There is literally nothing wrong with sex as transaction. It probably is unironically as old as humanity itself. And, controversial opinion, it is probably a lot more common today than we think, whether in relationships, or outside them, but I do, it is worth mentioning, have a cynic bias.
Why do I care? Let me put it this way. I am autistically pedantic. But also, I believe in earnest the whole moralizing prostitution thing is really a mask for gender narratives. "Women are helpless muffins". I find this appalling for two reasons: the first, because it is deeply chauvinist when you turn on your brain, the second, because some men might be naive enough to fall for it and get taken advantage of by women as a result.
No matter how the moralizers try to frame it as being about whether sex can be "work" or not, in reality, the activity itself, and its semantics, are irrelevant in terms of human suffering.
The actual causes of suffering:
1. Pimps (who I consider on the same level as slavers, and would treat the same as the good ol' John Brown did if I could)
2. Cops (being branded a criminal isn't very nice)
3. Violent Johns (but independent prostitutes nowadays have online platforms where they gossip about and warn of clients to other prostitutes)
4. STDs (admittedly still a risk even with medical advancement)
That's it.
Any discussion that does not revolve around these is useless moralizing.
405 posts and 36 image replies omitted.>>2527106Why? What kind of spook is this where it has to be a stimulation by liking by a woman specifically?
>>2527154Why dont you just rub your asshole with your fingers?
>>2527155I like it when a girl does it
>>2526200It becomes inherent because of how gendered prostitution is, and what it represents more widely.
I definitely have the same issues however with the way service workers are treated too; waiters, cashiers, etc. Where we're supposed to assume a mask of professional even when we're insulted, degraded or threatened. But that's "okay" because we're getting "paid for it". I once got a lot of shit from a manager because I let on I wasn't happy with being insulted, especially having after having slept outside the previous night. No cussing, insults or threats of violence on my part. But apparently we're supposed to tolerate anything.
Take for example the high end escort who earns thousands a week and works on a contract basis for an established agency; even if she's willingly "pretending" she's still perpetuating the fantasy that women are supposed to act like that. You pretend to enjoy sex even if you don't, you pretend to like the man, you pretend to be a couple in public, etc.
Important here is that you're not simply exchanging a "commodity". The prostitute doesn't lend her body to be "used" while mentally she's in virtual reality or something. As a cashier you register the sale and ensure the product isn't "stolen" (See Debord's take on "rioting") and so remains a commodity. A waiter delivers commodities.
Taking into account the example of the high end escort, a sex worker who operates like this ends up selling "themselves" for a period of time as opposed to other types of work where you "only" sell your labor-power (See Marx for the difference between labor and labor power). Both are forms of disciplining bodies and labor, but there is a distinction here.
>>2526783Whether prostitution is or can be safe does not answer whether prostitution should be opposed regardless.
I so want this anarchist Freudian uygha in court on a case of a child grooming ring or some such and how he'll try to bail the pedos out with brilliant arguments like "Pedophilia is mostly the fault of patriarchy" and "Kids getting diddled on camera isn't that different from them being forced to mine ore, so clearly we don't need any laws against child sexual abuse, in my utopian world it would disappear on its own".
>poor women forced into prostitution because they have no other good option for making a living
>"Clearly the solution is banning prostitution!"
what is being implied in all these posts is that sexuality is something inherently prohibited by civilization.
>>2527234>>2527219I consider myself a Freud enjoyer, but is this actually true of all civilizations and not just Western ones? Not everywhere got the Christoid brainworms like they did.
>>2527346its not the west that makes homosexuality a crime, is it?
>>2527348I dunno it sort of depends on the time. Greeks and Romans were supposedly down with it. Some western countries permit it today. It's always been controversial though and that controversy is widespread across cultures, but I think I see what you mean. But even in these cases, just because one type of sex is prohibited does not mean all sex is prohibited. It's a nitpick but I guess I might say that sex isn't prohibited by civilization, but rather regulated or managed.
>>2527346Yes, all of them, pretty much by definition.
>>2518511>There is literally nothing wrong with sex as transactionTransaction under capitalism implies coercion to be able to afford the essentials of life. So it has an aspect of being nonconsensual. What matters more is the greater social context surrounding it.
See anon's references at the bottom:
>>2519119 >>2519254Nice effort-post anon
Something people often neglect to think about is how things like rape culture and systemic misogyny affect men, all the things men see during their childhood that shape their perspective on the world and how they see women.
I think it was late middle school or early high school when I first remember hearing other kids talking about having sex, like stories of girls having sex with boys in the bathroom at school and things like that. After years of "sexual education" which was all about abstinence and shame, the reaction among students, boys and girls alike, would basically be "ew gross what a slut" rather than any concern about the fact that a 13 year old girl is already having sex with boys - we were too young and naive to understand why this kind of thing happens (the girls were sexually abused in the past by adults) all we knew is that it's considered shameful and gross on the girl's part and so we played the role we were assigned and blamed the victim.
Then towards the end of high school and the years thereafter, I got to see the whole macho culture of adolescent men/boys obsessed with sex and treating and talking about women as sexual objects, I began to witness acts of sexual harassment and sexual assault, incidents of sexual assault at school with the police involved and all the rest of it, the inevitable "she was asking for it" responses from male and female students and faculty alike, the subsequent trauma and ostracization and shaming of the victims, I think all of this stuff kind of gave me this weird distorted perspective about women, seeing them as sort of frail delicate victims in a world of predators, and it also gave me bad vibes about the whole idea of sex, I felt like sex was this inherently evil and manipulative and aggressive act and it made me afraid of sex and I didn't have sex until like age 20 or so and couldn't even cum, part of me just felt like I was doing something wrong and it took years to get over that feeling. That's just one example of how rape culture can affect men.
>>2527170Are actresses in normal movies sexually exploited? Feminists would say yes.
Does this automatically translate to movies being a backwards thing?
What you're talking about right now is "no one likes to pretend". You're dwelling on a moreso philosophical matter, than a social one: "the authentic self". Marxists would tell you there is no such thing as an "authentic self". Pure idealism. And this philosopher whose specialty is precisely this topic:
https://youtu.be/SWD03nbnlgwWill tell you, that everyone is already pretending.
>>2527584eh, the idea of sex being about men conquering and women submitting is not unique to the West, nor is it unique to this time period or to any specific culture. It's basically just how human sexuality works and I feel like trying to change it is a waste of time. There's only so much you can "teach" sexuality to people before they call you an annoying faggot and just go back to doing things how they want because it's how they've always done things.
If you want to change the way people approach sex you have to start with a culture that provides both men and women with some personal incentive to treat eachother differently, and it has to include some alternative method that is just as successful for procreating, otherwise the "male feminists" will just be outcompeted by chads who don't care about any of this shit.
I've met way too many women that basically became chuds just because they find the culture of "anti-sex feminism" to be extremely patronizing, and men who feel like they're being directly attacked for things they didn't do just because they find certain aspects of a woman attractive like being a good cook or having big tits, as if there's something wrong with what attracts humans to eachother. A lot of it comes off like "theorists" are abandoning materialism entirely and just trying to dictate to people how they should live their lives and interact with eachother just because it's more "proper" or whatever, and I think people can sense this and are understandably annoyed by it.
Same for the stigma around sex work from leftists, it feels like a lot of it is just patronizing sex workers and talking down to them like they have zero agency, and they're just supposed to sit down and let some armchair theorist take their livelihood away because "muh morality" even though you aren't providing any kind of alternative way for them to live or make ends meet. I tend to take a much more live and let live approach to sexuality, if two adults consent to enter into a sexual contract of any kind it's not really my or the state's problem unless it starts impacting birth rates or some other measure of long-term productivity. And there's basically no evidence that sex workers do that, so who cares.
When I'm in defending rape competition and my opponent is a leftist :l
>>2528053>It's basically just how human sexuality works and I feel like trying to change it is a waste of time.Well nobody even tried in my case. Like I said, the sexual education at my school basically boiled down to telling girls not to be whores and that's about it, nobody explained things like sexual abuse or how to recognize it or tell an adult about it, nobody talked about consent or rape culture or anything like that. Obviously we can't rid the world of misogyny or sexual violence but we could at least have the courage and honesty to talk about it instead of sweeping it under the rug.
>>2527211After skimming the thread, this kind of sums up my issue with how things are being framed. Is prostitution safe? In many countries, even those where it is strictly illegal, no. Will illegalizing prostitution stop prostitution or stop people in poverty from pursuing prostituion? No, and stating such would largely go against the body of work marxists tend to refer to when discussing and analyzing the consequences of poverty, such as the use and selling of drugs. I think many in this thread are doing the thing that /leftypol/ tends to do, which is to have a preexisting belief, and then justifying said belief by means of materialist-esc language. There is not a lot of clinical analysis actually going on here, and a lot of resistance and unwillingness to explore the possibility of being wrong or right. I think we're also missing out on a lot of nuance, because I don't think it's fair to compare typical street prostitution with selling merch and sex on the side (particularly in the modern day online), just as it's not fair to compare mining in the global south with mining in the first world. We have to be honest, are we discussing sex work as a whole in a nuanced way, or are we discussing sex work in hypothetical and isolated scenarios, whether they be "romantic" or cynical?
Also, to what degree are we defining sex work? If someone pays for an act, physical or otherwise, and they sexually get off on it, despite not being what we typically associate with "sex work", is it still sex work? Is sex work under threat of poverty clinically any different in terms of a strict Marxist analysis from all work under threat of poverty? To be hyperbolic, is not all work slavery just as all sex work rape? This isn't to make a "pro" argument, but I don't understand focusing energy on being "anti" sex work either, external in focus from being simply against all capitalist labour. I don't think we can have our cake and eat it to; you can't say other areas of labour can be "reformed" in terms of the safety laws surrounding it, and then isolate another area of labour to be uniquely incapable of such unless you can sufficiently prove otherwise. And as an anon earlier pointed out, we do have situations, countries, and city's which as a tendency show it to be not unique it terms of legal regulation. I think this discussion requires us to be less inflammatory, and more mature regarding the topic.
>>2528065tbh I feel as if there's just no point in fighting prostitution because humans will always exchange sex for goods and services no matter how hard you try to stop them. there's no law that will stop a tenant from exchanging sex with her landlord if she can't afford rent. there's no law that will stop a woman from marrying herself off to a rich man, effectively prostituting herself for a life of wealth. the more you try to control people's private relationships the more it will backfire on you through civil unrest.
>>2519119>Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.>Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization.This data is actually highly contested and is now taken as being incomplete in both its data and conclusions. What we instead see, at least in developed countries with sufficient economic stability, is a two fold process. First, decriminalization, which initially results in a moderate uptick in a given practice (gambling is used as an example) as black market agents who already have established operations take advantage of and feed into an emergent market. Then comes legislation and regulation by the state and "secondary" capitalists in the following years, which now have a vested interest in involving themselves and rooting out older black market agents. Criminal involvement decreases, and so to decreases the use of criminal networks to acquire goods or services, replaced by regulated means. By another decade, the market is integrated, and criminal activity becomes negligible as market actors becoming streamlined into a process of legal compliance to operate their business. This reflects stats in Germany, where there was an initial uptick, then a general decrease. I think the more interesting conversation is regarding labour trafficking though.
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/21/07/2021/legalizing-prostitution-does-it-increase-or-decrease-sex-trafficking >>2528040I don't think you captured that in this specific case "pretending" becomes a social issue. I also do think fictional depictions do shape our views of the world.
>Marxists would tell you there is no such thing as an "authentic selfSocialism is something you have to choose - in the existentialist sense, not lolbert indeterminism. But on the subject of existential authenticity, considering what Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
>Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm Selling your body is denigrating and dangerous, talk to actual people that do this for a living and you will see that it's plain bad and out of necessity, at least street prostitute not virtual whores on Onlyfans.
>>2528171>virtual whoresReally cant help yourself from openly spilling your sexual frustrations for a single sentence, even when you try to dress them up in "concern for victim" garb.
This discussion is always retarded first worlders or middle to upper class people mad that the work that is overwhelmingly done out of necessity or direct coercion has negative connotations.
Persecuting prostitutes obviously won't work, it is the pimps and sex rings that must be destroyed but trying to frame prostitution as "liberating" or whatever other nonsense is retarded, especially in the thirld world.
>>2528689Show me a single post in this thread framing it as liberating.
>>2528171>denigrating>it's plain bad>virtual whores>>2528689>middle to upper class>connotations>sex rings>frame prostitution as "liberating">especially in the thirld worldThis is mega moralism, pure cope and strawman, not a single argument to be found.
>>2528171this is true of literally every manual labor job and probably a lot of other jobs as well. why does 'sex' have this big glowing ring around it that separates it from other kinds of dangerous and psychologically harmful work? under capitalism all labor will be denigrating and dangerous.
>>2528708Because they're not having sex with ME!
>It probably is unironically as old as humanity itself.
It's not though. Sex "work", in the sense of buying and selling sexual services for money, is a product of class society and patriarchal private property relations.
>>2528705What is there to argue about? Being pro "sex work" is being pro rape
>>2528739Nobody here is pro sex work, people are against banning it.
Why can prostitution be "banned" but the rest of wage labor not?
>>2528740That's not what OP is about though.
>>2528740I guess I am "pro sex work" in that I know people who do sex work for a living and they enjoy their work and find it fun and creatively fulfilling and they are pretty happy well-adjusted decent people with pretty ordinary lives other than having a somewhat unusual profession. It's really not as big of a deal as normies make it out to be. You see someone having sex in a porn video and you make all these conclusions about who this person is and what their life must be like, forgetting that this person is just an actor playing a character, it's just a performance, a job. After the camera goes off and work is over, they go back to their normal life, helping their kids with their homework and shit.
One question appalled normies ask a lot about sex workers is "How do you tell your children about what you do?!?!" and the answer isn't actually that complicated - you just be honest and tell your kids that you make videos for adults that aren't appropriate for children and that's all they need to know about it, end of discussion.
>>2528946But this is not "pro" position in any meaningful way, saying that sex work is like any other job seem like completely neutral position to me.
>>2528965Well I guess my point is, if someone is voluntarily doing work they feel comfortable with and is not being exploited or abused or coerced by anyone, I don't see anything wrong with that kind of work, I'm pro sex work and pro work of any kind as long as it's a consensual and safe and fair exchange.
>>2528169>I don't think you captured that in this specific case "pretending" becomes a social issue."Pretending" is like breathing, hence in all societies, there will be "pretending". That's why it is not a social issue, that is the act in of itself. What you're made to "pretend" might be, in a particular place and particular time, harmful to you, due to social attitudes - but "pretending" itself is a neutral activity.
>I also do think fictional depictions do shape our views of the world.I don't think you understood the question. Does putting pretty women in movies, just because they're pretty, make movies *as a whole* backwards? I would say, not anymore than the existence of illustrated Nazi agitprop, makes drawing a "backwards thing".
>Marx wrote in The German IdeologyMarx is not concerned with what we're talking about (authentic self). He's concerned with the division of labor, which is only a thing because of class society. Once class society ceases to exist, that is communism, so too does the division of labor. It's strange to cite Marx in that book because the whole book is dedicated to dismantling Stirner's fetishization of the individual. For Marx, Stirner's ideology is directly the product of capitalist relations which separate humans from each other; Stirner engages in idealism, reifying his conception of the individual over the facts of real life (i.e. material conditions), that is why Marx mocks him by comparing him to a Jacobin (the nickname "Saint Max" is probably meant to allude to Louis Antoine de Saint-Just).
>>2518511>I am autistically pedanticNo, you're just autistic. Which is why you can't parse why people take umbrage with prostitution.
>>2528730Where did you see the term "sex work" in the OP?
>There is literally nothing wrong with sex as transaction
>as a transaction
The point is to end that "transaction." Prostitution only exists as long as there is property to exchange. Without that, there's just sex-love or voluntary sex for pleasure. This is why when anarchists go on another pro-sex worker rant and how it will still exist in their commune, they don't know what they're talking about. If there is nothing to exchange, there is no "sex work."
>I believe in earnest the whole moralizing prostitution thing is really a mask for gender narratives
Not really. It's mostly a concern for the circumstance that cause a women to seek prostitution. Even in the developed world, the vast majority of prostitution is coerced by economic factors, like poor immigrants being funneled into sex trafficking. Poptimism does nothing to address this, instead trying to disguise the immiseration with yassss queen ideology.
Some reject it because they think it's icky and offends their moral system, but those people are libs that don't care about the broader social reasons for its existence. They're religious moralizers.
>No matter how the moralizers try to frame it as being about whether sex can be "work" or not, in reality, the activity itself, and its semantics, are irrelevant in terms of human suffering.
I agree that it's pedantic to argue whether they're proletarian or petit-bourgeois, but Marx and Engels specifically pointed at them as lumpenproletariat, or part of the dangerous classes. Engels went on to say that prostitutes primarily exploit men in his work "Origin of the Family," as they extract money from Johns and this is something that is true even for "lesser" sex work like strippers. They subsist on identifying rich clients and extracting money from them (something they brag about, if you've ever known any), which is how it's "exploitive" or in other words, not an incel argument. Read some stories from people who visited the legal red-light districts and they rob people just to walk in.
You could argue that Marx and Engels were too dismissive of prostitutes, but I don't actually see an argument against the transactional nature of their existence and so it would quickly go into moral grounds. Something else I noticed is that pro-sex work people never really defend street walking, betraying they find some part of it aesthetically disturbing and would prefer it hidden away. It's the same reason people don't like seeing the homeless, because it acts as a reminder of what could become of people if they don't "make it" in capitalism. Marx makes a similar point to how vagrancy used to be illegal, as a form of terror against people who didn't want to work. It still exists, just in a more subtle way.
>The actual causes of suffering…
All occupational hazards but you ignore the economic immiseration that encourages it. This is why sex work is very lib-coded. I agree they shouldn't go to jail for prostitution, but that's a different topic than encouraging it. I want there to be crackdowns on sex traffickers and it's hard to do so when they're "legitimate" businesspeople. I'm mostly ambivalent to it though, so I wouldn't really care if it did become legalized in its entirety. My ultimate hope is for it to vanish entirely.
<but that sounds authoritarian! They should do what they want
Notice I never argued that we should control a woman's sexuality. If they want to have a lot of sex, publish videos of their sex acts as some form of kink or have affairs, I do not care. "Sex-work" however, is exploitation and people should strive to end the means causing its existence, ultimately to free sex from its materialist connections.
Idk if this was covered in the thread, but like the arguments against legalizing prostitution showing that it raised, is it because it was legalized or because it's on the books?
Like Sweden had an "increase" of rapes when they expanded the definition of rape, but the reality wasnt the amount of victims increased just the database entries.
>>2529366OP isn't claiming prostitution would exist in communism. Rather, that in a world of commodity exchange, selling/buying sex is irrationally singled out; moralized. Hence OP questions, for what purpose? It was Marx himself who stated that all laborers are prostitutes in the 1844 Manuscripts.
There's a double standard somewhere in here that people are missing out on. People say prostitution is "the oldest profession" or whatever and we act as if women were the first to commodify their own bodies, but what the hell do you think marriage was in its original form? It was ownership, a commodity. Fathers sold their daughters off to some man and she became his property, that's what marriage was until pretty recently in history. If anything this is even more degrading than dehumanizing than prostitution, a woman isn't voluntarily renting herself to a man, she's being involuntarily sold to a man. But this is perfectly okay, more than okay in fact, it is a holy and virtuous tradition. So it's not about women's bodies being sold and degraded; it's about who is doing the selling. It's about whether a woman's body is her own property or someone else's.
>>2528976>if someone is voluntarily doing work they feel comfortable with and is not being exploitedAll work is exploitation what the fuck are you on about?!? how did you even find this site?!?
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