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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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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.

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.

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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