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I don't really understand your point. Isn't it genuinely considered wrong for a boss to order their employee to do something that's wildly out of their job description? Or likewise to suddenly cut their pay for no reason? Usually there are rules against that sort of thing. Of course she has some agency, she can say no, but her life is going to get messed up when she gets fired, so she'd be justified in filing a lawsuit in that situation. Or at least cursing out her boss to anyone who'd listen. Making it about sex just makes it worse because it makes her think about gross things, so it's emotionally disturbing even if she can say no.
Are you an anarcho-capitalist who thinks that absolutely everything should be legal as long as there's no physical force used? I know there are some people who think that way, but that's a really fringe view that now many people share.
I feel like this is a very urban-corporate-PMC attitude towards employment, where many small business owners take more of an attitude of "I'm paying you for eight hours of your time, during that time you do what I tell you to do." If that means helping with putting up Christmas lights at the owner's house, that's your job description today. Obviously in a corporate setting a middle manager having personal tasks done by his underlings is bad, because he is embezzling. But there's no law against a restaurant owner asking some of his waiters to help him move his mother in law to a new apartment on the clock. But there's that word again, ask. This isn't ancient Rome, an employee can always exercise agency by saying no, and if his employer no longer wishes to employ him he can be fired, and if the employer operates his business in such a way that employees don't stick around then he'll have to close his business or reassess his ruleset.
Where I agree it would be genuinely bad would be a bait and switch, where the employee accepts the employment on the promise of the opportunity to do certain work and develop certain skills and is instead given low level work. The magazine intern who gets stuck getting coffee and is never given the opportunity to work on articles, etc.
In all these cases, I expect the employee to advocate for themselves. If they don't want to do something, it is incumbent on the employee to say no to it, and to threaten to quit if forced. If that makes me an AnCap then so be it.
I don't particularly think that fucking your employees is good, but I do think that trying to make it into a consent violation is confusing and dumb. It's not a consent violation, otherwise women are incapable of consent and agency which is obviously a repugnant conclusion to most people making the argument against Gaiman in the New Yorker, it's a different category of thing.
The problem isn't really "it's wildly out of your job description", it's "it's wildly worse than your job description".
Putting up Christmas lights is not so distasteful a job that few people would do it (at least without an orders of magnitude pay increase if at all). Having sex with your boss is such a distasteful job.
De gustibus non est dispuntandum. I'm sure I could find some people who would sooner have kinky sex with me than help me put up my Christmas lights. Actually, I live with one. b'dum'tish.
But the perceived or actual unpleasantness of any given task isn't for you or I to opine on. It is for people making the deal to decide whether they want to accept the deal or reject it. Consent is the question of whether they validly agreed to the deal or not, not whether it was a good deal or a bad deal, or even whether they should be legally allowed to make such a deal. My question is and remains: why is sex the one part of the deal for which women/employees apparently lose all ability to utilize their agency and make logical cost-benefit analyses? If it isn't the only part of the deal for which women/employees lose all agency, than which contracts are and aren't they allowed to sign and forced to abide by?
On the contrary, the unpleasantness of the task is exactly what's for us to opine on. If we're going to have the concept of right and wrong at all, how much people are harmed is going to be important, and how unpleasant the task is is directly related to that.
Because sex is a really really unpleasant task to take on in this context and many employers are also highly motivated in the real world to demand it. This combination is pretty much unique to sex.
Sure, assume that sex is the worst thing in the world that any employer will ask you to do, and forbid any employee to consent to it for various moral reasons. I get all that. It doesn't change the factual question of consent and agency. "You're not allowed to consent to that" is different from "you didn't consent to that."
A good comparison would be minors. We traditionally don't allow minors to consent to sex, or to sign contracts to which they will be bound, outside of certain exceptions. We feel that minors don't have the power to consent to those things. I'm trying to get a proper explanation of women's power of consent in an employment context.
It pretty much is, because some employers are very motivated to ask for it and most employees value very very highly not having to give it. Humans are like that. There's nothing comparable except maybe for some extreme forms of dangerous working conditions.
A definition of consent that captures what most people mean by "consent" excludes cases where failing to "consent" results in a high cost imposed by the party asking for consent. You can try to claim that nobody owes you a job, so the employer hasn't imposed a cost by firing you., but if the job isn't sexual and the demand for sex is suddenly sprung up, the employer has committed fraud. Not committing fraud and not imposing costs through fraud is something the employer owes the employee.
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The law has to draw a line somewhere. Should a person on unemployment be kicked off for refusing to work as a prostitute?
That's a different question than, is such a deal consensual.
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