This is why Amerikkka attacked its own education system. Its why your school's funding is based on the houses in the fucking area.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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that is why they call it liberalism. obviously you can't build a society on just "everybody should just do whatever" but that is the core belief that liberalism is named after
Maybe an unpopular opinion but I think the problem is compounded by the way identity politics has been melded with that liberal individualism. Identity politics is useful for describing and analysing political / material effects where identity plays a factor. But I’ve seen a swathe of arguments from the younger liberals that “a personal interaction which isn’t what I want” = “an attack on my group identity”. The over-conflation of the personal and collective damaging to the cause of liberation of marginalised groups imo
Unlike Marxism which correctly says "if something makes me feel good, it's BAD!"
The philosophy behind "sex work is work"
SWERFism isn't allowed here
I didn’t feel like that needed to be in the CoC until I read the prior comment and went looking for it to be explicitly stated 
I don't think Women should be forced to sell their bodies to survive. I have nothing against sex-workers, but I am thoroughly opposed to the lecherous sex industry.
I don’t think anyone should be forced to sell their bodies to survive. Yay capitalism!
Your original comment doesn’t distinguish that very well.
i would think in a communist space it would be a given that people hate the industry, not the workers. "sex work is work" is a slogan that's usually used to endorse the industry, e.g. when hasan piker went on twitter to brag about being a sex tourist in germany
Thank you. I had assumed this would be most people's interpretation of my comment, but I should have clarified better.
I think it’s clear I’m not the only person who read more into the comment than was intended by it. It’s great that she’s clarified.
I mean, a ton of the replies are literally 100% the usual SWERF party line, so her dogwhistle obviously worked exactly as she intended.
"sex work is work" is a slogan that's usually used to endorse the industry
no it isn't, crawl back to your misogynist hellspace over on incelgrad
Terminology is often fused to a theoretical position so that adopting the term means adopting the political theory behind it. Oftentimes, activists strategically do this. “Sex work is work” is one of those terms. It’s not simply stating that sex work is work, but endorsing a specific theory and calling for an entire political program based off of that theory.
The question often frames the possibility of the answer. The question of whether sex work is work was framed to fuse the interests of the sex worker with the industry. The problem, of course, is that this fusion is entirely superficial because the prostitute’s interests are diametrically opposed to that of the pimp and the buyer. “Sex work is work” then becomes more about protecting the interests of the sex industry and less about protecting women forced and coerced into prostitution.
...
Leftist men who are too lazy to work on improving the material conditions for women can instead opt to support the sex industry. It’s where women who have no other choice belong and we should accept that. So let’s throw all the buzz words around to sound radical: destigmatize, decarcerate, decriminalize, center, solidarity. Yet they can never actually explain where the stigma or violence comes from. And they never explain why their version of “solidarity with sex workers” always aligns with the interests of pimps and buyers. They sound radical while remaining comfortably within the boundaries of male supremacist culture. Their objectification of women remains unchecked.
“Solidarity with sex workers” has been engineered to mean only one thing: normalize, legitimize, expand, and sanitize the sex industry. The other options, by virtue of the slogan’s intended purpose, are intentionally side-lined. Everything else is framed as anti-sex work, which they argue is anti-sex-worker: Guaranteeing the right to not be prostituted, the right to exit, the right to subsist without survival sex, the right for Indigenous women to end prostitution on their land, the right for third world women to not be forced to serve imperialist men. The revolutionary feminist left needs to fight to redefine the meaning of “solidarity with sex workers” as pro-worker, anti-industry.
- Esperanza Fonseca, The problem with the phrase “sex work is work”
Of fucking course you quote a text that is basically the faux-leftist SWERF bible at this point. Thanks for proving my point. Fuck right off and never interact with me again, you misogynist garbahe pile.
if you're so familiar with the text, i guess it can't be said that you so passionately support the sexual exploitation of women out of ignorance
if you're going to play like this, you haven't mentioned queer people so far, so I guess you support the sexual exploitation of gay and nonbinary sex worker.
I have nothing against sex-workers
I'm not buying that for one second.
what is that and why do you think I am it?
- Sex-work exclusionary radical feminism
- Because of your prior comment
"Sex work is work" is a completely meaningless, thought termintating cliche and peak liberalism. It is about as insightful as "child labor is work". Capitalism forces Women into positions where they are forced to sell their consent at great risk for themselves. I don't support this. If you have an image of me as a puritanical, anti-sex freak, it is wrong.
If sex work is work and all work is performed via coercion under capitalism... Then sex work is coerced sex. We have a different word for that usually.
I don't support anything that will harm sex workers, but I do support the gradual elimination of the conditions that give rise to a sex industry and thus the elimination of the industry altogether and its reduction down to solely hobbiests doing it for free because they actually want to.
If sex work is work and all work is performed via coercion under capitalism... Then sex work is coerced sex. We have a different word for that usually.
Yes, this always struck me when I saw people say "sex work is just work, all work is coercive". Of course, there are different degrees of coercion in sex work ("voluntary", meaning coercive only as much as work usually is so long as the laborer can find different work, vs. human trafficking where there is strictly no choice at all, etc.) and many measures people claim are for the benefit of sex workers are counterproductive, but I think just saying "sex work is work" ignores the clear difference in impact of, for example, being forced to re-shelve library books for a day vs. being forced to prostitute oneself for a day.
And also of course, the implication when saying "sex work is work" that it should be regulated and have safety standards like any other job is also correct.
It is about as insightful as "child labor is work"
Very well put, and a great analogy because in both cases it isn't the worker that we are attacking but the employer and industry. People who go on about "SWERFs" constantly don't understand this fundamental point, that we aren't attacking the sex worker but the john, the pimp and the sex work industry as a whole.
You are a politically myopic clown, measures like the Nordic Model are proven to increase harm to sex workers.
I thought it was used in the sense that a lot of people don't view sex workers as laborers, and therefore don't think about legalisation of prostitution and having sex workers legally recognize as laborers, which would give sex workers the same rights as other laborers, which is better explained here.
Proving OP's (both of them) point here.
proving what exactly
I mean I don’t know who this person considers “young” but this has been a problem on the left for a while. It’s the whole “let people have fun” mentality that has been a slogan of radlibs since at least the time I was in college. I think it grows out of the whole 2000s/early 2010s zeitgeist when everyone had an overwhelmingly libertarian philosophy, some being more social in orientation, and some being more conservative, though even those conservatives had their “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.” There’s a usefulness to social libertarianism, but at one point you need to decide if you fall down more on the social side of that, or the libertarian side.