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I don't know how many people agree with me on this but I do believe that Sexual Revolution didn't go far enough, sex is just a physical activity similar to tennis and the only reason it is not treated the same way is because prudes still have their way. More over puritan factions won in both the right and the left in spite of proclaimed commitment to the principle of sexual freedom in the latter one. Technology did solve issues that come with unrestricted love-making, we just need to wait for the culture to catch up(just in time for some other tech to disrupt it again). Some niche cultures are already there and make polyamory work quite well.
I don't believe this at all, and I don't believe you believe this, either. To illustrate, I'll simply take my favorite argument against sex-work-is-work: suppose you have a close family member of the opposite sex who starts a business. I would want to support my family, and so I would make a point to patronize the business, at least once if not regularly. However, if the business was prostitution or sexual photography, I wouldn't think that my patronage would be welcome, and I wouldn't dream of trying.
So I ask you, if you had a family member who started a business, would you support them? If it was a bakery would you buy a cake or loaf of bread? If it was a vineyard would you buy a case of wine? If it was a landscape business, would you get your weeds pulled? And if that business was prostitution, would you become a client?
It very quickly becomes clear to me that sex work is not work, and that sex is not like tennis.
This seems like picking the criterion to suit the conclusion. Was there some prior general rule that "work" was something you'd support if your family did it? So if a family member sold medical equipment or industrial mining equipment, you'd buy it?
My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.
Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.
Fortunately I can care about, and make progress on, multiple political issues at the same time.
Unfortunately, making uneven progress on multiple political issues can create perverse situations like the one I've outlined above. Going from the status quo -> the government can't compel work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work is fine. Going from the status quo -> prostitution-is-work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work has a bit of a rough patch in the middle, to put it mildly.
I was being literal when I said it should be your first priority, and didn't mean to imply that it should be your only priority or your ultimate goal.
Sure. There is a theoretical worst case where sex work becomes normalized to the extent the government compels it like normal work, in the absence of other reform removing various compulsory labor measures. Practically we are so far from that world I am not sure it's worth worrying about. My expectation is that even if sex work were more normalized various carve outs to these kinds of compulsive programs would become commonplace.
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