I lament Nova’s demise, too…
I think the reason that the tech companies won’t allow us to have our devices our own way ( Microsoft was doing this decades ago ), is “religious”/ideological, not practical:
I think they “need” to keep everybody permanently in a headlock, with our heads all twisted, because only if we are all in permanent learned-helplessness, only then can they automatically get away with everything they intend to be getting away with, in our world.
IOW, our autonomy violates their totalitarian religion, see?
It’s the same as how ANY spirituality grates on Dawkins’ blood: he wants it all gutted/butchered/destroyed, & suicides of ones he destroyed are no problem for him, & no alternative ever can have any validity to him.
Totalitarianism, whether traditionally “religious”, or in any other ideology/prejudice/religion, is the same: it HATES violation of its homogenous dominion.
( comically: homophobic-religions want a homogenous het humankind, with no violation of that homogeneity. The existence of homosexuals is too heterogenous for them )
Autonomy is something that totalitarian supremacism ideology “needs” to obliterate from the whole world.
Consistently.
It seems to be a damn-good diagnostic for it, even!
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There are costs beyond the physical.
I agree with you that intimacy shouldn’t be for money.
The sexually-transmitted infections ( I cannot understand how the modern population isn’t 50+% infected with life-damaging infections, nowadays, and maybe it is, given how disinformation & “marketing” have completely replaced the value of correct-information that journalism used to have ) seem likely to rule the lives of both porn-industry participants & those who use porn as their frame-of-reference for deciding their own lives.
Getting the torquie out from the sex-work industry, however, de-criminalizing it, getting the pimps & organized-crime out of it, to make it safer for those who ( for whatever reason ) work in it, would require some serious restructuring of our cultures.
You’ve read that in other apes sex is traded by females for nutrition?
Male hoarding of rights/food/power/safety, making female trading of their intimacy for a portion of what the males had possessed as their “rightful exclusive possession”, extends well beyond humans.
The thing is, we’re supposed to be upright, not rationalizing pack-behavior, but instead dismantling it from us, making us all we can be.
That didn’t happen, in the last few millenia.
It’s possible that humankind will earn it, now ( The Great Filter, if survived, will produce this result, in about a century ).
but the prejudice is sooo deep…
You know that there is a story in the Abrahamic religions’ Book of Genesis, about woman eating of “the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil”, which means MORALITY?
& sharing this eating with man?
Wasp-researchers in Panama ( from Exeter & Bristol universities ) discovered that altruism is generalized-mothering, among wasps.
Buddha Gautama stated that this is the case, 25 consecutive centuries ago: altruism is generalized mothering. The Buddhist phrase “all our kind mothers”, in referring to ALL other continuums/souls, is rooted in this.
That the Abrahamic-religion men twisted a statement in their own scripture, in order to change it from meaning that women/mothers ate of morality, & shared it with men,
TO women committed the “original sin”, & it cannot ever be revoked, & punishing/abusing women is now inherently-valid…
& holding that gaslighting for millenia…
Do you have any idea how fundamental the sex-racism is, in our religions & laws?
What culture/country holds that raising children is real economically-required-and-valid work?
Here in North America, that’s a sick joke: raising children is … treated as parasitism.
The male apes who hoard wealth, forcing female apes into prostitution for sustinance…
There’s waaay too much of that, in our cultures.
Remove the need,.
That must come 1st.
Letting people do that if they want to, but cut criminality out from it, completely: criminalize pimping, human-trafficking, certainly, hard-line, but decriminalize sex-work that doesn’t harm anybody.
( no protection against infections is harming people: protection ought be legislated, same as in any hazardous work )
do everything one can to prevent people younger than 21yo from doing it ( because brains aren’t fully-developed until about then, which is the same reason that setting the legal-drinking-age to 21yo so significantly reduces deaths on the roads: younger people don’t consider “no” to be as meaningful as people with older brains do ).
Put care in place for people who’ve been “turned into commodities” through abusive relationships, to get them out from that devaluation, instead of just letting the industry use their lives, & pretend that that’s OK…
etc…
Really, living-wage legislation would cut into the “need” for sex-work, significantly.
Oh, & I’ve read that when sex-work is suppressed, rapes & domestic-violence both go up, so there’s some displacement going on, between the categories, that way…
It isn’t a simple thing, & I wish “commerce” & intimacy were so completely distinct that nobody would ever consider a Venn diagram showing intersection of the 2 categories, but … the actual world doesn’t work right…
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