More likely she had clients simply deliver food to her place, lots of different clients at the same location, it would send red flags to the fraud detection algorithms. Rather than have a system in place asking clients if they chose that delivery they just silently ban the address.
(Yes, I read the thread and how she had the food sent to another place, that could've been the triggering event for the algorithm.)
She should just list her place on AirBnB and it would probably be sorted.
My guess is they have some list of addresses/numbers that are banned (supposedly due to high fraud risk etc) that they just buy from another company instead of building themselves. The OP said they tried to deliver to a brothel so that could be a banned address.
Not enough love for Nitter. Nitter is how websites like Twitter should be. Only text and images, lightweight, fast. Try loading Twitter on an old PC (say, Win7 era). It will come to a complete crawl. For text and some images.
I can't help but admit to some schadenfreude here. Where are all the claims of doordash being a private business that can do whatever it wants? Why isn't anyone advocating to build your own food delivery platform?
Sex work is consensual, doesn't target anyone, does not create a victim, doesn't diminish anyone else's rights, so why would it be comparable to hate-mongers being de-platformed?
The argument isn't if it's a good or bad thing. It's just pointing out that hypocrisy is going on. If the basis of your argument is JUST that companies can do whatever they like because they're not the government and don't have to follow free speech rules, then you can't turn around and say that they shouldn't be able to do whatever they like in some other situation.
The point being made isn't that this is okay behavior. The point being made is that people should be honest with why they're against or for something rather than pretending to appeal to some more basic moral/political/civic reason.
(The deeper point is that some on the left and on the right are okay with censorship/deplatforming/refusal of service in specific situations because it was only happening to the people on "the other side". When in reality these are universal negatives and absolutely WILL be applied to your side as well once they become the norm.)
The worst cases of sex work are those in which the sex workers are forced into it by human traffickers.
Wether consensual sex work is good or bad, it’s clear to me that discriminating against victims of human trafficking is a terrible idea. Those people need to be saved from their abusive circumstances.
Using the panopticon to ban them from everything only hurts them more.
Fair enough, but if that's your stance, I hope you're honest and open about it. I am not claiming you personally have done this, but so many people immediately jump on the private company defense when someone they dislike is deplatformed, when they really just don't like that person and are glad it happened.
I think the main problem is that many people fail to distinguish actions that are bad, and actions the government should prevent.
There is a big difference between saying "This is bad and this company should stop doing it" and "This is bad and the government should step in".
This is made worse, because most people don't even bother to propose a solution and just say "this is bad!" leaving others to fight over the implications of the incomplete thought.
I disagree, I think the main problem is that people use the private company argument as a way to mask their emotion-based reasons for wanting someone deplatformed. My brain translates "it's a private company" into "we should not question the actions of private companies" because they're effectively the same. I'd much rather people just say "this is bad" than hide behind some bs free market argument.
I agree that being private company is a bad defense for a moral attack, because it 1) it is morally irrelevant, and 2) it goes both ways, allowing freedom to censor or not censor.
My point is rather that most people don't even bother making a coherent criticism. "This is bad and I think they should update their policy" is a vastly more constructive position than "this is bad"
Of course! Anything is massively debatable, if you want to be unreasonable enough about it. I've had discussions with people who were on the pro side of the "slavery debate", which is a thing apparently, and then tell me off using woke language to stay in my lane.
But, yes, all anti-sexwork positions must begin and with the premise and insist that the sexworker does not really have agency. Not really a reasonable perspective, no matter how cleverly you try to twist it.
I have difficulty following this argument. It seems to me that if I were to apply this to myself that I would appear as a victim of "math work", where I have a background / life story that pushes me to "want" to do math.
The same could be said of plenty of other jobs. Does your waiter "want" to serve you food? Does your office's janitor "want" to clean toilets? If we adopt the position that workers who do their work because they need to earn a living are victims, then huge swaths of the economy - perhaps the majority of workers - are victims.
I especially dislike this unthinking and unconsidered memeing of sex work because it only serves to normalize the profession and has a net-deleterious effect on society.
I'd rather that your sex worker acquaintances spend their energy surveying the existing body of academic literature on the subject than to make pleas to me.
Not trying to be snarky here, and I'm not mounting a defense for complete prohibition of prostitution and the varying types of sex work, I'm just terrified by the increasing acceptability of the work in common society: I want little girls to have engineers and doctors as role models instead of being prodded into sex work by virtue of its encroaching and increasing presence and exposure, a trade that obliges (commonly) the woman to invest their time pleasing men, a trade that has diminishing returns overtime as they age. Leaving aside the mountain of studies that pinpoint poverty as root of most sex work the continents across the globe and related psychological issues brought on by the experiences later on, if you cannot accept earlier-stated premise, then I reckon we come from differing views and further debate on this forum on this subject will likely be fruitless.
The "existing body of literature" is dominated by sex-negative academics that consider all compensated sex to be exploitative, ignoring the agency of sex workers. Apply the same logic to any other type of work and it's clear how shallow these arguments are. Sports also have diminishing returns as athletes age. I'm confident fast-food workers wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't need it to put a roof over their head and food on their table. Yet these don't elicit the same negative response.
I think a lot of this is largely due to the ever expanding definition of "sex work". I can't say for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that the "sex work" the characters in this twitter thread are involved in is selling nudes on the internet. If you want to call that sex work, fine, but let's not ignore all the horrific things that more "traditional" sex workers experience.
It's just odd to see an attractive western woman advocating for "sex work" because she made a killing on onlyfans from her bedroom. That is not the reality of most sex workers!
>Prostitution and sex work is often rooted in poverty
Work that alleviates the hardships of poverty is a good thing. This is a positive good, not a mark against sex work. Same with other low skill jobs with low barriers of entry.
The same situation happens with non-compensated infidelity. Does it follow that Tinder victimizes people because people use it to cheat on their partners, some of which consequently transmit diseases?
Sure, infidelity is wrong - regardless of whether it's with a sex worker or in a normal relationship. But it doesn't follow that the former is wrong, across the board. The idea that sex work is wrong because someone could commit infidelity with a sex worker is as non-sensical as claiming bars are immoral because someone could cheat on their spouse with a partner they meet at a bar.
How? Cheating is, well, cheating on your implicit agreement with your spouse/partner. Prostitution, when done correctly, is a consensual agreement between two people.
Essentially, there's no case in which cheating is not "wrong." There's many where prostitution isn't.
Maybe you're blinded by your biases. It's not necessarily support for prostitution that you see (with all the seedy implications that your edit makes) but support for any person to have autonomy of their body in whichever way they see fit, including making a living by selling access to it to other people. The only side of sex work which is "wrong" and should be vilified, are the abuses that are prevalent in our society due to its illegality. Morality is not universal, so yours has no more value than anyone else's.
> It's not necessarily support for prostitution that you see (with all the seedy implications that your edit makes) but support for any person to have autonomy of their body in whichever way they see fit, including making a living by selling access to it to other people.
Great. Let's legalize selling yourself into slavery while we're at it.
> Morality is not universal, so yours has no more value than anyone else's.
> Great. Let's legalize selling yourself into slavery while we're at it.
This is a non-sequitur. A slave, does not have autonomy. Nothing in the parent comment supports slavery. You're trying to draw a false equivalence between consensual sex work and slavery.
> [it's] support for any person to have autonomy of their body in whichever way they see fit, including making a living by selling access to it to other people
There's simply no way you can claim that doesn't include selling yourself into slavery. Not a false equivalence and an extremely common practice around most of the world until recently. Usually you were paid after your term of slavery terminated.
I understand why you're shocked. You just realized that you support slavery. The good thing is that you can change your mind and come around to not supporting the exchange of human bodies for money.
I think you're arguing in very bad faith here. I do not condone slavery, but yes, I condone the right of people to sell themselves into slavery. I'm not sure why you would perceive these two things as not* different, but nuance is very important when thinking about stuff. Let me ask again: are you sure you're not being blinded by your biases?
You just admitted that you support legalizing slavery! Okay, fair enough, you're not encouraging people to become slaves. And it would involve voluntary sale of oneself into slavery. But I was fairly close to the mark.
Also, questions have to be asked: if a man is poor, is he really voluntarily selling himself into slavery?
> Let me ask again: are you sure you're not being blinded by your biases?
Perhaps it is "bias" that is keeping me from supporting the legalization of slavery. Or perhaps it's something else. I'm going with something else.
> You just admitted that you support legalizing slavery
I have also admitted that I support abortion, assisted suicide, sex work and probably some other unsavory things that you can think of. I'm not sure why when I say "full autonomy over their bodies" you fixated on just the one.
> support for any person to have autonomy of their body in whichever way they see fit
For the second time, slavery by definition means depriving someone of autonomy. This directly contradicts what the comment supports. The comment directly opposes slavery, because it deprives people of autonomy.
This kind of false equivalence between consensual sex and slavery is going to take this conversation nowhere.
> For the second time, slavery by definition means depriving someone of autonomy. This directly contradicts what the comment supports. The comment directly opposes slavery, because it deprives people of autonomy.
Read the rest of the thread. That commenter already admitted they support legalizing slavery.
Supporting absolute autonomy clearly means supporting selling yourself into slavery. How could it not? Part of autonomy is choosing when and for what duration to surrender it.
Generally a slave is considered, by law, to be property and does not have most of the rights a free person has. You seem to suggest that any contract where a person sells his services to another person, institute or company, is slavery. Are most of us slaves since we sell our time to an employer? Are soldiers slaves? 'Selling' yourself on any terms you choose, should be possible, but unless you become property and lose your rights, it's not slavery and calling it that just diminishes the word.
Who's is it then: Jesus, Budda, Kali, Jahveh, Mohamed, Musk, Thor, Ganesh, Gates, Bernie?
I don't mean to be an asshole, but even if you are religious (which I take you are) you can't fault people that find moral relativism a worthy concept when there are so many points of view between different religions. And I understand that "faith" strips relativism from your own belief, but you beeing someone that posts on HN, you probably understand that not everyone can say the same thing and it's a little rude to not even acknowledge that.
That's obviously not true as there are laws in the US making it illegal to discriminate against certain classes. Sex workers are not one of those classes, though they should be.
You have it backwards. Boycotting is a consumer decision, de-platforming is a business decision. We generally have few rules about how consumers make their decisions. We have tons of rules about how businesses operate.
The only way to reduce exploitation among sex workers is to stop making consensual sex a crime. If you actually care at all about actually people, and not just about wishing we lived in a world that suits your specific morality, you support decriminalization of sex work. That is the only path towards reducing exploitation and protecting sex workers.
It’s turning womens bodies into a product to be purchased. You can try to lawyer it however you want but it’s obvious to anyone with a degree of common sense that it’s not a good thing. Not for the women directly involved or women who aren’t & have to live in a world where they are frequently reduced to sex objects.
What an interesting but odd article. It seems to flounder at so many seemly obvious questions.
>However, it is economically nonsensical for a consumer to buy a commodity in the market if a qualitatively identical ‘product’ is freely available to him in the domestic sphere.
Clearly sex with a prostitute is not the same as sex with a lover. How does Marxist thought deal with the pricing of a good like a painting? Are they all worth the time put into them?
> if the sexual acts are the same, what is the difference which compels men to pay for sex which they could feasibly access through personal, private relationships?
This glaringly ignores transaction costs and availability on demand. If a man only wants sex, there is an enormous cost to obtain it via private relationships.
It doesn't bother me any more than a man using his body to do construction. People are often reduced to their objective and instrumental uses: building, cooking, coding, cleaning, and sex.
I think is it silly to carve out sex as different and sacred, and the one thing that cant be bought and sold.
Legitimizing it as a profession might be one of the few ways which allows the people that are caught in the vicious circle of abuse as sex workers to actually make it out. I would be very cautious in using any moral stance into forbidding anyone full autonomy about how to use their body.
Maybe to you as an outside observer. Many devote followers of religions express that it is a fundamental part of their identity. Many around the world are willing to die for it. Does this sound like something that isn't intrinsic?
Religion is a proxy for culture, which is generally a protected class for the most part since you don't chose the culture that you grow up in.
Furthermore, companies are allowed to discriminate on aspects of religion/culture - not allowing time for prayers, requiring certain dress code, e.t.c.
Sex work is near-universal in human society and sex workers are arguably among the most vulnerable of all working people, with an uniquely high risk of abuse and discrimination, hence the acute need for special protections.
I think morality plays into it. If morality wasn't an aspect of this, you could say the same thing about rapists: they're universal in human society, they're at a unique high risk of abuse and discrimination. But criminal history is not a protected class because society's morality says we shouldn't protect them. This isn't to say that sex workers are like rapists, but only to illustrate that the spectrum of morality influences what is considered a protected class. And despite what people might want it to be, sex work has pretty consistently been in a gray area of morality: both desired and rejected. I don't think it is at the threshold to make it a protected class, at least in the USA
"sex work has pretty consistently been in a gray area of morality"
So was slavery, but we don't pretend that past moral failings should make us question our modern moral understanding, as you have just suggested we do for sex work.
Classifying sex work as immoral (or at best, amoral) is not the same as classifying slavery as moral, so I would find a better example for "moral failings"
Cooking and food service is near universal in human society and is a hard job that often pays absolute garbage while working people very hard.
Yet another "they're so vulnerable, let's re-order society" push that throws around all of the right buzzwords (vulnerable, discrimination) but fails to make any real sense in a broader context.
If you want to protect sex workers then legalize and tax it
"If you want to protect sex workers then legalize and tax it"
Yes, obviously we need to stop making consensual sex a crime. But that alone won't protect a type of worker that is obviously at a higher risk than food works, which is a nonsensical comparison.
Most of that discrimination is legally required. If im using ur airbnb to commit a crime and you know about it and do nothing ur are also likely committing a crime.
Where exactly is the hypocrisy?? I don't see any in the linked twitter post.
It is exhausting to see all these attacks against hypothetical and hypocrit straw men. "people argue this" and "people care about that", with no concrete examples for meaningful discussion
You know exactly what I’m talking about. Which means you’re arguing in bad faith.
You’re telling me you are unfamiliar with people arguing that private companies can do as they please when somebody they don’t like gets canceled, then decry free speech restrictions when their side gets the axe?
That's my point. If I go on twitter, I can find people arguing every conceivable combination of arguments. I'm sure many are hypocritical.
In this context, neither the twitter post or the replies I saw were calling for government intervention.
I just think it is a bizarre social phenomenon to criticize and in this case find schadenfreude in a hypothetical reaction. It is the political equivalent of shouting out into the night because you know some is out there, and laughing that you scared them off.
"Im sure someone out has this hypocritical take, and boy do they look stupid"
Everything is a meme and common on the internet, depending on your bubble
That's why it is important to be clear on what idea you criticizing, opposed to just "those people"
I was very clear on what I was speaking against. Not wasting my time providing sources for an exceedingly common phenomenon is not a failing on my part. That was by design. Let the person who is unfamiliar do the research if needed.
I'm not sure who you think you're getting back at here. Sex workers aren't a left cancel culture monolith. And it's not like Twitter only bans some people with partiucular politics.
Their reporting and review is so bad, I once received a 7 day ban for telling a newspaper to "cease existing" (exact words, probably banworthy had they been aimed at an actual person, but well, wishing bankruptcy on a newspaper isn't exactly the same).
I am aware my comment is childish and not really worthy of the standards of this website. But I don't mean to "get back" at sex workers, I mean to "get back" at hypocrites who all seem to universally love the private-company/just-build-your-own-X argument when someone they don't like is deplatformed. I find it amusing that no one ever seems to make that argument when someone on their side is the victim.
edit: I also just find it very odd and disappointing that so many on the left are so eager to defend the "rights" of massive multinational corporations. As someone who used to be proud to call myself a democrat, what the hell is that about???
>Their reporting and review is so bad, I once received a 7 day ban for telling a newspaper to "cease existing" (exact words, probably banworthy had they been aimed at an actual person, but well, wishing bankruptcy on a newspaper isn't exactly the same).
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about hate speech laws?
I feel very okay about hate speech laws, if they're reasonable. I don't subscribe to the notion of absolute free speech where what is acceptable speech is inevitably a slippery slope and thus you should just allow all of it. No implementation is perfect, but I do think my place of residence (Germany) does reasonably well.
I'm also frequently the target of hate speech and a cult that wants to see people like me eliminated from society exists freely on Twitter, but that is not down to it being impossible to moderate them, that's because moderation on Twitter is an uncoordinated afterthought executed by an overworked and underpaid workforce that does not get nuance. For instance, I'm regularly told to "join the 41%". That's code for "trans people that attempt suicide". Twitter doesn't care.
>I feel very okay about hate speech laws, if they're reasonable.
Well I don't know what to tell you, because one way to describe what happened to you is that twitter removed an account that uses hate speech. What you said can easily be interpreted as "kill yourself", and if you think that's silly because it's a newspaper and not an individual, I would agree. But that is the "slippery slope" that you seem to dismiss while being a victim of it.
edit:
>I'm also frequently the target of hate speech and a cult that wants to see people like me eliminated from society exists freely on Twitter
Another question for my curious mind - do you know what BNWO stands for?
You missed the entire point of "I am okay with moderating hate speech if done with the sufficient nuance" despite me providing two very different instances of that not happening leading to a bad outcomes - one with too much interference and with with lack thereof.
And no, I have no interest in fetish race play terminology? Or are you being serious? Sorry, but last I checked the GC cult had actual backing by russian dark money and conservative think tanks like Heritage[1] while black fascism exists mostly in the minds of few right wingers.
So It sounds like you are conflating this with other platform discrimination issues, perhaps Twitter banning people after repeated misinformation (1) or banking and infrastructure platforms banning N*zis (2) (it's important to note that banking platforms also often ban sex workers and the platforms they use).
In the first case, that is banning people for actions that they take directly on their platform that goes against terms of service. Great, easy, we know that that a private business can set rules for their own platform.
For the second, I think its reasonable that a company might be cautious allowing certain groups to actively fundraise and recruit if they demonstrate a direct harm to others (hate groups with militias).
For this case of Doordash x Sex Workers, the case is a lot less defensible. If true, this would mean that Doordash is extending their terms of service to include off site activity. This does raise some red flags... but from case (2), we know that that can be defensible if A) that action hurts others and B) if the service used directly aids in those acts.
A) Consensual Sex Work is not harmful, and the moral panic around it is probably more harmful than the act itself and B) Doordash does not directly aid in the operation of Sex Work... So yeah I think some outrage around this is warranted if it is true.
For someone who is at the "UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry", there is a startling lack of desire to provide details to the allegations. In all the tweets and associated articles, just the claim is being made, along with statements like "I literally have a PhD I know what I'm talking about", and "this consistent disbelief by other ppl/workers/researchers is imo our biggest obstacle. not only do ppl not believe us when we share how we’re treated, they don’t believe that the conditions for that treatment exist in the first place."
That may be because no supporting details are provided...
I remember a Douglas Adams book (one of the hitchhiker's guide books I think, but I can't remember which one) that had a planet where every inhabitant broadcast their thoughts ESP style, so the planet started playing loud music everywhere to drown out each other's thoughts because they were so horrified to find out what everybody else had been thinking.
Of course, it was a funny Douglas Adams throwaway joke, but it got me thinking - if we could actual hear each other's thoughts, would we be horrified or relieved to find out how many people were actually thinking the same things we were thinking? Maybe rather than blocking out each other's thoughts, maybe we'd suddenly get to be more reasonable about each other's thoughts.
The internet is slowly creating a world where we're discovering that a lot of the things that we assumed were pretty rare and unusual are... actually pretty common. We can either insist on going back to pretending that the world is a certain way that TV has been presenting it for decades, or start to collectively become a lot more reasonable about how the world actually is.
The internet is slowly creating a world where we're discovering that a lot of the things that we assumed were pretty rare and unusual are... actually pretty common.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're ok. For example, imagine being an attractive woman and thought-hearing "my god look at those tits" every single time you walk into a room. Frankly I'd rather the whole world not sound like 4chan.
It's good thing that we can't thought-hear then because 4chan is a hell of a lot closer to "what's going on inside people's minds" than polite society.
The premise that reading someone else's thought would be horrifying to the point where you would stop loving or respecting them dates at least to Young Goodman Brown, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not very long / worth a read.
so reading between the lines, it appears that they have the capacity to have banned her for whoring but there doesn't appear to be any 'smoking gun' connection. I'm a little torn. I've seen lots of complaints "XYZ banned me for NO REASON", but when it gets dug into it turns out there were lots of reasons, but on the other hand the smokescreen that Door Dash (and other companies!) give themselves by stating vague "violations of our terms of service.." combined with their capacity to actually do this makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don't know what to think, but I figured others might also be looking for proof.
It's a shame that so many on both sides wold be happy to impose their will on others.
It's also a shame that 330 million of us are trying to sort this out through mass media, under the influence of multinational corporations and power addicted politicians. Not working so well.
"It has come to our attention that you were a keynote speaker for the 2021 American Renaissance Conference earlier this month in Tennessee. Airbnb's community policies prohibit people who are members of or actively associate with known hate groups."
You know, it reaaally weakens your position when you try and sweep "racist, white supremecist, white nationalist organization" under the word 'controversial'. Pineapple on pizza is controversial. A UBI is controversial. White nationalism isn't, it goes with all the social mores we don't allow in public, like defecation. Or is that 'controversial' too?
The person in question here probably didn't get banned for being a sex worker.
The actual reason is fairly easily understood by examining the second tweet of the original chain. She tried to order DoorDash for someone in LA that she was fundraising for whilst she herself is in New York City (her bio states she works for the New York University).
My guess is that the mismatch of her geolocation versus the place she ordered at triggered an anti-abuse algorithm and disabled the account "just in case".
Mind you that she also openly opposed trying to figure anything out from the support (apparently contacting DoorDash' PR account through DMs is "doxxing her to DoorDash", which y'know is weird since she already was a customer at DoorDash) and seems to be golden hammering the reason based on her own professions (when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail).
For their part, DoorDash has openly said that they don't give a damn to the DailyDot and that her refusal to try and talk with DoorDash is the only real hindrance to them doing something about it: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dominatrix-banned-from-doorda...
Can someone help me understand what caused Doordash to block the account? The title says "cross platform surveillance" but the ban message says they noticed issues on their own account.
I call bs. It's far more likely that the card or email was flagged for chargeback history, the account was abusing customer support (saying items were missing, etc.), you showed up somewhere else doing fraud (e.g., your email was found in a fraudster message board, you were card cashing, you were using stolen gift cards), or any number of things. There's zero reason to believe it's because this person is sex worker without further evidence. This is all just speculation.
I bet she was going to several different houses and ordering food. Some algorithm probably saw that as fraud since most people probably only have one or two locations where they order food to.
Say I'm a worker working in different homes/buildings on a daily basis like an HVAC tech or plumber and use doordash to deliver food to the job site. How is that fraud?
Or are they discriminating by time thinking no "legit" work happens door to door after 5pm save for people doing unpopular things?
What's the most likely explanation? Addresses of hostels raising a red flag because of past abuse, and most companies do just that. What does "sex workers" or "cross-platform surveillance" have to do with it? From what I can gather, nothing, it being an unsubstantiated twitter thread.
143 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread(Yes, I read the thread and how she had the food sent to another place, that could've been the triggering event for the algorithm.)
She should just list her place on AirBnB and it would probably be sorted.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostel
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothel
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/report-airbnb-owns-ai-tech-...
https://nitter.net/MistressSnowPhD/status/151105231271802880...
Neither does tweeting that you won a presidential election but here we are.
The point being made isn't that this is okay behavior. The point being made is that people should be honest with why they're against or for something rather than pretending to appeal to some more basic moral/political/civic reason.
(The deeper point is that some on the left and on the right are okay with censorship/deplatforming/refusal of service in specific situations because it was only happening to the people on "the other side". When in reality these are universal negatives and absolutely WILL be applied to your side as well once they become the norm.)
Wether consensual sex work is good or bad, it’s clear to me that discriminating against victims of human trafficking is a terrible idea. Those people need to be saved from their abusive circumstances. Using the panopticon to ban them from everything only hurts them more.
There is a big difference between saying "This is bad and this company should stop doing it" and "This is bad and the government should step in".
This is made worse, because most people don't even bother to propose a solution and just say "this is bad!" leaving others to fight over the implications of the incomplete thought.
My point is rather that most people don't even bother making a coherent criticism. "This is bad and I think they should update their policy" is a vastly more constructive position than "this is bad"
Isn't that massively debatable?
Even if you find someone that says yeah I want to do this - what in their background/life story pushed them into that and made it what they "want"
Of course! Anything is massively debatable, if you want to be unreasonable enough about it. I've had discussions with people who were on the pro side of the "slavery debate", which is a thing apparently, and then tell me off using woke language to stay in my lane.
But, yes, all anti-sexwork positions must begin and with the premise and insist that the sexworker does not really have agency. Not really a reasonable perspective, no matter how cleverly you try to twist it.
I am a victim of my middle class upbringing that made me want to be highly compensated and do white collar work.
I especially dislike this unthinking and unconsidered memeing of sex work because it only serves to normalize the profession and has a net-deleterious effect on society.
Not trying to be snarky here, and I'm not mounting a defense for complete prohibition of prostitution and the varying types of sex work, I'm just terrified by the increasing acceptability of the work in common society: I want little girls to have engineers and doctors as role models instead of being prodded into sex work by virtue of its encroaching and increasing presence and exposure, a trade that obliges (commonly) the woman to invest their time pleasing men, a trade that has diminishing returns overtime as they age. Leaving aside the mountain of studies that pinpoint poverty as root of most sex work the continents across the globe and related psychological issues brought on by the experiences later on, if you cannot accept earlier-stated premise, then I reckon we come from differing views and further debate on this forum on this subject will likely be fruitless.
Off topic, but congratulations, you've just found an example of why the phrase "trust the experts/science" is not a good argument!
One of the few fallacies that stops being a fallacy if your science checks out. Which it doesn't here.
Nobody wants their kids to grow up and do sex work, no matter how progressive they claim to be. So yes, there is a clear difference.
And unlike a lot of low end service jobs, some people actually seem to enjoy doing sex work and make a much more reasonable wage.
It's just odd to see an attractive western woman advocating for "sex work" because she made a killing on onlyfans from her bedroom. That is not the reality of most sex workers!
Work that alleviates the hardships of poverty is a good thing. This is a positive good, not a mark against sex work. Same with other low skill jobs with low barriers of entry.
Is that not to become a victim?
edit - the intense support for prostitution on HN (mostly computer programmers) will never cease to make me smile.
Essentially, there's no case in which cheating is not "wrong." There's many where prostitution isn't.
Great. Let's legalize selling yourself into slavery while we're at it.
> Morality is not universal, so yours has no more value than anyone else's.
Morality is universal, it's not mine though.
This is a non-sequitur. A slave, does not have autonomy. Nothing in the parent comment supports slavery. You're trying to draw a false equivalence between consensual sex work and slavery.
> [it's] support for any person to have autonomy of their body in whichever way they see fit, including making a living by selling access to it to other people
There's simply no way you can claim that doesn't include selling yourself into slavery. Not a false equivalence and an extremely common practice around most of the world until recently. Usually you were paid after your term of slavery terminated.
I understand why you're shocked. You just realized that you support slavery. The good thing is that you can change your mind and come around to not supporting the exchange of human bodies for money.
I think you're arguing in very bad faith here. I do not condone slavery, but yes, I condone the right of people to sell themselves into slavery. I'm not sure why you would perceive these two things as not* different, but nuance is very important when thinking about stuff. Let me ask again: are you sure you're not being blinded by your biases?
edit: actually making sense this time.
You just admitted that you support legalizing slavery! Okay, fair enough, you're not encouraging people to become slaves. And it would involve voluntary sale of oneself into slavery. But I was fairly close to the mark.
Also, questions have to be asked: if a man is poor, is he really voluntarily selling himself into slavery?
> Let me ask again: are you sure you're not being blinded by your biases?
Perhaps it is "bias" that is keeping me from supporting the legalization of slavery. Or perhaps it's something else. I'm going with something else.
Well:
> You just admitted that you support legalizing slavery
I have also admitted that I support abortion, assisted suicide, sex work and probably some other unsavory things that you can think of. I'm not sure why when I say "full autonomy over their bodies" you fixated on just the one.
For the second time, slavery by definition means depriving someone of autonomy. This directly contradicts what the comment supports. The comment directly opposes slavery, because it deprives people of autonomy.
This kind of false equivalence between consensual sex and slavery is going to take this conversation nowhere.
Read the rest of the thread. That commenter already admitted they support legalizing slavery.
Supporting absolute autonomy clearly means supporting selling yourself into slavery. How could it not? Part of autonomy is choosing when and for what duration to surrender it.
Who's is it then: Jesus, Budda, Kali, Jahveh, Mohamed, Musk, Thor, Ganesh, Gates, Bernie?
I don't mean to be an asshole, but even if you are religious (which I take you are) you can't fault people that find moral relativism a worthy concept when there are so many points of view between different religions. And I understand that "faith" strips relativism from your own belief, but you beeing someone that posts on HN, you probably understand that not everyone can say the same thing and it's a little rude to not even acknowledge that.
I don't know. We should keep asking though.
I would say that your comment:
> Morality is not universal, so yours has no more value than anyone else's.
is much "ruder" than mine:
> Morality is universal, it's not mine though.
It does.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vlJ80i...
>However, it is economically nonsensical for a consumer to buy a commodity in the market if a qualitatively identical ‘product’ is freely available to him in the domestic sphere.
Clearly sex with a prostitute is not the same as sex with a lover. How does Marxist thought deal with the pricing of a good like a painting? Are they all worth the time put into them?
> if the sexual acts are the same, what is the difference which compels men to pay for sex which they could feasibly access through personal, private relationships?
This glaringly ignores transaction costs and availability on demand. If a man only wants sex, there is an enormous cost to obtain it via private relationships.
I think is it silly to carve out sex as different and sacred, and the one thing that cant be bought and sold.
Anything that can be changed (like a job) is not considered a protected class.
Furthermore, companies are allowed to discriminate on aspects of religion/culture - not allowing time for prayers, requiring certain dress code, e.t.c.
In other news, the State Department announced the release of passports with “x” as the gender.
This isn't universally true.
E.g. pregnancy is a protected class under many laws.
Religion is a frequent one, too.
And in e.g. California, political affiliation is one.
I think that falls under "health" in OP's post.
Please explain your reasoning.
So was slavery, but we don't pretend that past moral failings should make us question our modern moral understanding, as you have just suggested we do for sex work.
Yet another "they're so vulnerable, let's re-order society" push that throws around all of the right buzzwords (vulnerable, discrimination) but fails to make any real sense in a broader context.
If you want to protect sex workers then legalize and tax it
Yes, obviously we need to stop making consensual sex a crime. But that alone won't protect a type of worker that is obviously at a higher risk than food works, which is a nonsensical comparison.
Yes, so simple. Let DoorDash not deliver to minority neighborhoods for a few weeks, and observe the simplicity.
Sex workers aren't a protected class, but that doesn't mean customers have to like it or shut-up about it.
Similarly, McDonald's is private company and can decide to go 100% vegan. That doesn't mean the customers have to like it.
The solutions are simple, complain to the company, tell others, and take your money elsewhere
It was highlighting the complete and utter hypocrisy in causes people argue for.
It highlights how people care more for their side winning, rather than the principle itself.
It is exhausting to see all these attacks against hypothetical and hypocrit straw men. "people argue this" and "people care about that", with no concrete examples for meaningful discussion
You’re telling me you are unfamiliar with people arguing that private companies can do as they please when somebody they don’t like gets canceled, then decry free speech restrictions when their side gets the axe?
You seriously want references? Go on twitter.
That's my point. If I go on twitter, I can find people arguing every conceivable combination of arguments. I'm sure many are hypocritical.
In this context, neither the twitter post or the replies I saw were calling for government intervention.
I just think it is a bizarre social phenomenon to criticize and in this case find schadenfreude in a hypothetical reaction. It is the political equivalent of shouting out into the night because you know some is out there, and laughing that you scared them off.
"Im sure someone out has this hypocritical take, and boy do they look stupid"
2 phones.
Their reporting and review is so bad, I once received a 7 day ban for telling a newspaper to "cease existing" (exact words, probably banworthy had they been aimed at an actual person, but well, wishing bankruptcy on a newspaper isn't exactly the same).
edit: I also just find it very odd and disappointing that so many on the left are so eager to defend the "rights" of massive multinational corporations. As someone who used to be proud to call myself a democrat, what the hell is that about???
>Their reporting and review is so bad, I once received a 7 day ban for telling a newspaper to "cease existing" (exact words, probably banworthy had they been aimed at an actual person, but well, wishing bankruptcy on a newspaper isn't exactly the same).
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about hate speech laws?
I'm also frequently the target of hate speech and a cult that wants to see people like me eliminated from society exists freely on Twitter, but that is not down to it being impossible to moderate them, that's because moderation on Twitter is an uncoordinated afterthought executed by an overworked and underpaid workforce that does not get nuance. For instance, I'm regularly told to "join the 41%". That's code for "trans people that attempt suicide". Twitter doesn't care.
Well I don't know what to tell you, because one way to describe what happened to you is that twitter removed an account that uses hate speech. What you said can easily be interpreted as "kill yourself", and if you think that's silly because it's a newspaper and not an individual, I would agree. But that is the "slippery slope" that you seem to dismiss while being a victim of it.
edit:
>I'm also frequently the target of hate speech and a cult that wants to see people like me eliminated from society exists freely on Twitter
Another question for my curious mind - do you know what BNWO stands for?
And no, I have no interest in fetish race play terminology? Or are you being serious? Sorry, but last I checked the GC cult had actual backing by russian dark money and conservative think tanks like Heritage[1] while black fascism exists mostly in the minds of few right wingers.
[1]: https://xtramagazine.com/power/far-right-feminist-fascist-22...
In the first case, that is banning people for actions that they take directly on their platform that goes against terms of service. Great, easy, we know that that a private business can set rules for their own platform.
For the second, I think its reasonable that a company might be cautious allowing certain groups to actively fundraise and recruit if they demonstrate a direct harm to others (hate groups with militias).
For this case of Doordash x Sex Workers, the case is a lot less defensible. If true, this would mean that Doordash is extending their terms of service to include off site activity. This does raise some red flags... but from case (2), we know that that can be defensible if A) that action hurts others and B) if the service used directly aids in those acts.
A) Consensual Sex Work is not harmful, and the moral panic around it is probably more harmful than the act itself and B) Doordash does not directly aid in the operation of Sex Work... So yeah I think some outrage around this is warranted if it is true.
That may be because no supporting details are provided...
Of course, it was a funny Douglas Adams throwaway joke, but it got me thinking - if we could actual hear each other's thoughts, would we be horrified or relieved to find out how many people were actually thinking the same things we were thinking? Maybe rather than blocking out each other's thoughts, maybe we'd suddenly get to be more reasonable about each other's thoughts.
The internet is slowly creating a world where we're discovering that a lot of the things that we assumed were pretty rare and unusual are... actually pretty common. We can either insist on going back to pretending that the world is a certain way that TV has been presenting it for decades, or start to collectively become a lot more reasonable about how the world actually is.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're ok. For example, imagine being an attractive woman and thought-hearing "my god look at those tits" every single time you walk into a room. Frankly I'd rather the whole world not sound like 4chan.
A commenter here dug up https://www.inputmag.com/culture/report-airbnb-owns-ai-tech-...
so reading between the lines, it appears that they have the capacity to have banned her for whoring but there doesn't appear to be any 'smoking gun' connection. I'm a little torn. I've seen lots of complaints "XYZ banned me for NO REASON", but when it gets dug into it turns out there were lots of reasons, but on the other hand the smokescreen that Door Dash (and other companies!) give themselves by stating vague "violations of our terms of service.." combined with their capacity to actually do this makes it difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don't know what to think, but I figured others might also be looking for proof.
AirBnB will ban you from using their platform if you attend conferences that are controversial if they can find your name/info.
It's also a shame that 330 million of us are trying to sort this out through mass media, under the influence of multinational corporations and power addicted politicians. Not working so well.
We don't respect each other at these scales.
IDK, I'd have banned them too.
The actual reason is fairly easily understood by examining the second tweet of the original chain. She tried to order DoorDash for someone in LA that she was fundraising for whilst she herself is in New York City (her bio states she works for the New York University).
My guess is that the mismatch of her geolocation versus the place she ordered at triggered an anti-abuse algorithm and disabled the account "just in case".
Mind you that she also openly opposed trying to figure anything out from the support (apparently contacting DoorDash' PR account through DMs is "doxxing her to DoorDash", which y'know is weird since she already was a customer at DoorDash) and seems to be golden hammering the reason based on her own professions (when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail).
For their part, DoorDash has openly said that they don't give a damn to the DailyDot and that her refusal to try and talk with DoorDash is the only real hindrance to them doing something about it: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dominatrix-banned-from-doorda...
Silicon Valley, if your tech is so good, then why do you need to spy on me?
Or are they discriminating by time thinking no "legit" work happens door to door after 5pm save for people doing unpopular things?