My family are mostly Democrat voting liberals and I identified as one for years. When I was in 5th grade I spent more time with my Fox News-watching grandparents and became a Republican for like a year or 2 and became an apolitical lib for a while. From like 2015-2019 I was a Bernie bro who had some objectively shit takes. The biggest 180 I did was probably on the sex trade. I used to be for it as a horny teen like “huh? Did someone say SeX?? Well it’s all ConSeNsUAL so why cockblock someone from getting some PuSsY?” Obviously now I realize that’s a disgusting sentiment and that most people in the industry are not happy and would rather do anything else. Just because a few are happy with their line of work, it doesn’t make it right to force so many others into a position where they feel abused and humiliated or threatened. “Legitimacy of industry” in terms of prostitution always means lining the pockets of abusive pimps (physical or anything else) who will use the opportunity to get rich and usually fund illegal markets (source: Look at Nevada). Enough about me, what topics have become more clear to yall after becoming a communist? I could probably list a few others but I’m interested in seeing what yall say.
This isn’t emphasized nearly enough. Again, when people talk about sex work they gotta be more clear about who they’re talking about.
We gotta make the distinction between sex workers and sex bourgeoisie in these conversations because mainstream liberal society just casually lumps the latter into some big tent where both the views of the pimp and their sex-slave are held on equal footing.
Like I said in another comment here, there are some grey areas that add nuance to the discussions around this, but when it comes to who is exploiting and who is being exploited – that part is pretty damn clear.