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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.
What if your mom/sibling/dad was a therapist? Is therapy not work?
I suppose you could go in the other direction and say it is not. It's a paid friendship or something of the sort.
Therapy also has more emotional significance than tennis or any other physical activity.
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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.
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Ok, let's isolate some variables here then, to remove the "incest" aspect. Imagine you are a father (sorry if you are, what follows might be upsetting to imagine), and your daughter just started a prostitution business; one day one of your coworkers says something like "whew, I've been horny these days, I wish I could get a little action tonight", do you enthusiastically direct him to your daughter, the same way you would if he said he was hungry and she was selling cupcakes?
Nope, but that doesn't mean it isn't work. If my daughter were an assassin and my co-worker wanted to hire someone to kill his wife, I also wouldn't give him my daughter's card. because I think murdering people for money is wrong. But if you are exchanging money for a service, whether that service is murder, sex, or making eggrolls, then it is work. It is just that some work can be illegal and/or immoral.
The reason I would be against my daughter being a sex worker is not because it isn't work, it's because I think it is a bad idea.
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Is being a gynecologist not work because a mother would refuse to let their daughter do a pelvic exam on them? Or if you require opposite sex if a father refuses to let their daughter do a physical/prostate exam/colonoscopy?
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That’s nepotism. If she’s driven to succeed in her chosen industry, any self-respecting mother would wish to stand on her own four limbs without having to rely on her son’s patronage.
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This seems like picking the criterion to suit the conclusion. Was there some prior general rule that "work" was something you'd support if your family did it? So if a family member sold medical equipment or industrial mining equipment, you'd buy it?
My favorite argument is similar, but it focuses on the government instead of the family and therefore avoids your criticism: If sex work is Real Work™, then the government can use all of its regular powers to compel you to do it.
Prisoners can be compelled to do work; some clean up ditches, some fight wildfires, some stamp licence plates, and some perform Real Work™. Maintaining your unemployment benefits requires a reasonably active job search and accepting good offers of employment, which obviously includes Real Work™ for a significant subset of the population. Appearance/ethnicity is a bona fide occupational qualification for Real Work™, so obviously foreign workers will be qualified to fill the niches that locals can't.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
There are countless other ways that something would be changed by becoming "work", but those are the most obvious and objectionable IMO.
Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.
The Venn diagram of sex-worker rights advocates and prison abolitionists is not quite a circle, but it's pretty close.
Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary, but maybe it would help get everyone in the system enough to fight pimping/disease/violence/etc. And maybe people could audit the classes at the trade school and pick up some useful skills.
As I said downthread, it matters what order you do your goals in. If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.
Also, knocking off one example still leaves my other two, as well as the countless others I skipped over.
That's not wild. What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.
Perhaps, but that's just tactics.
My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing that sex work is not work through the argument of 'We're ok with making prisoners do work, we are not ok with making prisoners have sex, QED sex is not work.'
If that was the point of the comment, my response of 'we not ok making prisoners do work' does dissolve the argument.
I agree there's tactics involved in avoiding the bad outcome you hint at as a practical matter, although realistically I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes more than logical formulations, and you whole point is about how those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.
That's a whole different issue, though.
Yup, it sure would be wild if we did that for chefs! Or writers! Or drivers! Or dishwashers! Or babysitters!
It would definitely be crazy if Scope of Practice laws were used to do crazy things for no reason. But that has nothing to do with sex work. Scope of Practice laws aren't used that way because, again, voters wouldn't like it.
I was trying to make an argument about policy, not fact. e.g. "A whale is a fish because you can catch it with a boat".
From a fact-based position, prostitution is a job, gang membership is employment, and hitmen are contract workers. From a policy-based perspective, that's irrelevant.
For now. Aren't you trying to change the vibes?
No, progressives are not trying to make people feel more positively about rape.
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What if I reject the premise that government can compel people to work? I think both military conscription and prison slavery are morally unjustifiable.
Maybe that should be your first priority, then. The fact of the matter is that the government can compel you to work, morals be damned.
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
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Fortunately I can care about, and make progress on, multiple political issues at the same time.
Unfortunately, making uneven progress on multiple political issues can create perverse situations like the one I've outlined above. Going from the status quo -> the government can't compel work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work is fine. Going from the status quo -> prostitution-is-work -> can't compel + prostitution-is-work has a bit of a rough patch in the middle, to put it mildly.
I was being literal when I said it should be your first priority, and didn't mean to imply that it should be your only priority or your ultimate goal.
Sure. There is a theoretical worst case where sex work becomes normalized to the extent the government compels it like normal work, in the absence of other reform removing various compulsory labor measures. Practically we are so far from that world I am not sure it's worth worrying about. My expectation is that even if sex work were more normalized various carve outs to these kinds of compulsive programs would become commonplace.
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It simply comes from asking myself what I would consider work, and how I would make the distinction.
And yes, I'd buy mining equipment from my family member, if I needed it. There's a bit of a difference between machinery that costs tens of not hundreds of thousands of dollars and a $5/month onlyfans subscription or $10 or bread from a bakery. But given I'm willing to buy the product from anyone, I'd prefer to buy from a family member.
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"If you wouldn't have sex with a family member you don't think sex work is work" is one hell of a take.
Make it indirect.
"Hey, my sister just hung out her shingle as a prostitute. If you go sleep with her and use my name, you get a 10% discount"
Sure, on the internet it's very easy to say "Well, if my sister made that choice, I would happily support her!" But it's a little different when your friend Dave "the Keg" is asking for coupons for family member fellatio.
My mom is a psychologist and I would not want her to take any of my friends as patients (and I believe professional ethics would preclude it).
Lots of jobs are like this.
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I have it on very good authority that people in Kazakhstan feel pretty much that way about family prostitution. See time 2:49 in this video for the proof: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YG7SHcVEJqI
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This relies on an assumption of legitimacy of my intuitions which, in this context, I may reject. Might I intuit that it is gross that someone I know is hiring a family member as a sex worker? Should I feel that way? I may feel a "yes" to the first question and a "no" to the second. There are many things in life I have intuited as bad that I have later changed my mind about due to reason and reflection. Maybe this should be such a case!
Frankly, I don't put a lot of stock in historical people's moral intuitions given the conclusions those intuitions led to.
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This isn't meant to be argumentative. Because of the constant use of hypothetical statements, conditionals, and equivocation, I'm not sure what your point or position is.
I think sex work is work but would not have sex with a family member just because they were in the sex work business.
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There's no starker way that I know of to show the differences between work and sex work. Yes, if you wouldn't subscribe to your daughters onlyfans, then it's because you too understand the distinction I'm making.
Care to engage with it at all?
You seem to be arguing against the position 'sew work isn't sex', which isn't an argument anyone is making.
Yes, sex work is still sex, with all the attendant facts and context about sex. All your attempts to point out how sex work is like sex are kind of pointless; yes, it sex work is sex, hence the name.
The claim being made here is that it's work. Not that it isn't sex.
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Okay, first example that comes to mind, a middle-aged couple grappling with secondary infertility in the woman who already has an 18 year old daughter who is an ovum donor.
Do you think their refusal to buy her egg for the purposes of IVF makes that illegitimate? Or if she's offering to donate for free.
It's a ridiculous criteria, so no surprise nobody cares to accept it. The obvious answer is that most people are against incest, or at the very least have no interest in it barring maybe looking appreciatively at the tits of a cousin.
In what part of your scenario is anyone going to work? I wouldn't call selling eggs work any more than I would selling a kidney.
And I don't think, "being willing to take your father or mother, sister or brother, on as a client," is a bad first pass at what I'm getting at. Sure it lacks nuance, but it hits the gut check squarely.
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I think there are many industries my family members might engage in where I would not become a client. I don't subscribe to anyone's OnlyFans currently, for example. Am I obliged to subscribe to a family member's OnlyFans so I think it's "real work"? More generally, what if they start a company in an industry I don't ordinarily patronize? We all use bakeries, but we may not all use whatever industry our family members start their own business in.
There's a line that judges sometimes use in oral arguments where they admonish counsel for "fighting the hypothetical". That is, the judge is interested in knowing whether a distinction applies in a certain situation, and they dislike it when the response is to avoid answering and to argue that that's not the situation we're dealing with.
It's a hypothetical. Fighting the hypothetical is a dodge.
Ok, so you don't normally hire prostitutes. Great. But let's say you did for some reason - after all, sex is just like tennis, right? I'm sure you don't normally pay people to play tennis with you either, but let's say you had a reason to do so on this occasion. Maybe you're training for a big match and you want to get some training in so you can perform well. Or whatever circumstance you need to make the hypothetical work.
Do you hire your sister the tennis pro to show you some moves?
It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.
The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.
It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.
Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.
I mean, that's the point though, isn't it? The reason why it's fine to play tennis with your sister and not fine to have sex with your sister is the same reason why "sex work" is not just like any other job - Sex is Different.
It's also ok to join the military but not ok to shoot your sister.
Lots of jobs are unlike other jobs in one way or another /shrug.
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And what's the next part of that thought? Because KMC started his comment saying that this was an argument against "sex work is work" and not tennis is different than sex it just happened to be applicable in that situation. I mean arguing that sex work is different from other work seems trivially true and not actually what people are talking about. Shame and discomfort can be applied to many kinds of work for many kinds of reasons and I don't think that disproves that they're real work, whatever real work is supposed to mean.
I mean the subtext here is that sex work shouldn't be allowed, should be shunned, something along those lines? And not just proving that sex is something that evokes discomfort and shame for many people and that its especially exacerbated by imagining or experiencing their family in sexual situations.
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I do not think anyone engaging in adult consensual incest does anything ethically objectionable, if that's what you're asking.
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