Prostitution As A Healthy, Wholesome Occupation

What we need is proper oversight and a bit less assuming that women are better off losing fingers in industrial accidents than having sex.

They went on the assumption that the industry was rooted in human trafficking and exploitation, and that by criminalizing all ends of the transaction they effectively threatened the very people who needed to run to them for help. So they started treating the prostitute as a victim rather than a criminal. The fact that this approach deflated the industry by almost an entire order of magnitude within a decade indicates that...well, they were right.

edited 18th May '12 3:08:32 PM by Pykrete

Or it could be that, by making it much easier for customers to get busted under that law, demand for prostitution shrunk.

I mean, if most prostitution is based on human trafficking like you claim . . . well, I have a hard time believing that someone who's been kidnapped and repeatedly raped would refuse to go the police for help because they're afraid of being charged with a misdemeanor.

edited 18th May '12 6:21:25 PM by RavenWilder

That happens quite frequently Raven. That's if they can even get to the police. Pimps and such have a habit of taking away any identifications the girls might have to prevent runaways.

There's also the first law of exploitation: make sure the exploited don't know their rights. And, think going to authority means thing's'll just get worse.

It's a lot harder to be afraid of the police if, when you are caught, you're not charged and/or deported, but it's your customers and your bosses that have the book thrown hard at them. It kind of negates any negative press the pimps will have handed out. So, you're more likely to listen to anything said by the police translator. And, maybe get the help you need.

edited 18th May '12 6:41:00 PM by Euodiachloris

Seems to me that, if you have a more typical legal-but-regulated prostitution policy, that same scenario could easily play out except with "prostitution inspector" replacing "police officer".

Yeeeeeeahhhh, suuuuure. Just like there are sooo many MD students want to be gynecologists...

It's very unlikely that a special occupation would be made for this, just because the authority could've just added one more extra training for such situations. If we can lump STD inspection, abuse inspection and crime inspection into one, why not let it be police?

edited 19th May '12 4:18:22 PM by Cassie

Prostitution would be a very difficult thing to give "legitimate industry" status to. It would have to be remade from the ground up, so that concepts like "pimps" are eliminated and something more akin to brothels is the basic business model. Such things would have to be tightly regulated and licensed and held to very strong standards of safety, cleanliness, and strictness of access to minors, etc. And while I am sympathetic to prostitutes as of now, as many are victimized as people who have had horrible lives as slaves and objects, one must remember that if we made prostitution a legitimate industry this industry would lobby very hard to get rid of the aforementioned regulations that it needs to stay a legitimate industry. It's the same problem as perfectly competitive markets: they are self-destructive. Overall, it is a very wide-reaching problem, and not unlike the problem attached to legalizing and legitimizing the sale of marijuana.

The same can be said for all industries. Whoever has enough money may attempt to lobby / bribe the way to lax the grip of the law. However, the sure difference between prostitution and industries is that prostution is personally profitting, whereas industries are pyramiddic.

Hollywood can lobby for extra dickery, but prostitution can't. Every prostitute out there (even if under a group) has sway over their own bodies, and they should have the right to call for protection from law. There's a reason why there's a trope called Band of Brothels

edited 19th May '12 4:37:23 PM by Cassie

Exactly. A more correct correlation would be the tobacco and alcohol industries. And, hey: those problems apply there, but few people say they should be outright banned. Prohibition of something that might be troublesome to administer correctly doesn't work: be it a substance or human activity.

May's well try to make it safer for all involved, and limit access to it.

That's...not how a brothel works. They're still pyramidic. And even if it was, they'd have to charge exorbitantly just to offset the cost of testing to make sure you didn't give them anything while still leaving some for basic sustenance and insurance, that they wouldn't have a market. Factor in oversight, and there's basically no way they're going to turn a profit.

Which is, you know, exactly what happens to legal brothels.

Once more, comparing it to alcohol and tobacco doesn't work. QA testing a mass-produced inanimate object is on a completely different order of magnitude than regulating human resources in a medically high-risk profession with a known history of abuse.

edited 19th May '12 4:48:23 PM by Pykrete

You misunderstand me. I do not mean to say that I don't think prostitution should be legal (or that marijuana should be legal, for that matter). I simply am saying that it's not as simple as "well there's nothing wrong with prostitution except for the pimps, so let's just legalize it and let the prostitutes sort it out now that they have legal protection!" That kind of libertarian drivel is the exact wrong way to go about this; it would have to be a tightly regulated and monitored transition if it were to happen at all.

edited 19th May '12 4:45:55 PM by DerelictVessel

Why not charge what would turn a profit? That would go some way to dispel the 'cheap-disposable-whore' label.

Because then they wouldn't have a sustainable market. I mean, not a whole lot of people are going to drop a grand for ten minutes of orgasm.

I don't think you are placing the right views on this. Maybe treating the occupation freely is bad, but you are wrong in two parts. One, you can't blame the occupation. It has been Older Than Print. Two, it's not so much the occupation but the ingrained threat of mafia or bad mindsets that threaten the occupation's safety

The latter seems to be an excuse to avoid legalizing prostitution in some parts. On that note I'd like to say, not every prost is a Dragon Lady

The main problem with this argument? Why can't the prosts choose a price?

edited 19th May '12 4:49:42 PM by Cassie

I don't blame the occupation specifically, though it is by its nature dangerous in ways that most other industries aren't. I blame its inherent nature as a business, which is fundamentally a problem in orderly democratic society. And, I think there's a very real and very problematic safety issue with regards to customers potentially mistreating prostitutes that is much more worrying than wispy concerns about the mafia.

They can, but that doesn't mean it will make for sound business. Running a prostitution industry properly would be prohibitively expensive, and the price necessary to sustain such an operation would be high. As such, the pool of potential customers would be small, and thus the industry would not be solvent. In economic terms, the equilibrium price is so low as to make every firm in the industry marginal, and thus makes them all below their shutdown point before the word "go."

In simpler terms, you can ask whatever price you like, but that doesn't mean you'll get it. That's just how microeconomics work.

See, that has been bugging me. Why should it be industrialized? The human body isn't easy to function, and treating the bodies like a machine regardless of gender is flat out insulting. I prefer to think of industries as run by workers and machines, while prosts are the managers themselves who should have the right to maintain their own bodies.

Prost-ing has never been proven a lucrative occupation. Why should it be taxed and ripped? The prosts should keep all their money. It's others who spend it on them. The customers still have their own income taxes to pay. I don't think prostitution should be taxed beyond income tax since they don't have receipts to write on and peel off

edited 19th May '12 5:06:10 PM by Cassie

Isn't that just a case of re-educating the consumer-base so they don't expect the economics of the black market supplying the artificially low prices any more?

Besides, as I've stated, there are ways to allow prostitution to make a profit, if the legislator is serious in promoting a healthier, legal industry. Just ruling out the possibility is not examining the potential thinking outside the usual would provide. Cultural change being one of the potential positive changes.

edited 19th May '12 5:09:12 PM by Euodiachloris

I take it that you're a libertarian...

"Industry" is an economic term to refer to a specific part of the economy that manufactures a certain kind or category of goods. Hence, "peach growers" are an industry under this definition. What you're referring to is that prostitutes would be essentially self-employed, and that brothels would, in effect, be co-ops.

Because it's a business venture and business ventures get taxed. It's really that simple. Of course, they would probably be taxed individually under small business rates, which ideally would be lower than corporate rates. Asking why prostitutes should be taxed is like asking why a fruit stand vendor should be taxed: they're running a business within a country and thus subject to that country's tax code. If they don't like that, they should move to another country.

Well, you are right in that it's basically just the industry internalizing its externalities. I'm not entirely sure if simple "reeducation" would be sufficient to teach customers of prostitutes that they aren't allowed to treat them like slaves. Having security guards seems like it would be much more effective and less time- and resource-intensive, while still enforcing reeducation in the sense of "if you act out, I break your fingers."

edited 19th May '12 5:13:14 PM by DerelictVessel

Like I do for just about every business idea, I wonder if a worker's co-operative model might be helpful here.

I'd just like to point out that there are ways someone can give another person sexual pleasure that pose little to no risk of disease transmission.

Kinda a no-brainer. If this is an occupation, it has to be safe like OSHA