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> abolish commercial sexual exploitation > wish to abolish the sex industry at large I see very little difference between these two sentences, and archived lin

• dijit 4y ago
  Consent is the difference. If you’re willing to sell access to pictures of your naked body because you see it as worthwhile and are not coerced; that’s fine. If there’s a hint of coercion, (implied, forced economic or abusive (physically or mentally)) then it’s not ok. Sexual exploitation is not hard to define, let’s not pretend that it is.
  • cloutchaser 4y ago
    That's nice when you write it down, but the whole thing is much grayer than that. Consent isn't necessarily as clear as that, especially when you have 5-6 men in a room with a single woman who is being filmed. How do you stop coercion then? How do prove consent? There are stories on both sides. Some porn stars say they will quite easily make informed decisions in that situation. But I think that is the minority...
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      > Some porn stars say they will quite easily make informed decisions in that situation. But I think that is the minority... from my experience, we have no way of quantifying that statement because even many “sex work positive” forums will remove and ban any performer talking about their experience in a positive light this whole discussion is based on bad assumptions partially because everybody with a platform has an angle, so far
    • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Being pressured into doing work that isn't the "gravy" part of your job is part of literally every job.
      • cloutchaser 4y ago
        Except in most jobs you only metaphorically get fucked violently in the ass. Have you tried it not metaphorically?
    • elp 4y ago
      > Some porn stars say they will quite easily make informed decisions in that situation. But I think that is the minority... This seems to be a common trope. The poor porn actress didn't know what was going to happen.... In the real world while some producers are complete scum they are not the majority and the outright criminal ones end up in jail (See GirlsDoPorn) . Most porn stars have agents looking out for their interests at least partially. Look on something like iafd.com and you can see that the major studios have people returning year after for shoots. While the work might seem horrible it is the choice of the people involved who have made decisions appropriate for THEM. Working for a full month at minimum wage vs 1 week a month for vastly more money etc.
      • willcipriano 4y ago
        I had to stop watching porn since I grew up in a poor area and can tell when people are on opioids. About half the time they look so messed up that I doubt they even really know where they are.
      • cloutchaser 4y ago
        The 18 year old actress recruited online flying down to Miami to shoot and live with 5 other actresses has an agent that represents her interests? Yeah no. And that I know is the situation for many in porn.
  • blamestross 4y ago
    So sex work is only ethical as a side gig? Without your needs being satisfied by some other source, capitalism is inherently coercion. Enforced by the violence of starvation, exposure, or the state. Basically, unless it is legal to sustainence farm without paying taxes, all employment is selling your body under duress. Being naked only makes the power disparity more obvious.
    • Agamus 4y ago
      In other words, life is inherently coercive? Life is... life under duress?
      • techdragon 4y ago
        Unless your able to go off the grid on land you somehow own freehold without needing taxes and subsistence farm without need for any greater wealth than that land you are using… or you can forage freely in the wilderness as a hunter gatherer … then it’s hard to argue that life is truly without some basic level of coercion. It’s tempting to consider it a reduction to absurdity but it’s not really. Society in most places around the world has obligations that require us to do things. It’s coercive. Not in a deliberately malicious way but in an apathetic, conformity sort of way.
        • blamestross 4y ago
          "Not in a deliberately malicious way but in an apathetic, conformity sort of way" It feels that way until it is realized that it is enforced by government monopoly on violence. And despite this rant, I'm not a libertarian or even an anarchist. I just need us to be honest about the fact Society can only exist with consent under duress. It tends to get obvious when you talk about sex-work because people feel different about bodily autonomy when it comes to sex vs other types of bodily harm.
        • Agamus 4y ago
          I tend to agree with your base premise. My question is, do we say "Yes!" to that, or "No!"?
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    The problem is going to be drawing a clear line around "coercion" in an unequal capitalist society. In a very real sense I am coerced into working at all. I have lucrative paths of work available to me other than sex work, but if I didn't and I did sex work because it was the best pay available, would you consider that coercion? I would, and do. Let's remove that coercive pressure on labor and then see who wants to do sex work. I mean this seriously, I'm sure people will still choose it. But probably in different numbers and different forms than they currently do.
    • dumpsterlid 4y ago
      You are so right. Honestly a big reason I read hackernews is to see the hilarious cognitive dissonance some people have here when trying to twist their ideologies so that the state of capitalist society makes rational and humanitarian sense. There are so many extremely intelligent people here that put all that intelligence into the stupidest box.
    • dijit 4y ago
      If there are no other options, then selling your body for sex is coercion. Same is true in capitalism, and I will die on that hill too. If you work in a company town and you’re forced into manual labour then I see that as quite similar honestly. That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion. But yes, it gets muddy when you have to contend with the idea of your free will not being your own, but I don’t get the impression that girls on onlyfans are forced, that they are unsafe or that they are being put in tenuous situations (like people trafficking them and keeping their passports).
      • nybble41 4y ago
        It makes a difference who is doing the coercing, though. Is it the person offering a solution (employment), or the universe in general for imposing scarcity? You may be "coerced" into working by the general human condition of needing to earn money somehow to survive, but that doesn't mean your employer is coercing you. That relationship is still voluntary. You can choose to work for them on mutually-agreeable terms, or not—and they can choose to hire you, or not. Neither party is forcing the other to do anything. > That you’re not free to sell your body as a sex worker but are free to sell your body as a miner or oil rigger is a weird double standard in my opinion. On that point we agree.
  • LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    Am I coerced or consenting to selling time and brainpower as a computer engineer? If I stop, CPS will eventually take my son from me, the bank will definitely take my house from me, I'll lose my health insurance, and my car, and the grocery store won't let me take food off the shelves anymore... There's definitely a spectrum of dead-end careers and employment by debtors with resulting economic exploitation versus desirable jobs that you have to show up to maintain, but it's quite a stretch to say that any hint of economic coercion is not OK. We're not yet a post-scarcity socialist society, the globe is very much capitalistic, and participation in our capitalist society implies some economic coercion.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    How do you know an actor or actress is not performing in a shoot because they were forced to? How do you know the editor hasn't cut out the parts where the model revoked consent between shots? You'll have to review the entire making-off process and confidential interviews with all participants to find out that the people on camera actually consented or were merely forced to do so. Then there is porn which specifically focuses on vulnerability, humiliation, power balances, trust, you name it. I don't think most porn is nonconsensual, especially not most professional grade stuff, but I know for sure there is a percentage of "consentual" porn that's actually based on faked or revoked consent because human traffickers can make big money on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans. It's the only logical conclusion, you don't need to be a criminal mastermind to think of this. The legal definition of consent and exploitation is the easy part: there is no consent until it's freely given, and consent can be retracted at any point. Any non-consensual activity is abuse and exploitation. Easy peasy, covers pretty much everything. The verification process is where the actual problem lies. You obviously can't have people sign a document (because people can easily be coerced). Even in full production pornos where the people on screen seemed professionals doing their job, produced by dedicated companies and sold to the public on VHS tapes, turned out to be rape years after the fact, and people who bought those might never find out. It's a practically unsolvable problem.
    • dijit 4y ago
      > Then there is porn which specifically focuses on vulnerability, humiliation, power balances, trust, you name it. I don’t want to rape anyone but I have a rape kink, my girlfriend also has a rape kink- but anything that remotely resembles realistic depictions of rape (rape depicted in movies) is deeply unsettling still. I think a lot of people don’t understand this, kinks of a thing aren’t direct desires to do the thing, and I can understand why- it’s confusing for me too. > How do you know an actor or actress is not performing in a shoot because they were forced to? How do you know the editor hasn't cut out the parts where the model revoked consent between shots? By making it legal and ensuring there are custodians who’s purpose in life is to ensure workplace health and safety. we have this for office workers already
      • 4y ago
  • mc32 4y ago
    Often times people participating in that industry are addicted to some drug(s) which could affect behavior and decisionmaking. Often women are incentivized via "bonuses" to perform acts they would otherwise avoid --and they are routinely given "painkillers" in order that the act be less painful in its execution. Imagine you had a different employer who got people addicted to some substance and in return for more drugs had them work at some arbitrarily low rate via some contractual arrangement. Maybe, if drugs were all legal the arrangement would be legal --but would the population at large be okay with that? I think most people would cry foul.
    • techdragon 4y ago
      Your analogy is flawed by adding the assumption that they got addicted on the job. As though they gradually fall down a slope from paracetamol to Percocet and off the rails as some moustache twirling villain exploits them… All fields of work are routinely subject to “bonuses” and millions of people take painkillers and miscellaneous other medications to function through the workday in order to earn both their base pay and to try and meet targets in order to get bonuses… Is the manual labourer taking painkillers on the job to get through a day of laying bricks who is ignoring their body telling them they need to stop the work, who is pushing themselves artificially in order to get a job bonus, hurting their body, potentially beginning a cycle of painkillers being necessary to function for their job, not being equally exploited by your logic?
      • mc32 4y ago
        I see, since manual labor over the period of many years can lead to situations where you need painkillers, the sex industry is beyond scrutiny and reproach, yes? Let us not forget how sexist and ageist the industry is as well.
        • ninjanomnom 4y ago
          Not beyond reproach but it is a fair argument to make that people's choices can be considered unforced from a moral perspective even in the presence of reasonable external pressures. If someone has decided that sex work is acceptable to them then I'm willing to take that at face value unless genuine exploitative behavior is found. If you aren't willing to allow any sort of pressures on people to perform what they consider their livelihood, then employing anyone such that they only make enough to live paycheck to paycheck is immoral as well.
  • colonwqbang 4y ago
    You will find many people who think that a person can never consent to selling their own body. Similarly, there are those (though fewer) who think that a person can never consent to selling pictures of their own body. Let's not pretend that there isn't.
• romwell 4y ago
  >I see very little difference between these two sentences, Sex workers do.
  • Retr0id 4y ago
    I think GP's point is that a "faith-based group" would not, and therefore the sentences are the same. However, that's a big assumption - not all faith-based groups think that way, so IMHO it's better to be explicit.
    • romwell 4y ago
      I understood the OP's point, but even if the two sentences mean the same thing to a particular faith-based group, we should take care to not to take on and spread that group's biases. Because the sentences absolutely are not the same. And especially, and most importantly, they aren't the same to the affected people, whose interests the "faith-based groups" (and in one word — bigots) purport to protect.