My opinion is that sex work should be legal. It would enable involuntary virgins to get a good sex experience for payment; they will be guaranteed a good sex experience with a sex worker: no harassment, good education, and a fun time.
Sex work gets shamed by ~~people~~ puritans because of payment for sex and it's "sinful"; yet these same ~~persons~~ puritans get and have sex for free out of "passion" or marriage; they also discriminate against minorities in sec.
EDIT: Apparently there is an implied difference between sex work and prostitution. I mean sex work.
EDIT 2: I messed up the writing of my post. My real opinion is located in this comment:
Oof. I didn't realize there was way more exploitation than just sex traffickers. It totally makes sense though; sex trades are a product of capitalist exploitation and the existence of private property. (Naturally under communism, the prevalence of sex trades would be heavily reduced.)
It seems like I couldn't communicate my ideas properly beforehand. I don't want people in the sex trade to be criminalized; I want pimps and johns to be criminalized.
Only a few hours ago: I wanted to support a sex trade industry that didn't involve rapes or rely on economic coercion. I just wanted disabled people, who keep getting discriminated out of sex,^[Sexual Ableism]^[Dating With Disability: How to Rise Above Sexual Ableism]^[Dating with Disability: Choose Your Dreams Over Sexual Ableism] to be able to feel better about their lives; a lack of sex can cause mental health issues in some people (even though this shouldn't happen). (However, having sex probably won't fix the issue, it will just hide the problems until later). Now I feel like shit...
I gotta ask, do you know any sex workers? Are you a man? I'm a guy but I used to do SW and in that process I met tons of women who are SWs and I think most of them would roll their eyes so hard at your comment and the sources you provided.
You're sort of cherry-picking articles and are ignorant of the other side of SW-- the side most SWs would understandably feel far too uncomfortable explaining to the media, but far more comfortable explaining in a more private context.
I don't have the energy right now to thoroughly explain why your view on this is so far off the mark but just... yeah. You really don't understand it and by your logic, I could easily cherry pick articles where people claim they love working at Wal-Mart and how it allows them to express themselves.
I feel like there's a LOT of privileged people on the left who can't wrap their heads around the difference between a person selling their body to Amazon to pack boxes, versus a sex worker selling their body to (almost always) some guy. Go look up statistics on how common sexual assault is among women who do sex work, versus say women working at Amazon.
Don't be one of those people who thinks the sex worker and Amazon worker are both selling their bodies, therefore there are no major difference between what each party has to deal with.
I really don't want to talk about this topic anymore but yeah, I wish there was some fast-track way for me to help you understand why you're wrong on this. I've met plenty of people who mistakenly but genuinely believe the average SW enjoys her job and it's so far off the mark. If we were in a voice call I don't think I'd mind taking more time to explain this but that being said, the topic and discussion does exhaust me because I've had this conversation with so many people in the past, although thankfully I've changed a decent amount of peoples' opinions on this.