Brothels - should they be legalised everywhere?

The legal upshot of it, unfortunately, was that rather than things getting better for women, the repeal of the legislation was used as a weapon to disband brothels and boarding houses - which were usually female run, and a lot less evil - and force prostitutes into street walking. It then went on to talk about how the Jack The Ripper hysteria was a product of this cultural shift...

Obv, in a perfect world, I'm against prostitution, because I do feel it's exploitative. But MOST professions are exploitative in one way or another. If people are going to be exploited, then they should be allowed to do so in a way which provides the most protection.

Even watching docu's about legal brothels, one is struck time and again by the *thickness* of the sex workers. It's sad that they end up sex workers, but I don't know what kind of other choice they would have.

However, if it's going to happen, they should be protected, and that points towards legalisation of brothels.

My brother told a story about a bunch of his colleagues wanting to go to a brothel in Nevada, but on the way there, my brother passed a place that offered helicopter rides through the Grand Canyon. It was about the same price. And he figured, hey, what was cooler, and any man could go to a prostitute, but how many men could say they flew through the Grand Canyon in a helicopter?

He was shocked and horrified and aghast that I'd even suggested. But he always was more of a prude than me, which is why he's an Ex.

(However, it's strange, because I would never ask the same thing of HSA, even the thought would really drive me nuts.)

(Perhaps this is because my emotions for HSA are more "real" or perhaps because I've now had the closest power-dynamics I could have had to going to a prostitute, in the form of the Whoreton debacle.)

I mean, just cos they dance the go-go...

have you been to germany?

I think you were misled on the program you watched. I was under the impression that prosititution and brothels have been legal in certain counties in Nevada for a quite a long time (ie, decades). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I admit what I'm about to say is a bit of a stretch and uber-pedantic, but i can think of many office jobs in the U.S. that are analagous to this, yet never receive the same criticism or scrutiny. The only difference being the mental toll as opposed to the physical toll.

(disclaimer: i may severely regret this post later as those more wise than me will point out more obvious differences, but I'm starting to get more defensive of people who choose an "exploitive" career, when so many "accepted" career choices in america are just as "exploitive" but in different ways)

Prostitution shouldn't be legal, it should be mandatory! Oh, wait, that sounds kind of.......

Hmm... What about S&M? What if one woman in her contract says it is ok to, I dunno, bite her for example. And some client bites her neck too hard and she bleeds to death... Hmm...

Last roundup at the Mustang Ranch
Bordellos R Us: In the Nevada desert, a new management style is coming to the world's oldest profession.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Cruickshank

August 12, 1999 | "It's sure been a wild ride," said a former working girl on Monday as the feds shut down America's most famous legal brothel after its owners were convicted of fraud. "It's the end of the road for the Mustang Ranch," she sighed.

The Mustang, a 104-room bordello on a 440-acre spread near Reno, Nev., was established by Joe Conforte, a onetime cabdriver, in 1955. Sixteen years later, he won a court case that paved the way for the legalization of prostitution in Nevada -- where whether to sanction or forbid the establishments is left up to county government. Twelve of the state's 17 counties now permit the operation of bordellos. Indeed, not since New Orleans' legendary Storyville has prostitution in the United States had such a large, legal land base, and Storyville was a mere neighborhood on the edge of the French Quarter, not a vast slab of sagebrush-dotted desert.
http://www.salon.com/people/rogue/1999/08/12/mustang/

Let's all have a bake sale to save Mustang Ranch.

This is true - basic market economics really. Prostitutes in brothels are technically employees, street-walking prostitues can be self-employed. Therefore, brothel owners and staff are taking a cut of any fee, the prostitutes themselves would make less than they could make on the street. And who becomes a prostitute unless they are desparate for cash.

Or do brothels charge more?

And streetwalker almost never work for themselves. There's always a pimp lurking in the shadows ready to take 3/4 of the money. Also, it's supply AND demand at work. I don't think a lot of the customers will want to go to a brothel where they can be seen, recognized, registered, get their coupon booklet stamped, etc. They'll always get a quickie from a streetwalker in the car even though she almost certainly has AIDS.

I'm not against legalization at all: I'm mostly libertarian in principle on most issues. I just don't think it will change that much in this case.

This is different from prostitution in part because as I commented above, not everyone is comfortable walking into a brothel and being identified as a regular customer. People want the anonymity. That will make it hard to regulate. Even though it's always with us, prostitution is hardly part of the mainstream, whereas drinking always has been. But I'm still not opposed to legalizing prostitution because it may help a few people. Just not the ones who need it most.

Not all women will choose this profession Dave q!!

yes, on a conversation with boss level. but no, not in a peer group level. i mean, no one is ever going to be embarrassed about smoking a joint or doing a line are they?

you're seen as a sad loser if you have to pay to fuck someone

This is the urgent and key point. But is it socially more acceptable on a trip to Amsterdam in a way it wouldn't be at home, like its all considered to be part of the whole decadent dirty party?

These are desperate people and its the idea that you are directly contributing to their misery that is the really offputting bit, not whether your mates would laugh at you.

In some way, this is the difference between yer average bloke on the street and the Jamie Theakston/Angus Deayton 'high class' hooker, which is a phenomenon I can't really even get my head around.

But then someone else started going on about how wasn't it like sexual discrimination that there weren't male prostitutes for women (which I don't think would have been said if I wasn't there, mind), and I got the feeling that the general consensus was that going to a prostitute was seen as, you know, alright, really.

I think I suggested that maybe some people didn't want to be seen as unable to get sex without paying for it, but no-one really thought that was much of an argument. So it seems like there's some kind of ground-level acceptance - at least among this lot of guys at my college - of using prostitutes, but I still think they'd baulk at admitting to it.

Personally, although I don't approve of prostitution, I'd rather brothels were legalised if that meant there could be some measure of regulation and protection for the women (or men) who work there. I get the sense that the current system makes it too easy to arrent/punish the prostitutes, rather than their pimps or their clients - which is, in my opinion, insane, because the prostitutes are the ones most open to abuse, and I doubt that many people go into prostitution by choice.

I think the arguement about whether brothels should be legalised is a simple one of consenting adults being allowed to do what they want as long as they don't infringe other people's rights. The counter-argument is that prostitution is horribly exploitative. But I think that argument would work only if it were inherently exploitative, which I don't think it is. I once saw a TV programme on the famous Parisian madam, Madame Claude - her prostitutes were all young, intelligent, beautiful and paid absolutely stacks of money to have dinner and sex with businessmen. They did it for a couple of years or so to put themselves through college or set up a business. I don't think they were being exploited, I think it was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that most prostitution is like that. Most prostitution IS horribly exploitative. But the fact that it is not INHERENTLY exploitative means that people should be allowed to do it, and that steps should then be taken to try and protect the people who do it and limit exploitation. As has been pointed out above, many jobs are shit and exploitative. But the legal goal is not to ban employing people but to set limits on the exploitative nature of their employment.

you might as well ask for a doctor's note first as well, i don't think this is a 'right' of anybody's as such - don't forget that the prostitute definition extends to both types Matt DC described, with the latter posing far less of a health risk supposedly.

And I don't think that if it were legal, many people, male or female, would be more accepting of it. "What did you do today, Junior?" "Oh, after work a round of golf, couple of drinks with the guys, and off to the brothel for a quickie." "Sounds great, but think about seeing the streetwalkers. They have lower overhead and pass the savings on to you." along with AIDS, and every other imaginable disease.

are we talking on the second date here or what?

ie the safe-zone operates primarily by driving the unpleasantness (actual real violence, coercion, illness etc off-camera (also the fact that these ARE eliminated in the nice brothel and the consensus pornworld suggests they are increasingly concentrated in the shadow-world)

(ie put that baldly it's an empty question)

Stevem that is a riduculous thing to say. If I am potentially going to expose myself to vd (which is quite possible) because I am about to sleep with someone who has slept with a porstitute yeah I am entitled to know. Same as if he had injected & shared needles, I'd want to know.

objective pan-cultural discussion of sex at all (let alone the facts or even existence of the sex trade)* is erm patchy

(ie think of the nationstates which simply blandly announce that homosexuality doesn't exist in THEIR country)

i know it's a global effect mark, but it seems 'unfair' to prevent legalisation of something in one country just because it may have negative effects in another due to external factors (crime syndicates from that country) which are the responsibility of said country's government more than the one proposing domestic legalisation. sorry if i missed your point.

I think we can all agree on that, about any subject. Concretely, mark s, if you were a UK MP, would you want to change legislation - if so, in what directions? Yes, UK laws affect prostitution in third world countries, we can take that into consideration.

as a freelancer myself, i'm a bit suspicious of the "legalisation of corporate entities" (brothels) while retaining clampdowns on an individual basis ("streetwalkers") cz it's a *such* a charter for management bullying

i think legalisation in the absence of strong, recognised, publicly respectable prostitutes' unions is very risky - the ideal i guess wd be orgs run as some kind of "sex soviet" (probbly some brothels HAVE run themselves somewhat like this, actually: eg where the madame/management is ex-hooker herself)

Which makes a good argument for prostitute visiting over one night stands. In a business transaction - especially in a health monitored facility - there is no reason not to ask about health status and/or condom use.

I don't know. About to say something very risky here, but during my one night stand period, I almost kinda wish that the prospect of safe, legal, (male) prostitutes had been available to me, because of the dangerous things that happened to me during that part of my life. (But, seeing how mentally unbalanced I was at the time, perhaps the danger aspect was part of the appeal.)

So I don't think I'd necessarily write off a man who had been to a brothel while he was single. However, what that says about his viewpoint of women and sex as a commodity is more worrying than his disease status.

kate's disparagement of ppl who view 'sex as a commodity' is one of the big things here - why shouldn't it sometimes be just that ?

we institutionalise lots of behaviour that also has more personal dimensions in other circumstances - eg caring for someone ill/incapable, paying to visit counsellors/therapists to discuss very personal emotional issues - are the ppl who provide those services being mistreated as 'commodities' ? Why should sexual behaviour be kept so sacred and unsullied ?
It's not even as if it actually is anyway - we are surrounded by appeals to our sexdrives as part of eg the pop business

If he was honest, and said something like "well, I was really lonely but I didn't have the time for a relationship, so I thought it was safer and more honest than having a series of one night stands or leading someone on into thinking that I wanted a serious relationship with them" then I would have more respect than someone who just said "Women ain't nothing but bitches and ho's anyway, marriage is just legalised prostitution, so are we gonna get it on or what?" or even worse "Hunh hunh well all the guys in the office were doing it, so I thought what the fuck, like I don't wanna look like a pussy or a queer in front of my mates".

I mean, sure, people pay to go to psychologists and therapists when they're having problems, when previous generations might have gone to a priest or a parent or a friend. But if a person had NO FRIENDS and ONLY EVER TALKED ABOUT THEIR EMOTIONS TO THERAPISTS, well, fuck, I wouldn't date them, either.

Sex as entertainment vs. exploitation. here we see a different aspect of the same divide right here on the relatively openminded ILX board. Also, men and women see sex differently, a different bio-evolutionary imperative. At least say some experts and I tend to believe it.

And repeating, I don't think there really are any freelance prostitutes, or not many. Almost all streetwalkers have pimps.

why wouldn't they choose to go legit? Do you really think prostitution would EVER be "just another career choice" legal or not? I can't imagine it.

And Blount, do you REALLY tell each sex partner your full history? I mean, even about that weekend in Panama City with the two cheerleaders, the truck driver, and the St. Bernard? I doubt if you do, at any rate YOU PROMISED YOU WOULDN'T TELL ANYONE!!!!

public health issues ?
control of social frameworks for possible pregnancies ?
sociobiological control of women's bodies/sexuality ?
daily mail family values/collapse of civilisation stuff ?
deep wired-in fears/conflicts of sanctioning a decoupling between sex,psyche,etc. by making it a 'commodity'?

most of this stuff looks like pre-tech patriarchal monkey-business strained through romanticism

in the characterisation of most possible punters as sad, bad, or arduous to know, there is still throughout this thread an underlying tendency that sex can't/shouldn't be regarded as 'just business', that to do so is to fail to understand human emotions/relationships properly, to undercut values by setting prices - that it is like equating sex with love

yeah, right, AS IF

kate i don't think it's an either/or scenario:
and if a person really only ever wanted to talk to therapists/counsellors about their inner lives because they found that experience more productive/enjoyable/useful, because they found paid professionals to be BETTER at certain aspects of the transaction that they were interested in (intellectualisation, articulation) - i'm not sure why, in the absence of this person committing any social ill or crime by their preferences, they should be worthy of contempt: yeah i'm not sure i'd want to know them either, and i might feel sorry for them because there are other possible dimensions missing from their interactions, but should we make it a legal/moral issue ?
(or is this what morality boils down to - insistence on a common set of fundamental needs/preferences/values in our psyches ?)

i think it would be pretty bizarre if they were denied access to confidants by law on the basis of 'endangering social cohesion' or 'failing to make proper personal connections' (i know in practice it is the desire/inability to cope with some aspect of the latter that often drives ppl to counselling, but if they want to keep paying instead, they're not going to be arrested for it)

shouldn't society provide for the awkward, the difficult, the lonely, the maladjusted, the anti-personal - not stigmatise them as a bunch of saddo losers ?

You talk like *everyone* has some kind of natural right to sex. They don't. That is the fundamental principle of Evolution. NOT everyone has a right to sex, sex is something that you have to earn. (Though not necessarily a monetary earn.)

kate is right that jack the ripper follows AFTER some measures of "cleaning up", when/where the interface between civil orderliness and slum energy is at its most raw (hence persistant myth that he's a doctor or a toff, i guess)

i just meant it wz a widespread rumour in the 1880s (cf commentary at the time, when the police kept saying "no no it is an escaped madman") and continues to be one today (cf endless LaYMoR retreads of the royal connection)

despite highly unpromising title, this book has lots of interesting background stuff relating to thread topic (eg leading anti child-prostitution journalist ended up in jail for SELLING a child, in order to prove that the practice was widespread and easy, and that clients were not hard to find) (also lots of good stuff on the politics of policing london in the 1870s and 1880s)

I am not necessarily doing so (though yes, I see your winky face) - just that the whole Darwinism aspect was something that I hadn't even thought about yet in my thinking about Brothels, and I need to take it into account. I need to think about it, and I can't do that while my trainee keeps popping into my office to find me typing away at a page entitled "Brothels!"

I know that there are as many reasons for having sex as there are for people that have sex - it's not JUST for procreation, but neither is it JUST for fun, and neither is it JUST to establish intimacy between two people. It's individual.

However, there are attitudes towards sex that - if people have them - make me not want to have sex with them. Ha ha.

Yes, Kate, there are as many reasons to have sex as there are people who choose to/are lucky enough to have sex. But there aren't that many reasons that have been sanctioned as acceptable by society. That's what you're getting at, I think. Maybe. And the idea of sex for fun is not something that most people support (most people being some kind of hypothetical cross section of society, I guess.).

ppl are maybe reacting against the practice of disengaging the Desire from the Behaviour: doing it for the material gain, just doing one's job, instead of because you want to shag THEM IN PARTICULAR on the basis of the person they are - even if that only goes as far as what they look like - is seen as somehow all wrong

(perhaps because most of us can't imagine being able to do that?)

FWIW, the strippers are beginning to unionize

Someone who is profoundly disabled, and/or as a result may find it very difficult to form regular relationships, this one brothel encouraged their patronage. A sort of "they deserve sex as much as the rest of us, theyre human too!" idea.

I thought it was really quite cool. I'm all for unionised, properly run brothels - esp if run by women - to prevent exploitation, organised crime etc. Or help prevent at the least.

similarly doesn't the extra-legality of a profession cut against ability to organize, etc.?

also the current shady system is about as coercively top-down as it gets in the worst poss. way.

also mark all this stuff about the third world seems somewhat true (i.e. conditions *are* much worse there, but also for say illegal immigrants BROUGHT from there to europe etc. to work in the same trade) but aren't you also presupposing some sort of constant quality of shady evilness which if disappated in one area just moves to another, like some sort of wack-a-mole? doesn't broad living standard, quality of life, degree of development of economy affect social attitudes towards sex &c as well?

Actually despite legal brothels here there is still a parallel illegal industry. There was a horrible case here recently in which it was found that a well paid tax inspector and his wife were bringing in young women from SE Asia illegally and basically holding them in bondage. It's horrible to think that men would frequent such places knowing the violence and exploitation that enables them to function.

The Lusty Lady has actually been unionized for several years, but more importantly it is employee-owned and co-operated, making it the first strip club of it's kind. There's a documentary about it called: "Live Nude Girls Unite!" that's pretty good (and funny!).

It's right across the street from the old Cocodrie Club and my favorite Italian restaurant in SF.

I had a girlfriend for some months who used a wheelchair. There are a few extra difficulties, but it is perfectly possible, though I guess if a man is paralysed below the waist there are some limitations, for example.

Owner seeks $7M for Chicken Ranch brothel
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=BRF%20Chicken%20Ranch%20Sale

I don't see how prostitution benefits society in the long run. Perhaps if you have real social handicaps, but prostitutes attract drugs and violence. I mean, I'm as libertarian as anyone, but practically speaking, a world without prostitution is more realistic than a world without, say, war.