What If We Treated Sex Work Like a Serious Career—Not a Teen Impulse?

When Trisha Paytas casually floated the idea of a congressional run, the internet did what it always does - laughed first, debated later. But buried beneath the spectacle was a surprisingly adult conversation: what happens when influencers with lived experience start talking policy?

One idea circulating alongside the chatter deserves more attention than it’s getting, especially in spaces that actually understand sex work.

What if the minimum age for entering sex work were raised to 25?

Not as a moral panic. Not as a purity campaign. But as a labor, safety, and power issue.

Sex Work Isn’t a Starter Job, Even If the Internet Pretends It Is

In most industries that involve risk, permanence, or high-stakes decision-making, we quietly acknowledge that maturity matters. You can’t rent a car until 25. Insurance premiums drop at 25. Neuroscience tells us impulse control and long-term planning don’t fully settle until around that age.

Yet sex work, an industry with real physical, psychological, and digital permanence, is routinely marketed to teenagers and barely-legal adults as “easy money,” “empowerment,” or worse, a shortcut to relevance.

That contradiction should make us uncomfortable.

Raising the Age Isn’t Anti–Sex Work. It’s Pro–Sex Worker.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about shaming sex workers or infantilizing adults. It’s about acknowledging power asymmetry.

At 18, most people:

• Don’t fully grasp long-term digital consequences

• Are financially vulnerable

• Are more susceptible to coercion, grooming, and bad contracts

• Are still forming identity, boundaries, and self-worth

Sex work doesn’t just involve sex, it involves branding yourself, negotiating access, managing parasocial attention, and navigating an audience that doesn’t always respect consent once money is involved.

Waiting until 25 doesn’t eliminate risk. It increases agency.

The Cultural Shift We’re Avoiding

The uncomfortable truth is that the current system benefits platforms, managers, and consumers far more than it benefits young workers. Youth sells. Naivety sells. “Barely legal” has been normalized to the point of invisibility.

Raising the age would force a reckoning.

It would require:

• Better labor protections

• More honest onboarding

• Less fetishization of inexperience

• A shift from “fast money” to sustainable careers

In other words, it would treat sex work like work—not a viral phase.

No stranger to adult work, Trisha Paytas once shared all on OnlyFans

Why This Conversation Is Happening Now

America is entering a period of cultural tightening. With Donald Trump back in office, institutions are recalibrating, not expanding. If sex work policy is going to evolve at all, it will likely do so through arguments rooted in protection, responsibility, and labor and not liberation slogans alone.

That’s not necessarily a loss.

Sometimes progress looks like fewer people being rushed into choices they don’t yet have the power to refuse.

The Real Question

This isn’t about whether sex work should exist. It already does. It’s about when someone is truly equipped to choose it.

If we believe sex work can be empowering, then we should also believe it deserves informed consent, emotional maturity, financial leverage and time.

Twenty-five isn’t a punishment.

It’s a pause.

And in an industry that rarely encourages reflection, a pause might be the most radical protection of all.