I have no idea if Dave Cummings is still acting but he started at the age of 55.
Two girls I knew were escorts in their early twenties. Both were a bit unstable, borderline types. They quit the “life” when they were about 25, not because they were out of clients, but because they no longer liked the job and lifestyle. Both are now single moms with the odd job and the odd partner, and do okay on welfare. They have no regrets.
As others have mentioned I doubt most sex workers consider stripping, porn etc. to be their long term “career” and most would be out of porn as soon as they got sick of it or the money dried up.
Interestingly enough if you google around you will see there is also a substantial sub-industry for MILF and granny porn, so it looks like some can keep right on working into retirement if they can keep their health up.
Sex workers even have their own advocacy magazine
You’re lumping too many categories together in your prejudice.
Crack whores do exist. What happens to them? They die, go to jail, or clean up. Just like every other type of addict. A few do become homeless, but that can only be a small percentage. Other prostitutes get out of the business and find other work or marry. Why shouldn’t they? Do they have scarlet A’s on their breast warning people off because of their pasts? Everybody has a past.
Strippers and porn workers often are part-time, and do it for short periods to make quick money. Yes, some really do it to make money for college. Some don’t. When they get out of the business they find jobs doing something else. Or get married. Or both.
And strippers and porn workers do pay social security and every other type of tax (unless they want a lot of trouble). Why not? Those are completely legitimate job categories.
Everything is explained by the sentence, They’re just people. Once you accept that, everything else falls into place.
But I don’t accept that.
The vast majority of people would not do this type of work. These people, by virtue of their choices, have already revealed themselves to be different than the average in terms of career choice. So there’s reason to wonder if their future choices might also be different, on average.
As in any job that depend heavily on tips, under-reporting is endemic.
All groups are different from the average. You have to show that sex workers are somehow different in a different way. There is no evidence I know of to support it.
Easy, quick, good money has always been a draw even if it’s criminal, marginalized, or discredited work. Young, good-looking women have opportunities to use their bodies to make money. Some get married, some become gold diggers, some turn to sex work. The last are part of a continuum, not a wholly different group. They often turn up in the get married or become gold-diggers spectrum, after or even during their sex careers. (Many porn stars are married. So are many prostitutes and strippers.) Women have been doing this forever. Yet there are no pools of former sex workers disgraced, homeless, or dead. You can’t find them. They disappear into the population just like “good” girls.
It’s a reasonable question. I don’t understand why you won’t accept the reasonable answer.
Morality on the SDMB? There is no place for that here. You have to know by now that sucking dick for a living is just as honorable as anything else in this world, and you are a bigot for thinking or saying otherwise.
What kind of “tips” do porn workers “depend” on?
(rimshot)
(ducks)
But are we debating whether sex work is moral and honorable, or are we debating what happens to sex workers after they are too over-the-hill to make a living as sex workers?
If you want to debate the morality of stripping, porn, and prostitution we could do that, but we’re having a perfectly satisfactory discussion about another topic.
This question could be asked about any job that depends on your physical condition, and what happens to people with those jobs once they no longer meet the physical demands for their job. What happens to professional athletes? Soldiers? Firemen? Construction workers? There are lots of jobs out there that you can do when you’re 20 and 30, but by the time you are 40 or 50 you won’t be able to keep up anymore.
Sex work is one of those jobs. And the answers to what happens to construction workers when they turn 40 is pretty much the same as what happens to strippers when they turn 40, with the exception that strippers usually don’t stay working as strippers that long.
Oh, I just remembered, I know a former stripper! I forgot, because she’s a, you know, normal person. But yeah, she was a stripper for a year or two, not sure exactly how long. Then she became a hairdresser and massage therapist and various other hippy-type things, had a couple of kids with another bohemian type, then split up with him and got married and had a kid with an attorney. It’s true that I can’t imagine her holding down a straight nine to five office job, but she’s done OK.
I much prefer it as a hobby (or an avocation, perhaps), but I don’t particularly see a problem with charging for it, as long as the person doing the service isn’t being coerced. The illegality of prostitution is one of the sillier holdovers from a more repressive time.
I disagree; to call it vitriolic is to be tolerant of prejudice. If someone had posted a thread using the same kind of insulting and stereotypical language about black people or gays, the responses would have been appropriately in keeping with that. My tone was very carefully chosen to point out that such prejudice would not be acceptable in any other context. Far from vitriolic, it was appropriate to the situation. If you’re gonna call someone on prejudice or bigotry, you’re gonna do it forthrightly, I would hope, and not have your primary focus be the delicacy of their feelings when what you’re calling them on is their outrageous indelicacy toward the feelings of others.
Now, hijack over, I hope. If I continue to participate in this thread, I will call out prejudice appropriately, but I will not become insulting or vitriolic.
Judging from some of the responses in this thread, that time is now.
As pointed out upthread, this question could be asked of any job that depends upon a certain physical standard. Added to that, however, is the obstacle represented by the prejudice in this thread. I doubt if anyone in this thread would refuse work to an ex construction worker; I have no doubt at all that some of the participants would fire a menial laborer who worked for them if they discovered that the worker had sex work on their curriculum vitae.
There’s your difference, Fotheringay; and it’s one that *you * help to perpetuate.
Black people certainly can’t help being black. Gay people, I’m told, can’t help being gay. But sex workers have no choice but to be sex workers? I thought you were the one sneering at the idea that being a sex worker is carried in one’s DNA.
The comparison that you’re making to begin with is what comes across as rather frothing at the mouth.
That’s true, and the same question would apply to those types of work. Difference is that there is not that short of a shelf life in those other lines of work, so the assumption is that people who chose them just keep at it and what I’ve seen of such people so far is in line with that assumption.
It’s a perfectly reasonable answer, and I suggested it myself in the OP. Only thing I’m disputing is whether you can arrive at this conclusion based on the premise that “they’re just people”. I can speculate that they fade into society as well as the next guy, and I did, as noted, but you’ve not added anything by saying “they’re just people”, IMHO. It remains a possiblity.
To be clear, I’m not saying that these activities are less honorable than anything else in the world. All I’m saying is that a lot of other people wouldn’t engage in them. So whether you think all these other people are right, or you think the sex workers are right, it is in any event incorrect to say that sex worker “are just people”, as regards to career choices. They are obviously different. So I agree with lemur866 that the actual morality or honorability of these occupations is beyond the scope of this discussion.
I believe you may have confused me with someone else.
Well, I’ll agree that people who decide to go into sex work do tend to be different than your average person, if they weren’t then there would be a lot more sex workers.
But that’s like arguing that most people wouldn’t want to be librarians. There are plenty of people in the world who just aren’t cut out to be librarians, they’d go out of their skulls if they tried. So there are certain combinations of traits that allow people to work in the sex industry too. Like, maybe impulsivity, tolerance of risk, and so on. I’m not a sociologist, so I have no idea what we’d actually find if we compared personality types between sex workers and librarians, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that there were differences.
Nobody’s saying that they have no choice. The objections to the tone aren’t even about choice or not. Frankly, the visceral reaction to the term “sex worker” as if it were morally and hygienically equivalent to the term “leper” is SILLY. That’s what’s being said.
It’s only the puritanical Protestant sex-hysteria of our culture (outside of relatively narrow accepted forms) that makes this whole conversation possible.
Nope.
Please read again more closely. I’m not making that parallel; I’m suggesting that *you *are.
Justify that statement please. I can tell you that for 2 billion plus Asians who are neither puritanical nor Protestant, having “sex work” in one’s past is even more of a stigma than anything in the US.