Hostile Fire Pay

Is hostile fire pay coercive?

I'm in the middle of eavesdropping on a Twitter conversation. The relevant tweets are from a non-follower, so I'm disinclined to reprint them here, but the gist is this: sex work is different from ordinary market labor because penetration is categorically different from, say, clerical work. Paying women to perform such degrading acts is exploitative due to both the sacred-violating nature of the work and the lack of decent alternative options.

Bullets penetrate. The bodily effects of combat are visible and often gruesome. The mental health effects can be devastating. Yet, Soldiers earn wage premiums for being stationed in combat theaters. Is hostile fire pay similarly exploitative? Why or why not?

Commoditization vs. Trafficking

I had not heard it put quite this way before.  Regardless of whether this is logically defensible, the author does seem to make a valid empirical point:  exchange is more acceptable than "trafficking," for many people. (Click for a more readable image)

A Marxist wrinkle on the Aristotelian distinction of trading things as things and trading things as commodities.  Except it's a lot clearer than Marx.

From "The Cultural Biography of Things," by Igor Kopytoff, in The Social Life of Things, edited by A. Appadurai, Cambridge Press, 1986, pp. 64-95.