Quite right but it is still a choice, they at least have some agency. I'm not in any way attempting to downplay the awful situations we're discussing, but there is still a significant psychological difference between "I'm doing this to make my life and my families lives better" and "This is being done to me against my will for other peoples' benefit", is there not?
The line between consensual, coerced or exploited are sometimes vague but they are real. It's like the pornography line. It's vague, some things are grey, it's culturally contextual but it is a real line. people usually know it when they see it.
When extremely disempowered, poor and desperate people interact with much richer, more powerful people who see them as just a means to an end and are completely contemptuous of their humanity (their dignity, their desires..), we cannot call this agency. If a university teacher dates a student or a boss dates an employee, we view it with suspicion because we know that dynamic can be abusive, though it is not necessarily so.
Sometimes things are what they seem. Sometimes a name on a dotted line or other symbol of agency means nothing. If you find a dozen girls from rural moldova living in an Istanbul basement, making almost no money, ostracized by society and another group of people making the money and the decisions… I think it's prudent to assume what seems obvious.
I would argue that that 'Pornography line' is a very personal distinction you've made. Pornography still crosses the line into coerced and exploited. Read the firsthand accounts of women who have left the porn industry. Watch documentaries about people going into the porn industry. These are people who are desperate and taken advantage of, hurt and abused. I've seen a few statistics, but all of them have said that the average life expectancy of a porn performer is under 50, due to the high rates of suicide and drug abuse. I really don't see much grey there -- I don't think letting poor people sell their kidneys is moral, just like I don't think pornography is moral.
Completely agree with the rest of your post though.
There's a lot of muddy water here. Self-selection for one. Who knows whether the folks going into the business are already selected for an mtbf of 50?
'Desperate and taken advantage of' is a big category, and those folks often come to no great end. Its not a unique feature of this industry - heck even WalMart employees fit there. Cause and effect might be getting confused here.
However, Walmart employers do not offer their potential addict employees drugs before they go to work. They don't have them participate in labor that frequently compromises their ability to work with no effort to support them when this happens. The employees of Walmart have actual worker's rights and nearly universal standards of employment in this country, while Pornography, especially amateur pornography, has none of this.
The self-selection claim is not independent from the claim I'm making -- in fact I find them to be very correlated. You're getting a specific subset of people who are willing to do Pornography, most notably people who are desperate, potentially addicted/suicidal young women. Providing them this predatory avenue and calling it 'empowerment' is beyond unethical.
You're getting a specific subset of people who are willing to do Pornography, most notably people who are desperate, potentially addicted/suicidal young women.
A common trope, but highly dubious. The majority of women who enter pornography come from relatively stable or average backgrounds, and go in there through their own volition. Quite ironically, the more underground subcultures like S/M are disproportionate examples of this. Regular women who have taken up modeling and promote themselves in the scene, accepting it as their lifestyle.
It should be noted that "porn stars" and plain old "models" intersect a lot. Many of the former also belong to the latter, and vice versa.
I didn't mean pornography's moral/immoral line, I meant the "what is pornography" line. The obscenity line.
I just picked it because it's a famous example of lines that are very difficult to legalistically define, but most people can recognize, at least culturally similar people.
There are many men who agree to go and work for someone, and who are then forced into labour. If they try to leave they are chased and sometimes beaten or mutilated or killed.
People mean different things when they say "wage slave". It's an imprecise term and it leads to confusion.
But bonded labour leads to some horrific abuses of men, women, and children.
