Sex work is cool and all but it's also cool to be able to support your friends without it requiring them to give you pictures of their buttholes in exchange for money. I can't help but feel like this particular phenomenon is a product of a uniquely American capitalist hellscape and that maybe this sort of thing wouldn't need to be a normal occurrence in a semi-functioning society. What do you guys think?
my not-that-hot take is that selling homemade porn on OF is no more or less "alienated," "empowering," whatever, than selling homemade jewelry on etsy. We're just used to thinking of sex as tied up with relationships, but conditioned to understand gift giving as the exception to normal human interactions that proves the rule of barter and trade.
my not-that-hot take is kind of the opposite of yours in that if we're being conditioned to think of sex a certain way that it's likely that we're being conditioned by capital to think of sex as closer to meaningless because that makes it easier to commodify. Sex means something different to everyone so moralizing binary judgements like sex work = good and empowering or sex work = bad and alienating are completely useless anyway, but if we're thinking about this stuff within the capitalist hellscape we exist in the view that selling sex is just like selling stuff on etsy is one that might benefit capital more than it does you or your intimate connections to other people.
I think I wasn't super clear and our positions may not be all that different. I will say though that I disagree with your account of what the hegemonic attitude towards sex work has historically been under capitalism. Like everything to do with sex, social attitudes have been varied and contradictory, but the dominant view of it in polite society, at least until the mid to late 20th century, was that it was entirely disreputable, dishonest, and a threat to the social fabric and bourgeois morality. You could ascribe the ambivalent reversal of these attitudes to the neoliberal turn, but I think we agree that it's not a neat delineation. The point I was trying to make is that a society that compels people to put sexual services on the market is perverse, because markets are perverse.
Totally! And for the record I was referring to the present moment, not anything about historic hegemonic attitudes towards sex work. Like so many things that capitalism is good at exploiting, changes in social attitudes towards sex were literally the entire reason why the floodgates to profit were opened. I feel like my timeline for the very beginning of this shift is informed mostly by boogie nights lol
Trading sexual favors for basic qualify of life conditions is bad, for the same reason any imposition of labor demand in a country with our level of surplus is bad.
One could argue it is worse, due to the social stigma attached. But removing the stigma from sex work is meaningless unless you improve the material conditions of all workers.