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I really want to dissect this part of social worker culture, but it's difficult because so much of it happens behind closed doors, and is only hinted at in official documents.
The first time I noticed it was the glamorization of "sex workers" in my college sociology courses populated by future social worker girls (I was one of two guys in all of the classes). And it was always "sex worker," the same way fetish communities fixate on specific words to describe things.
The upper level course that I didn't take by the same prof had the girls go to the closest sketchy part of LA to campus and larp as hookers, then write an autoethnography about it. There wasn't a single guy by that course, of course.
We keep seeing these tiny glimpses of it, like that scandal with the woman including "sex worker" in a school career day, etc., but it's never explicitly argued for or explained in detail. I still don't understand how it exists in that weird superposition of "sex work is good, men who employ sex workers are evil predatory pedophiles."
In normal practice the "sex positivity" media glosses over it entirely by making all the examples "queer" and thus non-problematic by definition; we've all seen those tumblr-style comics with the hello-kitty bright colors and smiling lumberjack-bearded women giving handjobs to a wheelchair guy in a hijab.
Do we have anyone at all who could do a deep dive into that whole culture? It seems like one of those heavily onioned ones where you don't get to see the heart until you've passed through all the layers of initiation rituals and privately had "the conversations y'all folx aren't ready for."
It worries me because (as already pointed out) these people already seem to run our entire social work and therapy systems, and we've already seen other "inner circles" of crazy socjus ideologies bubble to the surface and burn through mainstream culture with no resistance.
People saying "that stuff's crazy, nobody wants that crazy stuff, you're crazy" aren't much comfort when they were saying the same thing about racial socjus in 2015.
I know very little about social work or its culture, but certainly I was educated in ways similar to you, where "sex work is work" was the unchallengeable dogma, in the sense that any parent who would react to their daughter saying "I got a job as a hooker at the local brothel" any differently to her saying "I got a job as a server at the local restaurant" is necessarily a misogynist, and I think it's just another instance of the humanities in academia going off and declaring things as true based on what sounds convenient rather than based on what is actually true in reality. How much time, do you wager, the professors who taught this sort of this stuff, actually spent around real prostitutes working the streets or the internets or whatever, actually learning and documenting what the median or modal woman who goes into this industry would experience? I'd wager that what little time they spent with IRL prostitutes wasn't spent in actual meaningful documentation and knowledge generation, but rather on confirmation bias. It's convenient to just believe a simple slogan and then fit all observations into that slogan instead of trying to modulate one's worldview based on observations. Doubly so when you spend your entire professional and most of social life surrounded by people who all agree with you on this, many of whom have very high status and are willing to heap more status onto you for agreeing with them more loudly. Both logically and logistically, you run into major holes in your belief if you actually start thinking about and observing the way customers interact with sex workers and how sex workers get into the industry and how the employment structures work, but why think about logic and logistics, when there's valuable status to be gained?
I really don't think there's anything deeper than that. It's not an
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I mean, is there necessarily much to it? There’s a paranoia that a female person is being denied her right to sexual autonomy and self expression which of course must trump all else, combined with a suspicion of family and an elevation of any sexual act which can’t make a baby, attempting to reconcile with relatively accurate views of the men who buy child prostitutes. I doubt it’s a super coherent worldview. The public facing feminists who rant about campus rape while supporting hookup culture aren’t being ideologically consistent. It’s pure woman good man part of heterosexual sex bad.
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