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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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