It’s a little too easy to be nude on the internet and make money off it compared to being a prostitute irl. There needs to be some moral policing in my opinion so online pornography doesn’t become normalized. I’m all for completely legalized prostitution, but the balance is it still needs to be on the margins to have an upstanding society.
Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
191–200 of 511 posts
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporate consolidation made sure that a lot of important markets aren't free anymore. Vertical integration between corporations made that even worse - e.g. if Visa won't process your payments, people with Apple phones won't be able to pay either. These kind of things - there's too little competition across many markets so big players just itegrate with themselves and newcomers simply can't compete due to integration…
It's important to point out that this is a natural consequence of a market system, and it's exacerbated by allowing capital to rule those markets. Until we recognize that, we're not going to be able to fix it. One can't just declare that "If only the market were truly free, it wouldn't be like this." We've seen this play out on the freest market that has ever existed (the early internet) and we ended up in the exact…
It's late stage capitalism. It's how all 'free markets' end up eventually.
The biggest players gobbling up all of the competition and essentially having a monopoly.
All you have to do is drive through middle america to see the Ruby Tuesday/Strip Mall-ification effect on most of the United States.
I love capitalism when it's functioning it's the greatest system ever invented.
When it's just a market full of monopolies it's akin to dysfunctional communism from a consumer choice perspective.
I don't know what the solution is.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#193Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#194Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#195There's a libertarian ethos that says anything between two consenting adults is the their business. I'm more and more skeptical not just of that principle but the self awareness of the people who purport to support it. I know that the choices I think are correct may not be - either for myself, for everyone or for any particular person. For that reason I don't think that anyone should run my life or that I should be t…
> "What you're doing is crazy. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you let someone do that to you? Why would you do that to another person?"
People who want to amputate perfectly healthy limbs and/or submit themselves to cannibalism are some of the first things that come to my mind here. Most of us would probably agree there should be a line somewhere, especially considering the potential of undiagnosed mental illness.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but there are no shortage of people who also end up with psychological damage from their jobs outside of sex work Not to labour the point but: cf Soldiers. Men can take the emotional and physical toll but women can't? edit: just to expand on this, talk to people who have been on military tours about the horrors of draging dead bodies (that they might have killed) from the road side, the pain of loosing friends, bei…
Not sure if you're intentionally stopping before the obvious elephant in the room. The army has always been glorified as a country without soldiers is free pickings. It's practically a necessity, as current day tensions show. Sex work isn't a necessity. Worse, regarding prostitution and porn, most of it's clientele remains secretive to avoid shame. Even if sex was considered a necessity, the stigma alone would preven…
It's not hard to argue that sex is a necessity. There are physical mechanisms that create a desire for sex in most humans. I'm sure just about any therapist would attest to the impact of sex on mental health (both positive and negative impacts).
Being gay used to be taboo and shameful too, it still is in many places... but this is changing. Sex work is already a little less taboo in places where it's regulated. Societal norms are much easier to change than biological compulsions.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, the issues you list would be best solved with a professional prostitution industry and regulatory committee running the show. As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet. "This idea feels right, and is consistent with my ideology, so it must be right" .
"As for the pair-bonding thing, it reads like it came out of a bible pamphlet. "This idea feels right, and is consistent with my ideology, so it must be right"." Why do you think that? There are objective reasons for parents sticking together - success of the child and the economics of being in a pair tend to positive things. Although I will say that I don't know of any resources that investigate these on things like…
Sex isn't what makes people partners...
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and it is a fact that cartel and authoritarian statist money laundering is intertwined with banking. See just about any story about Deutsche in the last decade. I've worked with sex-related sites before. And you're right that there are sleazy people in that industry. But it really isn't hard to distinguish, especially when you can see their payment stream. Without moralist obsessions with sex, nobody would care…
What's your point? Sans morals, nobody would care murder either.
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Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a cookie baking or massage business that covers enough to pay a modest mortgage and car. The rest you pay in cash. You give family members down payments to buy property or leases for you.
Aka money laundering (according to the feds)
As long as sex working is illegal they will have to launder the money somehow.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#200"It also establishes a precedent, allowing private companies to set opaque, moralizing, and arbitrary censorship terms without oversight." Yes, this is done with other things as well. On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others. On the other hand, it seems that many financial things are set by international organizations, which the proce…
>On one hand, I think that the free market would create payment processors willing to work with the groups rejected by others. These already exist and are sometimes known as "high risk" processors. They charge a lot more for the privilege of accepting payments for what industry has deem high risk transactions due to larger rates of chargebacks. Typical examples are paid subscription to a porn site, but then the card…
Chargeback risk in these industries is considerably higher than in other industries. If your wife/husband finds a porn subscription on your credit card bill, a lot of people take the approach of denying it and charging it back. Chargebacks are expensive, whether you fight them or accept them.
A lot of adult industry businesses also accept ACH transfers or crypto because there is no chargeback risk on either of these.