Do you think sex work is “real” work?

I suppose it just depends on what you mean by "real work".

If you take it literally then yes of course it is real work; it involves putting effort into an activity that earns you a living. But then by the same token you could equally say that drug dealing or working in a scam call centre or simply begging on the streets is also "real work".

However in another sense, I would say that it is not "real work" in my opinion, because it doesn't provide anything of value or benefit to the customer. A person who has paid for the services of a sex worker is in actual fact no better off than they were before. Rather, sex work involves taking money from the customer by exploiting a (potentially temporary) weakness in their ability to realise that there's no real value in what they're paying for.

define work?

if you define 'work' simply as someone who gets paid in exchange for a service then it is work; likewise then drug dealers and arms dealers and human traffickers would be considered doing work same with those illegal weed and cocaine farmers. pretty sure they all work really hard for their money.

It's the oldest profession

Sex can be considered a benefit? It may make the customer happy, which is a benefit right?

I’d say it’s a very artificial sort of happiness.

As human beings, we’ve evolved with a reward system that gives us a hit of dopamine (which is pleasurable to us) every time something “good” happens. So for example you feel happy after eating a nice meal, or getting a good night’s sleep, or making new friends, or getting your pay check etc.

Some people have found a way to “hack” that system so that you get the chemical reward in your brain without actually having any real-world improvement in your life (e.g. when you take addictive drugs). It’s a shortcut to getting the dopamine hit, which makes you feel that it’s more worth your while to get it that way, leading to an addiction. Meanwhile you stop bothering to seek actual value in the real world because your brain no longer thinks it needs to care about that, and your life crumbles around you.

It’s a similar thing with sex work. Sex is supposed to make you happy because it’s an evolutionary reward for building close emotional bonds with another person or for trying to produce offspring. But paying for it essentially cheats that system by giving you the dopamine hit without any actual improvement in your real-world state of affairs. So as I said, you’re not getting anything of value; you just think that you are at the time, and someone is exploiting that weakness in your judgement to get money out of you. Meanwhile it interrupts one of the biggest incentives we have to actually work on ourselves, be the best and most attractive we can be, find partners who appreciate us and with form those emotional connections with us etc.

McDonalds and other fast food companies: *hide away*

It's the oldest profession

I wouldn't say people who work for these companies aren't doing "real work", because they are still providing something of value. You need food and calories to survive, and fast food companies do provide that. Of course at the same time, they are also doing something which is of negative value (damaging your health), as well as providing some artificial value as well (excessive salt and fat which trick your brain into thinking you're getting better nutrition than you really are).

I wasn't saying that those companies didn't do real work

It was more a joke off this:
"But paying for it essentially cheats that system by giving you the dopamine hit without any actual improvement in your real-world state of affairs. So as I said, you’re not getting anything of value; you just think that you are at the time, and someone is exploiting that weakness in your judgement to get money out of you. Meanwhile it interrupts one of the biggest incentives we have to actually work on ourselves, be the best and most attractive we can be, find partners who appreciate us and with form those emotional connections with us etc."

Ah okay I misunderstood what you were getting at.

Don't understand why people always say this.

What about hunting or gathering?

No marketing is

Arguably done by people for their own benefit rather than sold as a commodity.

they just gonna eat it themselves and give none to the women and children?

If a group of men take down a woolly mammoth are they just gonna eat it themselves and give none to the women and children? lol

Hunting is clearly work done for the benefit of the tribe in my opinion.

They raise a good point tbh, especially when theyve tossed the word commodity in. Doing it for yourself/tribe is one thing, doing it for barter as a commodity is quite another, even if there would have been a degree of overlap.