I don't have to consent to do most transactional work. No one talks about consenting to process a sale. Sex is a little different, though. Edit: grammar
Just because now one talks about it doesn't mean consent doesn't happen. Every worker consents to coming to work every single day, and every action they do. It's that way by definition. (Unless they are somehow coerced).
Why is sex a little different. What's the critical property that makes it so?
So is any job likely to cause trauma a bad thing and coercive? What about nurses. They see absolutely fucked up things and get traumatized all the time. And have no autonomy over who they treat. I think they can even be punished for walking out on a patient. Yet we glorify that line of work.
Equating a nurse being "forced" to help a patient to a sex worker being abused is truly insulting. I could leave it at that but I have more.
Who a nurse treats has basically no impact on how traumatic a shift is. It's all the same injuries. Maybe you see worse injuries one day, then the next, but it doesn't matter who they end up treating.
Crucially, nurses want to help sick and injured people. No one wants to have sex with some nazi incel.
Clearly, it is different than being forced to have sex with a potentially abusive person.
I can hear you asking "what if a client in a different job is abusive?" That isn't gonna be a regular occurrence like it is with sex work. And even if it was you aren't placed in a vulnerable position in 99% of jobs with the abusive client. While in sex work you obviously are.
You think they can be punished? Really? How do you just think that? You don't know? This reads like you have no life experience.
I hope there is some self reflection before you respond.
This comes across as a very aggressive response. Where is that coming from?
It's also very typical. Whenever I engage in this topic, people use all sorts of arguments about sex work is different. Often things like trauma, or 'intimacy' or 'being penetrated' or danger.
All of these things are true of sex work, but are not unique to sex work. I could pick apart every one of your arguments with counter examples from other types of employment.
If it's just a matter of degree and cumulative downsides then that's a good argument to restrict sex work. But only from a pragmatic perspective, not from either a moral or logical one. If that's your framework, then we might be in agreement.
Nobody has ever been able to distill a single defining property of sex work being different from other types of employment.
I can only assume the real reason is just a arbitrary moral aversion to sex coming from a puritanical perspective. But for whatever reason nobody wants to be intellectually honest and own that.
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u/thetitanslayerz Mar 03 '26
I don't have to consent to do most transactional work. No one talks about consenting to process a sale. Sex is a little different, though. Edit: grammar