one - both sides are morons and should be killed with hammers.
OK, I guess?
But I still owuldn’t want to put sexual exploitation on the same level as physical labor exploitation.
All in all I don’t subscribe to the dualism you present here, even considering that’s what OP suggests.
