All this time, and technology hasn't solved this issue? Wasn't bitcoin supposed to be applicable here - anonymous transactions? Wasn't the internet supposed to enable humans to interact at will without censorship?
It was, and then governments came
Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
441–450 of 511 posts
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#442Why doesn't the argument "private companies can do whatever they want, so if you don't like being arbitrarily banned by the incumbents, then start your own bank and payment processor" apply here?
because said companies have kicked the ladder behind them
I mean people invented cryptocurrency for this reason. Then the bans started
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#443Why doesn't the argument "private companies can do whatever they want, so if you don't like being arbitrarily banned by the incumbents, then start your own bank and payment processor" apply here?
They did 20 years ago. Going strong: CCBill.com
CCbill cannot circumvent VISA. So now the websites that use them need to keep the goverment ID/passport of every person that posts a dick pic.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#444It’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.
Too easy to be nude? Wtf are you talking about? A lot of tech we have today may not have existed or flourished if not for porn. There needs to be moral policing? No. There is no need for this. Let the market decide. If people want porn give em porn (you need a reality check btw. Most internet traffic is porn. Even today). Also, puritan moralistic misguided people need to get with the program. You don't like it? Don't…
I don’t agree with that. I think the puritans were onto something and I want a partial return to those ideals.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Society? You're painting an awfully broad brush. I absolutely think it should be regulated because of the reasons you name, but it's mainly particular demographics that want sex work banned, and generally these demographics don't actually care about the well-being of sex workers (re: provably negative consequences for sex workers in previous situations where such work was made illegal or otherwise deregulated and pun…
The “particular demographics” who want to ban prostitution include “the majority of women.” https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me... Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
> Women oppose legalized sex work at higher rates than men, because they’d be the ones who would encounter social pressure to do sex work in tough economic circumstances if it became normalized.
There is a huge leap from "the majority of women oppose sex work" to "the majority of women oppose sex work BECAUSE if sex work was legal they would encounter social pressure to do sex work".
I have women in my life who oppose sex work decriminalization. Not a single one does because they worry they will encounter any social pressure to do sex work. Almost every single one does because they believe that coercion is very common, and the downsides to criminalization are minimal. And none of them have spent much time listening to actual sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization on their lives.
The women I know who are in favor of sex work decriminalization are very similar to the ones who oppose it but have spent more time listening to sex workers talk about the effects of criminalization. They understand that there is very little additional risk to someone who coerces another into sex work b/c of criminalization but far more additional risk to the sex worker.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great theory, and I am inclined to agree, but how does it explain large, stable adult websites encountering such roadblocks?
The above poster has completely ignored the large religious morality groups that have made it their mission to remove porn from the internet entirely. They are the ones that took pornhub to court saying all their content was child porn and got pornhub to remove 90% of its inventory
That’s a completely different topic to the alleged discrimination from financial institutions. There are plenty of industries that have well funded lobbies working against them, and most of them don’t tend have issues opening merchant accounts.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they weren't in the past. And because HN is an international forum for tech geeks; I think social conservatives and Christians are underrepresented in tech; and I am quite certain the kind of social conservatism and "Christianity" that exist in the US doesn't exist in the same proportion, or with the same beliefs, elsewhere. In Europe for instance, so-called "pro-lifers", while they exist, make up a small min…
Fair, but if the underrepresentation is 50% say, half of a large number is not tiny. Tech nowadays is a major career path akin to law or medicine, less of the niche idiosyncratic subculture it was 20 years ago. Anecdotally, my socially conservative church is full of FAANG developers & one of our lay pastors is a highly-cited ML researcher
Hacker culture is full of exactly the kind of people it used to despise.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#448I investigated this a few years ago in Australia. Sex work is legal in Australia, kinda. It is legal to exchange sexual services for money, but supporting and assisting such a transaction is illegal. So a landlord who rents a property to a sex worker is breaking the law. A payment processor who processes the card transaction is breaking the law, and so on. There are some clauses around managing establishments that ba…
This is why so many sex workers prefer decriminalization to legalization. Because many times legalization comes with these shotgun laws that prevent anyone from helping out a sex worker in any way without facing legal consequences that were built to be severe enough to punish the worst sex traffickers.
Do you want to pay your ex-marine brother to sit in the next room to make sure you're safe? You can't, he'd face severe penalties for supporting the transaction.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. In fact we’ve made televised “I’m not the father” dancing into a national pastime. The patriarchy mentality our norms are built upon includes blaming women for everything ‘wrong’. Women are blamed for premarital sex. Men are celebrated for their scores. Women are paid less yet have less leisure time. They are the first to blame if anything goes wrong with children, including just bringing them into public space…
Do yourself a favor and read "Self-Made Man". It's obvious you're only seeing this from one side of the coin and lack the perspective of the other side in some kind of crusade. Both sexes have their problems and the status quo causes stigmas for both. To claim women are uniquely seen as "lesser beings" in a developed world is horribly naïve.
>To claim women are uniquely seen as "lesser beings" in a developed world is horribly naïve.
Not really. The developed world barely raised a few generations since women can vote. This is not saying men don't have problems - but the field is still very often tilted against women.
Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a point of pedantry, "child sex abuse material" (CSAM) is a new, more descriptive and accurate term.
Pretty sure that mainly caught on because corporations are more comfortable putting "CSAM detection" on a feature list than "child porn detection".
Maybe, but I agree with the argument that we should focus on the abuse aspect