Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
A new religion sweeps the land, proclaiming that bartenders are bad and damaging society. Bartenders promote alcoholism, they operate in the seedy underground, they are profiting off slowly poisoning their customers. Bartenders become stigmatized and legally grey; most quit 1/x
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
the profession to become weed dealers instead. People quit their mixology classes; bars go underground, hard to find. Over a few years, those who still bartend have become a tougher, harder crowd. They come out of people with fewer options, or people who have less to lose. One-2x
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
is a single mother looking for pay in a bad housing market. Another is a young man who is comfortable with breaking the law. Yet another struggles with mental illness and finds the underground bartending market to be more forgiving to his flexible schedule. 3x
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
No longer do you see middle-class kids putting themselves through college, or a freelance writer making a bit of extra money on the side. And so you are arguing that bartending should be socially accepted and decriminalized. But then you hear-
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
"Bartending is obviously bad and damaging. Bartenders are desperate, mentally ill, fucked up on drugs, or criminals. Nobody wants to do that job, you have to be fucked to want to do that. I can't believe you want to normalize bartending when you see the effect it has!"
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Like, you're not wrong that bartending has a tougher crowd, but you didn't stop to wonder why that is? How maybe the problem is actually the stigma and underground nature? How you'd get the same effect if you stigmatized other jobs, such as waiters or artists or sex workers?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Okay yes, this is obviously about sex workers. I'm not saying there's no other factors that go into the discussion about sex work, but I'm sick of critics pointing out the "lowlife" nature of sex workers without wondering if maybe they caused that in the first place.
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tzvi
@bestnewuser
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
The fallacy here is that bartending isn’t inherently monetizing an action that’s intensely emotional and personal for most people. in sw, you need to either be somewhat desensitized from that internal sexual ‘shame’ or desperate enough to overcome it
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ancap4prez 2024 💛/🖤
@the_f_m
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I would say that this topic tends to conflate two distinct issues when it gets discussed, and forms a sort of political compass around which we inevitably point guns at each other in a mexican standoff and accomplish nothing.
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Burro Borracho
@movnta1n
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Sex work is legal in Germany, Austria, Denmark, and many other countries. Which is the best example of sex work not being “lowlife”? It’s obvious to me that sex work should be legal, but it seems useful to have examples to show that it has been tried elsewhere & worked.
Ξdo
@Cryptoverse520
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
Yes I was surprised how different attitudes were in east Asia & esp Thailand. Not the same stigma attached to sex work that we have in the West. Still not considered a top prefession but without the moral judgement that we have
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