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Five thousand years of history bring us to the hardest questions: what policies actually protect people, what evidence says about different approaches, and what it would mean to organize our response to commercial sex around the genuine interests of the most vulnerable people involved.

The internet transformed commercial sex as radically as anything since the industrial revolution — enabling greater autonomy for some, creating new vectors for exploitation for others, and producing a legislative and ethical landscape that nobody has figured out how to navigate. This episode examines FOSTA-SESTA, OnlyFans, the trafficking-platform debate, and where we actually stand.

Beneath the historical narrative is an economic structure — one characterized by specific mechanisms of recruitment, control, and profit extraction that have remained remarkably consistent across centuries and continents. This episode examines the business of commercial sex as a business: how it actually operates, how exploitation is maintained, and where the money actually goes.