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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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When feminists say "porn is exploitative" and "all sex is rape", this dynamic is what they're getting at- the former because it means that women for whom having sex is a job [that pays a wage] now have to compete with free.

This doesn't ring true at all. Many of those feminists are against sex work too.

It seems more based on on the very conservative idea that women need friendship, support and other things from their partner, which require a lot of effort from the man, but that porn teaches men that they can get sex from women without providing these things. Not: "she had sex with me because I put a lot of effort into the relationship", but: "here's your pizza, sex?"

Should have been slightly more clear on what I mean by "a job that pays a wage", since what you've said is exactly what I meant:

women need friendship, support and other things from their partner

Yes, these are the wages. The work is sex and the other things men need from their partner.

Relationships are ultimately transactional, even though it's at least slightly offensive to acknowledge that fact, as the more a relationship is treated this way by its participants the less likely it is to survive. (One only need look at marriage vows: through an economic lens they are a contract by both parties that says "I hereby disclaim the right to find a better match if for any reason this transaction should become unbalanced by internal or external circumstances".)

but that porn teaches men that they can get sex from women without providing these things.

And in doing so, porn drives down the market price for sex (from "she had sex with me because I put a major amount of labor in and/or signed a contract saying I'd never back out, since virginity doesn't grow back" to "30 minutes or it's free"). So does sex work, for the same reasons- plus it puts an explicit price on sex, which heavily disadvantages sellers who benefit from price discrimination, and that requires the price for sex to be illegible to work properly.

(It's not just porn and sex work that affects the market price for sex, of course- at a population level, marital rape laws are an effort to get better working conditions, age of consent and public decency laws are an effort to impose a higher minimum wage, and ex post facto rape laws work the same way as consumer protection laws do, and all of those powers can be used and abused in the same ways. Sure, things can be much different at an individual level, but microeconomics and macroeconomics are two different fields for the same reason.)