The idiom is not “true”, or false, for particular varieties of labor.
An idiom carries the meaning understood from broader usage patterns.
Your analysis is not particularly accurate, that the intrinsic content of the phrase describes particular labor better than other, especially in the way you have argued.
At any rate, sex work is the context of the discussion, and how the phrase was employed specifically, from which my objection was raised.
As such your emphasis may seem to be misdirection, perhaps seeking pedantry or virtue signaling, more than engagement that is honest and substantive.
Good lord, you must be fun at parties.
I’m well aware of what an idiom is and how they’re used. I understand that traditionally the phrase, “selling your body,” is employing the idiom that means to engage in sex work. I also understand that this is what you’re referring in the initial comment I replied to. I understand the idiom itself doesn’t refer to other forms of labor because that’s not how idioms work.
My point is that if you take the literal phrase “selling your body,” you can very easily construe it to be just as true about any labor. Like I said, I’d argue this point is illustrated particularly well manual labor. You are commodifying the physical use of your body to achieve a task, often at a heavy cost to your body if done in the long term.
This is not me changing the context of the discussion. I’d very much argue that this is actually a very useful point to make in the context of sex work. We are taking an idiom that has been historically used to harm people, and deconstructing it. The intent being to point out how sex workers aren’t any more, “selling their body” than people in other forms of socially accepted work.
Again I understand the idiom refers specifically to sex work, but if we deconstruct it we can use it to point out a hypocracy in the thought process of those using it.
This is not me changing the context of the discussion.
We are taking an idiom that has been historically used to harm people, and deconstructing it.
You were deconstructing the idiom, and in doing so, you were erasing the context.
The comment that initially invoked the idiom employed it as a reference to sex work, following the original usage of the idiom, which is understood stigmatically.
I raised an alarm, and indeed, an exceedingly mild one, but instead of meeting my remarks on their merits, you preferred to engage in pedantry and virtue signaling, by attacking a straw man.
More, no one sells one’s body, taken as the “literal phrase”.
You can’t do it. You can sell a car, a house, the shirt off your back, but everyone has exactly one body through life. I have mine and you have yours.
It is not particularly meaningful to analyze which labor is described accurately versus not by the phrase of the idiom, because the phrase has no coherent literal meaning. Hence, the phrase is understood only idiomatically.
Hooo boy, you’re continuing to perfectly misread me and gloss over what I’m trying to say at key points, it feels. But I’m just going to skip over the first two points instead of continue to try and clarify them seemingly fruitlessly.
It is not particularly meaningful to analyze which labor is described accurately versus not by the phrase of the idiom, because the phrase has no coherent literal meaning. Hence, the phrase is understood only idiomatically.
Let me try a different approach here since it seems I’m not communicating with you effectively.
First off, seems like we’re both on the same side here: Sex work is real work, and it should be destigmarized. Cool? Cool.
The idiom, “selling your body,” is derogatory phrase used to refer to engaging in sex work. It’s used to separate or, “otherize,” sex workers. Pretty sure we’re still on the same page.
So, actually, I guess my first question to you is if the string of words, “selling your body” has no meaning outside of the idiom, how did it come to refer to sex work specifically in the first place? Obviously it was just a figure of speech someone used first right? And their implied meaning was that there is something wrong or immoral about selling sex, and specifically sex. Which is what got rolled into the idiom.
So, bare with me, and just humor me for a minute here.
Take just the figure of speech, drop the part where it’s specifically about sex work. Can you explain to me how sex work is “selling your body,” so to speak, where other work isn’t?
