Brothels - should they be legalised everywhere?

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.
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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)