Today's memes are being critiqued for the crime of making dumb arguments that are too easy to refute.
Let's begin.
People don't put sex work on their resumes because sex work is illegal.
Obviously.
Really, that's all there needs to be to it. I assume drug dealers and purse-snatchers in crime rings refrain from adding those activities to their resumes for similar reasons. The right-wing Facebook page that shared this added in the caption: “[a]nd why do you get so upset when you are told to pay taxes?”
…to whom, exactly? Again, outside of a few counties in Nevada, sex work is not legal. Are you sincerely suggesting these women go to the nearest IRS branch and volunteer their literal criminal activity and offer them a cut? For real? You really wonder why they don’t?
…Or are you talking about Only Fans? Stripping? Other things that don’t involve sex but do involve women voluntarily displaying their bodies to the willing and eager men who are paying them to do just that for them? Why don’t you yell at restaurant servers and drug dealers for evading their taxes? And why do you even assume the OnlyFans and other legal “sex workers” in those parts of the industry don’t pay taxes? Maybe some younger and more naïve people may not at first because they don’t realize they need to, or because they think they can get away with it like they did when they were a waitress who didn’t claim cash tips, but they’ll pay for that later. You can’t hide from the IRS forever.
The most irritating thing about any kind of anti-sex work sentiment expressed by men on the internet is that you never hear them saying anything negative about the multitudes of men who keep the industry afloat; you never hear them talk about the men at all. You know how to end the sex industry? Stop buying sex from people. Businesses fail when there is no demand for what the products and services they offer. Speak out against men using women as paid sex dolls if you hate when women respond to the market’s demand for those services by offering them. That’s how you do it. Not by making fun of women on the internet for being smart enough to refrain from including illegal activity on a resume. And since ending sex work hasn’t been done in the history of humanity so far, my best guess is that we’re stuck with it, so maybe you ought to adapt and focus on raging against something else.
This brings me to one other reason that more tame, legal versions of sex work (stripping, OnlyFans) aren’t often listed on resumes: the continued stigma of the industry and the discrimination faced among those who’ve worked in it. Perpetuated, over and over again, by the exact kind of people who ask questions like “why don’t you put OnlyFans on a resume, then, hmm? I am very smart.”
Whether sex work is a positive and empowering form of work or an exploitative one contributing to the degeneracy of society, it is unquestionably work. That’s what it’s called when you exchange a product or service for money. “Work.” As former stripper Lily Burana explains,
Sometimes the supportive “Sex work is real work” sentiment gets coupled with “It’s a job like any other job.” Is it real work? Lord, yes. No other job I’ve held required as much labor, physical or emotional. Strut, spin, flatter, serve — the constant flex of thighs and white lies.
It’s just silly that it’s even a question that needs debating. You can argue whether it should remain illegal and/or stigmatized work, or whether it should be legal and respected, but is it work? Obviously it’s work. Jesus.
The (again) very simple answer to this question is usually: “because I can't afford to buy a house.” Having enough money for a down payment and good enough credit to get a mortgage is a prerequisite to buying a home. Owning the property with which you wish to collect rent is a prerequisite to becoming a landlord.
I don't even disagree with the idea that being a landlord requires work. Of course it does (or, it should). And some tenants are literally the worst kinds of inconsiderate leeches and require a lot more work on the landlord’s behalf than others. I mean, the bad thing about landlords is that everyone needs a place to live, so you can get away with being a lazy piece of shit slumlord pretty easily, and that's the real issue, if you ask me. It’s a tale as old as time. I'm not really as staunch of an anti-capitalist as I used to be, and I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with charging rent from someone to live on your property. But “why don’t you just buy something really expensive” is one of the most idiotic pieces of advice ever doled out about anything. If anything was ever that easy, they’d have done it by now. Few people who are able to buy a house continue to rent when they don’t want to.
Maybe the lazy meme-maker meant to imply that the person saying that being a landlord requires no work doesn’t become one because they are afraid of the actual hard work involved that they deny exists, but that’s an absurd assumption that is out of touch at best. If the person really just wasn’t interested in the work involved, they’d probably just say so. You need money to become a landlord. Full stop. Nothing else is really relevant, and that’s the actual reason that most people don’t become landlords. Not because they’re afraid of repainting a few rooms every few years and fixing punched-in drywall.
…Ironically, a lot of landlords that I know have politics rooted in left-anarchism or socialism. I don’t know much about how they maintain their properties or what they charge their tenants (or how they reconcile their choice of passive income-earning with their politics), but as it turns out, there are a fair number of anti-capitalists who go on to intentionally become literal capitalists, so there’s an interesting tidbit to explore in maybe a later essay.
Is there a meme you want me to consider eviscerating for some reason or another? Send it over to me at lirpastriker@gmail.com.
I originally wrote something else on a pedantic point but them I realized that you weren't just talking about an abstract puzzle and there really are people dumb enough to make the argument you mention about putting it in your resume.