Anthony, I assure you that you and Kerwink are both in precisely the right place. I started this forum because I knew that those of us on "this side" need spaces where we can talk safely enough that our differences can emerge and we can discuss them. That doesn't have a chance of happening when we're all banded together in defending our basic premise against the prohibitionists. 

What you and Kerwink seem to disagree about, I think, is actually not a question of sex-negativity or moralism, but a question of how to balance collective interests against individual freedoms, and that is an issue that organized labor faces in all the places where it operates. For that matter, it's a question we all face in our everyday lives (e.g, should I uy the SUV or not?).  

I read Kerwink's labor speed-up analogy not as a suggestion that some kinds of activities were right or wrong in themselves, but that as a labor situation the expanding expectations of workers without negotiation presents serious problems for many. Of course the workers in most strip clubs don't have a union, and so they don't have collective bargaining...

But to remove the sex from the situation for a minute to make the point (maybe): I teach at a college where we do have a union and we do have collective bargaining. Our teaching load is 15 contact hours a semester. Some faculty do a lot of part time teaching in addition to that load in order to supplement their income. When enough of them do that extra work during the ordinary work day (instead of, say, on the weekend or at night) it makes it harder for the union to argue that the regular contractual contact-hour load should remain at 15 credits. What one group of workers finds useful, and what they do willingly, really can put other workers at a disadvantage.

To take it back to the strip club, if I chose to work in a strip club precisely because there was no sexual contact being sold, and then the expectations of customers began to change because workers could essentially do whatever they wanted, and a group of workers felt absolutely fine with selling sexual contact, and I started seeing a dramatic reduction in my earnings, and had to look for other work or give in to the pressure of the customers, I would be put at a great disadvantage.

I don't think that discussing that dilemma and its impact on workers is a matter of making moral decisions or evidence of sex-negativity/sex-positivity, but simply a matter of talking labor strategy: how do workers manage to balance individual interests with collective interests?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth