It doesn't help that every time this topic comes up, some here feel the need to focus on the small minority who are doing it for enjoyment, as a hobby or a fetish. People who choose to believe in the 'happy hooker' stereotype, and that sex work is a really empowering choice, do so for a reason.
I said no such thing, but the sex industry as a whole is exploitative and very damaging to the individuals involved. I'd really like you to elaborate on what you mean by this exactly. My feeling is that sex workers are less likely to posses a 'victim mentality' than most.
Is your comment even relevant in a thread about person who, from what little information we do have, seems to be working on the street, and getting into cars, which is a miserable and dangerous life?
Walmart is exploitative of their workers and in paying them so little that working a 39 hour week still requires them to seek government assistance just to eat or pay rent they do a lot of damage to the ability of their own staff to feel self reliant or that their labor is of any value. Hating your job or being victimized by systemic poverty is a phenomenon that has nothing whatsoever to do with it being sex.
Treating sex work as being any different than any other means of earning a living is an artifact of puritanical sexual shame, and nothing else.
I have to agree with you that sex work is most often bad for the person who does it. But that has NOTHING to do with it being sex work, and everything to do with it being illegal and socially stigmatized.
Aside from the obvious greater exposure to STD's ( a danger that the merely promiscuous also share ) All of the primary damaging things about sex work are directly attributable to it being an underground enterprise, dealing in cash, that no one is going to report being stolen or even earned.
Prostitutes share all the dangers that a drug mule risks. They end up being taken advantage of BECAUSE they can not simply seek the same protection from police and governmental agencies as any other worker.
Pimps are NO DIFFERENT than the mafia wise guys who extract protection money from store owners under threat of violence.
People who live in the marginalized world of illicit and stigmatized behaviors have a strong incentive to manufacture personal narratives of victimization. Like every convicted criminal claiming he was framed, its a trope.
Just as some waitresses often learn that slightly larger breasts nets them larger tips- and so stuff their bras- Prostitutes learn that a narrative of victimhood can get them extra pay... thru sympathetic response from their customers.
In fact- most prostitute's customers are significantly older, and a solid narrative of victimization is a means to evoke a man's fatherly instinct to protect others.
This literally can make their job safer.
A narrative of victimization has also become the primary means by which any group can achieve political change or fairer treatment.
The pressure society places upon folks to invent a narrative of victimization astounding.
And, of course, in many cases, people who end up in prostitution HAVE been sexually victimized in their youth. But there is no proof that that has any correlation to becoming a prostitute- Partly because you can not trust that all self reportage is true- given the above listed incentives for invention of victimization stories; And partly because of the fact that the vast majority of people who have had molestation or incest experiences do NOT become prostitutes.
Kinsey found that over 30% of all people he interviewed had had some kind of sexual experiences as children.
While he found that early experiences had an effect on their sexuality... there was no evidence that such experiences affected the overall course of their life.
But this was data collected in an era when Americans did not believe in the victim narrative as the excuse for bad choices.
Today- EVERYONE is looking for someone else to blame for how their lives ended up, because we, as a society, have come to believe that victimization is exculpatory.
And in Believing that we CAN be victimized, we ARE.
Children hang themselves over mean tweets BECAUSE we have taught them that words have the power to harm. And so they obsess over words said, and thereby elevate them into trauma. I was raised in an era in which we were taught that mere words can NEVER harm.
A child is molested... And, today, even if it is never discovered, the child is raised in a society where there is an ongoing and vocally hysteric narrative about such experiences being
damaging in a way that is life altering- and so the child and young adult learns to fixate on their own victimization.
Myself- I was lucky to have been molested in an era when such things were not openly discussed... and so left to simply come to grips with it without the intense cultural pressure guiding me into feeling like a victim. And because of that, I
don't feel like a victim about it.
There
is real suffering. I have arthritis from a lifetime of hard use of my hands in making a living... and it hurts and limits me.
But Most of the suffering we endure is mental- is emotional.
And in that measure, We suffer precisely the level of trauma that we have convinced ourselves to BE trauma.
Sex and sexuality is so clothed in conflicted narratives that most of us simply can not just LOOK at the thing dispassionately and objectively for what it truly is.
