Canada

But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

I wouldn't sell logic, flow-charts, and diagrams short. But its worth considering how much sex-negativity pervades Abrahamic Western culture up front. It isn't that we're devoid of logic when it comes to sex and business, its that we've been sold a bill of goods at a very early age. It feels bad because its been drummed into us as bad.

I don’t really know how to fix this.

It's difficult to balance, because the defensive social posture around sex is itself a social counterbalance to the aggressive instinctual impulse people can feel naturally. Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment. What we want is a more nuanced understanding of the sexual drive. But that's harder to achieve than blanket permission or blanket sanction. You want some kind of bureaucratic convention to apply, which gets you to institutions like marriage, but that gets you to the commodification of virginity which is its own can of worms.

If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I would argue that sex work is ultimately a negative externality of the rent-system broadly speaking. If you constantly need to generate income for basic essentials - food, shelter, energy, etc - then the people cartelizing those services become your defacto pimps. By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

The fixation on the sex work itself is the problem. What people need is public housing and utilities, guaranteed sustenance, and a pathway to a career of their choosing. That plus decriminalization removes the network of pimps that make sex work truly morally abhorrent.