Yes! Adding money to the equation makes it MORE exploitative, not less so!

This is a great post. Money is coercion, and coercion is rape. It’s as simple as that.

I think a lot of people have this idea that the definition of rape is like, randomly being attacked by a stranger in a back alley.

and that’s why they don’t consider prostitution to be rape because some men don’t beat the woman up, or the woman “consents” to it.

but so many prostitutes DO experience that kind of forceful rape, too, so people who have that kind of idea but still support legalizing prostitution are hypocrites.

it’s clear they think that there should just be some lower class of women that’s legal to rape.

(tangentially related: deception is another thing that way too many people don’t consider rape. all those HSTS who get off on not telling their partners that they’re trans are rapists… they might not pose a sexual threat to women but they’re still rapists without morals.)

I was at a conference in South Africa in the 90s in which one speaker was a former soldier in the military, assigned to guard a camp peopled by women and children. Many of the soldiers singled out a woman and proposed to give her extra food for her children if she'd "allow' them to fuck her. I have always wondered just how this is any different than prostitution, in which a desperate woman is driven to make a deal with a man (or men) in order to eat. She may not be incarcerated (although incarcerated women are often forced to make such "deals"), but she's still coerced, both by circumstance and the man.

Now here's the kicker for me: The man who was speaking at that conference in South Africa said that he also gave extra food to a woman there, but he didn't require her to allow him to fuck her. He did it, he said, because one of her children resembled his own daughter. He couldn't do anything about the general situation in the camp, he said, but he could choose to help feed one family. So he did. He was roundly attacked by the audience for this, despite his not requiring of the woman anything.

I wish that more libfems understood this, as they’re the most prominent in the west. Trying to explain to them is like talking to a wall.

I think part of it is on social media there’s many young women that talk about being escorts and they just talk about the positives (if you can call it that) There’s 3 women that always show up on my fyp on TikTok that are like this. All the comments praise them and I never see any criticisms. These women dont even mention most women are forced into this and they never talk about the bad johns.

It’s so sad. However I do see many young women making content that is critical of sex work. I think young women are waking up. Most pushback I feel comes from millennial women.

Exactly

Wow, this is a pretty powerful point. I'll keep this one in mind.

Exactly.

I don't understand how the public opinion can be so absurd. Coercing a woman into letting a man rape her by withholding the food she needs until she"consents" to the rape is wrong. It doesn't get any less wrong by inserting money into the equation. (Especially absurd because many of those who support prostitution also call themselves communists. In communism, according to them, the man should get to rape the woman for free, as much as he wants to. "To each according to their needs", isn't it?)

If I met a homeless young woman and employed her as my gardener, then the difference between giving her room and board, or paying her money, would be mostly in taxes (bad for her) and social insurance (good for her), and a "work for food and shelter" deal would be considered less good only because of the lack of insurance. It certainly wouldn't move the whole thing into a different moral dimension. (In fact, for someone who has been homeless for a while and doesn't have a postal address or bank account, a direct exchange would be considered kinder than to tell them they need to get a bank account before they even have the address they need for that.)