Exactly! I could have more easily paid my way through college :-)

Because people are more likely to do things the easier they are, and sex stuff is one of the few ways it's easy for young people to make money.

Due to a confluence of perverse incentives across many facets of life, this becomes part of a sales funnel that recruits young people to the sex industry.

Because you believe the sex industry itself is bad? Or because specific companies and members of the sex industry are bad, and you are generalizing?

In many cases sex work is not a physically or emotionally healthy way to support yourself.

In every case it is a limited career that does not scale with age, while inculcating habits and attitudes that make traditional employment or switching industries difficult.

>In many cases sex work is not a physically or emotionally healthy way to support yourself.

It's a popular opinion, but is it also true? For example sex professions aren't regarded specially in Germany or Sweden, do you think those people are damaging themselves more than any of the more "legitimate" professions?

Couldn't you say the same thing about many jobs out there that are legitimate?

Yes, but they come up less frequently in discussions because they're less prevalent. Anyone can have sex, but fewer people can do something like being a wrestler, which also tends to be a crappy job except for a few superstars. Even those superstars can't do the job for very long before physical or emotional breakdown settles in.

Sex "work" is a "job" where the less experienced you are, the more "employers" will want you. What other job prefers inexperienced people? Only exploitative ones do.

Yeah, we wouldn't want consenting adults to make their own choices.

We don't want to put people in a place where the only choices available to them are shitty ones. We want a world in which everyone can make a choice they truly want and would still take even when all circumstances in their life are optimal.

Powerful, happy, balanced, rich people do not tend to work in the sex trade. Can you imagine Condolezza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Marissa Mayer deciding that porn or prostitution is what they really wanted to do all along but just could never find the time for?

>Can you imagine Condolezza Rice or Hillary Clinton

You say this like these people are shining examples of people doing good for mankind. They're run-of-the-mill politicians. I couldn't care less about their porn or political careers. I'm sure the void would have been filled by someone.

I didn't say they ought to be admired or not. I said they were powerful. (And why did you neglect Marissa Mayer?)

Powerful people do not typically choose porn or prostitution.

Sure, I'll go out on a limb and say there's a moral problem with the sex industry — in fact, the combination of the terms sex and industry strikes me as not only wrong but very sad. I didn't think disapproval of the sex industry was so obviously incorrect that we had to shame people for it, but some of the side-threads here seem to be heading that direction.

A lot of people disagree with your opinion, myself included. Morals aren't absolute, obviously, and they differ between people, but the shaming is usually directed at those who work in the sex industry from those who are morally opposed to it. I definitely agree that shaming from either side is wrong, though.

God, awesome.

I am so tired of hearing in techy circles how everything about porn and prostitution is an awesome thing. Thanks for counterbalancing against all the dudebros who think everything about selling oneself for sex is great.

(I'm pretty sure this is gonna attract a lot of downvotes, but I just wanted to get this off my chest.)

It has nothing to do with porn and/or prostitution being 'awesome' and everything to do with it not being any of your damn business what consenting adults get up to, whether or not it's 'easy'.

Also; down votes are for not contributing to the conversation. You're not arguing for your position, you're just thanking someone else for appearing to share it.

Also, yay bitcoin, because you.

> It has nothing to do with porn and/or prostitution being 'awesome' and everything to do with it not being any of your damn business what consenting adults get up to, whether or not it's 'easy'.

This whole consent argument is totally flawed and is an attempt to ignore the question about whether the participants in porn and prostitution are being harmed or not. The people working in sweat shops in China are also "consenting" to do that, but we shouldn't be promoting any efforts that put more people in sweat shops.

Whether or not being in porn or prostitution are comparable to being a sweat shop worker is a different matter and a different debate, but it's a debate that should be had and not be dismissed with the consent argument.

> The people working in sweat shops in China are also "consenting" to do that

Damn right they are. Stop idyllising the abject poverty of subsistence farming.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/24/magazine/two-cheers-for-sw...

Well you stop idolising indentured servitude (well an analogous situation of paying for a job and then having to work in conditions beyond the bounds of human decency often to end with less than you started with) and then perhaps we can get him to think about it.

I'm really not sure whether I'd choose being held prisoner in a factory making high-end gadgets or scraping an existence from the soil and rain and having my family around me a little autonomy. Hobson's choice.

They make many times more money in the gadget factory than the subsistence farming. Nobody's forcing them to be there.

You mean like this http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/forced-... :

>In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately."

Or this http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5078402/workers-in-apples-... :

>The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side.

>Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made."

Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like.

People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job.

Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.