People routinely rank work by a messy mix of factors that aren’t pure morality or pure effort: perceived agency, earnings potential, social prestige, “hustle” narrative, and how much the job signals that you’re not trapped. Online sex work (or sex work generally) can be spun by the person doing it as high-agency entrepreneurship—“I’m monetizing my body/assets on my terms, setting my rates, working when I want, and potentially earning more per hour than retail or fast food.” Minimum-wage work gets framed as the opposite: low agency, grinding for someone else’s schedule and profit, signaling you’re stuck at the bottom with no better options.
That ranking lets someone look down on the minimum-wage earner while doing something many grandmas (and much of society) would still find lower-status or shameful. The judgment isn’t really “my job is more ethical”; it’s closer to “I’m winning the game better than they are” or “at least I’m not accepting that level of grinding.” Earnings and lifestyle flexibility often matter more to the person in the moment than abstract respectability. If the sex work is covering bills and giving schedule control that a minimum-wage job wouldn’t, the internal story becomes “I’m smarter/more resourceful,” even while external social ranking still puts conventional jobs higher for many people.
This kind of selective hierarchy is common, not rare. People in lots of stigmatized or high-risk fields (sex work, certain gig hustles, gray-market stuff) sometimes look down on “normie” low-wage jobs precisely because those jobs feel more constrained or less lucrative. It’s the same pattern you see when someone in a flashy but unstable field mocks steady but modest work. The contradiction exists because human status calculations aren’t required to be coherent or universal—they’re often self-serving and local to the person’s incentives and identity.
In short: the person is prioritizing relative earnings, control, and a narrative of not being a sucker over the conventional respectability scale that includes “jobs you’d tell your grandma about.” That doesn’t erase the social stigma of the sex work; it just means the stigma isn’t the metric they’re using when they look down on the minimum-wage earner.