Plerase bury the Nazi shit, it is purely distracting an inflammatory.
That aside, it si true that the fact the someone enjoys his work does not prove that it ultimately beneficial, it is a big, an immense, presumption that enjoyable work that doesn't harm others is beneficial.
Isn't that a, maybe the, central point that Marxists have to make against capitalism, that under it work sucks? Of course there are other objections. And work can be enjoyable, thus in that sense beneficial, but done under problematic, e.g., exploitative conditions.
As for sex work, I lack the facts to knwo whether it si more than ordinarily exploitative. Certainly there are sex slaves kidnappeed or lured bt fraud into horrible abusive situations, but there are migrant workers, maliquidores proletariat, slaughterhouse employees, and in fact domestic and other slaves whose conditions are about as horrible as ytou can imagine even though they do not have to sell sex for a living. It may be true, for all I know, that
a) sex workers are more likerly to abused, enslaved, and brutally treated than most workers, b) their ranks are disproportionately drawn from victims of domestic abuse
But one would like sto see some evidence rather than mere presumption.
I think that, without invoking labguage like "anti-sex prudery" there is something else going on in your discomfort about sex work. Some people have argued that theres re certain goods that should not, ethgically, morally, whatever, be marketed -- evenif you don't believe in markets that it is worse to distribute these goodsa on the basis of buying and selling than on some other basis. Thus, toothpaste is OK to sell if anything is. Vegtables. Music CDs. Sex toys, to use Brian's example (unless you really are a prude.) Hoiwever, many of us think that health care is not OK to sell for profit, it should be distruburted on the basis of need. And some things you cannot sell without destroying their meaning and value -- if I buy an Olympic Gold medal it means zippo. I have to win it for it to count.
I think many people think that sex is in one of the latter two categories, either it should not be bought and sold because even if sex workers are not coerced or even exploited (fancy self-employed call girls/boys) it is just not the sort of thing that should go to the highest bidder, to do that degrades the partipants and the activity; or it cannot really be bought and sold any more than honors can because, perhaps, it is intrinsically bound up with a sort of intimacy that commerce inherently denies. I am not sayoimg these objections are right, and I grant that it is hard to formulate them clearly, but they are not stupid whatever else they are.
All that said, the left should avoid the appearance of high-handed paternalism by suggesting that we have the key to true happiness and even if workers (including sex workers) disagree, they are benighted and ignorant and in need of enlightenment.
I think it is more than possible that a need for the sort of fairly anonymous, emotionally uninvolved sex that does not require an elaborate expenditure of energy in a courting ritual would remain if class, patriarchy and exploitation were abolished. Perhaps there would be enough people who for whatever reason, other than raw need, who would be interesting in providing such services, maybe because they liked that sort of sexual activity, hard to say. (Far fewer, no doubt -- I wonder what the figures for prostitution are in Sweden, where women get enough social benefits they don't mostly even have to get married.) Would that be bad? And under capitalism, insofar as most work is exploited labor, does it make it worse than some of that work is sexual?
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