There is a tendency to see the sex industry as a set of individual interactions, not as an organized, established industry. This is result of (1) social relations being congealed in capitalist transactions and (2) liberal feminism pushing individual analyses of individual choices https://twitter.com/GUN_Vanguard/status/1347915122275184641

Although individual recruitment does happen, I’m referring to the sex industry as a whole which wouldn't exist if not for its reliance on economic crises pushing women deeper into poverty and precarious unstable living. When the economy tanks, the sex industry booms.

Historically, militarization and imperialism helped recruit women in the Global South. For example, when US sponsored militarization in Thailand, soldiers set up military brothels and recruited local women. This set the basis for their sex tourism industry today.

The govt. encouraged mass sex tourism to pay off debt after Vietnam War. Few years later, IMF/World Bank policies decimated the Thai economy leaving masses of women and kathoeys with prostitution as their only means of survival and cementing their entrance into the sex industry.

No surprise that IMF/World Bank has been documented as now encouraging nations in the Global South to legalize prostitution to inflate GDP numbers and lower official unemployment numbers.

States and the comprador class, such as in Thailand and Philipines, are even known to encourage recruitment into the industry while driving down the price of the commodities (women, trans, etc.) Maria Mies writes about this in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale.

Pimps also recruit. Note that pimps are not the racialized image of a stylish Black man in a purple suit. Tim Stokely, who appropriates 20% of the earnings from OnlyFans, is a pimp. OF recruits it’s laborers by relying on economic crises and uses peer-to-peer recruitment.

The media helps too when they paint the image of an independent sex worker who can lift herself out of poverty, pull herself up by the boot straps, and buy a house because of the sex trade. These are the exceptions, not the rules. Majority of women cannot ever do that.

The point is, we don't live in a primitive barter economy where everything is an individual interaction happening in a vacuum. This is a globalized and often organized industry. The sex industry recruits its army of labor via economic and social coercion.

My goal is to raise the living standard of every person so that sex can be for leisure, not work. And the only way we can do that is by liberating our bodies and sexualities from the control of the state *and* the market while raising living standards for everyone.

Now I haven't had coffee so this might be a little choppy... but you can see that there are state and industry actors who collude with each other to recruit women into the sex industry and that structurally, economic crises push large swaths of women into the industry.