You joke, but I knew a woman who danced at a strip club to get extra money for herself and school supplies who got fired after a student's dad saw her dancing
That's the world we live in, and the only reason we're seeing this story is because she was/is a teacher. The number of people affected by others' vindictive smearing for similar but in less "shocking" circumstances would lend itself to a public outcry that could very well undermine the whole "moral" control this stems from.
If you don't realize you're living in a seriously fucked dystopia already, you're likely a white cis-het male in the middle class, all due respect. Take a look around, and breathe it in.
Regardless of the fact that there's no way many of her students will be mature enough to handle this information without being disruptive, there's a difference between supporting life decisions and accepting them.
Like the difference between fatphobia and supporting healthy lifestyles, right? One is cruelty, the other is not supporting bad habits.
Same with prostitution, it's one thing to not oppress sex workers, it's another to tell kids to become sex workers. Hopefully she's not doing that but is normalizing the profession really what you want around teenagers?
No parent wants to find out their kid started turning tricks because Ms Smith seemed cool.
Especially when her "Ways to Spot A Dangerous John" course wasn't approved by the principal.
Why would you assume she was "promoting sex work" instead just teaching kids "normal" sex ed? That's a very strong assumption, and the article says nothing about that. Do you have an alternative information source that says otherwise?
Her existence as a teacher is tacit approval of her side gig by the school. Her existence in the classroom promotes it as a viable career.
There's always a fine line to tread by institutions in charge of minors between trusting your kids to be mature enough to handle things like this and knowing how vulnerable they are to making poorly thought out decisions.
I wouldn't want a prostitute teaching classes on sex ed, and I wouldn't want a drug dealer teaching chemistry, and just to be clear, I use drugs and have used prostitutes.
I just didn't do it and won't support it around people whose brains are literally unfinished.
Seems to be a viable career, if she can charge a $3000 cancellation fee…
I love how you admit to “using” prostitutes, because you don’t seem to view them as human beings. Seems like what’s good for the gander isn’t good for the goose.
Should things that are “social goods” pay living wage? Or should we expect people to forgo survivable wages in order to do good deeds? Most of the schools I’ve worked at have been hiring randoms with no qualifications because there’s not a lot of folks willing to work 80 hours a week for “maybe enough for one person to survive on if you’re never hoping to ever have a kid or home of your own.”
Her getting fired means she'll likely have to rely more on her prostitution to survive. This means the school has now increased the amount of prostitution. How are the schools against it if that's the case? Maybe the schools should increase teachers wages so that they don't need to be a prostitute.
Her existence as a teacher is tacit approval of her side gig by the school. Her existence in the classroom promotes it as a viable career.
The logic of your argument follows that teaching as a career itself shouldn't be presented as a viable career is it requires a second job to finance the career of teaching.
Some people view sex as something intrinsically beyond the purely transactional, and for those people it's immoral to treat sexual intercourse as a commodity. I'm somewhat undecided, but it does seem a bit like the final frontier of neoliberalism.
What a useless word soup. Sex can absolutely be transactional if it suits two consenting parties. Your world view being as narrow as a drinking straw isn't a basis for how the rest of society chooses to live.
Whose worldview? I'm undecided. I've been reading about the lives of prostitutes in Bangladesh though, and it's heartbreaking. I'm definitely not a supporter of that side of the sex trade.
I'm not making an argument, I don't understand what you mean. I'm barely even expressing an opinion; at present I haven't reached any strong conclusions but can definitely see that the sex industry generates a lot of suffering.
Should we punish those sex workers in Bangladesh? I’m not sure why their plight = sex workers should be punished.
Sex work is fucking terrible. I have PTSD from some of the acts I was forced to participate in. Do you know why I was forced to participate in those acts? Because sex work is illegal, and advocating for myself in any way was impossible. Someone could choose not to pay me for my work, and because what I was doing was illegal, I had no recourse. I have often had to allow men to not use condoms or do really fucked up shit, because my other option was not getting to eat.
If you want to stop the sex trade, then advocate for things like universal basic income. Sex workers aren’t the ones who have decided to treat sex as a commodity, they just recognize that others do and that they can use that to eat. Dissociating and letting some boomer wet their dick bought me rice and butter when I didn’t have any other option.
Yes, I believe UBI or something is necessary. The worst excesses of the labour market are absolutely due to systemic economic coercion, including the vast majority of what goes on in the sex trade. Sex work advocates that view prostitution as some mutually beneficial exchange between equals are living in a fantasy world.
Okay cool. But until UBI exists, sometimes sex work is the only option. It is systemic economic coercion, just like working any other shitty and abusive job. Making sex work illegal makes it more dangerous for sex workers. The demand will always exist, and people desperate enough to submit to that demand will always exist, as long as we don’t provide for all human beings.
The biggest factor that made sex work not a “mutually beneficial exchange between equals” was the fact that it was illegal. I had zero protection from people choosing to stealth (ie, remove condoms mid act), or not pay me after the fact (always charge up front!). I did not have legitimate means of work, as the sex on my drivers license did not match my presentation. Punishing sex workers is the most bass-ackwards thing you can do.
Yeah, before neoliberalism prostitution didn't exist, so clearly it is good to victimize prostitutes, as that's just sticking it to neoliberals, the ones who invented prostitution.
Do you think sex ed somehow cheapens sex? People understanding sex only makes it better for everyone in every way.
There is nothing about sex ed that teaches anyone that sex is a commodity. My experience in public school was there was no morality involved whatsoever. It was very sterile and 100% about learning technical shit about how our bodies work. Invaluable information, I might add.
And I grew up in what many would consider a liberal area, especially in terms of our local public education.
Freaks like you who are obsessed with which genitals a child has, are incapable of separating the physiological aspects of sex from the emotional ones. Sex ed is not sexy, dude, it was awkward as fuck. If anything, it turned me off of sex.
It's like saying that learning about the chemical processes used to make meth in chemistry class is the same thing as smoking it.
I'm an advocate of facilitated discourse and was highlighting what causes such polarisation in attitudes towards sex work/workers. Since some people view it as fundamentally immoral, that's a very difficult bridge to cross.
Sex education is incredibly important and I'm amazed how bad it remains in many parts of the world. I'm unsure how or where children's genitals come into this.
Seriously. This is a human being we're talking about, who's now lost her livelihood, and will possibly need to resort to prostitution again to make a living because of it.
You're acting like she introduced herself to her students as a former prostitute. The kids never would have known if these asshole adults didn't dig into her past like it mattered.
It is massively naive to think that zero of the people who are students right now will ever do sex work at some point in the future. Some of them definitely will. Even if you don't agree that sex work is valid and honorable work (which you clearly don't agree with) there's no way to stop people from doing it despite how vilified or illegal it is in any society.
Given that reality, a course teaching people how to avoid the dangerous elements of a job that some of those people will eventually do, sounds like a great course. Having a sex worker who knows WTF she's talking about teach it? That's fucking amazing.