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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.
"If you wouldn't have sex with a family member you don't think sex work is work" is one hell of a take.
There's no starker way that I know of to show the differences between work and sex work. Yes, if you wouldn't subscribe to your daughters onlyfans, then it's because you too understand the distinction I'm making.
Care to engage with it at all?
I think there are many industries my family members might engage in where I would not become a client. I don't subscribe to anyone's OnlyFans currently, for example. Am I obliged to subscribe to a family member's OnlyFans so I think it's "real work"? More generally, what if they start a company in an industry I don't ordinarily patronize? We all use bakeries, but we may not all use whatever industry our family members start their own business in.
There's a line that judges sometimes use in oral arguments where they admonish counsel for "fighting the hypothetical". That is, the judge is interested in knowing whether a distinction applies in a certain situation, and they dislike it when the response is to avoid answering and to argue that that's not the situation we're dealing with.
It's a hypothetical. Fighting the hypothetical is a dodge.
Ok, so you don't normally hire prostitutes. Great. But let's say you did for some reason - after all, sex is just like tennis, right? I'm sure you don't normally pay people to play tennis with you either, but let's say you had a reason to do so on this occasion. Maybe you're training for a big match and you want to get some training in so you can perform well. Or whatever circumstance you need to make the hypothetical work.
Do you hire your sister the tennis pro to show you some moves?
It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.
The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.
It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.
Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.
I mean, that's the point though, isn't it? The reason why it's fine to play tennis with your sister and not fine to have sex with your sister is the same reason why "sex work" is not just like any other job - Sex is Different.
And what's the next part of that thought? Because KMC started his comment saying that this was an argument against "sex work is work" and not tennis is different than sex it just happened to be applicable in that situation. I mean arguing that sex work is different from other work seems trivially true and not actually what people are talking about. Shame and discomfort can be applied to many kinds of work for many kinds of reasons and I don't think that disproves that they're real work, whatever real work is supposed to mean.
I mean the subtext here is that sex work shouldn't be allowed, should be shunned, something along those lines? And not just proving that sex is something that evokes discomfort and shame for many people and that its especially exacerbated by imagining or experiencing their family in sexual situations.
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