Memes of Production

Yeah I feel like this person is getting all riled up about something that doesn't happen. I've heard people say it's immoral, dangerous, exploitative, etc... but enemy of the working class?

Marx did.

He considered sex workers part of the lumpenproletariat, the lowest of the low alongside drug addicts, thieves, unemployed, etc. and he viewed them as a dangerous class who could be bribed by the rich to turn against the proletariat.

Yeah, most of the critiques on sex work you hear from the left is that it's such an inherently shitty and degrading job that it should be banned because it is so exploitative.

iPhone users masking as leftists on twitter make up their imaginary enemies to shit on

This is the question that needs to be asked everytime an outrage discourse starts

There are a brand of folks derogatorily called SWERFs or sex worker exclusionary radical feminists. It's not a super common view, but exists, and I'm sure as a sex worker she's experienced plenty of it on twitter.

Yeah, this is a very weird tweet. It almost is like that person doesn't want to think of the realities of procuring. Sure buddy, the women having to sell their bodies / services to rich men got to keep all the money and then spend it in their communities.

I'm really torn by this argument. To me it's mainly an argument against capitalism (and a valid one for that).

The vast majority of cleaning personal might as well be single mothers to meet their means of survival. Also: where I am, there is "good enough" social security, so it's not about survival.

People working at construction sites are ruining their body to make ends meet (to pick up your argument again). Sure, you could not argue that they are raped, but enslaved then.

Edit: the -> there

The problem here is that the poster is not necessarily a "porn-addicted gooner" but a sex worker herself. So she is also speaking from her own experiences. I think the problem is that very valid concerns, such as your own, can be weaponized against individual sex workers to alienate them from our movements. So even if your arguments don't originate from a place of vague moralism, they still function to reinforce divisions of labor, which only benefits the ruling capitalist class, the pimps, the exploiters.

A fundamental part of any struggle for liberation is the struggle for legitimacy against individual dehumanization via structural delegitimization. You compare sex work to slavery, which is a good comparison in many ways, especially since we live in a (mostly) post-slavery society and are able to criticize slavery from a position of moral and social certainty. It has been thoroughly delegitimized by history and only persists in the shadows of production.

W.E.B DuBois makes some observations about chattel slavery before the civil war:

The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.

The victims of Southern slavery were often happy; had usually adequate food for their health, and shelter sufficient for a mild climate. The Southerners could say with some justification that when the mass of their field hands were compared with the worst class of laborers in the slums of New York and Philadelphia, and the factory towns of New England, the black slaves were as well off and in some particulars better off. Slaves lived largely in the country where health conditions were better; they worked in the open air, and their hours were about the current hours for peasants throughout Europe. They received no formal education, and neither did the Irish peasant, the English factory-laborer, nor the German Bauer; and in contrast with these free white laborers, the Negroes were protected by a certain primitive sort of old-age pension, job insurance, and sickness insur­ ance; that is, they must be supported in some fashion, when they were too old to work; they must have attention in sickness, for they represented invested capital; and they could never be among the unemployed.

This is not an argument for slavery, but an objective assessment based on actual people's experience of their own lives, that exists as part of a soaring criticism of slavery. But it demonstrates that people who were enslaved could feel happy, healthy, and "taken care of" despite being victimized by absolutely horrific means of production. The victims of chattel slavery emancipated themselves during the battles of the USAmerican civil war, and many of them not just willingly became soldiers but eagerly sought the right to self emancipate, to fight and die bravely for their own freedom. During Reconstruction, even the people who stayed behind on the land their masters bound them to, who obediently supported the southern armies, were extremely committed to the cause of freedom and emancipation for black victims of slavery, and were not willing to give up the project of black emancipation.

Slaves were, according to DuBois and any material analysis, part of the working class. This original post is explicitly saying that sex workers are not enemies of the working class, and the "pro sex work" leftist position is that sex workers are workers. Granted, I def know comrades who hire sex workers and probably use the leftist argument to legitimize their own desires, but I doubt that the shared experience is one of rape. These experiences definitely exist within the objective social structures of sex work, and I don't think that engaging in sex work as supplier or consumer is any more revolutionary, arguably less, than any other consumer decision.

But the important part is that sex workers are part of the workers movement, are welcomed and empowered to speak and act on their own experiences, and struggle for their own emancipation of sex work. Now a lot of times a common reform suggested is the legalization of sex work, which is suggested to improve protections of sex workers. I think if we continue the slavery comparison, it gets really difficult to stand by this argument, as legalization of slavery is the legitimization of it, and subsequently, the structural manifestation of exploitation. Legalization of slavery under capitalism is just going to make conditions worse for all workers. Legalizing sex work, as a movement, would also be extremely difficult as I think you'd automatically have like 70-80% of women firmly against it.

But this is how it functions as a division of labor. If people are arguing that sex workers are enemies of the working class, this is wrong as they are part of the working class therefore their exploitation is part of the exploitation of all workers. Like you said, lots of sex workers are single mothers with minimal qualms about it, just trying to provide for themselves and their children. So I question anyone who jumps into a thread about whether sex workers are enemies of the working class who make broad generalizations about the nature of the work that seem to also shout down the experiences of the sex workers themselves. Like, I have a lot of sexual trauma that I gave consent to. I don't dispute that consent is contextual, and can be seen quite differently even years after the fact.

But sex workers have to be centered in the project for their own liberation, as only they are able to liberate themselves. And delegitimizing their experiences and views, even if they are wrong-headed, only reinforces the divisions of labor that contributes to their exploitation as well as the working class generally. I think the whole discussion around sex work is framed in a way that harms both side's ability to see the other perspective, which just deepens the divisions between workers.

Like I agree with everything you said, but the fact that you said it in response to this post kinda proves that the well is poisoned on this discourse.

"sucking a stranger's dick for money is more horrifying and degrading than cleaning a stranger's toilet for money" and other statements only ever spoken aloud by people who have neither sucked dicks nor cleaned toilets for money.

I find it odd that your definition of sex workers ends a prostitution. What about.... Strippers and Private Dancers?

What about onlyfans men and women, eroticica writers, or hentai artists? These sex workers bearly interact with their customers in the real world! (Okay I've seen some onlyfans prostitution. I digress.)

Did get raped when he did some sex work?

Finally. No I will not turn off my gooner brain. You loons need turn off your violence brain and turn on your gooner brain. Sex is way more fun, and cooperative, than violence.

Heyyyyooooo

Cum.