this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Here's a possibly-controversial take, but joining the army isn't really even close to the best analogy for a male-dominated industry where you "sell your body".
Being a labourer is. Working in industries like construction, but not as a skilled tradesman. It doesn't carry the same moral weight riley was going for though.
True, but it's not just about labor.
To join the US military you have to literally sign over your bodily autonomy to join. Once you do then they can pump you full of experimental drugs, or run whatever other ungodly experiments, all they want. I know someone who considered joining then backed out when this allegedly happened.
Anyway, never heard of Riley before but seems nice. Hope she supports our troops and offers military discount for her OnlyFans.
Wait, what?
I'm gonna need a source on that one my guy.
By ungodly experiments, he means your typical round of vaccinations.
Also, there's a waiver for just about anything in the military. If there's an actual medical concern with vaccinations, then you can apply for a waiver. The problem is when people confuse an actual medical condition with a conspiracy theory they read on the internet.
I doubt that; more likely they were thinking along the lines of agent orange
I was thinking more along the lines of the Bikini Atoll tests which included tens of thousands of people in the Navy but yeah.
I assume this is what they're talking about: "Under the Defense Authorization Act, the President is authorized to waive the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act's (the act) informed consent requirements in military operations if the President finds that obtaining consent is infeasible or contrary to the best interests of recipients and on an additional ground that obtaining consent is contrary to national security interests."
https://www.fda.gov/science-research/clinical-trials-and-human-subject-protection/protection-human-subjects-informed-consent-exception-general-requirements#:~:text=Under%20the%20Defense%20Authorization%20Act,on%20an%20additional%20ground%20that
I dunno, I think, for a modern example, PB pills are pretty bad.
US Soldiers are given many vaccines to prepare them for various diseases abroad or weaponized. Historically, refusing could result in sever penalties. I also think it's been normally questioned whether some vaccines given were experimental or rushed, but could find no explicit proof that's happened before.
Military personnel sue for use in experimental agent testing.
Experimental drugs given to soldiers during the Gulf war
See also the Burn pits, Agent Orange, CTE and other effects from prolonged exposure to crew weapons use, and the working conditions inside AC-130s and related health effects
I don't mean this to sound rude, but it's fairly common knowledge
Doesn't that just come with being a US citizen. Or being any other citizen
Labourers sell their labour, but they effectively have bodily autonomy, they get to walk away if they want to. That's largely not true for hired murderers.
tell that to my chronic pain
Depends on your definition of mortal danger and how OSHA compliant your work site is.
I get what you're going for, but having worked in construction in Ohio I can say that yes, sometimes people do take potshots at you/around you.
i'm still going to choose popcorn lung over being blown the fuck up
True, you're far more likely to die working menial laborer jobs than you are in the military.
Laborers are providing direct goods to the people they supply too. The military is far more intangible with prevention being the key factor for it's expense.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187127/number-of-occupational-injury-deaths-in-the-us-by-gender-since-2003/
9 military people die from hostile action in 2020. 317/1017 in accidents. 190 illness. 406 suicide.
https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner
I highly doubt they consider suicide for occupational hazards too which is strange in hindsight considering the military accounts for it now. One of the few things they do ahead of the woke curve lol. First responders as well.
So in reality you'd need to remove both suicide and illness from the military's numbers to equal laborers.
363 died in the military then vs 4,774.
Even hostile deaths... 9 in hostile action and 37 homicides... Meanwhile there were 392 workplace homicides. 37,060 nonfatal intentional injuries.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/workplace-violence-homicides-and-nonfatal-intentional-injuries-by-another-person-in-2020.htm
Oh man, this is wrong.
In. 2022, there were 500k plumbers in the US, I don't have exact numbers for how many pipe fitters there were, but it's a position that's always in high demand, safe to say that very few of that 500k number are pipe fitters, less than a quarter. So let's say 100k pipe fitters which is honestly, probably generous.
There were 70 fatal accidents involving pipe fitters. Not injuries, fatal accidents only. That is a ratio of .0006.
The US military boasted 1.3 million members that year, and 270 fatal accidents, and 0 to enemy action. A ratio of .0002.
You are 2/3rd less likely to die in the armed forces then you are pipe fitting.
That's interesting, but it would be perhaps more interesting to compare the yearly average accross a longer time frame. Also didn't a bunch of people get lung cancer and die as a result of burn pits? I'm sure people died years later from exposure to other hazards too, not to mention how many people commit suicide after.
Also this isn't to say pipe fitting isn't a dangerous job, I am just interested how the statistics would look over a longer time frame and with consideration of deaths that occur after service, but still as a result.
So there's a few things happening here that are causing industrial numbers to surpass American military rates of injury.
We are not actively in conflict with any other nation, so being in the military is no more dangerous than any industrial occupation because of conflict.
The military is, generally, safer than any one occupation, but the military is also a monolith. Saying it's safer in the military is kind of like saying office jobs in the US are more dangerous than pipe fitting. You're essentially comparing numerous disparate positions to one type of work, and that skews your results. It would be more accurate to compare rates of incidents in say, front line infantrymen to any particular other field.
It's also worth pointing out that the military has it's own plumbers, and they do their own pipe fitting. Statistics on the rates of injury there are a little harder to come by.
But more to the specific points you mentioned: yes, and that's not the first time the military has accidently killed or seriously injured it's own people. These incidents happen in civilian world too and arguably, more frequently. The US industrial labor pool is 10 times the size of the military, and negligent safety hazards come up every year. Rates of suicide are also lower in the military than in the general population, and a variety of factors contribute to that.
First of all, KIA MIA for 2022 is 0, I did add them.
People who later die due to injury is also included, for both metrics. That's why these numbers are almost 2 years old.
What specifically was excluded were those who died to illness or self inflicted wounds.
I picked the most recent year for which information is available, I gathered the summary information from statistics that others had already done.
These reports are prepared yearly, I'm not sure what you expect. It's literally how statistics are done. It's an industrial standard. Do you expect that people only work for 1 year out of their lives while everyone in the military is stuck there for 8?
I dunno man it sounds like you're just being dense on purpose because you've run out of room to argue.
I mean the joke in the military is literally you can't kill yourself because it's destruction of government property.
I agree with the point but you can tell your boss to fuck off and stop being a laborer whereas your ass gets thrown in prison if you decide you don't want somebody else fully in control of what you eat when you sleep where you live and who you kill.
Both are selling your body but one of them you can't decide to stop selling it.
Any form of physical labour is selling your body sex work is selling your right to refuse sexual consent. I think that makes it a worse situation for the person doing the sex work than other work
If you are doing only fans or similar how are you not consenting? It's fully on your terms.
I doubt most people in the military would consent to getting their dick blown off by a mine if given the opportunity.
Issue is you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. That woman on OnlyFans could be in horrible debt or have a manipulative boyfriend or some other social factor pressuring her into it when she actually hates it. But part of the appeal of OnlyFans is that its "more ethical" than regular porn so they have to keep up the façade of "loving their job".
Now are there women who genuinely like doing it and are just in it long enough to pay their way through med school or whatever? Yeah probably, and I kinda doubt the women who have two blogs and a podcast about how much they love doing sex work are faking it cuz that'd be A LOT of effort just to sell people on your OnlyFans. Truth is thought under capitalism there is not 100% sure fire way to know if the woman is doing this 100% consensually. Heck you probably wouldn't ever have that under socialism, but the likelihood would at least be higher.
There's a reason why people who join the U.S. military are disproportionately poor.
You're describing a problem that is common across "industries" as if it were unique to sex work, when it's not.
It's unreasonable to posit that somehow Onlyfans models have less bodily autonomy or more coercion than members of the U.S. (and probably any other) military.
I encourage you to take some time to interrogate why you were so easily able to make this leap of logic, because to me it seems (consciously or not) motivated by moralized "disgust" of sex work rather than rational consideration.
This isn't true, theyre wealthier on average.
Yes, which is why I'm a socialist.
Thing is we humans usually understand that sex ads a different dimension too things, since it is one of the most physically and emotionally intense things humans do. Sex crimes are consider more heinous than non-sex crimes, porn is considered more graphic than a regular romance film. Hence I don't think we can pull this "muh sex work is just like coal mining" Schtick, everyone knows it's kinda bullshit, people just have a hard time articulating why. Also, there's important infrastructure that relies on coal, you can't really boycott coal completely, you don't really NEED to watch a video of a woman using a dildo on herself as fun as it may be.
You keep on making points that I know you must know don't apply to capitalism in practice.
There are so many jobs that don't NEED to exist, and yet they do. And chances are that you'll be coerced into doing at least one of those jobs in your life, especially if you're poor.
I guess I am also coming at things from the practical perspective of:
There will always be sex workers. What can we do in practice to keep them safe?
"Solutions" based on moralizing sex work as inherently "bad" end up being things like:
Making directly providing sexual services illegal, which is "intended" to stop "sex trafficking" and punish "pimps" but in reality forces transactions underground and in the dark, facilitating sex trafficking and leading to victims being harassed and prosecuted far more than perpetrators.
Sex workers of all kinds want sexual services decriminalized because they understand that criminalization makes everyone less safe:
Providers of sexual services need to advertise on shady websites and meet in non-public spaces, rather than openly using Craigslist on their own terms. Is Craigslist a good example of a safety-focused platform for sexual services? Absolutely not! But providers of sexual services were much safer before Craigslist cracked down than they are, by far. Police regularly harass street workers, very much including sexual assault.
Clients risk getting arrested, and are similarly forced into more dangerous situations.
All people, especially poor and marginalized women, are less safe. The large underground market for sex work makes it much easier for humans to be trafficked. Children sexually abused (child sexual abuse absolutely must be criminalized, and CSAM a long with it). Undocumented immigrants trafficked for sex work, as well as non-sex work.
I believe that the moralization and criminalization of sex work is absolutely fundamental to institutions like the Catholic Church being able to facilitate the sexual abuse / rape of so many children, for so long. And it's not like its over, especially in fundamentalist Christian churches but also in all major institutions and parts of our society.
So, I mostly care about the unique moralization and criminalization of sex work because I regularly listen to sex workers themselves talking about what needs to change to make them, and everyone else, safer.
And they regularly use analogies to other physical and emotional labor.
I'm not sure that I can defend that notion to you articulately, but I also very much don't care.
I support listening to and learning from marginalized people. I support the notion that marginalized people generally know what is best for them better than the random old white dudes that declare themselves to be experts without any real connection to, or respect for, those communities.
I know that policies decisions led by those that are most vulnerable almost always end up helping everyone else too.
At no point did I advocate for the criminalization of sex work, I was arguing about the morality of consuming the content or using the services of sex workers.
This gets said a lot but I think it's actually questionable how true it is. I'll try and dig it up when I'm not at work but there was a study done in the Netherlands that found legalizing sex work actually increased human trafficking since it created semi-legal loop holes that traffickers could exploit to conduct their trade in a legal gray area. Also, pedophiles still exist under a legal sex work system so there'd still be a market for trafficking children.
Personally I support the Nordic model, but not fully criminalization.
Independently employed adult sex workers who enjoy being in the industry say this. And their opinions are valid. But they are a minority in the global sex trade. Most women being coerced into sex work would prefer it if the part of the industry they are in were to be completely abolished and I think it's debatable if making legal sex work easier would actually be a boon to that cause or not.
Yes but a lot of those jobs utilize skills that society does need in order to function and ideally a socialist society could redirect those labors in a more socially healthy way. Nobody should work at fucking McDonalds but we will always need food prep workers until Star Trek replicators become a thing. That doesn't really apply to most sex work though.
If you genuinely enjoy doing it, go for it, no shame there, but if we're discussing the morality of consuming the content it's always going to be morally dubious cuz there's no way to 100% confirm the person providing it is doing so totally consensually unless you have mind reading powers, or at least know a lot of intimate details about their personal life.
it's not fully on your terms because if you refuse to provide sexual content for the only fans subscribers you stop getting paid which means that with the coercion of the market you stop having full and uncoerced control over your ability to refuse to give sexual consent to sharing provocative images of yourself
In the same vein are you not selling your right to consent of your bodily autonomy by being a laborer?
yes but your right to refuse to consent type out emails, or stack boxes is less intimate and personal than your control over your sexual consent
it is for example perfectly socially acceptable to pressurize and even insist that people do various chores which would be deeply immoral in the case of sexual consent. For example your roommate could insist that as a condition of your living arrangement you have to clean the house (which is a bodily autonomy sacrifice as you have to use your body to work potentially against what you want) but they would be out of bounds if they insisted you do sexual favours for them
Onlyfans models generally have the option to apply for a job at McDonald's instead.*
People working for the military generally do not.
* Ok, there's actually more nuance here because a large percentage of sex workers are disabled, and lack of accessibility and general ableism prevents them from working most other jobs. But while that's important to understand, it's a different discussion.
While this is currently true, there isn't any logic in one of these activities being treated significantly differently than the other, except where risks are concerned. If the sexual favors entail no additional risk (for instance, if they do not involve bodily contact, but merely putting in a show) then although society treats them differently, I would argue it shouldn't.
This is why we are socialists and want to disconnect labor from work
No different than any other job at that point.
I think if you look at it that way, you could also say working for the military is selling your right to a safe workplace. Like, a lot of other jobs (including sex work) can be dangerous, and often are due to a lack of care from those in power. But the military is necessarily dangerous by its very nature.
yeah which is why I wouldn't join the army and would advise anyone not to
although sex workers are far more likely to experience PTSD than soldiers
also sex workers are substantially more likely to be killed in a violent attack than soldiers are at 112-225 per 100,000 for sex workers and 51 out of 100,000 for the branch of the army with the highest mortality rate so being a sex worker is more than twice as dangerous as being a soldier
Yeah those sorts of facts are unsurprising to me, and they're why I brought up the fact that other jobs often are dangerous in practice.
you still have consent during sex work.
I'd also add that even desk jobs are selling your body. All labor is. The brain and fingers are part of the body.
Doing "unskilled labor" is at the very least creating something. Even if that thing is socially useless like a Starbucks location that's across the street from another Starbucks location, that's a better outcome than bombing or shooting something.
I wasn't interested in making any value judgments. Simply in coming up with what job is the purest expression of "selling your body".