Brothels - should they be legalised everywhere?

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.)