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Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

thewalrus.ca

71–80 of 511 posts

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#71

We're really seeing a counterrevolution around sex and sexuality. From Row vs Wade to crackdowns on pornography to this, America is getting back to its puritanical roots...

The French writer Houellebecq had a pretty compelling explanation for this. With religious norms ebbing away or being transformed (even among right-wingers), sexuality becomes another market parallel to the standard economic one. This was always the case, but the shifting norms speed up and formalize the process. All else being equal, in a scenario where sexuality exists but restrictive norms don't, the natural conclusion is that people with sexual capital will have a rich and varied sexual life whereas those without much appeal in that spectrum will only know lifelong frustration. This mirrors economic inequality in a surprisingly close fashion: desperate swiping through a dating app for an average person is starting to look a lot like copypasting resumes on a job site.

One consequence of this is that people with little sexual capital will try to recreate norms anyway they can. Therefore we end up with a hodgepodge of ideas, religious or not, that have as their only link to one another the desire to enforce sexual restrictions and quell anxiety surrounding sexual prowess as much as possible. The extreme form of this is the incel desire to legally enforce monogamy and erase women's rights, but the less ambitious equivalents take on the form of the counterrevolution you are describing here.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#73

Quoted post unavailable.

I think this is such a progressive view because many religious and some secular people still uphold the belief in the sanctity of marriage. To them sex never stopped being the most intimate and precious thing to share with a spouse and no one else. Add the fact that the rebranding of prostitution into sex work is still a very recent thing plus some things falling under the umbrella of sex work being very illegal in m…

That said, it's important to remember that "sex work" includes prostitution, but is not limited to prostitution. It's a broader umbrella term for porn, stripping, camming, etc.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#75

Quoted post unavailable.

I think the progressive label comes from two angles: there’s a lot of history of religious moralizing and policing around this which these days identifies strongly with conservatism (note especially how that often shifts blame from the patrons to the workers), and that starts with the idea that there’s something uniquely degrading about this in way that there isn’t about, say, physical work which might leave you damaged for life or jobs which are basically lying or harassing strangers. It might be interesting to think about exactly why you think that’s worse than, say, working in a meat processing plant with a high rate of injury or being a collections agent for a hospital.

The second is having empathy for the worker, a key progressive position. That says, for example, that if you do think that there’s something truly degrading about the work the answer is to have economic and social policies which reduce the number of desperate people without good alternatives, or to have better regulation of the middlemen profiting from the situation, etc. rather than traditional approaches focused on punishing workers.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#76

The only thing special about sex workers in this situation is the politicized nature of their work. The industry they work in, and they way they conduct their business, simply doesn’t align very well with the risk management strategies of conventional financial institutions. Any form of non-conventional work is going to run into exactly the same problems. I know this because the same thing happens to me. Nearly all m…

This is a great theory, and I am inclined to agree, but how does it explain large, stable adult websites encountering such roadblocks?

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#77
post #42

"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…

Having built a neobank. It’s fact that pornography is intertwined with sex trafficking, organized crime, revenge porn and other illegal activities. Regulators crack down on financial institutions if they are caught providing services for illegal activities.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#78

Quoted post unavailable.

I think this is such a progressive view because many religious and some secular people still uphold the belief in the sanctity of marriage. To them sex never stopped being the most intimate and precious thing to share with a spouse and no one else. Add the fact that the rebranding of prostitution into sex work is still a very recent thing plus some things falling under the umbrella of sex work being very illegal in m…

You're absolutely right. Some people think sex should be limited to married couples, and some of those people also think they're within their rights to force other people to adhere to their moral code. They are wrong. What other consenting adults do with each other is not the province of anyone's morality but their own.

Re: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial scarlet letter?

#79

Quoted post unavailable.

> We also know that the vast majority of people who work in the "industry" are either coerced by others or forced into it by life circumstances. Most people are forced into work by life circumstances. That's how society operates: work or starve. Sex trafficking is a genuine issue, but it's not at all the majority of the industry. I don't see what makes consensual sex work uniquely coercive or evil when compared to ot…

I would think the moral calculus is different when the non-consensual activity is sex vs. eg. cutting timber or cooking fast food. A single rape is a lot more traumatizing then a decade of physical labor. I don't know anything about how common involuntary sex work is, so I won't argue a broader point; I just think the equivalency doesn't hold up.
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