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There are "sex cam studios" in every country, including America. There are several in Arizona and Nevada. They're just like the coworking spaces us devs/designe

• LukeWalsh 13y ago
  While this is technically true, I disagree with the undertone. I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers.
  • sbov 13y ago
    Extreme realizations and exploiting workers is a problem in any industry. People have died farming gold in video games. Its why we have labor laws.
    • sillysaurus2 13y ago
      People have died farming gold in video games. What.. really? Died farming gold?
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      • pallandt 13y ago
        I think it's possible it might've happened although I don't know a specific case. I have read about several instances of gamers having died as a result of prolonged sitting and developing deep vein thrombosis though. Here is an example: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/xbox-addict-chris-staniforth-killed-blood-clot-marathon-gaming-session-england-article-1.162095 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/xbox-addict-chris-stan...
      • rch 13y ago
        Yeah, really. It happens.
      • mschuster91 13y ago
        Yap, IIRC one Japanese and one Taiwanese dude, but don't remember the specifics.
        • hkmurakami 13y ago
          Definitely a few in china and Korea as well
      • Ygg2 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction#Notable_deaths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction#Notable_de...
    • dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      Citation needed but it is hardly the same thing ... unless this is false equivocation day or something ...
      • chockablock 13y ago
        'false equivalence'. Equivocation means something else
        • dinkumthinkum 13y ago
          I don't want to be mean but if you are going to be pedantic, it would help if you were correct ... :( Please Google it or something. I have used it correctly, I think you do not know ...
    • javert 13y ago
      Because we need the government to protect us from our own judgement. It is better for the government to constraint people's action, rather than allowing them learn from their choices and adjust over time.
      • harlanlewis 13y ago
        Labor laws aren't about judgement, they're about leverage.
      • bayesianhorse 13y ago
        If the government has the power to stop a particular exploitation, and decides not to stop it, hoping that some decades or centuries down the line all citizens will be enlightened enough to cease this exploitation themselves, is that morally more correct?
        • javert 13y ago
          What exploitation? If I offer you a job paying below the market rate, don't take it.
          • bayesianhorse 13y ago
            That's exactly the point about exploitation. Many sex workers are not in a position to leave "job paying below the market rate", for a combination of reasons like illegal immigration, underage, drug addictions, and psychological and corporal torture and abuse. In most definitions of human rights there is a provision that these rights are "unalienable", making it at least highly questionable to "buy" the right to violate someones sexual self-determination, or inflict the long term damage that has been shown to occur even in "voluntary" prostitutes.
            • javert 13y ago
              I see what you are saying, but I don't agree. For the majority of the poor (and everyone else) who want to work and move up in life, don't put up any barriers to action and economic activity. For the tiny minority who don't want to work and move up in life (usually, because they don't really care that much), who cares? Don't sacrifice the virtuous and capable majority for their sake. You may say, "What about a country like India or (less extreme Eastern Europe), where the poor genuinely can't move up?" Well, the only way to change that is to free up the economy and let people pursue sustainable economic action. If you put up barriers to economic activity, the people who want to move up will never be able to; they will be permanently poor. For example, ith an expanding economy, you can eventually make it so a person making $10/hour is able to live nicely, as productivity rises and prices fall. But if you instead put minimum wage at $20/hour, people who only actually produce $10/hour of value won't have jobs, and the economy won't be able to expand to the point where if they had a $10/hour job, they could live decently on it. Minimum wage and other regulations are why America no longer manufactures. We could be making all the things now made in China, with a commensurate decrease in expenses. Our factory workers wouldn't be rich, but they'd be able to afford the kinds of things they themselves make in the factories. Meanwhile, China would also be doing fine, it just would have grown at a more measured and sustainable pace, which isn't a bad thing.
    • bayesianhorse 13y ago
      So essentially you are equating rape with video gaming. Something's fishy here...
      • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        So essentially you are equating porn with rape. Something's fishy here...
      • mseebach 13y ago
        And you are labeling activities you disagree with "rape" with not even a whiff of evidence. Fishy, indeed.
        • bayesianhorse 13y ago
          I'm certainly not inclined to dump all of the plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion and suffering involved in sex labor. From what is available in the media and public discussion you can deduce that commercially viable prostitution without exploitation is a very "niche" product. I also wasn't speaking only about webcam studios, but even with these studios there is a lot that is going on "off screen". Forcing a model to perform sexual acts is still rape, even if the perpetrator is not on screen and even when he has "trained" the model to make a good show.
          • mseebach 13y ago
            Oh, you've deduced it from the media and public discussion. We're good then. On behalf of the ignorant masses, forever shrouded in blindness by our inferior power of deduction and lack of access to such hallowed sources as the media and public discussion, I would like to thank you for educating us on the true state of the world.
          • dragonwriter 13y ago
            > I'm certainly not inclined to dump all of the plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion and suffering involved in sex labor. There's plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion, and suffering involved in labor in many industries . In other industries, we deal with this by attacking specific exploitative, coercive, and suffering-inducing practices directly -- and by doing so, we've (in the developed world) managed to greatly mitigate the exploitation, coercion, and suffering in all kinds of industries. In the sex industry, we've mostly taken the approach of viewing the problems inherent in having a sex industry, and used it as an excuse to preserve and reinforce the illegality and taboos against sex work, and as a result we've managed to perpetuate (and in some cases exacerbate) the exploitation, coercion and suffering in that industry
  • ocharles 13y ago
    > In its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers. Care to share these findings?
    • LukeWalsh 13y ago
      The simplest (and arguably most egregious) example is the sex industry's use of children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_sexual_exploitation_of_children http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_sexual_exploitation_...
      • MichaelGG 13y ago
        But that's not really related to cam studios where people voluntarily decide to perform.
        • DanBC 13y ago
          Some people like sex, and they like getting paid for sex work. That's not true for most people involved in sex work. It's not a free choice they've made. They find themselves in that situation to pay for drugs, or alcohol, or to pay off debts, or because they're modern slaves. Camming is the lighter end of sex work, and thus the ratio of willing : unwilling workers is better than for other sex work, but it's still more likely to be harmful than harm free.
          • dragonwriter 13y ago
            > Some people like sex, and they like getting paid for sex work. > That's not true for most people involved in sex work. You know, if you dropped "sex" for most other domains wherein people might work, that'd probably still be true. There's probably a few areas of work where most people work in the domain because they like it, but for most domains of work people work in the domain because they need the money and working in the domain is the best way they feel they have of making the money they need. Socially taboo -- and, even moreso, illegal -- domains of work, naturally, increase the risk of people being stuck in them and being less able to move to other domains of work later, and they also increase the risk of exploitation (because people feel trapped in them, because subject to abuse have less ability to address abuse, and because the social taboo (or illegality) of working in the domain naturally means that people, even if they like the domain, are less likely to choose it as a domain of work if they have other viable options, meaning the people that do end up there are usually the most vulnerable to exploitation in the first place.
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers. The "most extreme realizations" of most industries have been shown to cause severe harm -- often both physical and emotional -- to exploited workers. I mean, really, we see this fairly regularly with the all kinds industries that don't involve sex, and then we blame it on the particular abusive practices, and don't try to claim its fundamental to having an industy that deals in, say, garments, or electronics.
  • malandrew 13y ago
    Severe? Hardly. It's not like these people are being beaten or abused. They're there voluntarily. They're just getting the short-end of the economic stick and their clients got the short-end of the sexual capital[0] stick. It's only emotional harm if you attach a lot of emotional value in the work you do. It's not really any different than whoring yourself out to Wall Street. If you have ethical concerns with the work, it will cause you anguish. If you don't and you're happy with the money you won't be bothered or emotionally harmed that much. As the author of this piece pointed out, it's all incredibly pedestrian. The emotional harm really is the emotional pain of having no better options to make a living than participating in an exploitative system they don't fully agree with. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_capital http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_capital
    • bayesianhorse 13y ago
      Right. Please perform masturbation in front of a camera and send the video to some of your closest friends. Then say again there is no chance of emotional harm involved...
  • BSousa 13y ago
    Are we talking about startups or sex industry? Cause burnout/long working hours have taken a toll in many of our brightest engineers and ruined a few families as well. And hey, if you are not doing 80 hours work you are a cop-out right?
• calvinwest 13y ago
  Your point of view couldn't be more incorrect. Coworking spaces aren't modeled around a brothel atmosphere as most cam dens are. There are "humane" cam studios in some countries like Germany where there are regulations for sex workers, but this is usually the exception.
• rayiner 13y ago
  > They're just like the coworking spaces us devs/designers have available to us This is one of the more out of touch bits of false equivalency I've seen on HN recently, and that's saying something. It's a bit of pop philosophy that says that sex workers are just like any other service provider. However, it totally ignores the psychology and power differentials in the industry. In America and especially in developing countries. The point 'LukeWalsh makes about child sex workers is relevant. The phat answer is: "well that's different, because children can't consent and nobody can consent on their behalf." Neat and clean. But the psychology that leads someone to push their child into sex work is not susceptible to a neat answer or pop philosophy. Whatever psychological phenomenon is at play, might a lesser but qualitatively similar sort of phenomenon be at play with less extreme examples of sex workers?
  • selmnoo 13y ago
    I'm guessing probably because the secular crowd doesn't ascribe so much power significance to sexual matters. They don't see a girl being forced to do sex work (of any variety) as having been exploited in any way. What's interesting, I suppose, is that a new form feminism brewing (especially among women of younger age) shares these values -- they see sex work just like any other work to get money, and so the sex work is just fine and should be let as is according to them. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this if you have any.
    • DanBC 13y ago
      Adults with free choice should be able to buy and sell sex. There's no intrinsic problem with that. The trickiness comes from what is meant by "free choice". Is a drug addict free to make a choice about sex work? How about someone with huge debts? And existing laws should be aimed at protecting the more vulnerable people (children; trafficked workers; etc) but have unintended consequences of pushing away from working from a well run brothel and towards working off the street or a poorly run brothel.
      • tptacek 13y ago
        If adults with free choice are able to buy and sell sex, then economics and the dynamics of capitalism are going to compel disadvantaged people into selling sex, far more than happens today. I'm not going to argue that the vice laws we have today are coherently enforceable or practicable, but there is more to the issue of outlawing prostitution than Puritan moralism.
• antoinec 13y ago
  ...and this spaces are full of people that are doing their job by passion and not because they don't have the choice, right? This is sad to read such a comment.
  • dangrossman 13y ago
    Yes. I know about the ones in Arizona and Nevada because I know (offline) two friends that work in them; one with a boyfriend, one with a husband, both go to college and "cam" in the studio after classes a few nights a week for extra money. The boyfriend is in his girlfriend's page most of those nights so they can chat whenever it's not busy. They're both also active in their local kink community; they have a passion for voyeurism and get paid for it. Yes, there are "sex workers" that are being exploited or coerced into their situation all over the world. Not everyone who turns on their webcam and disrobes for money is one of those people, and the fact that there are companies catering to them isn't in itself a "sad" thing. They're not part of some underground -- you can find the job listings for the studio's building managers, website maintenance and such on Monster.com. If you've ever visited Philadelphia and walked the tourist attractions, you unknowingly walked by the nation's largest phone sex hotline too. It's a cubicle-farm call center, the employees wearing normal work attire while working FT shifts for FT pay, benefits and bonuses.
  • agumonkey 13y ago
    I mostly agree, but nothing is pure and perfect. I've seen many people in dev out of necessity rather than appreciation or even desire/passion. Many people despise it deeply (managerial harassment, being undervalued as a person, high stress, absurd workplace processes). It's better for social status and pay.