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China Shuts Down OnlyFans, Calls It a Threat to National Morals and Social Order
(thedailyguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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There will always be people who enjoy providing sex as a kind of community service.
Yes. But this is true of labor in general. It doesn't mean plumbers won't exist under communism. They will just look very different than how they do now, they won't do what they do because the alternative is poverty or death, but will do it because it feels good to be skilled at something and to use those skills to improve the lives of the people around them. It's not a complete perfect 1:1 analogy (nothing ever is), since for example most people have sex though most people don't do plumbing work (though it's reasonable to expect plumbing work will be something more people know about and do on their own as well). But that doesn't change the fact that there will be people who enjoy it, work to become skilled at it, and provide it like I said as a kind of community service. That service is still socially necessary labor. As another analogy, therapists will also probably be vastly less necessary under communism, but there will still need to be people specially trained in helping the members of the community that need or desire help with their emotional issues who will still seek the services of a therapist (trauma will always exist even if we can reduce its incidence a thousand fold by abolishing capitalism), and as such, that socially necessary role, that need in the community for therapy, will be provided by someone who fulfills that role for their community. There is no reason to think that sex work won't be in the same sot of position as therapy - far less common or needed in a society that isn't sick and twisted by capitalism, but still a role that some will seek and thus provide a service and benefit to society. Yet another analogy: There will always be exhibitionists who enjoy expressing their sexuality with groups of people who enjoy watching them do so. Just as there will always be actors who enjoy performing the act of story-telling by presenting themselves as a character in that story, and there will always be people who enjoy watching them do so. A socially necessary role.
So it really bothers me when people insist that someone like me who has had positive experiences doing sex work and who took pride in bringing joy to others via that labor "simply won't exist in a communist society." Well, we'll see since communism has yet to be achieved and no one knows exactly what it will look like (something even Marx pointed out), but that we don't know how a given current profession will manifest under communism is true of all professions. And under transitional socialism, you can be damn sure that sex work will still exist, especially considering it does in some form in every current AES country.
The problem isn’t sex as such, it’s sex work. It’s not a ban on sex as an activity but as an industry.
I understand that workers will find ways to embrace their proletarian condition of life. I don’t want to work for a wage, but to the extent that I must, I look for work that somehow fulfills me. But I’m skeptical of the conclusion that, essentially, exploitation only exists if the victim is aware of it. Enjoying a job doesn’t negate the exploitation.
The way to abolish exploitation is to abolish its conditions of existence. The solution is not merely to make it tolerable. This applies to sex work all the same as to wage labor in general.
You seem to want social equality for sex work. We’re all proletarians and a job is a job, why cut off an avenue for making money?
But the cold reality is that sex work is not actually viewed that way in society and especially not by employers. Revenge porn exists as a concept precisely because sex work, and open sex in general, causes harm if linked to one’s real identity. Yet, I’ve never heard of someone “outed” as a former plumber and left unable to find work, or fired from a job they actively hold like that one story about the teacher fired for being on OF. This industry goes beyond “simple” exploitation of labor and takes it to a different degree of coercion.
It doesn't seem like you read anything that I posted other than that first line you quoted, which you then extrapolated into a long thesis I never made. Most of your response has nothing to do with what I said and some of it assumes I hold a position completely contrary to what I actually did say.
I am not only skeptical of this, I think it is ridiculous. Of course exploitation can exist without the victim's awareness, that describes most forms of exploitation.
What do you think I was saying with my multiple comparisons of sex work to other forms of labor? Seriously, I think you are replying to a comment someone made in your head, not to the one I posted.
You don't? Well, first of all, be specific about what you mean by social equality. But do I want sex work to be treated as the work that it is? Yes, I do, and so should anyone who cares about the well-being and empowerment of working class people.
The cold hard reality is that low-wage so-called "grunt work" is looked down upon and viewed negatively by society. That doesn't make it so nor does it mean that as Marxists we should ignore the struggles of people doing low-wage work. In fact it would go against Marxist principles in a very fundamental way.
What are you even talking about?? The vast majority of revenge porn is not "outing" someone as being a sex worker. For the most part, it has fuck-all to do with sex work. It is private photos taken by regular people any profession regardless of what they do for work that are then made public, usually but not necessarily by an angry and unscrupulous ex to hurt them by violating their privacy. Revenge porn would exist and be a problem completely independently of whether or not sex work even existed within a society, and depends only on the viewing of sex (and usually women's sexuality in particular) as a vulgar and shameful thing.
All the more reason that as Marxists we should struggle to rectify those problems so that sex work can be treated as the work that it is.
My original comment was about whether or not sex work is part of human nature and therefore inevitable and necessary. I don’t agree with that. Communism would revolutionize not just the conditions of work, or the distribution of wealth, but the nature of work itself would change. There might be people trading sex for other things within a communist society, but its character would be completely different because not embedded in class society nor generalized commodity exchange. This isn’t some random tangent or extrapolation, it’s the point of my original comment, and I did a bad job seamlessly switching between an abstract discussion of communism and the more concrete situation with China banning OnlyFans.
I agree with most things you said, and disagree with parts of it / how you read my comment, but I don’t have the energy to tease those apart, so I’ll just leave it. Genuinely sorry if I made some insensitive arguments, I’ll reflect on it some more