For those not familiar with Billy’s stuff, the original ask the question is referring to is here. And you should check out his tumblr for sure, @hypnohepcat.
This is going to be another one with a short answer and a long answer.
Short answer: Generally, yes.
Long answer: Usually, but I don’t think it’s “inherent”. Or rather, I think there’s a way to depict this sort of thing without it becoming insulting and demeaning, it’s just difficult to do. That’s not to detract from the original point, but I think we can do more to try an tease out what, exactly, the problem is with these sorts of fetishes, and whether anything can be done to try and mitigate that.
This issue, after all, isn’t a matter of who gets to have sex in stories. There can’t be something inherently wrong with a story about two construction workers having sex–that is, the act itself. But rather, there’s an issue about how these characters get portrayed in these sorts of stories, where they become flattened and reduced to cliche and archetype rather than filled out and given actual lives and development.
Because as Billy points out, a lot of the labor we tend to fetishize is, generally, rather skilled. Construction is a great example. We love our stories about dumb laborers, but there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge and skill that goes into construction, electrical work, plumpbing etc., but in our culture, we have created such a vast cultural gap between manual labor (brute force, low intellect), information labor (high intellect, cleverness), and social labor (service work, either controlling or worthy of humiliation) that it becomes very difficult to conceive of, say, a smart, clever, intellectual construction worker.
But these jobs are skilled, and people take pride in them, and they use them build lives beyond them. That’s what we tend to forget. When we fantasize about the dumb brute laborer, we don’t usually get so far as to figure out what sort of place he goes home to, if he has a union job with union wages, if he has a family, what he does for leisure, if he feels like his life possesses worth. We reduce these professions to their “sexy” elements, and everything else, everything inconvenient, disappears into the ether.
It becomes especially troublesome when the depiction becomes inherently demeaning. When the job becomes a symbol of a person lacking worth in society. I’m guilty of this part, especially, and it’s something I’m trying to do less of, especially because it is lazy, uninteresting writing. A character should be more than what they do for work, in the same sense that a character should be more than the culture they hail from (both in terms of race and class). We can still tell sexy stories with characters who are more than cliches, I think–it’s just a difficult challenge to do so.
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