The problem with the so-called Casting Couch -- the practice of women getting paid work that isn't sex work per se in exchange for sexual favors -- is that it's a form of corruption which both harms the end product and sends a false signal concerning what it takes to succeed in a particular business, especially if you are a woman wanting to make it on merit.
It's similar to taking kickbacks. Kickbacks are typically paid to people in lower positions for choosing an inferior product over something they would otherwise choose on the merits of the product.
Sydney Biddle Barrows became best known as the Mayflower Madam because she came from the American equivalent of royalty or nobility and although she didn't have money, she had ethics like someone in charge. She went into fashion and had some low level job that likely paid dirt and her new boss began buying purses of inferior quality, likely in exchange for kickbacks.
Barrows foolishly confronted the woman and was wrongfully fired to cover up the crime and allow the woman in question to keep lining her pockets. Barrows perhaps should have found a way to go through other channels and notify people above her boss because Barrows was correct that her customers expected better and would likely soon start shopping elsewhere because of the decline in quality of the product.
So she was correct "morally" and in terms of business sense but made a foolish mistake in how she handled it. Odds are good her old boss still works for the company in question and may have justified the firing after the fact with the fact that Barrows began running a call girl service, so obviously wasn't the kind of people we want working here.
The reality is that her service was such a class action that some businessmen told her employees they stopped seeing sex workers in other cities when they traveled because it just wasn't the same.
She took them shopping, taught them how to dress, taught them manners, notified clients if one of her ladies caught an STD and was just extremely savvy about what upper class men wanted and needed from her service.
She even chose the name to weed out unsophisticated nouveau riche with insufficient manners for the kind of clientele she desired to serve.
Odds are good that the buyer who fired her did untold harm to the brand in question by taking kickbacks to purchase inferior purses but line her pockets.
Hiring via the Casting Couch is like that but potentially vastly WORSE.
Heteronormative culture holds female sexuality sacred and insists women should be virgins on the wedding night and guardians of virtue such that most women would rather DIE than admit they performed a sexual favor to get hired. Men are not expected to ascribe to similar values "because men have needs."
So it's not a big deal in the mind of the man demanding sexual favors but the women granting them are likely to feel it's an extremely big deal and he likely doesn't need to do anything else to get them to keep this dirty little secret because she will feel very ashamed of it and he probably won't.
Heteronormative culture says there are two kinds of women: Good girls you marry and bad girls you sleep with. A lot of "good girls" remain largely ignorant about their own sexuality and admitting you know anything about it may get you reassigned to the Bad Girl category no matter how you have lived your life.
It's also a truism that there can be a wide variety of reasons to want sex with a particular person, including cuckolding her man. If a woman is married well and getting work via the Casting Couch, she might have no idea that they are really counting coup against her husband and otherwise don't even find her attractive.
It wouldn't become apparent unless she divorced and then she still might not see it because there can be endless confounding factors obscuring the real reason. She may think it's because she's older or because her health has declined or any number of other reasons.
Monogamy is a popular expectation for probably most culture around the world. It helps limit the spread of disease. It helps ensure that people know who the parents of the child are. It helps ensure that children have two parents to both support them financially and raise them.
My default preference is happy monogamy which unfortunately I've never figured out. I blog in part because I'm not satisfied with the way my life has gone and I feel like the fact that I am someone who so strongly WANTS a happily monogamous relationship and can't arrange it implies that the system is broken.
Making sex work illegal is part of this heteronormative cultural set of mental models where we try to insist women need to be Good Girls TM if they want to marry well and then we arrange life such that marrying well is just about your only hope of getting access to the good life if you are a woman.
It's a system fundamentally broken that assumes some people must break the rules in order for life to work at ALL.
"Men are supposed to have experience before marriage. Women aren't.""Who are they supposed to get experience WITH?"-- Scene from All in the Family
Or as someone once wryly suggested to me: Widow women should be deflowering young men.
It fits all the parameters our society expects while generally breaking the brains of the sorts of idiots who believe things like "Men are supposed to have experience and women are not."
We currently have a lot of rules surrounding who can sleep with whom at work etc. and those rules exist because we accept a lot of assumptions about sex being a big deal involving a lot of power inherently when the reality is our rules are a source of most of the power in question.
It CAN be a big deal:
1. IF a child is conceived.
2. IF an STD is involved.
3. IF it's a DIRTY SECRET that can harm reputations etc.
That last is MOSTLY a consequence of our heteronormative culture and all the rules we create to try to insist women be Good Girls.
We do that in part because although women KNOW that if that baby is a consequence of sexual intercourse, that baby is HERS, men cannot be similarly certain. She can get high and drunk and attend an orgy and nine months later be absolutely certain the baby carries her DNA while having no clue who the father is.
Heteronormative cultural expectations that Good Girls are the ones you marry is rooted in patriarchal and patrilineal practices that are no longer necessary because we now have the technology to TEST for paternity. You do not need to treat your wife like chattel property and feel confident she's never been with anyone else to feel confident the children you are supporting who will inherit from you were really fathered by you.
From what I have read and heard, matrilineal cultures tend to have better women's rights. If you gain certain rights via your mother, people are less hung up about a lot of things that are made largely irrelevant by that practice.
My understanding is human infants tend to look like daddy. This is biological evidence that there is a long, long history of genetic selection favoring children whose father is more likely to stick around and take responsibility for their offspring.
You MUST be Mrs. Traylor. They look EXACTLY like him.-- Some guy I met exactly once at my husband's office, stepping forward to shake my hand as I walked in with my two young sons in tow.
I don't know how we can fix this giant pile of manure. It's a lot to fix.
But I would start by decriminalizing sex work and no longer acting like a woman is only worth marrying if she is sexually inexperienced, sexually ignorant, knows nothing about getting her own needs met etc.
A lot of married couples meet on the job and this can destroy her career. It usually doesn't damage his.
If "Yes, we hooked up. And? I mean, really, who cares?" were something you could say, a lot of the cultural practices creating the Glass Ceiling would wither and die.
My 2 cents as an earthbound human woman who has spent an excess of time wondering why my life doesn't work.