There is something I find particularly revolting about sexual exploitation, having both your dignity and your agency taken from you.
My issue is not with wage labor (at least, not for this thread). My concern is where the sex work industry is contorted in certain ways into modern slavery with an unappealing twist.
As one sugar baby explained to me: I can either work crazy hours for minimum wage at Dairy Queen all month and barely cover rent and food. Or I can have an older guy take me to a Michelin star restaurant and hook up with him, and I'm set for the month in a span of a couple of hours. Have a couple of them on the hook and you're now in the luxury lifestyle territory which most people can only dream of.
It's an interesting conversation. We're ok with people doing extremely dangerous and abusive jobs for shitty pay. Miners, people roaming the sewers, people welding beams hundreds of feet in the air. Those are fine. But you give someone head for thousands of dollars so you don't have to flip burgers at McDonald's while you're in college, and suddenly you're a poor victim to stand up for.
My fuckfriend was an escort for about 3 years and I think most people have the same misconceptions that I had.
When I told her that she must have encountered some nasty customers, she said not that much because she didn't have a pimp and always chose her customers.
If the guy didn't look clean or she had a bad feeling, she would refuse to have sex with him.
Regulations like this are putting a strain on the "good" side of this work because it's making it harder for girls to operate independently since they can't post ads.
So they will have to operate with pimps that will feed them customers and make sure they are kept stoned enough to make them money hungry (and thus lowering their standards or at least make the choice harder for her).
Let's not kid ourselves, this bill has nothing to do with protecting sex workers or improving their lives.
Just like Cannabis, the problem will never go away, so you either regulate it or let the black market take care of it.
Belle du Jour made £300/hr. I remember her doing a Q&A for readers of the Sunday Times (for US people: an influential conservative newspaper in the UK). All anyone cared about was that she paid her taxes.
I'm completely against sexual exploitation as well. But prostitution, i.e., sex between consenting adults in exchange for money, has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual exploitation or slavery.
Sexwork is work, just like any other type of work.
As I tried to make very clear in my post, I have zero problem with sex work. I simply want it regulated in a way so it’s safe for sex workers, and they’re not coerced into the work.
I've thought about this a whole lot. If I understand your various comments here correctly, I agree with you that it should be allowed while not being exploitation.
The problem as I see it is that most people who feel that way will do what you are doing here and speak out against women being exploited. Meanwhile, there are still huge practical barriers to women making good money via other avenues.
Due to my compromised immune system, sex work is out of the question. If this were not true, I might well have moved to Nevada where it is legal because trying to get taken seriously as a woman, trying to network and make business connections, trying to get business people (who are mostly men) to engage me substantively, help me figure this out, open doors for me has gone just so painfully slowly and I remain dirt poor.
And it frustrates me to see these kinds of remarks here because I feel like most of what I say falls on deaf ears. On top of that, I get a lot of ugly push back where I get literally called a liar (quickly edited to merely say not honest) and accused of having a political agenda and told I need to just shut up about my life for some reason or other. Rich men express similar opinions, though often not in an actionable way, and that's basically OK even if others don't agree. I try to talk about it and try to say in practical terms "Hey, if you sincerely want to see women not be exploited and pushed into such choices, then other doors need be opening for us." and that's often all kinds of ugly drama.
But, seriously, how else do you think that works? I have stayed the course due to extraordinary circumstances giving me no other viable options. I wish to hell and back every single day that I had an easier answer that would make my life work.
I am not asking for charity. I am asking for help to become successful at earning a middle class income.
That's the missing piece here. Women need other doors to open. And if that isn't happening, then decrying sex work, one of the few well paid things reliably available to women, is just cutting off options and making things worse.
I don't understand why that seems so extremely hard to get through to people.
How do we get those doors open for women in order for them to have more opportunity? How do we make sure they have every opportunity available to them to experience a secure middle class lifestyle?
This issue strikes particularly close to home for me, as my mother took off for about a decade and worked odd jobs in Nevada while wrestling with mental health issues.
We need to get men and women engaging in conversation substantively with a default expectation that it is platonic. One of the problems is that men mostly don't really talk to women except to hit on them. I have run into this problem over and over that trying to engage men substantively often illicits romantic feelings on their part even though it's only a few replies in a public forum, never mind that I have been celibate 12.5+ years and I'm open about that.
My belief is that doors open for men based on two things: establishing trust and casually being exposed to a great deal more information pertinent to developing a career than women get exposed to. Both of these are rooted in the fact that most men can talk to other men a lot without sex interfering. Women can't really do that. Men either decide they aren't interested, and then barely speak to us, or they decide this is a negotiation for sex/romance if there is more than a tiny amount of conversation. It's a no win situation for a woman.
My experience has been that once a man is sexually or romantically interested in me, he's completely useless to me in terms of being a professional contact. I was romantically involved for a time with a man who had recently changed careers just a few months earlier. His previous career was the field I wanted to go into. No, he never read the paper I wrote that I asked him for feedback on.
Men who are romantically interested in me will not clue me, will not make vital introductions, will not give me meaningful feedback. Other men also mostly don't do those things for me because they barely know me, don't trust me (because they don't really know me), don't want to talk to me enough to get to know what I have to offer professionally, etc.
All of that boils down to I need men talking with me more with a strong assumption that it is platonic/professional, not romantic.
While I empathize with your situation, do you not seem to realize that the vast majority of men won't help other men in the way you want help either. Unless they're getting something they value in return. That's the key. When you ask for help, you have to provide the helper with the promise of something they want. Else why should they bother?
The problem I face is that the only thing men want in exchange is basically sex and there is a lot of value that I provide at times that people feel they can just get for free from me and to hell with me. I am very interested in figuring out how to make mutually beneficial exchanges. But you can't try to negotiate such if most business people will only really talk to you in hopes of getting laid.
If you want to get rid of a large chunk of coerced sex-work, just make other options easier to attain, or give those sex workers support. But the US has an annoying trend of implimenting solutions without looking into whether that solution is effective.
I'd agree with you if people were forced into prostitution - and of course what you say does apply correctly to victims of human trafficking who are forced. But I don't think that's always the case.
Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.
I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.
But you present generalizations and assumptions specific to the scenarios that you describe without facts to back them up. The responder above presents a valid scenario that is no different than 15-20 years ago, college women with proper skills/looks/aptitude, might go work at the few strip clubs/bikini bars in the Bay Area while going to college.
I recall, while in college, being surprised by the roommate of a friend (who was a very good student) pulling in what was more than the highest CS grad made out of school when I graduated.
Exploitation is one thing, but this immediate jump to everything is exploitation is what leads to things like this particular law getting passed. Generalizations without facts.
My issue is not with wage labor (at least, not for this thread). My concern is where the sex work industry is contorted in certain ways into modern slavery with an unappealing twist.