Asklemmy

Who do you know that goes to work for fun, and not to make ends meet?

Fact is, we humans make quite surplus enough for everyone to make ends meet. Your job is a form of coercion, to make others money. That health care in the U.S. is tied to one's job is evidence of that. That housing is dependent on mortgages being paid consistently or one risks homelessness is more evidence still. Taxes are coercion by governments to give credence to fiat currency, not because they need it to pay for goods and services... they could print money to pay for goods if that weren't true. Point is jobs are coercion, and sex workers are under the same pressures I described above, enough that I doubt any sex worker is in it just for their love of the game.

I think they mean it's their only option to make ends meet.

needing to perform sexuality in order to make ends meet is a form of coercion. Like if someone has to grant access to their body, under threat of starvation or homelessness or whatever, that's coercion. I don't know how many sex workers are out there with a couple jobs lined up an then say "nah i'd rather do sex work" but within the current framework of gig economies and legally grey/restricted labor I bet it's not a significant amount.

Whats going on??? There's obviously a difference between a cashier or warehouse worker being forced into their labour than a sex worker forced to sell intimate access to their body?? "Their own boss" what kind of liberalism is this???? This just flattens all the discourse around "sex work as work" into "wow they just perform a service like my mechanic it's literally the same thing!" Fuck off with that bullshit.

I'm just gonna quote some marx here for all you people that think all labor is equally good and everyone just chooses freely what they want to do

The economists tell us, to be sure, that those labourers who have been rendered superfluous by machinery find new venues of employment. They dare not assert directly that the same labourers that have been discharged find situations in new branches of labour. Facts cry out too loudly against this lie. Strictly speaking, they only maintain that new means of employment will be found for other sections of the working class; for example, for that portion of the young generation of labourers who were about to enter upon that branch of industry which had just been abolished. Of course, this is a great satisfaction to the disabled labourers. There will be no lack of fresh exploitable blood and muscle for the Messrs. Capitalists—the dead may bury their dead. This consolation seems to be intended more for the comfort of the capitalists themselves than their labourers. If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!

But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment—are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?

I'm against the conditions that force people into doing any work that they don't want to do. I'm mentioning sex work because the topic of this post is sex work and not construction or janitorial work.