Legalizing Prostitution?

[Ozme52]

I'd approve but you have to create a whole new set of circumstantial laws to fairly regulate it...

The following purportedly happened in Germany soon after they legalized prostitution. Apparently a brothel owner was perusing the local unemployment lists and saw a particularly good looking woman therein. He offered her a job which she turned down...

...causing her to immediately lose her unemployment benefits because she turned down a legal job.

Here's a link to a news article

(Now wouldn't that make for an interesting bdsm-story... a society where innocent young men and women can be "drafted" for service in legal sex dungeons, where they are at the mercy of well-heeled doms and dommes.)

[Rhabbi]

I'd approve but you have to create a whole new set of circumstantial laws to fairly regulate it...

The following purportedly happened in Germany soon after they legalized prostitution. Apparently a brothel owner was perusing the local unemployment lists and saw a particularly good looking woman therein. He offered her a job which she turned down...

...causing her to immediately lose her unemployment benefits because she turned down a legal job.

Here's a link to a news article

(Now wouldn't that make for an interesting bdsm-story... a society where innocent young men and women can be "drafted" for service in legal sex dungeons, where they are at the mercy of well-heeled doms and dommes.)

That is a wrinkle I would never have considered. WOW

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately if you happen to be a rich BDSM freak who is planning to open a brothel in Germany, it does not seem to be true. Here is what Snopes.com has to say about it:
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp

Anyway, I would be oppsed to legalized prostitution on moral and religious grounds, but I do think that it might be feasable if we could find a government that would not take advantage of the workers in some way.

Anybody think that would happen in the real world?

That i

[gagged_Louise]

Anyway, I would be oppsed to legalized prostitution on moral and religious grounds, but I do think that it might be feasable if we could find a government that would not take advantage of the workers in some way.

Anybody think that would happen in the real world?

That i

No, I really doubt you could have it running without others - the government, organized crime or other actors - trying hard to cut their slice of the money (as they often do today). People who argue that prostitution should be legal and easy will sometimes say, or imply, that it should be run just like any office 9-to-5 job with public taxation, health insurance. sick leave and the clents coming to get their services quite in the open, but would the "sex workers" and their customers really want to comply to that? No, it's just a shop front. Legalizing prostitution would not blot out the old market with its diseases, crime connections and its streams of black money and narcotics, it would just ensure there was a white sector of some sex workers, but behind that, business as usual, and now protected by the veil of this white sex business.

It's true the story that unemployed women in Germany would have been forced/suggested to look for work in the sex trade was a "paper duck", but that's just because it is not, even in Germany, a job like any other. If it were, you'd feel free to tell your friends "yeah I've been receiving sex customers for five years now" and to get interviewed with name and portrait in newspapers and tv. Which you don't - I've never seen an interview with a sex worker where he/she actually left anónymity behind and came into the open with real name and face photo...I'm not into stirring up hard feelings here, but I think much of the lobbying to have prostitution/sex services considered "a job like any other" comes from first, there's lots of money in the trade, and second, the fact that if you're doing a job that's demeaning and damaging on you - your health, ypur living, your chances of getting anywhere else - you damn well don't want to own up to being trapped in this line of work, so chances are you'll say "hey, I like this profession, I didn't need no expensive education and I can still make as much money as a doctor and have fun".

If it were a job like any other, then there would be pressure, more or less formal, on people who are out of work, "shouldn't you consider selling sex, hon?"

Some of you might answer "But hey, you sometimes fantasize about forced sex and prostitution yourself" Yes, in the same way that many of us get turned on by rape and kidnapping, but that doesn't mean I would really want to work the street, or even to do a full-time living selling sex to people I'd got hooked up with on the internet). Not that many here who would want to get raped by a stranger for real either..One is heady fantasy, the other is a sordid reality and to me, part of the point about the fantasy (beyond the turn-on factor) is that it dramatizes the powerplay between , for instance, a tart and her customers, or other men she once knew.

[Ozme52]

That is a wrinkle I would never have considered. WOW

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately if you happen to be a rich BDSM freak who is planning to open a brothel in Germany, it does not seem to be true. Here is what Snopes.com has to say about it:
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp

Anyway, I would be oppsed to legalized prostitution on moral and religious grounds, but I do think that it might be feasable if we could find a government that would not take advantage of the workers in some way.

Anybody think that would happen in the real world?

That i

Actually, what snopes is saying is that the news article is legitimate but was posed as a potential 'what if' scenario... which is what I also was pointing out. The potential for bureaucratic abuse exists... and is still potentially the seed for a hot story.