My first wife was a former prostitute. Through her, I ended up working security in a handjob parlour. Through that, I shared a lot of space and time with the women who worked there. This is in a society where prostitution is legal.
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It became my opinion, based on the drug, alcohol, relational and mental health issues I saw, that these women had become sex workers primarily from a place of unwellness and limited choices rather than authentic, free agency.
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In other words, they weren't "freer", they were compromised. In shorthand, I felt like there was a lot of dark triad shit going on, and perennial self-identity issues that seemed like hell to deal with.
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But that's one anecdotal bag of experiences, whatever.
I think the same kind of pattern holds in the porn industry, re: rates of addiction, personality pathology, trait neuroticism, and so on.
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I honestly acknowledge that there are some, even many people who, at all ends of sex work, pursue that work authentically, from a sturdy foundation of self, and truly enjoy what they're doing.
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I think the likelihood of any given man or woman being such a case is rather low. In that way, being a "sex worker" is a roulette wheel of possibilities where 75% of them suggest illness rather than wellness.
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If a person is okay with sex work because their Self is somehow compromised, then to build a relationship with them is like building a castle on the edge of an eroding cliff. The structure isn't sound. Maybe it'll be fine, maybe it won't. But it's a bad bet.
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That's all. Sorry for the spam, and sorry if this is all self-evident to you.
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Replying to
There's the phenomenon where if you ban a subculture from a larger internet forum, they go onto a different website to make their own, and the quality degrades hugely. It has something to do with, people who are willing to switch sites for that subculture are disproportionately-
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dedicated to the subculture, which often takes away the more nuances voices or people who did it for fun.
I think this is what's happening with sex work. If you put a huge social barrier in front of sex work, the only people who will cross that barrier have a strong need to do so
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So you will see disproportionately troubled, desperate people, and very few nuanced voices of "girls who are trying it out for fun".
If you instituted similar walls around other professions I bet you'd see the same effect
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Camgirls are legal in the us, but there was definitely a social barrier to being one
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