I dont think selling your body is like any other job…
Imagine going to work every day and doing porn. I can’t really see how that makes you a healthy individual psychologically and emotionally. Personally I think it’s pretty disgusting, all of it, and absolutely a gateway into a very sad, dark lifestyle.
I worked 5 years at a job that sucked the soul out of me as I devoted all available energy towards making sure I never got laid off, developing an entirely seperate personality that was better geared towards sales and customer satisfaction at the cost of my self-respect and personal relationships, dreading every day as though it would be the one to finally push me over the edge and convince me to end it all.
Work isn’t meant to make you healthy. The two often have a negative relationship with each other, in fact. Work is work. Let’s not pretend we’re above sex workers just because we’re not on camera while we get fucked.
Meh at least it’s a skill. Most of the “engineers” I deal with are corporate shits who have no skillset whatsoever. And take a preverse pride in not having one.
Ok that doesn’t sound like a good job, but how is that an argument that sex work is just like any other job? Have you ever had a good job? I hope you have, so you know the difference.
You need to escape your own perspective. Your comments, while seemingly well-intended, come across far more egotistical than I believe you realize.
You clearly place a lot of value on your thoughts and views, but then you don’t seem to realize that this perspective restricts you behind the lens of your own mind’s limitations (and biases). Most of the people you will encounter in your life do not think like you.
TLDR, You need to spend more time envisioning the world through the eyes of others, erasing your own existence and views. It would be enlightening if you succeeded.*
Note, some people are literally incapable of changing perspective due to how their brain functions, if that is you, please disregard.
My 2 cents, you never actually specified what makes sex work any different from a “normal job”. All you offered was your opinion on the work itself, and a false equivalence about the health of the worker correlating to the work they do. Your ego is blinding you to the fact that your thesis has not been justified, and it’s also telling you you’re inherently correct due to your own preconceived ideas behind the work.
The only real difference I can think of between sex work or contract work or office work or manual work…is that the sex one has the word “sex” in it. That word is very loaded though, and we all have very different emotional reactions to it, especially with how it relates to making an income in a broken society. That difference doesn’t make sex work unique though. It does make it a prime target for folks like yourself to treat it like it’s different and worse. You really have to zoom out of yourself to put us all in the same bucket, and that’s not an easy thing to do, to be fair, so it’s not hard to imagine why you might have an opinion like yours.
It’s been interesting reading all these responses. I previously didn’t know that so many people on Lemmy see no difference between sex work and other work. Truly an interesting thread. :)
You are either trolling, or need more time to develop as a person.
You are so locked into your own ideas that you don’t seem to realize that your ideas are subjective. You are overvaluing your own, extremely-limited perspective. Pause for a moment and do a thought experiment (everyone should do this from time to time). Say, “What if I am wrong about everything?” then just sit with that and work through what it would mean. No one can do this for you, so you may go about it a different way, but the general idea is to think, without trapping the thoughts in your web of biases.
You are responding to me as-if I talked about something I never mentioned. So not only are your own perceptions flawed, but when you speak with us, you don’t seem to hear what we are saying.
For energy reasons I can’t engage with you all day, but I hope you’ll give it some thought.
Final question, do you find it odd that in our discourse about conceptualizing, you brought up sex work? Why? That was someone else you were having that discussion with. Not me. I am talking about thinking. Ask yourself, “Do I engage with what the person is saying, or do I engage with what I tell myself they must be saying?” I suspect the latter, given our correspondences as example.
The people I’ve known in sex work tend to avoid working with those they don’t want to.
And as someone who has slept with people I didn’t find attractive with no money involved, it’s not the end of the world. If I thought I could make a living doing that, I probably would, and I would absolutely refuse service to anyone who repulsed me or that I despised.
I see, so I’m assuming the same goes for regular actors? And musicians? And basically any performer ofcourse? Oh and also anyone who does manual labour because you are literally renting out your body for that. Well, and technically anyone with an office job too because they are still renting out their time.
Having to work for a living is already an extremely sad and dark lifestyle. It’s inherently monstrous and inhumane, and antithetical to being a healthy individual psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
Compared to that, any hypothetical negative effects from sex work are as irrelevant as spitting into the sea.
And, frankly, sex work seems healthier, easier, and less emotionally taxing than most other alternatives, buck for buck, so if you’re gonna get fucked anyway it might as well be non-metaphorically.
Having to work for a living is already an extremely sad and dark lifestyle. It’s inherently monstrous and inhumane, and antithetical to being a healthy individual psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
Can you elaborate on this? This seems to be a popular notion with some people but I just can’t grasp the reasoning behind it
We’ve got an extremely short amount of time. A mere few decades, if we’re lucky. And only a fraction of those with our full faculties. For most of our lives we’re children, old and decrepit, sleeping, doing basic maintenance chores required for living (eating, shitting, cleaning ourselves and our environment, etc.) or sick (if we’re lucky the later is a small fraction… but a lot of people aren’t that lucky).
That leaves us precious little time to actually live our life. To enjoy ourselves. To share with our loved ones. And then we have to go and spend a vast majority of that already insufficient fraction earning the right to keep surviving (or more than a majority; an increasing percentage of people have to spend not only all their available healthy free time working, but also an ever larger amount of the time we’re sick, or old). That includes not only the time wasted working as such, but also the time spent going to work and back (for which most of us don’t get paid), or acquiring the tools needed to be able to work and get to work (car, gas, work appropriate attire, and so on; which also come off of our surviving another day budget).
That is evidently horrible. Monstrous. Inhumane.
You can argue that we should find jobs we enjoy, but that’s only possible for a statistically irrelevant lucky minority… and even then most of said minority isn’t able to choose what portion of their time to spend working, so they’re still not free to enjoy themselves as they should.
You can argue that it’s the human condition, that it’s just how we’re made. But it’s not. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not office or factory workers. And hunting and gathering are hard work, sure, but they’re healthier, they can be done on your own schedule, and they leave a surprising amount of free time, much more than we can afford now. Our bodies and minds didn’t evolve to be able to support our current lifestyle (or workstyle, rather, since it can hardly be called life) without breaking down. We’re not only wasting what little time we have, but we’re hurting and killing ourselves in the process.
You could argue that tough luck, there’s nothing we can do about it, and going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is obviously not possible given the amount of people on the planet. But while it’s true that we can’t go back, it’s also a fact that we’re producing much more resources than we’d need to be able to comfortably sustain every person on the planet (and throwing a vast portion of them away). We have the means to automate practically every job. We could become a post-scarcity society if we wanted to. But our society isn’t built around people (much less around people’s wellbeing), it’s not even built around corporations; it’s built around the blind pursuit of short term stockholder profits (have you never considered how utterly monstrous and dehumanising the term “human resources” is? we’re not people, we’re not even workers… we’re mere resources to be ground and processed into profit, and discarded once all profit has been extracted from our carcasses.
It’s monstrous. It’s Inhumane. And if left unchecked it will continue until the time we can physically dedicate to earning our right to exist isn’t enough to pay for the cost of our survival (which might take a while; the bastards are looking for ways to exploit lucid dreaming to make us work in our sleep), and either society collapses or we are forced to rise and fight for our right to exist and be human.
I didn’t expect such an extensive reply tbh. My writing skill doesn’t compare to yours, but I kind of feel compelled to answer.
The initial thought was that it’s “inhumane” to work for a living. I agree with you on most points that you brought up, but they don’t really support this idea.(imo)
Our bodies and minds didn’t evolve to be able to support our current lifestyle (or workstyle, rather, since it can hardly be called life) without breaking down.
That much is certainly true, and thus we haven’t really come far from our ancestors. We have evolved as social creatures, where it was essential for everyone to contribute to a society to ensure mutual survival. It’s wired in our brains, as we naturally like those who help us and dislike selfish individuals.
That leaves us precious little time to actually live our life. To enjoy ourselves. To share with our loved ones.
This is true as well, but closer to wishful thinking. We have been able to even entertain this thought only for a small fraction of human history. This is not inherently natural, but more of a perk of human progress.
it’s also a fact that we’re producing much more resources than we’d need to be able to comfortably sustain every person on the planet
Who is “we” in this case? It’s certainly made possible by millions of people working these jobs. And not only agricultural, because this efficiency couldn’t be achieved without the modern economy, science etc.
Look, I agree with what you’re saying. It’s just that saying “having to work is bad, unnatural, inhumane, monstrous” is a little bit over the top, that’s all. Anyway, thank you for taking your time to explain your point. I appreciate it.
What’s the difference between selling your body to be used and abused, and doing sex work? Either way, you’re selling your physical form and mental energies to someone else, but at least with sex work you get to get off.
I dont think selling your body is like any other job…
Imagine going to work every day and doing porn. I can’t really see how that makes you a healthy individual psychologically and emotionally. Personally I think it’s pretty disgusting, all of it, and absolutely a gateway into a very sad, dark lifestyle.
I worked 5 years at a job that sucked the soul out of me as I devoted all available energy towards making sure I never got laid off, developing an entirely seperate personality that was better geared towards sales and customer satisfaction at the cost of my self-respect and personal relationships, dreading every day as though it would be the one to finally push me over the edge and convince me to end it all.
Work isn’t meant to make you healthy. The two often have a negative relationship with each other, in fact. Work is work. Let’s not pretend we’re above sex workers just because we’re not on camera while we get fucked.
Meh at least it’s a skill. Most of the “engineers” I deal with are corporate shits who have no skillset whatsoever. And take a preverse pride in not having one.
Ok that doesn’t sound like a good job, but how is that an argument that sex work is just like any other job? Have you ever had a good job? I hope you have, so you know the difference.
Why do you think that sex workers can’t enjoy their job?
“If you love what you do you never work a day in your life” she said moments before getting gently slapped by a giant dong
Because nobody wants to have sex with ugly people, or people you despise, and who treat you like shit.
That’s the simplest way I can express it.
You need to escape your own perspective. Your comments, while seemingly well-intended, come across far more egotistical than I believe you realize.
You clearly place a lot of value on your thoughts and views, but then you don’t seem to realize that this perspective restricts you behind the lens of your own mind’s limitations (and biases). Most of the people you will encounter in your life do not think like you.
TLDR, You need to spend more time envisioning the world through the eyes of others, erasing your own existence and views. It would be enlightening if you succeeded.*
Yeah I actually don’t understand why it’s egotistical to think sex work is not like a normal job. Seems perfectly natural to me.
Why do you think it is egotistical? Maybe if you explain, I will see the errors of my thinking.
My 2 cents, you never actually specified what makes sex work any different from a “normal job”. All you offered was your opinion on the work itself, and a false equivalence about the health of the worker correlating to the work they do. Your ego is blinding you to the fact that your thesis has not been justified, and it’s also telling you you’re inherently correct due to your own preconceived ideas behind the work.
The only real difference I can think of between sex work or contract work or office work or manual work…is that the sex one has the word “sex” in it. That word is very loaded though, and we all have very different emotional reactions to it, especially with how it relates to making an income in a broken society. That difference doesn’t make sex work unique though. It does make it a prime target for folks like yourself to treat it like it’s different and worse. You really have to zoom out of yourself to put us all in the same bucket, and that’s not an easy thing to do, to be fair, so it’s not hard to imagine why you might have an opinion like yours.
It’s been interesting reading all these responses. I previously didn’t know that so many people on Lemmy see no difference between sex work and other work. Truly an interesting thread. :)
You are either trolling, or need more time to develop as a person.
You are so locked into your own ideas that you don’t seem to realize that your ideas are subjective. You are overvaluing your own, extremely-limited perspective. Pause for a moment and do a thought experiment (everyone should do this from time to time). Say, “What if I am wrong about everything?” then just sit with that and work through what it would mean. No one can do this for you, so you may go about it a different way, but the general idea is to think, without trapping the thoughts in your web of biases.
You are responding to me as-if I talked about something I never mentioned. So not only are your own perceptions flawed, but when you speak with us, you don’t seem to hear what we are saying.
For energy reasons I can’t engage with you all day, but I hope you’ll give it some thought.
Final question, do you find it odd that in our discourse about conceptualizing, you brought up sex work? Why? That was someone else you were having that discussion with. Not me. I am talking about thinking. Ask yourself, “Do I engage with what the person is saying, or do I engage with what I tell myself they must be saying?” I suspect the latter, given our correspondences as example.
Hate fucking is actually kinda fun
The people I’ve known in sex work tend to avoid working with those they don’t want to.
And as someone who has slept with people I didn’t find attractive with no money involved, it’s not the end of the world. If I thought I could make a living doing that, I probably would, and I would absolutely refuse service to anyone who repulsed me or that I despised.
I see, so I’m assuming the same goes for regular actors? And musicians? And basically any performer ofcourse? Oh and also anyone who does manual labour because you are literally renting out your body for that. Well, and technically anyone with an office job too because they are still renting out their time.
Who cares what you think though.
Having to work for a living is already an extremely sad and dark lifestyle. It’s inherently monstrous and inhumane, and antithetical to being a healthy individual psychologically, emotionally, and physically.
Compared to that, any hypothetical negative effects from sex work are as irrelevant as spitting into the sea.
And, frankly, sex work seems healthier, easier, and less emotionally taxing than most other alternatives, buck for buck, so if you’re gonna get fucked anyway it might as well be non-metaphorically.
Can you elaborate on this? This seems to be a popular notion with some people but I just can’t grasp the reasoning behind it
We’ve got an extremely short amount of time. A mere few decades, if we’re lucky. And only a fraction of those with our full faculties. For most of our lives we’re children, old and decrepit, sleeping, doing basic maintenance chores required for living (eating, shitting, cleaning ourselves and our environment, etc.) or sick (if we’re lucky the later is a small fraction… but a lot of people aren’t that lucky).
That leaves us precious little time to actually live our life. To enjoy ourselves. To share with our loved ones. And then we have to go and spend a vast majority of that already insufficient fraction earning the right to keep surviving (or more than a majority; an increasing percentage of people have to spend not only all their available healthy free time working, but also an ever larger amount of the time we’re sick, or old). That includes not only the time wasted working as such, but also the time spent going to work and back (for which most of us don’t get paid), or acquiring the tools needed to be able to work and get to work (car, gas, work appropriate attire, and so on; which also come off of our surviving another day budget).
That is evidently horrible. Monstrous. Inhumane.
You can argue that we should find jobs we enjoy, but that’s only possible for a statistically irrelevant lucky minority… and even then most of said minority isn’t able to choose what portion of their time to spend working, so they’re still not free to enjoy themselves as they should.
You can argue that it’s the human condition, that it’s just how we’re made. But it’s not. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not office or factory workers. And hunting and gathering are hard work, sure, but they’re healthier, they can be done on your own schedule, and they leave a surprising amount of free time, much more than we can afford now. Our bodies and minds didn’t evolve to be able to support our current lifestyle (or workstyle, rather, since it can hardly be called life) without breaking down. We’re not only wasting what little time we have, but we’re hurting and killing ourselves in the process.
You could argue that tough luck, there’s nothing we can do about it, and going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is obviously not possible given the amount of people on the planet. But while it’s true that we can’t go back, it’s also a fact that we’re producing much more resources than we’d need to be able to comfortably sustain every person on the planet (and throwing a vast portion of them away). We have the means to automate practically every job. We could become a post-scarcity society if we wanted to. But our society isn’t built around people (much less around people’s wellbeing), it’s not even built around corporations; it’s built around the blind pursuit of short term stockholder profits (have you never considered how utterly monstrous and dehumanising the term “human resources” is? we’re not people, we’re not even workers… we’re mere resources to be ground and processed into profit, and discarded once all profit has been extracted from our carcasses.
It’s monstrous. It’s Inhumane. And if left unchecked it will continue until the time we can physically dedicate to earning our right to exist isn’t enough to pay for the cost of our survival (which might take a while; the bastards are looking for ways to exploit lucid dreaming to make us work in our sleep), and either society collapses or we are forced to rise and fight for our right to exist and be human.
I didn’t expect such an extensive reply tbh. My writing skill doesn’t compare to yours, but I kind of feel compelled to answer.
The initial thought was that it’s “inhumane” to work for a living. I agree with you on most points that you brought up, but they don’t really support this idea.(imo)
That much is certainly true, and thus we haven’t really come far from our ancestors. We have evolved as social creatures, where it was essential for everyone to contribute to a society to ensure mutual survival. It’s wired in our brains, as we naturally like those who help us and dislike selfish individuals.
This is true as well, but closer to wishful thinking. We have been able to even entertain this thought only for a small fraction of human history. This is not inherently natural, but more of a perk of human progress.
Who is “we” in this case? It’s certainly made possible by millions of people working these jobs. And not only agricultural, because this efficiency couldn’t be achieved without the modern economy, science etc.
Look, I agree with what you’re saying. It’s just that saying “having to work is bad, unnatural, inhumane, monstrous” is a little bit over the top, that’s all. Anyway, thank you for taking your time to explain your point. I appreciate it.
What’s the difference between selling your body to be used and abused, and doing sex work? Either way, you’re selling your physical form and mental energies to someone else, but at least with sex work you get to get off.
Have you ever tried sex work?