Democrat sex work advocacy and conflict between material vs. informational sectors of society

One of the strangest aspects of next-gen Democrats is their obsession with sex work, and sex workers. Is this simply because liberal guys are dickless dorks who could only get laid if they paid for it? Or because they don't want their porn-site lifeline to be taken away from them? While both of those things may be true, the personal is not political. Instead we must analyze this phenomenon in the context of the make-up of their party's coalition — and that of their enemy.

Democrats represent the interests of the elites in the informational sectors of society — finance, media / entertainment, and info-tech. The output of these sectors is not labor-intensive: to reach a larger audience, a media outlet simply sends more copies of their TV broadcast over the airwaves, or a movie studio sends more hard-drives containing its movies to the multiplexes.

That is in contrast to labor-intensive forms of those activities, such as live music and live acting, where the output scales with the number of man-hours going into the production. There, if you want to put more butts in seats, a single live performance can only reach an audience of at most tens of thousands, in the largest stadiums.

If the target market is in the millions or higher orders of magnitude, suddenly you have to put on hundreds or thousands more performances than if you simply recorded one performance and made copies of that recording for mass distribution and projection. And the same troop of actors, or band of musicians, cannot possibly carry out those thousands more performances — you're going to have to hire a whole bunch of troops or bands. And now, your profit margin is strongly influenced by the unit cost of labor, unlike the producer of a movie or pop song.

Republicans, on the other hand, represent the interests of the elites in material sectors, where the output is labor-intensive — military / police / security forces, agriculture, energy extraction, and manufacturing. Not to mention myriad small businesses that are sensitive to the unit cost of labor, e.g. a mom-and-pop restaurant, not a small firm of accountants. If such sectors want to dramatically increase their output, they have to hire a lot more workers and managers, and open more land / space / workplaces for them to do their jobs.

So where does "sex work" fit into this partisan divide? Well, the term is still inchoate and amorphous, but you can see how different types of sex-related industries will be treated by Democrats, depending on whether or not they are labor-intensive. Some examples of labor-intensive sex work: prostitution, stripping / exotic dancing at a club, phone sex conversations, waitressing at a "breastaurant" like Hooters, and so on. Those that are not labor-intensive: any form of online pornographic content, and the remaining offline kinds of porn (DVDs, magazines, etc.).

If they are labor-intensive, their elites will not fit in naturally with the Democrats, and the Democrats will use their para-state armies — the NGOs — to undermine their interests. For example, organizing dancers in the stripping industry into labor unions (against the interests of strip club owners and managers). Whereas if they are not labor-intensive, their elites are a natural fit with the Democrats, and they will be integrated into the party's coalition along with those of other informational sectors. For example, doing favors for the owners and managers of porn studios, and seeking donations or other support from them in turn.

Having said that, which of the two projects will they pursue more? Whichever most advances their own interests. If there's a big prize to win for themselves by undermining the interests of the labor-intensive sex industries, they'll focus more on NGOs vs. the sex-industry elites. If there's more to be won by integrating the elites of sex industries that are not labor-intensive, they'll focus more on building up their own coalition.

In reality, Democrats focus very little on the labor-intensive industries. They are organizing grad students, journalists, and coders more than they are strippers, brothel prostitutes, and phone sex operators. And no, it doesn't matter if they run a union drive at one or two strip clubs out of the nearly 4000 in America. Nor is it material if one or two token prostitutes affiliate with the party; unless a large share of them are integrated into the political machine, they as a sector are left out of its patronage schemes of protection and provision.

The only labor-intensive sectors that Democrats organize are government workers (including health care, which is heavily reliant on government contracts through Medicare and Medicaid). So far, sex work is not produced by the government — and therefore, leftist activists would only unionize prostitutes if they were part of a "state-issued gf" program.

If Democrat NGOs are not redirecting the wealth from labor-intensive industries into their own coffers, via unionization, they do still have some government funding to hoover up, with "sex worker relief" as their mission statement. They will not do the things for workers that unions normally do, like securing higher wages and better working conditions. But they will conduct the all-important "community outreach" to de-stigmatize sex work, educate sex workers of their rights, and maybe pass out a few breadcrumbs of charity (e.g. free condoms for streetwalkers, if that activity ever returns to American streets).

That form of NGO-as-social-worker does nothing materially for the sex workers involved, but nor does it antagonize the elites of that industry (such as strip club owners) because their wealth is not being redirected into the Democrat NGO, whose government funding comes from political connections to Democrat politicians, or perhaps "philanthropic" (social engineering) funding from wealthy Democrat donors. It rustles the fewest feathers, and secures some sinecures for liberal members of the over-produced elite aspirant class.

As people, Democrats are fundamentally averse to interpersonal confrontation, and are socially awkward in large groups, especially if they're strangers and from a different background. These flaws are unimportant in the informational sectors that their party represents, but they are fatal in the labor-intensive sectors, which rely on a large number of man-hours to get stuff done. And when a lot of people work in that sector, they will be pretty diverse.

Organizing a union to directly interfere with owner / management operations would be far too stressful for activists who would rather cattily backstab each other over an internet connection. They are not firebrands or leaders of a conquering army, as a union would be if it won concessions from management. The only masses they can supervise are violent mobs who just destroy shit, like BLM and Antifa. It doesn't require a socially savvy, interpersonally well-oiled machine for leftists to orchestrate a mob burning down a working-class neighborhood in a battleground-state city.

Can you imagine leftists walking up to a group of strippers, and coming off as anything other than pathetic? Some would think the activists were well-meaning but boring and pointless dorks with typical nice-guy syndrome, while others would notice the sex-pest red flags and steer clear of them altogether. Once turned down, the leftists would stew in resentment over the same type of girls not noticing them or rejecting their attention in high school (a mental state the leftists never mature from). That includes leftist women, who would cry sour grapes over being excluded yet again from the pretty and popular girl clique, dismissing them as "typical airheaded cheerleaders, only with tattoos".

Liberals are more of the cerebral than corporeal orientation, and that's even more true the more leftist they are. There's no environment they viscerally fear more than one of kinesthetic performance, whether it's a sports field or a dancefloor where they're easily seen by the crowd. They have two left feet. Strippers might seem to be natural members of the Democrat coalition, but that was only back when the Republicans were the Moral Majority type (defunct since the 1990s). Now it's more of a jocks vs. nerds divide, and pole-dancing could not be any more kinesthetic and less cerebral.

I'm sure strippers are mostly apolitical, but Democrats would still write them off for living in Trump-voting flyover states, having working-class jobs, and not giving out pity sex to post-grads. If they checked some token demographic boxes — black trannies — then Democrats might be interested, but they couldn't care less about them as a class of workers.

That leaves mass media pornography as the sex sector where Democrats would work to integrate their elites, which has already taken place for the established studios in the L.A. area. Although pornographic in content, their business model is basically the same as the big Hollywood feature film studios, so why wouldn't they fit in naturally with the Democrats?

As an aside, this shows why it's misleading to refer to pornographic scenes as prostitution. It's true the girl is getting paid to have sex with some guy she'd otherwise not be with. But he's getting paid too, albeit far less. They're actors putting on a fictional show for an audience. The guy in the scene is not the customer, but all of those in the audience.

Importantly, unlike prostitution, where providing sexual services to a larger market means putting in more woman-hours, for mass media pornography the same scene can reach dozens, thousands, or millions of viewers. It's not like a peep show, where a different girl would have to carry out the performance in front of a different live audience (a dirty version of community stage acting). Porn acting, like movie acting, is not labor-intensive.

The only place left for Democrats to integrate the elites is OnlyFans or other Uber-for-porn platforms. None of the girls' performances are IRL, but are mass-mediated by an IT platform. Growing the audience does not mean having more girls perform, but having more viewers download the app, and for each girl to build her brand by orders of magnitude. The output is not labor-intensive. So the platform's owners and managers are a natural fit with the big-wigs of Silicon Valley and their Democrat political vehicle.

It's also possible that activists would organize the elite ranks of the performers (in both the traditional studio and Uberized versions), akin to the grad student unions at Ivy League colleges, journalist unions at prestige publications, or coder unions at elite tech conglomerates like Alphabet. It would be more of a guild for a labor aristocracy, rather than a broad-based union drawing on legions of workers.

The place to watch there is top-ranked Twitch streamers, some of whom border on titty-streaming. They have already worked hand-in-glove with next-gen Democrat politicians to propagandize and whip votes for the party, as in the Among Us livestream before the 2020 election, where AOC and Ilhan Omar played with the "Queen of Twitch" Pokimane and other video game celebs, who were only too eager to host the politicos.

It's not hard to believe the Democrats would launch similar ventures, and fundraisers, with the elite ranks of porn actresses from the traditional studios and OnlyFans alike, though hosted on an adult site like PornHub instead of Twitch. No different from the standard liberal telethon with celebs from the media / entertainment industry, just those whose mass-mediated entertainment is pornographic.

I can't see leftists organizing similar fundraisers and vote-whipping drives at strip clubs, brothels, or Hooters restaurants. They would be fighting the labor-intensive small-biz owners and managers, who are not 100% Democrat and may even lean (libertarian) Republican. In the eyes of leftists, those elites are just a more salacious flavor of boat dealers and Applebees franchise owners — chuds, deplorables, probably sexual harassers (totally unlike the management of a porn studio or OnlyFans...).

Nor would those labor-intensive workers give a shit if activists in the informational sectors fired up a reputation-smearing campaign against strippers found to be unwoke, Republican, or whatever else. Labor-intensive workers are not chasing fame, since there's no such thing as a stripper who dances in front of millions of viewers at a time, or a Hooters waitress who takes meal orders from millions of patrons at a time.

Their income is not tied to industry-insider reputation and general-public fame. You look cute, you put on the uniform, you smile at the customers, and do the waitressing tasks, you're hired, and you keep your job. But if leftoids wanted to destroy the career of a porn actress, their smear campaign would be highly effective. Those girls are seeking status in an industry where just showing up and going through the motions, as it were, is not enough. They have to have star potential, build their personal brand, and otherwise boost their fame. Anything in the media, including social media, that tarnishes their brand or fame is detrimental to their career.

Some gay media scold on Twitter drove a famous young and active porn actress, August Ames, to suicide during the #MeToo era a few years ago. She had simply warned another actress that the guy she was about to film a scene with was an HIV risk for having had sex with men. The gay media psycho and a broader leftoid social media mob hounded her for homophobia, and she couldn't stand the potential destruction of her reputation, when her status relies so much on reputation. The leftist orthodoxy these days is that porn actresses have to die from AIDS contracted from gay-for-pay actors, to prove they're not homophobic. Otherwise, terrorize them into killing themselves.

Since strippers and other labor-intensive workers are not so easily intimidated by threats to their reputation in the mass media, as they don't have a mass audience to worry about alienating, Democrats would not get involved with them politically. They wouldn't hold much leverage over them, and couldn't boss them around.

There's probably more to say on these differences within the not-at-all homogeneous sex work industry, but the key point is that the make-up of the two parties' coalitions reveals more about their advocacy than does their superficial propaganda ("we support sex workers" or "our enemies are SWERFs," etc.).