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?
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