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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.
I wouldn't buy weed from a relative either but it seems pretty clear being a drug dealer is work of some sort. They aren't selling sex, they are selling sex with them. And if you don't want sex with them (for incest reasons or because you don't find them attractive/they are the wrong sex), but others do and pay for it, then it pretty reasonably has to be considered work.
Now I don't think it's like tennis, but exchanging sexual services for money does I think fall under work.
I was thinking more, and came to an uncomfortable conclusion that if my brother were a pimp, it's much more likely that I'd patronize his business than if he were a prostitute, and there's orders of magnitude of difference between pimp and drug dealer, too.
I'll admit that I don't have the most fully explained rubric, but my example reveals the difference I care about. Sex isn't tennis for the same reason we have a word for incest in the first place.
If my sister were an assassin, I wouldn't employ her because I think killing people for money is wrong, but if she is getting paid by the Mob to give snitches concrete overcoats it is pretty clear she is working for them. Some work can be immoral or illegal. Sex work is clearly work, even if you think it would be wrong for you to have sex with your sister paid or otherwise.
I'm perfectly happy to include obviously illicit "work" such as assassination or extortion as similarly not work just like prostitution.
It's still work though. Just because we don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't. Even the Nazis running Death camps were working. There isn't a moral valence to the word. If we need to specify we can say illegal work or immoral work. Or indeed as we currently do the more specific sex-work in this specific instance, then people can impute their own moral intuitions onto it as they see fit.
But trying to say it's not work is just flat incorrect I think. You can work as a prostitute, as a porn star, as an assassin, as a CIA agent, as a pirate, or a privateer.
No, not all work is equal, but it is all work. For example the US government has people it pays to kill other people or steal things or even have sex with people (honeytraps et al). But generally private individuals hiring assassins to kill people or thieves to steal things is frowned upon. Sex work is kind of like those, but slightly more acceptable for private actors probably.
Sex work or murder work or stealing work are subsets of work which have different valences depending on the particular scenarios for various cultural and sociological reasons. It's bad if I steal your bike, it's good if a CIA spy steals uranium from a terrorist planning to blow up New York. So (depending on your point of view) sex-work could be acceptable with strangers, but bad if with family (as we have seperate taboos about incest), or it could be bad with anyone.
A nuanced position where sex-work is work, but is not the same as other types of work would probably be my position. Personally I think making it illegal is counter-productive, as that probably increases likely harms to those who partake, and like gun control, there is no way to actually really enforce it. But I also wouldn't suggest putting it in the jobs fair at my local high school.
Though beyond that I think there are different levels of sex-work even within that, from physical prostitution to cam girls, sex line operators and glamour models some of which are much more acceptable than others. I think if my daughter wanted to become a model, I would probably have a frank conversation about the likelihood of success, potentially predatory behaviors and the like, but if the choice is taking her top off vs working in a mine, or even on a factory floor, then she might be less at risk doing glamour modelling or something. Manual physical labour is particularly over time much harder on the body than many people give it credit for. Do I want her to be an ex factory worker who lost a hand in an accident like my neighbor, or to have been paid to take nude pictures? That's a much tougher type of call to make.
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