On Selling One's Body

Arguments about the ethics of sex work are pretty predictable. The person against will say “prostitution is disgusting and dehumanizing such that no one would ever agree to it unless they were absolutely desperate and had no other options to survive, therefore it’s simply rape by another name” and the person in favor will say “you may feel that way about it, but many other people feel differently” and the person against will say “no they don’t, you made that up to justify rape” and the person in favor will provide examples and the person against will say “well those people are subhuman degenerates and they aren’t worthy of moral consideration” and the argument pretty much breaks down from there. What no one except Andrew Tate questions, however, is whether it would be wrong to force someone who does feel that way about sex work to be a sex worker. Obviously it would, right? But like, if sex work is just another kind of work, with different benefits and drawbacks just like any other kind of work, could there not be people who are similarly disgusted by other types of work?

The answer is yes. I know people like that exist, because I am one. The idea of having any kind of job I could realistically get feels like having a Yeerk from Animorphs in my head. Having to live my whole life according to an externally imposed schedule, do mind-numbing repetitive tasks all day, be polite and respectful to people who don’t treat me the same way, and be constantly expecting something negative sound as viscerally repulsive to me as some gross ugly guy bending me over and fucking me. And yet, people who espouse that sex work is work very much do not treat this aversion the way they treat people’s aversion to prostitution. Whenever I complain about some aspect of my life, all I hear is that I wouldn’t have to live like this if I got a job and I’m just a whiny lazy little bitch who is responsible for all my own problems. No one except incel school shooters would ever in a million years talk this way about prostitution. If someone was living a life that was miserable for many reasons, but they could make those reasons go away by becoming a hooker, everyone would understand perfectly why they would choose not to. And yet, when I say this, everyone tells me “that’s not the same you whiny baby, prostitution is a special case.” But when the anti-sex work feminists are around, the same people are like “Sex work isn’t a special case you hysterical prude, it’s just a job like any other.”

Some slightly more empathetic people will tell me that if I really can’t work, to just go on disability. I do not find this to be much more helpful than the previous group. In addition to the practical concern that I have too much savings and the only things I’ve ever been formally diagnosed with are autism and generalized anxiety disorder, imagine we were still living in a world where women who couldn’t find husbands had very few options to support themselves economically, the main one being prostitution. However, in its infinite magnanimity, the state set up a special “ugly bitches fund” to pay out a barely livable pittance to women too deformed and disgusting for men to be willing to pay to fuck them. Of course, this would involve jumping through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops to prove that they’re really unfuckable hags, and of course if anyone ever did have sex with them we would immediately suspend the payments. Would this state of affairs strike you as particularly compassionate or just?

I do not agree with the anti-sex work feminists, because as a general rule arguments that rest on some people being subhuman degenerates who aren’t worthy of moral consideration are bad and wrong. But if we want to have the moral high ground over them, if we’re going to claim that sex work is no different from any other work, we need to actually treat other work as no different from sex work, and that means being equally compassionate and understanding of people who would rather die than do it.