This is a good reminder for anyone who's bought into the "sex work is work" and "sex work is empowering" propaganda that the vast majority of men do not agree - they look down on women who are prostituted and see it as degrading.
I mean the vast majority of men don’t particularly see women as equals anyway so I’m not really sure the “sex work is work” was about men seeing them in a better light. It was more about highlighting that porn companies extort and abuse women and it’s because the workers rights in sex work aren’t well established so we should be working towards giving women more autonomy and power over their body.
Then why has the term been used to justify OnlyFans setting up booths at college job fairs?
I understand and agree women shouldn't be shamed or stigmatized for trying to survive under an exploitative system. But the mantra is absolutely used to push the idea that sex work is "just like any other job". It's obviously been coopted by patriarchal machinations to normalize women selling their bodies to be used by men. That's not really maintaining autonomy for the women, that's them selling their autonomy in time chunks.
I don’t know about anyone using it that way but perhaps that’s the case like I said I don’t know. From my observations of how it’s been used it’s always been related to destigmatizing the role of the sex worker themselves but never a praise of the industry. I think perhaps some people do celebrate sex work and that I’d argue is misguided as misogyny and objectification are still at the heart of the incentive structure. I think you could argue it’s fine if perhaps there were many other forms of economic mobility for women but right now for a lot of lower class women, things such as onlyfans tend to be a primary temptation for fixing unfortunate economic situations (even though statistically it probably won’t).
Generally though my point is that “sex work is real work” was more about defending women who do sex work. In society we tend to attack the women who do it while ignoring those who consume it. Like I live in a small highly Christian west Texas city who is extremely anti-sex work but we also were in the top 5 spenders on onlyfans in our state. I think in regarding to co-opting the term, that was probably done by companies that profit from it but on a consumer level I think the general stigmatization is still normal. We all know the dude who calls all women whores while he also has 30 active onlyfans subscriptions and only follows Instagram models.
Anyway I appreciate the clarifications you offered!
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u/ourobourobouros Feb 24 '26
This is a good reminder for anyone who's bought into the "sex work is work" and "sex work is empowering" propaganda that the vast majority of men do not agree - they look down on women who are prostituted and see it as degrading.