I hear quite often that prostitution would be a wonderfully pleasant industry if it were only legal, which does not square with the experiences of countries where it is legal or tolerated.
You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.
Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block."
Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.
As you say, it takes a lot for the police to get involved - I'll speculate that they only pay attention when the monthly envelope of cash is light.
That isn't the model pushed by most advocates of legal prostitution that I've heard - most want prostitution to be legal in the same way that restaurants are. It actually takes very little to get the authorities to come take a look at your restaurant - complaints of a roach or the computer randomly selecting you for an inspection are usually sufficient.
> I'm confused here - according to Wikipedia, (coital) prostitution is illegal in Japan.
And so is gambling, yet you'll find plenty of pachinko parlours or soaplands/"health salons" announced very explicitly. I believe the main reason is that many of these places are run by Yakuza (organized crime), and police would rather not stir up the hornet's nest - there's a sort of tacit agreement.
You've missed the point. The original premise from patio11 was that legalizing prostitution doesn't automatically make it all safe, aboveboard, and free from crime. Then he used Japan as an example... except that prostitution isn't legal there. Regardless of how it's treated by the police, the point is that it's not legal, and that skews how the illegal operations work.
(Regardless, my feeling is that Japan's attitude toward sexuality is so different from that of Europe/the Americas that it's a little hard to make good comparisons anyway.)
The Amsterdam argument is interesting and worthy of further discussion, at least.
A lot of places where prostitution is legal, pimping is not, e.g., Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. There's less of a trafficking problem in those places, since it can and does get prosecuted (though there still are problems, since here sadly is demand for underage prostitutes etc.)
In the Netherlands, pimping is legal though, which may contribute specifically to the problems they are seeing. I'm not the only one who thinks so:
Why do you lump prostitution with sex trafficking? Why do we have to make both legal? Just make sex with two consenting adults legal...and use all those cops who are stuck busting hookers...investigating complaints about sex traffickers.
Prostitution ranges essentially from crack addict street walkers up to 'chat' call girls who are frequently educated enough to maintain conversation with wealthy businessmen.
It's exceptionally naive to think the Russian mob is going to start trafficking in university graduate hookers.
What needs to be done is establish an agency to govern and regulate the sex trades, including the money handling. You want to be a prostitute? Sure, but you'll need to sign a waiver allowing us to monitor where your money is going; 'oh you're spending it on groceries, rent and something at bestbuy' vs 'oh you're spending it on groceries, rent and oh look you just transferred $2,000 to an offshore bank account'.
You want to be a customer? Sure, pay the agency a certified check, by credit/debit card (something with a paper trail) taxes are immediately taken off and the money is transferred in whole (less taxes) to the worker.
There's reason to legalize prostitution without even getting onto the matter of the ethics of allowing a woman to have sex for money. Namely that legalization of prostitution is expected to lower the rape rate significantly (IIRC by ~25% in the US), would help decrease the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and most of all, would help prevent the murders and serial killings of women.
Criminalization allows for corruption. Why does organized crime still manage to rear its ugly head in government? Well, perhaps because criminal gangs are orchestrating prostitution through pimping rings and only have to get one picture of an official with a hooker to ruin a man's career when 1/2 their voters are puritanical, evangelical morons.
maybe we should make your boss pay you through an agency, that will keep most of your money. It should be each women's right to conduct her work in private,, with her ouwn guidelines that she is comfortable with. You already have us with a agency in your exampe which means we could not be independents. I am sure most of my clients would not come to visit if I where in some shady agency or spa with someone counting the money.
We are not cattel and we do not need anyone to monitor us, if you look at our orginal prostituion laws they where only created to stop a women from showing her wares in pubic.
Nobody is trying to montor how you have sex or with who. Your example is making the government the pimps and then they would be the ones exploiting people. Why do you think sex workers are so dumb they need to be regulated, we are not all addicts and most of us our middle aged sigle moms. Many of us are supporting our whole famiies because our husbands have been laid off, and we have lost our homes in foreclosure, we are soccor moms, yor neighbors,, we could very well be your mother, sister, aunt, cousin or child.
We only want to be decriminalized and have the same protection under the law. We want to stop being the vicitms of the worst HATE CRIME OF ALL. Hate just for being a sex worker.
Okay, be naive and don't even read my comment. Nowhere is going to legalize the sex trades when it goes hand in hand with organized crime.
I know here in Ontario many apartment buildings can actively discriminate against sex workers, drug dealers or anyone working illegally and they can do it quite simply: rent isn't accepted in cash. If you're getting paid in cash, you're not paying taxes and if the government catches a paper trail then you'll be in jail and they'll investigate every iota of your life.
Or, like I suggested, the government performs the actions any employer does: pay your income taxes, pay your Employment Insurance, pay your Pension; pay the rest to you. If you don't want to accept the government taking the money that by law they are entitled to through you earning a living, then you will always be illegal.
Either be realistic or stay illegal and naive. Governments will not allow a business that has been hand-in-hand with organized crime to simply go legal and allow the mob their easiest opportunity to money-launder in existence.
If you don't believe your transactions aren't already being monitored, you obviously don't have a bank account. I've seen people's accounts locked for buying a laptop, putting in a check, taking out $200. My UK card got locked when I first used it in Canada. I don't get why you'd be adverse to the government checking to make sure you're not depositing large sums into foreign bank accounts when your own bank already checks every detail of your spending to ensure it doesn't break pattern.
I'm sorry if you took offence by what I said, but I really don't give a damn if you're too naive to see the real world. You honestly sound like every whining moron who doesn't want the government taking their income tax.
Here at HN we like to discuss things. You add nothing to this discussion but the tired old dogma of the victim. You provide no justification of why the government shouldn't be taking the taxes they're entitled too, you provide nothing.
Don't paint every country with the same brush. In Australia it's legal and regulated. Sure, there are dodgy brothels (usually the asian ones) but the normal ones are mostly college girls who are earning a bunch of extra cash.
There are "dodgy" brothels like the American South had "dodgy" cotton plantations in the 19th century.
the normal ones are mostly college girls who are earning a bunch of extra cash
This is a myth which society uses to let it sleep at night about them. (The same myth is widely held about strippers in the United States, and is equally false there.) Prostitution, nice clean business, step up into a middle class existence. Social science research on the demographics of prostitutes, in Australia and elsewhere, is legion. Only about a quarter of brother prostitutes either have a degree or are enrolled in college. (see: "Sex work and sex workers in Australia")
You can find more numbers at your leisure. A good source of pointers is Wiki
After 10 years of legal brothels in Queensland, 90 per cent of prostitution here remains either unregulated or illegal, University of Queensland research shows.
You keep quoting numbers, but you never talk about why those numbers exist.
In Queensland, the reason that number is so high is because the government has made it very hard and very expensive for brothels to go legal, and the majority that do go broke. It is more profitable to run an illegal one, than it is to operate a legal one. So though you are statistically correct, your reasoning is not.
Additionally, your own myth about strippers is demonstrably false. I know this because I used to be married to one and was involved in that scene on a personal level for many, many years. Here in NYC, some girls pull six figures. My ex-wife did. At one point she was making more than I was. While prostitution of some variety does exist in the legal strip clubs in NYC, it still was a relatively small number of women. Most of the girls that I've met and interacted with, which probably numbers in the 100's, fell into four broad categories: college students, party girls, single mothers and poorly educated immigrants. I would call none of them victims, nor would I ever call them exploited. Most of them are very shrewd, very business minded and are capitalizing on the only resources really afforded to them given their individual situations. In fact, the only sadness I feel about the entire thing is for the lonely men lining up to swallow whole the illusion that within the walls of these places they are wanted, sexually attractive, etc. It is pretty depressing to watch.
You can't extrapolate from the experience of high-end strippers in places like NYC, Vegas, or Miami. That's like hanging out in major league stadiums and concluding that pro baseball players must love their millions, ignoring that the majority are stuck down in the farm system barely making a living wage.
That's a pretty ridiculous analogy. Strippers don't have to toil in a minor league strip club in Idaho for five years before finally "making it" to NYC. All it takes is a bus ticket and a lot of balls (figuratively)
It's not ridiculous at all. You really think there's not a hierarchy of strip clubs, that the top clubs don't compete for the best strippers, and that every girl who wanted could just buy a bus ticket and end up making six figures stripping in NYC?
The simple point is that the vast majority of strippers don't and can't work in the top clubs in NY, Vegas, and Miami, and don't make anything like the kind of money that's made in those places.
The strip clubs don't compete, not here in NYC. You have to audition. They pick you.
The business behind it is actually kind of interesting. The girl will audition, they get accepted and then they pay a house fee (usually around $100) to work there. Sundays are typically house fee free. Everything else is based on tips and the girls have to tip everyone: bouncers, house moms, makeup (if they don't do their own).
And it's really a scaling issue. I'm guessing (and I'm just guessing) that the median income for a stripper in a particular area is directly related to the median income for that area.
Also, a lot of girls travel to work, between NYC, Vegas and Los Angeles. Also, Miami is pretty big.
You don't need to be a super model to work at the "top flight" clubs in NYC either. I have photographic evidence of that. You do need to have some hustle to make a lot of money though, and a casual disdain for men doesn't hurt either.
I would most certainly NOT recommend it as a career for people. I think it has the capability of ruining healthy sexual attitudes in people. It certainly made my relationship much harder.
That being said, a lot of these girls have very few options that provide the sort of income and lifestyle flexibility that stripping offers. My ex-wife supported her entire family with it. Could she have done something else? Maybe, but she didn't finish high school and her family required her support. What career can someone in her situation take on that offers 90K+ for 4 days work without a high school diploma?
It's really interesting too because the entire perception of stripping is so culturally rooted. Where she is from (Japan) it's no big deal. It's another job, like being a hostess girl. Not something you wear on your sleeve, but not something you necessarily are ashamed of. Of course, being American, nobody in my family knows or knew - that would have been a disaster.
Of course they do. A given girl can only be at one club at any given time - how does she pick which one she's going to be at? She takes into consideration how much money she can make, how well the club treats her, what kind of crowd the club draws, whatever. If you're a club owner, you want the best girls to want to be at your club, and not at the club down the street. That's competition.
You have to audition. They pick you.
The flip side being that some girls won't get picked, and will have to move on until they find a club that will take them.
I'm not criticizing strippers or trying to imply that there's something shameful in stripping. I'm simply pointing out that not all strippers make 6 figures in top-tier clubs in major cities, and that you can't assume that the experiences of the ones who do are the same as those of the vast majority who don't.
(I don't know how long that link will work. It's "6227.0 - Education and Work, Australia, May 2008"), page 4
"more than one in five (22%) had a highest level of attainment of Bachelor Degree or above"
This is a myth which society uses to let it sleep at night about them.
Perhaps, though one might say that about a lot of things. On the other hand, places with strictly enforced prohibition still manage to have sordid redlight districts, no matter how aggressively they criminalize women who ply this trade.
I'm not convinced you can coerce people into being good, especially in a trade that caters to such fundamental biological drives. The strictest places I can think of as far as personal morals are concerned are countries like Saudi Arabia, whose 'solution' to the exploitation of women is apparently to drape them with black fabric and severely restrict their autonomy...and which still has a significant human trafficking problem.
You should probably add the row Diploma to the Degree row since in Australia it is very common to get a trade certification rather than attend a typical 4 year school, where most Americans would get a Bachelor's degree for something like communications Aussies will do a shorter certification. If you do that, the totals for brothel workers and private (callgirl) prostitutes are not that bad at all.
The main problem is enforcement though, the illegal brothels are the ones that cause problems. Making the industry illegal would just put more women at risk as it would remove regulation and oversight. There's not a country in the world where you can't find a prostitute, despite it being illegal in most places.
Compare:
"The workplace homicide rate for prostitutes (204 per 100,000) is many times higher than that for women and men in the standard occupations that had the highest workplace homicide rates in the United States during the 1980s (4 per 100,000 for female liquor store workers and 29 per 100,000 for male taxicab drivers)." [0]
Prostitution is not legal in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
First line of the paper you cited:
"Female prostitution is embedded in a context of felonious activity, illicit drugs, and violence."
Also from the paper:
"Deaths from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome occurred exclusively among prostitutes who admitted to injecting drug use or were inferred to have a history of it."
To be fair, you would have to compare to what happens if it were not legalized under similar conditions in the case of Japan, but I agree with you that the cases where prostitution is legal does not pave well for extending it in general if you care at all about the prostitutes condition (the same is also true for drugs, where many liberalization have totally failed).
I think the Japan situation is a bit particular, though - the Japanese society seems rather tolerant on extreme commercialization of sex in a way that is difficult to comprehend (and I am far from eeither puritan or American).
Would unionisation or regulatory organisations help?
[edit: another thought - I can imagination a few decades ago someone arguing similarly against US casinos. They were generally run by crooks. Now they're run by corporations. Not that I think that makes casinos any more ethical than they were before, but they are crime-free.]
Read the quotes from the union rep in that article. You tell me.
Priority one will be keeping it legal. Any bad press is aid to folks like me. There won't be any bad press, because there are no sex slaves in our industry, just like there are no incompetent teachers at public schools.
Casinos are billion+ dollar investments where regulation helps the client and being able to legitimately raise huge sums of capital lets you crush the mob. After decriminalization you can play in a seedy backroom with an unknown rake or you can have a business conference on the corporate nickle in a five star hotel where the rake is established as a matter of law. Customer preference wins.
Regulation in prostitution tells client that they can't do what they are willing to pay to do, and it is not capitally intensive and does not reward megascale. After decriminalization you can have the sex that they allow you to have or the sex that you want to have. Customer preference wins.
I read the article but didn't find compelling arguments to say that better oversight and regulation wouldn't reduce criminality. The question of whether widespread legal prostitution is good for a society is different to the matter of making it crime and exploitation-free. I don't have an answer to that ethical question so I wouldn't want to end up arguing that particular angle with you. It's just that the claim that it is inherently impossible to regulate effectively is quite a major one and perhaps people haven't tried hard enough, perhaps as a result of prejudices many of us share.
Amsterdam allows pimps (I believe someone mentioned this below) which contributes directly to their particular woes.
Prostitution is illegal in Japan.
It's not really a question if legalizing it will end exploitation, it's a question of legalizing activity between two consenting parties, and with it being legal, better affording protection from exploitation. In other words, licensed and regulated prostitution is a better tool to fight human trafficking and exploitation than keeping it illegal.
It's true the legalization of prostitution hasn't solved the problem of human trafficking in the Netherlands. The hope once was that legal prostitutes would lower demand for illegal ones, just like legal marijuana has all obliterated the demand for the illegal stuff. That hasn't worked but the legal prostitutes are still a good deal better off then when they were outside the law and nobody is considering making it illegal again.
> You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests
Out of curiosity, why would they cover for you? Isnt it in their best interests to not allow sub-legal tactics to ruin their income?
Completely agreed. Why would there be either an elimination or explosion of either sex-trafficing or child sex exploitation if prostitution is brought into the fold of legitimate commerce? Sewing shirts is legal, yet we still have sweatshops in America full of immigrants with limited communication skills and limited options forced into labor with illegally low compensation and dangerous working conditions. The more secure and more knowledgeable will always be in a position to exploit the less secure and the less knowledgeable. This is the basic operation of capitalism.
I think the question is do we ban manufacturing or agriculture because of the exploitation rife in both industries? Or do we set minimum standards as a society for the treatment and compensation of labor and the ability of minors to consent to labor, and treat violations of those standards as criminal behavior to be punished? Why is sex so special that we can't find a standard to apply?
You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.
Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24amsterdam.h...
Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.