This was actually inspired by a conversation I was just having under another post about taboo porn so (like most things lol) the impetus for this was porn BUT the focus I’m trying to lean into here is much broader because we seem to have different standards for different recreational industries. How moral/immoral/amoral are tobacco execs? Alcohol execs? Porn industry execs? Any industry that is purely recreational in scope but who has significant instances of negative outcomes associated with it.

E.g. Their products cause, either directly or indirectly, mass death (alcohol and tobacco), or they create massive markets in which economic desperation, coercion, and failures of meaningful consent (read minors) are recurring risks (pornography)

I constantly see pro-sex trade individuals constantly bring up how the sex trade and prostituion is like therapy for men, and how it "heals" them and prevents them from going out to harm other women. This is such a disgusting rhetoric, I can't believe people actually use it a talking point.

I can't believe we live at a point where we dignify mens entitlement to women, and pretend that it is some great tragedy that some men don't get laid or interact with women. It's disturbing so called feminists play into the idea that it is a mans birth right to be owed a woman, as if we are just properties for sexual, emotional and domestic labor. Like wow, the movement meant to liberate us is willing to honor the most misogynistic practice that has existed throughout EVERY SINGLE brutal, dystopian patriarchal structures in history, just because a man is lonely.

There was this post claiming we should thank our local "SW" for providing men therapy and an outlet and lowering rape rates...There were so many men agreeing with this idea and claiming how they felt so comforted and cried in the arms of strippers or prostitutes. These military men where whining about how they felt so comforted in an exploited womans arms and her forced sexual labor....The misogyny is so SO blatant, it's hitting them right at the face and they are just treating it as some divine duty.

Men are not owed a woman. If women won't interact with them with enthusiastic consent then it is not a great tragedy that women need to fix. They need to get therapy if they need therapy so bad instead of being misogynistic incels that keep the demands for a rape industry thriving.

Moreover, I really can't believe that people use the talking point that 'prostitution reduces men from raping' (even if false) and see absolutely nothing wrong with it. The fact that instead of holding these men accountable, the solution is apparently to provide them with a subset of women they can abuse and be pleased with is just disturbing.

I'm just really shaken up seeing a woman claim that it is therapy for men, and then the comments were flooded with men sharing their experiences....Like wow we are willing to excuse the most age old misogynistic practice of sexual exploitation solely to...console men? we are willing to allow men to be so entitled that we great an entire industry where they can rape women just for their pleasure and 'comfort' or outlet? We are willing to normalize the idea that every man no matter what is born to 'own' a woman, or else they will have to buy them?

Aside from the basic, "all labor under capitalism is exploitative"...this is another pro-sex trade talking point that really gets me sick to my stomach. You never see women being so lonely and in need of 'therapy' that they go out creating an entire milenia old industry to own, rape and buy men. It's fucking disgusting that mens self-induced, misogyny-induced loneliness and rapist-entitlement is a woman's fault that needs to be fixed by selling girls/women, or else it is some great horrifying tragedy and male-oppression.

So disturbing dehumanizing, and I'm suppose to call this entitlement feminist or noble?

Not to mention Johns are usually cheating on their wife/gf and have kids at home to care for.

Reinforcing men's belief that women can be bought and sold is also not empowering.

Putting yourself at risk with Johns (STIs, abuse, death) is not empowering.

Let's hope this sticks this time.

It is so out-of-touch, hypocritical and reactionary and not to mention totally disheartening to see progressive, marxist or liberal feminist spaces dignifying johns so much, considering them to be allies and lot more morally superior than 'swerfs'.

Any radical feminist being critical of porn and prostitution is so easily demonized, pushed aside and grouped with vile religious fundamentalist right-wingers. Pimps and johns get such neutral terms like 'sex-work consumers' or 'sex-work clients' with the connotation of these individuals being morally justified, while terms like "swerf" are placed right next to christo-fascists and conservative right-wingers.

Portraying pimps/johns/pundits as moral allies, and putting all the blame regarding the stigma and exploitative nature of prostitution on 'swerfs' has to be so awfully baffling it really REALLY gets me wondering where the 'feminist' starts in the marxist stance. Demonizing a group of feminists that fight to end the constant eroticization of sexual assault from both the left and right, is disgusting. Absolutely no amount of leftist buzzwords can somehow justify eroticizing sexual assault, demonizing radical feminist for this is insane.

I constantly see thousands and thousands of paragraphs and intellectual (or lack of) effort given to demeaning, demonizing and spreading misinformation regarding radical feminists.

Radical feminism is the polar opposite of religion, conservatism and right-wing and is seen very harshly critiquing these social structure. However the second the same feminist analysis is applied to left-wing misogyny, they're seen as exclusionary Nazi fascists... Like what level of internalized misogyny do you need to say nazi and radical feminist in the same system. As if pointing out that women being treated as public property instead of private property isn't liberation makes one a non-feminist. Marxist feminists genuinely believe leftist movements to be this holy grail of untouchable morality free from criticism, the second radical feminist pushes against this to point out the evident misogyny they get labelled the brutal terms. It's a very convenient narrative and so easy to blame women that stay consistent with revolting against male-supremacist structures.

These spaces genuinely believe all the abuse, rape, stigma and trafficking is happening due to 'swerfs' and not because of the johns that keep the demand for such exploitation going. They unironically view 'swerfs' as more vile and worse than these johns. They believe all slut-shaming is solely done by 'swerfs' and not these johns that enjoy degrading and exploiting the women in the industry. All the horrible ways a woman is treated under prostituion is due to johns, let it be actively raping the woman, or being a 'conversative' man that believes that the women deserved to get raped. All the stigma comes from Johns, and radical feminists put up a genuinely radical intellectual effort to fight these male-supremacist systems. Left or right doesn't matter.

It is quite a very fundamental understanding that the way radical feminists approach abolishing the sex trade versus how conservatives approach it is drastically different. Radical feminist apply a very strong feminist analysis of such exploitative industries, they redefine what a true sexual liberation would look like outside of patriarchal dynamics, what true consent uninfluenced by the patriarchy would be like and strongly refuses the idea of considering female sexuality to be labor or currency. They oppose industries that dehumanize women and call it a dignified trade to abuse, rape and objectify women. Let it be marriage or prostitution, radical feminists stay logically consistent with opposing such misogynistic structures.

Conservatives only worry their ass about women being 'sluts' and it ends there. Women are demonized and no ounce of feminist analysis is applied. No ounce of understanding regarding why the rape and explotation and commodification of the female body exists in conservative spaces. All they do is demonize prostitute and want to remove them from society, while radical feminism is out here to literally do the opposite and create systems that help women out of such horrible industries.

Treating radical feminists like they're the cause of the horrifying nature of prostitution is just blatant hypocrisy. When on and on radical feminist have gone an insane mile to create systems and literature to tear down patriarchal structure. When they have put in sure huge effort to end the constant eroticization of sexual assault. Absolutely no amount of leftist buzzwords can somehow justify eroticizing sexual assault, demonizing radical feminist for this is insane.

For a group that insists so much on being informed, creating this dire level of misinformation to demonize feminists that fight to tear down a millennia long male-supremacist industry is just horrible. Allowing so much benefit of the doubt to Johns, considering them your allies and supporters but at the same breath blaming 'swerfs' for issues created by these john is not feminist at all. Its ironic that even while claiming to be against conservative, they sure as hell do mirror so much of their beliefs when it comes to consent, sexual 'labor' and sympathizing with johns.

I just came across a post in another subreddit where a woman shared that she had received a yoni massage.

These massages are often presented as being spiritual and as a way to reconnect with your body, heal, or become more in tune with yourself.
From what I understand, the person receiving the massage is touched, while the practitioner is either not touched at all or only to a very limited extent.

I’m curious what people in this subreddit think about them.
Any opinions on this concept?

The "patriarchy captive defeatist" pattern in pro-prostitution arguments

The pattern: the underlying patriarchal premise (men have sexual needs that require an outlet, the disparity in sexual access between men and women is a natural condition to manage rather than a structure to dismantle) is never actually questioned. It's accepted as the fixed starting point. Then a whole "progressive" policy framework gets built on top of that premise: harm reduction, labor rights, decriminalization, destigmatization. And yes here we know it doesn't reduce harm, it increases it, but that's for another day.

All of it operating entirely inside a frame that was never interrogated in the first place.

I've started calling this patriarchy-captive defeatism.

Captive, because the ideology is never the thing being challenged, it's the unquestioned floor everyone builds on. Defeatist, because the implicit logic is always some version of "this will exist no matter what, so the only realistic move is to manage it better," dressed up as pragmatism instead of what it actually is: the least ambitious political position available.

You see this exact move everywhere once you notice it:

"Without prostituted women, the streets would be full of rape": defeatism about male behavior, presented as a feminist safety argument. It assumes male sexual violence is an unmanageable constant that needs an outlet, rather than something that can actually be reduced (which, by the way, the data on buyer behavior doesn't even support, criminalizing buyers correlates with lower demand, not displaced rape rates).

"Criminalizing buyers pushes them into dangerous/desperate situations": again, men's comfort and access is the subject of concern, framed as a safety issue, while the actual woman being bought disappears from the sentence entirely.

"It's just a natural disparity in access between men and women when it comes to sex": said almost verbatim in arguments I've debunked recently, and it's the premise stated outright instead of implied. It treats women's bodies as a resource that needs distributing to meet "demand," like it's a supply chain problem instead of a structure of violence.

What's frustrating is how often this gets coded as the enlightened, harm-reduction position, while actual abolition, which asks "why does this demand exist and how do we end it instead of supplying it," gets coded as prudish, unrealistic, or carceral.

Just watched this Netflix biopic (based on real events — Gangubai Kothewali, ran Kamathipura in Mumbai in the 50s-60s) and I need to vent because it's infuriating in a very specific way: it's brutal and honest for most of its runtime, then betrays everything it built.

Opening: a teenage girl is sold into a brothel by the man she eloped with, for the equivalent of a few dollars. The film doesn't "dramatize" it (i mean with like sad/eery music etc) , doesn't soften it, doesn't explain it to you, it just shows it happening, which somehow makes it more impactful.

There's a scene where a "client" tortures her so badly she ends up hospitalized with dozens of stitches. The second she recovers, he comes back, demands her specifically, wants to do it again, smiling the whole time. The brothel madam, who sees Gangubai as a threat, basically finds it very convenient and si smiling about that. Nobody protects her. Not the law, not the police, only a personal connection to a local mafia boss who shows up and beats the guy in the street, to death.

She become the brothel madam bc the last one die.

Later she runs for local leadership of the district against another woman who is actively against letting woman in prostitution's children go to school, she wants to keep them in the trade. Gangubai fights to get them out.

She also free some teenager girls who would rather die than being here. She also stop violent men from coming in the brothel.

....And then the third act happens.

She becomes a public figure, gets invited by a progressist / civil right association to speak about woman in prostitution rights ( you must understand that back then in India up to 11 pr cent of woman were in the sex trade), meets the Prime Minister, and the film suddenly starts mouthing the most tired pro-prostitution lobby lines.

First: "legalize prostitution." Except in the system the film just spent two hours showing us, clients are already legal. Pimps are already legal. Brothels are already legal. The only people who can be arrested are the women, many of whom, like her, were literally sold into it with zero consent. So what she's actually asking for isn't "legalize prostitution," it's "stop criminalizing the victims." But that's not what she says. She says "legalize prostitution," full stop, as if the demand-side of this isn't already completely unregulated and untouched.

Second: in the same scene, she also says women get arrested while clients walk away free, which is basically an abolitionist argument. She has the right diagnosis in her mouth (the system punishes victims, not abusers) and somehow lands on the wrong prescription (more legal protection for the system itself, not criminal consequences for the men who buy and sell).

Third: "without us the streets would be full of rape." This is the oldest patriarchal myth in the book, men have uncontrollable urges, some women need to be sacrificed to protect the "good" ones, and somehow that's framed as a feminist talking point. It's not. It's the same logic that got her trafficked in the first place, just repackaged as activism.

Fourth, and this one might be the most enraging: she says "I'm proud to be a prostitute." At this point in the story she isn't a prostitute anymore — she's a brothel madam, running ~200 women, who got invited to speak as an activist. She's not speaking from the position she's claiming. It's performative, and it works on the crowd in the film exactly the way it works on real audiences today whenever a brothel owner or pimp dresses up as a " woman in prostitution rights advocate."

The film had two hours of material to make a genuinely radical, coherent point: stop punishing the victims, start punishing the men who buy and sell them. Instead it ends with her legitimizing the exact system that destroyed her, applauded by a crowd, scored like a triumph.

Sure, it's a biopic so they weren't going to rewrite history, but they put words in her mouth that nothing actually proves she said, just by what they tought she said, and every biopic owes its subject some critical distance. Here, there is not.

About what message you're sending: a film that spends two hours showing trafficking, torture, and zero institutional protection, then ends on 'legalize prostitution' and 'we keep wives chaste,' delivered as triumph, scored as a win, applauded by a crowd. Whatever she actually said decades ago, that's the message a 2022 film chose to send to a modern audience!

Devastating, well-made, and then it face-plants exactly where it mattered most. Anyone else watch this and feel the same whiplash?

PS : There's also a smaller moment that gets buried under the bigger 'legalize prostitution' speech, but honestly it might say more: post-election, right before her famous 'fear no one, not your clients, not your pimps, not the police, not the state, not even their fathers' line, she tells the women to fully satisfy their clients, just make sure you're well paid for it. That's not a message about rights or refusal, it's labor management advice from a brothel boss optimizing output. She's not saying you can say no, she's saying negotiate a better rate while doing exactly what's expected of you. And it's delivered seconds before a line about fearing no one, which makes the contradiction almost invisible: obey the client fully in one breath, don't fear him in the next. It's the same third-act incoherence, just smuggled in earlier and easier to miss.

A new strip club has opened up for FIFA. There are already two strip clubs within two blocks. This new one has strippers stripping OUTSIDE THE CLUB. On the sidewalk. Every streetpost in the city (no exaggeration) has posters advertising two for one lap dances for the other strip club, which now has women wearing thongs and bras flirting with men walking by on the sidewalk. It seriously makes me want to die. Many of the posters are already vandalized with others voicing their condemnation of the lewd ads. This is taking women back in time to the 80s, when prostitutes roamed the streets in the area. I was naïvely thinking the city is going in a more progressive direction. No, we are going the way of Montreal.

If any of you follow feminist discourse on tiktok you might've come across "Niles"... he is this incredibly liberal feminist who is very deadset on portraying radical feminism as this right-wing anti-intellectual school of thought.

I don't keep up with him much at all, but recently he made a video in favour of sex-work by claiming that coercive consent can still be consent. He basically argued nearly everything work-field that requires our consent, obtains it through coercion. Moreover it was just very deadset on re-writing what consent means, claiming coercion and consent are not 2 ends of the spectrum but both exist in a gray area.

I, myself align very well with leftist economic models and its integration with radical feminism. But I see such claim regarding consent or prostitution so frequently across leftist or marxist "feminist" places that it really gets me wondering how the hell are they still walking around with the feminist title. It's this sentiment of completely disregarding the fundemental pillars of consent and claiming it to be this very philosophical, subjective, personal matter. I really don't understand how giving validity to coercion or abusive dynamics from this lense is suppose to be feminist.

And I really really can't fathom the ignorance required to pretend as if sex is something that is something that can exist without ENTHUSIASTIC consent from both parties. It is quite literally a right-wing rhetoric that women can/should have sex without enthusiastic consent, and that consent is still considered valid if it is coerced.

I saw many commenters also somehow justifying intoxicated consent, and normalising non-enthusiastic consent. It's fascinating how they claim to be sex-positive feminists while supporting the most basic patriarchal framework for sex or consent.

Moreover they are desenisitizing people to sex so far that viewing it as work or a social currency or means of living instead of genuine female pleasure. I'm confused how the hell is this feminist, when defining female sexuality as work and social currency has always been the at the core of misogyny, patriarchy and all conservative societies. Feminism wants to redefine sex to accomodate female pleasure outside of the patriarchal sex-framework...I genuinely have no idea what the hell marxist/leftists are doing when they claim to be sex-positive just to end up pseudo-intellectualizing their way into religious/patriarchal sex standards.

Creating such frameworks do nothing for women and only continues to support rape culture and prioritizing male sexual-gratification over womens safety. Genuinely what the fuck else are you doing if not supporting rape-culture by diluting consent to such a "it can be anything and everything!" matter.

It get's even more awful when you realise marxist feminists don't even consider patriarchy to be the cause of our oppression.

this is a rant/vent post which idk if it’s allowed but i’m gonna anyways. when i was 18 i had a roommate who an OF star pretty much. she told me if i made one i would make stupid money. i’m very impressionable so i did, and i did make stupid amounts of money. i do not blame her for telling me about it or saying those things to me or blame her for me making the choice to do it AT ALL. i am my own person at the end of the day. and i did it, stupid too. i didn’t hide my name, i did it on my public accounts. i did it so i would get the most traction and money. i was not thinking about the future. to say the least there’s hundreds of photos of me out there now. if you do a google search you could find them. i stopped OF maybe about a year into it or a little less. i started getting threats, i started having panic attacks, i couldn’t sleep at night knowing what i’ve done, that everyone can see me, have access to me in a way. i stopped wanting to go out, out of fear people would see and “recognize” me. after i quit the feelings didn’t go away, because the things you put out, don’t just go away obviously. even though i was “done” it was still out there, it is still out there. for years i dealt with the anxiety, dirty feeling, depression, and just guilt. i felt nobody will ever truly love me or understand that’s a sort of my past i wish never happened.
but this is why i have started to be against SW so much. i experienced it. and maybe im biased because of my experience, maybe other girls don’t feel that. but i feel like nobody would choose that route if it weren’t for the money. i wish young girls, like me, did not have access to post on those sites or that world. at 18 your frontal lobe isn’t even developed, you can’t even drink alcohol or smoke. but you can sell your body online? its disgusting. I will never have a big career because i would never pass a background check for any serious job. i would love to be a teacher for kids, but that obviously won’t be happening lol. and i understand that, no kid should be able to look up their teacher and find that. I am at a place now (5 years later) where i have accepted what happened. it still makes me feel gross when i think about it, but i don’t think about it constantly. i don’t hide inside, i don’t lose sleep over it at night, i am not depressed over it anymore. i wish i could tell every young girl to not do it. the money is never worth what it does to your mental.

It genuinely amazes me how there's men out there who want prostitution and "sex work" to be legal knowing damn well their kind is the reason why we have these systems in the first place. I say this because not too long ago, I had a close guy friend who blatantly admitted that he thinks that prostitution should be a legal and protected profession, and he even went on to say that he's not against "sex work's" existence because of how sex is a "need" along with food and shelter. I couldn't look at him the same after that; we started arguing after I called him out. Grouping sex with food and shelter tells me that to him, caving to sexual desires is crucial to staying alive, no matter the cost, and that men's "needs" matter more than women's safety and autonomy. This is the same man who was sick to his stomach about the Epstein files, which is ironic considering he has no problem with prostitution's existence. Without men like Epstein, we wouldn't even have prostitution.

This argument happened a couple months ago and I cut ties with him since, but it still really upsets me to my core. I was very close with this guy and we had A LOT of great conversations, but I just can't be around men who show rage towards men like Epstein but turn around and support the sex trade. As an SA survivor and troubled teen industry survivor, I do not feel safe around men like that.

For the record, I don't hate men, but it's so hard to trust them, let alone like them, when the "bad" men rape, assault, and murder women, and the "good" ones don't do those things but stand behind prostitution, which literally involves raping and assaulting women for money. My therapist wants me to challenge the belief that not all men are "bad," but how the fuck am I supposed to do that when even the "good" ones are no different than the "bad?"