The notion that sex is somehow relevantly different from producing food, transporting food, making food, serving food, cleaning up food, is a religious concept. It has no objective validity absent religious myths and superstitions. I can abuse, mistreat, enslave, exploit a food service worker. That in no way means food service work is inherently degrading or in any way wrong or shameful, or even undesirable (I know many who love the work
as long as they find employers and customers and coworkers who treat them decently, which is the moral reality of all work and employment whatever). It obviously also makes no sense to declare food service work illegal for any of these reasons (men like to eat laboriously prepared food and be waited on hand and foot and not have to clean up after
and they will pay women to do this
and no one is outraged by that). Ditto, sex work.
Sex differs in some respects from food service work, certainly. But not as much as you think, and not in any way that really matters. Its not inherently more dangerous, for example. There are serious, even lethal, accidents in the food service industry, too (not just workplace dangers, but criminal ones as well: many a food service worker has been beaten, raped or murdered by armed robbers). We didnt solve that problem by banning the industry. We solved it by improving (and continuing to improve) all aspects of safety and legal protection. We could do the same in the sex industryand in fact, we can only do that by legalizing it.
On the other hand, sex work is more intimate, more personal, and more violating than food work. But so are other industries. Sex involves being penetrated, but many professional athletes intimately and abusively touch each other, too; we pay surgeons to grab our balls, finger our anus, cut open our chests, and shove things up our every orifice; people pay professionals to pierce and tattoo them; cops and soldiers get paid to take a bullet now and again. Sex is very intimate and personal, but often so is professional writing and acting and dancing, interviewing people for oral histories or news reports, giving and receiving a massage, or speaking to a therapist. Indeed, that latter is arguably more intimate and personal than hired sex work. Think about it. Paying someone to listen at length to your most personal thoughts and darkest secrets, and being paid to listen to strangers most personal thoughts and darkest secrets. Thats exposing the real you, the deepest and truest form of nudity and vulnerability and penetration. Compared to that, sex is a mere dance.