I want to draw a big line between “coerced into sex work” and “do it out of economic necessity.” I do my job out of economic necessity, saying that we have to solve that problem before we can help people in the sex industry seems pretty backwards to me.
If we truly normalized it, then it wouldn’t be digging people deeper into their plight. They could put it on a resume experience showing customer service skills if they wanted to apply for some other jobs, for instance. They could use the same mechanisms as the rest of us to deal with unsafe work conditions (mechanism that ought to work better than they do but are definitely better than nothing). We can easily look at countries that have legalized prostitution if we want to see how that first step (which is far from “normalizing”) affects women involved.
