There's way more work that goes into making and maintaining that presence than just showing up with a body or personality. A lot is marketing, but it's not like traditional marketing you'd be taught at a university. They're figuring a lot of it out by trial and error, which is some amount of risk of getting it wrong. And popularity can swing quickly and dramatically so you can get fired by the internet mobs (more risk).

Not sure why it's a negative presence, either. Anyone who thinks it was a negative presence is not really someone you'd want a job from after making $10,000 - $100,000 a month.

Read about discrimination and hostility former sex workers face. It is very real and can be pretty ugly.

Many employers won't hire you and will fire you if they find out - regardless how great worker you at. Plenty of prospective partners take issue with it or can't deal with feelings of resentment, jealousy etc.

It’s a negative presence because it presents the moral degeneration of society.

Do we really want to hold sex work in the same regard as being an entrepreneur or doctor? What kind of signal do you think that sends?

They are selling pictures of their body. The body gets nearly no wear and tear for the work.

There's only negative presence in the sense of haters. Would you also encourage young people to avoid being Black, or Muslim, because that's a "negative presence"?

I wonder if the transactional nature of the work has an impact on the workers' relationships with people.

there's always a cost.

Do you ask the same thing about waitressing and front of house retail work? Forced to put on a smile, be submissive and obedient and make a pretend connection to the customer purely to ease a transaction and get a larger tip? Does that have an impact on relationships with people?

yeah, those professions probably have a negative impact on relationships, too.

I would discourage young people from getting face tattoos. I think that's a better analogy.

Facial tattoos are a traditional practice for many ethnic groups. Many modern practitioners feel that they're reclaiming a practice that was persecuted under American Puritanism.

It's not that there can't be reasonable appearance standards; however, it would be incredibly disingenuous to claim that those standards are established within a neutral cultural atmosphere. I personally find white dudes with short or no hair (the skinhead/cop cut) threatening, but no one's ever going to make that disqualifying.

> Facial tattoos are a traditional practice for many ethnic groups. Many modern practitioners feel that they're reclaiming a practice that was persecuted under American Puritanism.

I'm curious about this: is there any record of actual Puritans persecuting someone explicitly for having a facial tattoo? (It is true, of course, that Puritans in England and the colonies did not have a modern perspective about the separation of church and state and persecuted minorities like the Quakers. A revulsion to their sense of justice is also pretty understandable, but justice was pretty rough back then, too.)

> I'm curious about this: is there any record of actual Puritans persecuting someone explicitly for having a facial tattoo?

Like “fundamentalism”, “Puritanism” is probably more commonly (outside of specific technical discussions of sectarian history or theology) used in a sense which does not refer specifically to the theological group the term technically denotes but a broader (but overlapping, not a superset) group defined largely by a set of traits stereotypical of the group designated by the technical term.

Correct, as to my intent (I probably should not have capitalized the P). The taboo nature of facial tattoos is simply the evolution of a revulsion towards tattoos in general among "polite" American society. Until very recently, visible tattoos (and before that, tattoos of any kind) could be disqualifying for public-facing positions.

> Correct, as to my intent (I probably should not have capitalized the P). The taboo nature of facial tattoos is simply the evolution of a revulsion towards tattoos in general among "polite" American society. Until very recently, visible tattoos (and before that, tattoos of any kind) could be disqualifying for public-facing positions.

Thanks for clarifying; appreciated!

I'm confused as to why being black or muslim would be a "negative presence"...

In the context of

> doesn't help their future career aspirations

it fits perfectly (unfortunately).

> doesn't help their future career aspirations

only if you confuse causation. If most black dudes have poorer career prospects, it doesn't mean it's only because they are black, there are a load of other correlating factors.

If women as a group did worse as a group because some do porn, you wouldn't say "Don't be a woman", you'd be more specific: "If you are a woman, don't do porn".

Being a mob hit-man will attract haters too.

If the moneys good, would you disregard that?

What you do online has consequences. Not everyone is going to agree with your worldview.

Becoming a sex object is not a noble thing, and something you have full control over. You pulling race into this is completely irrelevant and a desperate grasping for straws. Race is not something you can control, and you subconsciously equating this to "negative presence" projects something on your behalf that I don't think helps you here.