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.
