prostitution

the best way to ensure their safety is to accord them the rights of any trade, but we're a long way off from that

Prostitution comes in two basic forms as I see it - on the one hand it's a terribly exploitative trade in which women are basically enslaved and treated like garbage because they have nothing else to keep themselves fed or are forced/manipulated into turning tricks by thugs. This is terrible and should be stopped.

The flipside is that some women pursue stripping, pornography and escort business as a serious career on their own terms and make a shit-ton of money on the club circuit, usually ending up out in Nevada once or twice a season to cash in big time. This is the free market. These women can collect huge fees for their time and effort. I don't think you can really call that 'exploitative' any more than you can any capitalistic enterprise. I see no problem with it - one could argue that club owners and promoters fulfill the same role as pimps in this situation but I don't buy it. These girls are always free to leave the business or find another place to work.

http://www.walnet.org/csis/news/world_2001/nytimes-010812.html

but if the right though having whores run amok would allow them to abolish the minimum wage, the bunny ranch would be mcdonalds. but then the union thing just confuses me. what?

As far as I can tell from history, in every society there always have been people who are willing to pay for sex services (i.e., a market), no matter how much the law and mainstream culture condemn prostitution. Previously I would have said that the answer would be legal prostitution in brothels, subject to certain regulations (age restrictions, mandatory VD testing, bouncers to handle dangerous clients). However, I hadn't previously heard that decriminalized prostitution in Australia or the Netherlands didn't eliminate the local underground sex markets.

i think there's a significant point you're missing here

and why again do you think legal polygamy is such a bad idea,
nabisco?

Tim Barnett actually has talked to heaps of prostitutes about this issue both before he entered parliament and after. I can name several of them. What he was talking about on the radio was select committee submissions - the select committee considering this bill have heard very little from prostitutes. This is understandable considering their legal status and they have very good representation from the NZ prostitutes collective who have been fairly active in the whole process.
I went to parliament tonight to see if i could watch the vote but all i managed to see was the "debate" which seemed to involve opponents of the bill trying to spread as much misinformation as possible about it.

Add in health & safety inspections to make it legal, and if that means there are unhealthy prostitutes working street corners more cheaply without health checks, publicise the dangers and clamp down on them under health & safety legislation, as a matter of practical protection of the public rather than moral ideology.
This is the first time in the debate i've seen anyone show concern for the health and safety of the clients. Why does anyone need to publicise that they might catch STIs from street prostitutes? like duh!
brothels and sex workers now have to get registered.
Not sure if this actually made it into the final version of the bill. Brothels already have to be registered despite it being illegal to run one. Its some sort of protection racket run by the police.

....we'll keep the red flag flying here.

National. He was environment minister for a while but hopefully he never will be again.
Ed- Whats the GMB? Is that part of the wobblies?

prostitution is eating up thousands of women around the world and
bringing in massive yields for organized crime. the global sex trade is
a form of modern slavery. most of the women who are recruited don't
know they're headed for brothels or the street. most of them are
trying to escape poverty and lack of opportunity, but once they're in
the game they're controlled by stiff-handed pimps who use
physical and sexual violence. the constant trauma of their existence
leads to massive dependance on drugs and alcohol until everything
is wasted, body and mind.

okay, so i'm sure you know all this but this is the sex industry as it is.
it is impossible to separate 'fair' and 'unfair' prostitution. considering
the overall exploitation that exists in prostitution, these terms are
just abstractions that we bandy about in academic debates.
what most call 'fair' prostitution only exists in a tiny tiny percentage
of the sex industry. most of it is cruel and unusual, and the best way
to help the victims of this industry is to set about eradicating it.
where it is tried, legalization just puts a fresh face on the same
old violent, exploitative pimps, equating them with honest
businessmen. witness the netherlands, where most of the
prostitutes are immigrants who eke by in adverse conditions.
in the long run, legalization will only benefit pimps and lower
indy womens rights. this is what I believe after thinking it
through and reviewing the sources of info available to me.

Abusing people is bad, in any form.

But one should have the right to do with one's body what one wants.

Obvious question, what is the guiding force supposed to be?

I think you're going to give an obvious answer too squirl polise.
And re yr last post, howabout legalising prostitution by but not pimping? Make it legal to sell your own sex, but not that of others.

- previously it was illegal to live off the earnings of another person who is a prostitute, ie it was illegal to pimp

- now it is not illegal to pimp

- that is a bad thing (I agree)

(Hope you don't mind me trying to explain what you said di, I thought it was fairly clear)

Except that throughout most of history, laws and cultural attitudes against prostitution have not eradicated the presence of people who are willing to pay for sex. This creates a market, and if Prohibition or the U.S. War on Drugs has shown anything, trying to kill demand by cutting off supply doesn't work.

- Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Seems to just be an opinion on the limitations of government.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/apr04/dalrymple.htm

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/images/directors/02/mean.jpg

legalized poppage

nerds in favor of prostitution - didn't see that one coming...

"coming"

milo z's post from January looks so plaintive, somehow.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/867332--canada-s-prostitution-laws-unconstitutional-court-rules?bn=1

Canada's prostitution laws struck down, for 30 days at least.

The women argued that if the law permitted sex workers to conduct their business indoors, they could employ safety measures such as the use of security guards and monitoring devices.

But when the case was argued in Toronto last fall, lawyers for Ontario’s attorney general suggested there are already measures that women on the streets can employ to ensure safer working conditions, including simply warning each other about customers with a propensity for violence.
--
This really worked out with the Green River killer.

They deserved to lose the case just for that argument alone.

Seriously! You'd think Crown lawyers could come up with something stronger.

wow that quote is appalling

OK, so this clarifies that the 30-day stay means that the effects of the decision are suspended for 30d, which may have been obvious to everyone else: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2010/09/davies-calls-for-open-and-honest-debate-on-prostitution-laws.html

i think this is amazing. after what happened with Picton, it's about time we opened the door to safer working conditions.

http://www.pressherald.com/news/police-hope-11-arrests-deter-prostitution_2011-08-19.html

a sting - I still can't see what the big deal is anyway

not sure what to make of this

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/

Did you know that 89 per-cent of the women in prostitution want to escape?” a young man told me on the first day of summer this year, as he protested in front of the offices of the Village Voice. He wanted me to understand that it is complicit in what he calls “modern-day slavery.” The Village Voice has moved the bulk of the sex-related ads it publishes onto the website Backpage.com. This young man, the leader of an Evangelical Christian youth group, wanted to hasten the end of “sex slavery” by shutting Backpage.com down. What happens to the majority of people who advertise willingly on the site, who rely on it to draw an income? “The reality is,” the man said to me, not knowing I had ever been a prostitute, “almost all of these women don’t really want to be doing it.”

Let’s ask the people around here, I wanted to say to him: the construction workers who dug up the road behind us, the cabbies weaving around the construction site, the cops over there who have to babysit us, the Mister Softee guy pulling a double shift in the heat, the security guard outside a nearby bar, the woman working inside, the receptionist upstairs. The freelancers at the Village Voice. The guys at the copy shop who printed your flyers. The workers at the factory that made the water bottles you’re handing out. Is it unfair to estimate that 89 percent of New Yorkers would rather not be doing what they have to do to make a living?

Prostitution becomes 'just a job', similar to being a cabbie or construction worker, only when you eliminate the pimp, along with the consequent violent coercion and physical abuse. Allow prostitutes to be licensed, independent small business operators in a well-regulated environment and it would become a reasonable option for those who were tempermentally suited for the work.

Just because evangelical xtians are pretty weird about sex in general doesn't mean they can't form a correct opinion on something, even if it is for the wrong reasons.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/the-new-prostitutes/?hp

https://www.amnesty.org/latest/news/2015/08/global-movement-votes-to-adopt-policy-to-protect-human-rights-of-sex-workers/

The sound quality here is kind of terrible but this is a good outline of their position.

http://youtu.be/pJ8xSBaVIXU