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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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