yeah that’s my a big part of my point. sure if thats the job you want to do, fine. but don't pretend the industry is all glitz and glam either like so many do. i get there is some legitimacy to the work and that’s fine. but why do the same people who want to say how that’s a legitimate job want to act like retail and other min wage jobs are a joke and corrupt when there wre those of us who consider it perfectly fine work. im willing to accept there is corruption in retail and min wage jobs hence why ive left some of them but no, sex work, all of us who want to criticize it have the wrong perception of it. well why cant’t those same people have the wrong perception of retail and min wage jobs and that just maybe some of us like the work and that really is what the business can afford to pay their employees without raising costs or cutting staff.

i get sex work is work. i hear your defense for it and respectfully disagree but such is life. personally i think while yes there have been good things that cone out of it the dark side of it is far worse. my point is those fine defending sex work as legitimate work will turn around and criticize low income work as if there aren’t people like myself who honestly have no problem with the system. i think paying low wage is completely fine so long as the employee is fine with it. but our opinion doesn’t matter when it comes to the debate of minimum wage.

@Joehlert11 disagreement is fine, as long as you don't try and advocate for criminalization. For example, this may be a different category altogether, but I find organized religion to be a scourge - especially when it comes to Christianity in the US. I think the dark side and harmful nature of Christianity far outweighs the benefits. But, I would never advocate for banning or criminalizing Christianity or religion. As long as you think free people should be allowed personal freedoms, even if it means engaging in Sex Work, you can personally disagree with it and criticize the industry.

I don't think Sex Work and Low-Wage Work are quite the same when facing criticism. Sure, you could make the argument that criticisms boil down to exploitation of workers, and who are we to impose restrictions on who can do what work and for how much. That is fair. However, Sex Work is typically criticized due to the prudish nature of our country and the social stigma around sex (see my earlier Christianity comments). There are some genuine people who criticize the industry based on exploitation and abuse, but the overwhelming majority of critics are only so because they want to control women's bodies and enforce their personal morals on everyone else.

Low-Wage work is a bit of a different story, especially because of everything that is tied to your job in the US. When it comes to freelance work, or contractor-type work, people aren't quite as critical with wages - see being a photographer or Uber driver or something. It becomes a little different with actual full or part-time work. In the US we tie health insurance to work, so you would lose your insurance if you get fired. If we don't have some sort of regulation on wages, what is to stop a company from deciding to cut pay in half, or by 99%, because they want to make more money. You then throw workers into a tough situation where they could lose their health insurance, but also can't afford to survive with their pay. You say you and others have no problem with the system, and would be willing to work for lower wages - so now you have a work force who will gladly step in with these reduced rates, meaning the company gets to keep making its billions upon billions while the work force fights each other for who will work for less. Where do we draw the line? Should we allow slavery as long as the slave is fine with it? When a business gets to exploit public government resources to conduct itself - public roads for shipping, corporate tax breaks, public utilities, etc - the government gets to set some rules for operating, such as discrimination policies or environmental standards. I see wages as the same. I also personally think if you aren't willing to pay someone a living wage, you don't deserve to open a business in the first place.

I would also just point out that your observation also goes the other way: the overwhelming majority of people who argue against raising the minimum wage or even having one to begin with - mostly Right-Wingers and Conservatives - are also fundamentally against all varieties of Sex Work.

@JacksonNought i mean yea there is the conservative Christian stigma towards sex work but sex work goes far beyond places where it is regulated and there are protections. and it’s because of that im very against sex work. now yes i am a Christian and have my opinions of sex work from that standpoint but im not going to advocate for straight illegality but i see so many ignore the bad that goes on in the sex work industry just because there are those who like the work but when it comes to retail/low wage jobs those of us who like the work don't get a say. our employers are all corrupt money hogs who want to keep us poor. i have my suspicions why i think we are so quick to defend one as legitimate work and not corrupt but i won't go into all of that

@JacksonNought ok well after reading the other two comments that seem to be pretty in agreement with what i was getting at i guess they did a decent job of explaining why i too would say people are so quick to defend sex work and not low wage jobs. with low wage jobs it two-fold, people see it as a social cause of people should be getting paid a “living wage” and at the end of the day if the business closes because they can’t afford to pay the workers a “living” wage what does the consumer care. the employees can just find another job that pays a living wage (though let’s just ignore the fact that those jobs may be more competitive and require skills and/or experience the employee lacks) and the consumer can just get the product online or from a competitor who didnt have to close due to increased labor cause. basically the consumer is largely unaffected but they feel good about making change for what they see as a benefit. whereas with sex work if you get rid of that you are not just getting rid of one seller of the good you are talking about the whole industry. the consumer loses out on the product altogether. in this case the product is sex and well we can't get rid of that because we all want that instant gratification. we’ll ignore all the darkness of the industry and only focus on the good because if we actually start looking into how the industry exploits and preys on women and corrupts young men then those who buy the product will start to lose out and so will the people in charge so they have to make it flashy and loom better and safer than it is in order to keep it alive. and like i said it’s sex. we are sexual beings, we don’t like having things related from sex taken away from us so we’ll defend almost anything related to it. hell just look st some of the fetishes that have popped up over the recent years they for the longest time would have been extremely taboo to the point there are those going so far as to legitimately defend pedophelia and it’s no longer fringe.

@Joehlert11 first I need to address your last comment. There is a huge huge huge difference between consenting adults (one, two, three, however many) engaging in sexual activities, despite what some might find "immoral" or weird or what-have-you... and something like rape, pedophilia, bestiality, etc. There is no slippery slope, as there is a clear-cut line you do not cross. Children and animals are incapable of consent. Allowing a person to go to a strip club or hire an escort, or even go to a swingers club and have an orgy, will not lead to pedophilia. It just won't. In fact, you could probably say quite the opposite, as the Catholic Church's celibacy policy was a factor in why so many priests molested children.

With that out of the way, perhaps a better way to explain the difference in the Sex Work and Minimum Wage arguments:

Critics of Sex Work say it shouldn't happen, that the entire industry should disappear. Now you will have varying degrees of this - some will be fine with exotic dancing or some will be okay with pornographic films, but typically they are always against escorts and prostitution. The critics don't say that the industry should be fixed; they never say that abuse should be addressed and properly punished or that it should be decriminalized to allow for victims to have the proper channels for safety. Critics don't want better conditions and protections or better pay for sex workers. No, critics of sex work want it to be erased completely. They call it things like "cultural defilement" or say it isn't "respectable" or try to somehow say it is related to "Marxism". They call it illegitimate work because some product wasn't "created". You also have a lot of attacks on sex workers themselves - questioning their character, degrading them, saying they either deserve abuse because they put themselves in that work or they must be some sort of slave. They even attack former sex workers, saying if they used to do it then they are deserving of what they get... though interestingly enough no critics attack Melania Trump for being a former sex worker.

Now, on the other hand, critics of Low-Wage jobs don't say that the jobs should be eliminated. Critics don't attack minimum wage workers. In fact, the minimum-wage critics you describe actually do want to fix the industry, provide better regulations and protections for minimum-wage workers, and generally improve everything across the board. These critics don't tell people that they can't work in fast food or be custodial staff. Instead, these critics think people should be paid a living wage for their work - this so called "essential work" from the pandemic that doesn't have a livable wage right now.

It's actually the critics of raising the minimum wage who attack the jobs and the workers. The say things like "this job is supposed to be a for a teenager" or "this is only meant as a stepping stone into the work force". They think an Amazon warehouse worker who can't take bathroom breaks and is literally breaking their back, or a dishwasher working 100 hours a week, do not deserve enough of a salary to pay rent or provide for their families. They think people in low-wage jobs are lazy and deserve to live in poverty because they didn't "pick themselves up by their bootstraps". Although, interestingly enough, sometimes when a person does pull themselves up, like AOC, they will still attack them and tell them to "go back to being a bartender" or mock them for being a former "low class" minimum wage worker.

The ones who are against a living wage are typically also against Sex Work. They want minimum-wage workers to remain in poverty and be exploited for the increased profits of the millionaires and billionaires running the world. They say paying a living wage is "Marxism", but then turn around and rail against the true Free Market Capitalism of Sex Work. They don't want people to leave the exploitative work that benefits them for the much more profitable self-employed nature of Sex Work. They are against someone having sex for money as "degrading" but aren't against a grocery store cashier having to deal with rabid anti-maskers berating them over store policies. They are against someone showing their tits on stage as "exploitative" but aren't against an Amazon worker peeing in a bottle because of high fulfillment demands... Amazon, a company which made 380 billion dollars last year. Walmart made over 500 billion dollars last year, it is owned by the richest family in America, and yet the majority of their workers are all on welfare because they don't get paid a living wage - the taxpayer foots the bill.

So, to sum up the argument, you have two groups of people you identify in you original post:

1 - Those who defend Sex Work (let's call them Pro Sex Work) vs those against it (let's call them Anti Sex Work).
2 - Those who demonize employers who don't provide a living wage (let's call them Anti Low Wage) vs those who are fine with taking low-wage jobs (let's call them Pro Low Wage).

Group 1 Pro and Group 2 Anti are actually quite the same - they want people to be able to work and support themselves without awful conditions and toxic cultures. They champion the workers.

Group 1 Anti and Group 2 Pro are actually the hypocritical ones (assuming they belong to each group) as they are fine with exploitative work but only if it fits their personal morals. They will try to excuse their Anti Sex Work position as "caring about victims" and trying to combat trafficking and slavery of sex workers... but then they don't seem to care about the trafficking and slavery of undocumented immigrants for low wage positions. Just look at the documented trafficking of undocumented immigrants at Trump's Mar-A-Lago.

@JacksonNought the claims you are making in regards to those who are against min wage just proves one of the key points i am making. you clearly aren’t listening to both sides of the argument because im a min wage worker and a grown adult. i make decent enough money doing it. is it difficult and a struggle at times, absolutely but if you raise the minimum wage it would kill my job. its exactly what is happening right now with unemployment. people are making more than 15/hour on UC right now and aren’t working and its causing businesses to suffer because they have no labor. but what do we know right? but then take sex work, which yes can be a legitimate job and be fine, ill fully acknowledge that but again that’s not the majority of the business. you are very naive if you think that the few people who actually have success in it means that is anywhere near the norm. and yes many who work low wage jobs hate it and want more and yeah the one argument is that it is meant just for kids and first time workers not for those trying to live off of it. that’s just another flaw in the min wage system that many who are against raising it want to do away with as well, which is the min wage as a whole. without a min wage there could be a complete economic reset where you make what you and your employer agree on together. and sellers will adjust costs because they want to sell their goods and if the price is too high for anyone to buy theyll drop to reflect what people can afford

@Joehlert11 it's a fair point about not listening to the ones actually living it day-to-day, though I will just say I am not personally advocating in either direction for the minimum-wage debate here - I am only pointing out the differences in the positions for both topics, and how they aren't quite comparable. You say it is not the majority of sex workers who are successful or happy, but perhaps you aren't listening to them in this case?

I am willing to listen. You say you would prefer to keep working low wage jobs. I would ask, if you don't mind, how do you survive on your low wages? Do you have several jobs? Is it enough to cover your rent? Your food? Would you consider yourself at poverty level? Do you get government benefits like welfare?

Yes, unemployment benefits right now are more than minimum wage. That is definitely a problem with the system, which is a reason wages should be higher. Removing the minimum wage altogether would be disastrous, and you would really start to see immigrants taking all of the jobs.

@JacksonNought i don't live above my means and i have worked multiple jobs. i mean heres the thing too most jobs that pay min wage also don't give full time hours in the first place to begin with so usually youd have to work multiple jobs. does it suck yes but but why does that burden have to fall on the employer. again put yourself in the employers shoes as well and imagine you were forced to ensure someone was paid x number of $ at y number of hours every a week without taking into account any of your profit numbers and costs. just thinking about my current employer; a good week day would be maybe on average $700 in sales. im a shift lead and make just under $10 an hour and work on average 5 hours a week. let’s round me up to $10 that’s $50 right there. then you have another manager who makes prob $11 or $12 and hour at 8 hours a day so that’s at most $96. some nights we may have a cashier who is prob $8 for 5 hours so there’s another $40. so already that’s almost a 1/4 of the sales going just to labor. now the store has rent and other expenses and the product wasn’t free so how much of that $700 does the owner even see when all is said and done? now sure there are sleazy companies that could afford to give up some of what the people of the top make but if you start force these people at the top to pay out more they arent going to be too happy and make the cut somewhere and chances are the consumer and/or the employees are going to be the ones feeling it most. the big issue is yeah we are using the older people working these jobs to justify why the pay should be better but we don’t make up the majority of the work force in these jobs and in the instances we do chances are there is a reason for why. I’m 28. most of the people i work with are half my age. i have years on all of them even some in management. im in no way judging, i mean for some its lack of skill or education. others its they had a career and are easing into retirement. some just got stuck in entry level positions and never got out. but the reality is these aren’t jobs meant to make a living off of but you can. im also single and don't have a girlfriend or anything that requires me to be made of money. i do have some government assistance as im disabled which does make up some of the difference and guess what many people in these jobs also receive these things as well, now how they use them may account for why there may be some of an issue with why they “can't afford to live” with these jobs. like what are their spending habits? do they buy the newest and best or do they go with what works. do they always have to have new or is second hand fine? like when we start talking about raising min wage then we are going to kill all these jobs from people who actually rely on these jobs like myself in favor of the spoiled kids and people who if they just budgeted better could actually make things work. and how many of these people have actually broken down the numbers for themselves and realized that just maybe companies really don't have all the money in the world to be paying people. yeah sure there are a few out there like amazon who could prob handle it but the corner mini-mart won’t be able to.