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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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And your point is…? The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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as that will make it kinda hard for me to get in and out of my tiny little house, do i at leat get a cut on the profits? seems only fair. And they won’t keep popping in to use my loo will they?
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
Neither. But I’m pro my doorstep.
Yes it is very trying to find people copulating on your doorstep when you’ve just mopped it isn’t it!
A fuel-air explosive combines fuel and air — which one are you against?
Flippancy & jokes have always been a part of the prostitute scene but this is serious stuff. Prostitutes, male & female really do provide a social service & work hard to survive. That customers should have no sense of what this means is as despicable as contempt for firemen, doctors, nurses and anyone else providing a necessary service……lawyers are excepted:-)
Sex workers are certainly as vulnerable as children to abuse of the direst kind and any measures designed to protect them from pimps, gangsters, brutal clients & the like should be welcomed & applauded. We may smile but this is no laughing matter when a short & dangerous and, currently, unprotected working life is socially derided as….well, so what!
Neither, I am a great fan of fuel-air explosives in fact. The MOABs is one of the most interesting weapons in many years.
However the absurdity of criminalising petty payment for sex is beyond belief. When a woman marries a wealthy man for his money, she is often described as having ‘married well’. Yet when a woman merely rents herself to a man, she is called a prostitute and threatened with legal sanction. My theory is the real ‘crime’ of prostitutes is bidding down the price of sex (i.e. they are unwanted market competition to more politically influencial women).
Oh, cry me a river! Most of them are supporting a drug habit. They could go for free help to kick it, so they are in it voluntarily. It’s easy money and most of them are also on welfare. [Verity: How do you know “most” of them are on welfare? Have you done any studies? Many are single mothers supporting their children as the fathers whose names they don’t remember are long gone! I personally have a friend who is “on the game” and the last thing she wants to do is desert her children or give up her dream of studying marine biology to save the plankton of the world (most of it in your head, you silly man).]
The answer to your query: No.
Meanwhile those wacky Canadians can now enjoy the comforts of group sex, safe in the knowlege that such activity has been confirmed as legal by the Canadian Supreme Court. Given the sort of weather Canada has, I’m surprised it was ever illegal over there; you have to keep warm somehow.
I’m the last one in the world to object to the rental of pink moist squishy body parts, but aren’t you worried that, despite good intentions, that this will go all tits-up?
The British criminal class seems to be getting more violent, and well-armed. Doesn’t this set the stage for even more dangers to be faced by families and children in your neighborhoods? Are you sure this will make things better?
I’m happy to have any ignorant statement which I have made corrected of course, I just can’t help thinking that this will lead to a coarsening of your society. Not that that’s any of my business.
I hope you post a follow-up article, if any are published, in a year’s time. It would be great if orifice-hiring is proven to be safe for suburban neighborhoods.
I’m the last one in the world to object to the rental of pink moist squishy body parts, but aren’t you worried that, despite good intentions, things will go all tits-up?
The British criminal class seems to be getting more violent, and well-armed. Doesn’t this set the stage for even more dangers to be faced by families and children in your neighborhoods? Are you sure this will make things better?
I’m happy to have any ignorant statement which I have made corrected of course, I just can’t help thinking that this will lead to a coarsening of your society. Not that that’s any of my business.
I hope you post a follow-up article, if any are published, in a year’s time. It would be great if orifice-hiring is proven to be safe for suburban neighborhoods.
This thing tells me I haven’t entered the security code, and I enter the security code, and my reward for compliance is to made to look stupid by double posting.
Sob!
Interesting theory, Perry. It explains the rabidness of the Daily Mail on the subject. That same paper that never loses an opportunity to tell its female readers that having a career and/or promiscuous sex is dangerous. I have noted before on Samizdata that the sexual revolution has losers as well as winners: I normally point to low-status unsophisticated males and moral regulators, but perhaps married women also feature in that list.
Mike, I think the “reform” currently suggested is so minor as to affect only a tiny segment of the market, and gangster involvement is going to be entirely unaffected. The main danger of that is in any case to prostitutes and their families, not the families and children of others (whose interests you imply are somehow superior to those of prostitutes, though I disagree).
Some very simple changes to the law could remove prostitutes’ civil disabilities, and improve their lives thereby. Most of the people who despise them would never notice.
If you don’t want them on [i]your[/i] doorstep, just increase the rental charges for the doorstep till they go somewhere else. The free market to the rescue!
Being very much in favour of both sex and the free market the only thing wrong with the proposal is that it does not go far enough.
As for illegality I think that we have already seen the answer to this question in gun control: if it is illegal for a brothel to have whores, only the illegal brothels will have whores. Legalise it and get legitimate business involved in this very lucrative service industry and there will be much less crime associated with it.
Personally, I have tended to regard prostitutes who sell their services to be morally on a far higher plane than most of the looters and fools who work in parts of the public sector, and of course most politicians.
Living in Dubai and speaking fair Russian, I probably know more about prosititution when practised in public than most. On the subject of legalisation, I used to have fairly clear view on this, but now I’m not so sure. It’s a bit too long to comment on in here, but I laid out my thoughts here.
Finally we get to see this government supporting small businesses! That’s one in the eye for all those people who didn’t think that Our Little Tone supported SME’s, although I wonder how much input David “Shagger” Blunkett had in all of this?
Funnily enough, prostitution is already legal in most of the planet. The allegedly oh-so-free Anglosphere is one place where it tends not to be. I haven’t noticed legalised prostitution upending the moral fabric of, say, Portugal.
Unlike, I suspect, most people here I live in an area with pretty widespread street solicitation already. It doesn’t particularly bother me, haven’t noticed any violence because of it, and don’t think these proposals will make much diference one way or the other to it.
I think people should be allowed to do whatever they like with their own bodies, so of course I think prostitution should be legal.
But I object to Perry’s attempted sophistry. When a woman marries a wealthy man for his money, she is often described as having ‘married well’. Yet when a woman merely rents herself to a man, she is called a prostitute …
When you have bought a house, you are often described as “the owner”. When you rent a house, you are called “a renter”. A married woman is a married woman. Someone who rents herself out to all comers, so to speak, is called a prostitute. These are the objective definitions in the English language.
permanent expat – your heartfelt plea falls on deaf ears. They don’t “work hard to survive”. They don’t work eight hours a day, as you do. And to ascribe dainty feelings to them is an ancient male fantasy. These people, male and female, are generally fairly stupid and are often a slave to drugs.
Sex workers are certainly as vulnerable as children to abuse of the direst kind and any measures designed to protect them from pimps, gangsters, brutal clients & the like should be welcomed & applauded. Prostitution’s a lifestyle choice (except for those women who are trafficked from abroad, and this is horrible, I agree). If it’s so dangerous, get a job in a shop or an office or selling tickets at a railway station. No. That’s too hard.
I agree that prostitution should be legal (actually, I thought it was) because commercial agreements between two or more people are not my business. But spare me the gross sentimentality, and spare me the New Labour-speak of “sex workers”.
I must admit that sex workers does not sound very alluring.
I think that prostitution is legal. “Living off immoral earnings” is not…
DK
Odd how people list the stigmata of illegal prostitution, as if they wouldn’t change.
It’s as if people were assuming that modern bourbon whisky distillers in the USA would produce their product in car radiators, rush it across the country at the dead of night in tankers labelled “milk”, and have tommy-gun shootouts with rival brands.
Julian Morrison – Your post was very amusing, but I didn’t understand it. (BTW, all Bourbon tastes as though it had been made in a car radiator.)
And can being a “renter” get you thrown in jail? I think you rather miss the point that “prostitute” is a criminal classification as well as an occupation.
I have known (and indeed worked with) bankers and commodity brokers who are also all those things. I have also known a couple well adjusted and quite successful ‘courtesans’ who were neither stupid nor slaves to drugs.
Verity, my point is, all those things in the USA relating to whisky distillers were side effects of illegality during the prohibition era.
If at the end of prohibition, people were to predict shoot-outs and speak-easies in every street, and the streets littered with winos half-poisoned by drinking moonshine, then they would be extrapolating from illegal drinking to legal in the same way as people predicting dire consequences from “mini brothels”. Prostitutes are abused drug-addled mafia-run eastern europeans because they are operating in a classic black market. Take away the black market, and those problems will evaporate.
Julian’s point is very well made: if you criminalise what people do, they will act accordingly (i.e. act like criminals). If they can do the same things safely within the law, they no longer need to do many of the less desireable associated things they had to do when the law was their enemy.
And bourbon is the king of whisky in my opinion – I particularly like Bulleit, which has a wonderful dry Armagnac-like taste.
It must be better than that evil Croatian liquor you gave me and an ex-girlfriend of mine some years back, Perry!!
And can being a “renter” get you thrown in jail?
It can, as things currently stand, if your tenant is a prostute. ‘Living off immoral earnings’ carries a maximum sentence of 7 years. Potentially this is applicable to anyone else who provides business services to prostitutes, too. Furthermore an ‘immoral’ contract is unenforceable. So no one can knowingly rent the flats our masters may so generously allow prostitutes to operate in pairs from, without exposing themselves to prosecution, forfeit of their lease, and so forth.
Unless that problem is going to be fixed, the likelihood that it will make any difference at all is small. Once more the Government is making a big announcement out of a nothing liberalisation, while ‘cracking-down’ on related activity. Compare cannabis down-classification at the same time as drug sentences were increased and arrest powers extended.
The tactic, which seems to work, depends on our country’s few public liberals being easily distracted by a few symbolic baubles, and so that those who do spot the con can be painted as extremists if they object that it isn’t ‘enough’, when it isn’t really anything at all.
Perry de Haviland’s ‘well adjusted and quite successful ‘courtesans’ ‘ are, of course, not the problem. Operators at the sort of level that he’s referring to don’t cause the sorts of criminal and social issues that are of concern. They are also quite rare.
What the people proposing these sorts of reforms overlook is that it’s not just a question of the crime and exploitation that the current laws create for the girls. Legalizations of the kind suggested will reduce those negative aspects, no question. But even if these reforms are put in place, and the girls are no longer so much at risk of exploitation and violence, that won’t change the social pressures on the johns, which cause them to do anti-social and dangerous things. Nor will it reduce the self-destructive and anti-social behaviours that seem to go along with this sort of work, for the vast majority of the participants – PdH’s exceptional cases excluded.
If the girls are working in a secure house with a beefy minder on-call, their physical risks at the hands of johns and pimps are removed, which is a good thing. But there will be little or no reduction in all the other stupidity and foolish behaviours of the johns, many motivated by a desire to keep their activities a secret, or by whatever unususal motives persuade them to do these things in the first place. Similarly, although the girls may be physically safer, there will be nothing to dissaude them from doing the foolish and self-destructive things which seem to be part-and-parcel of this line of work.
I don’t say that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, necessarily, just that much less will change than reformers hope for. Being allowed to work legally will not suddenly turn these girls into the proverbial ‘whore with a heart of gold’.
I know a man who makes a very good living driving a minivan. His business consists solely of ferrying ‘adult entertainers’ to and from work. He is beyond being surprised at the many and various ways in which these women contrive to screw up their own lives and the lives of everyone around them. He carries a large pistol, and his vehicle cannot be opened from the outside – both things for good reason. This line of work involves both stunningly stupid and self-destructive behaviours, and the nastiest of people – on all sides of the equation. Making some aspects of it legal won’t change that, nor make the attendant problems go away.
llater,
llamas
Of course courtesans cannot be compared with prostitutes. They’re usually physically attractive, clever and beguiling as well as being obliging. They operate on a completely different level from women who stand on street corners in January in high boots, mini-skirts and frilly tops. They also end up a hell of a lot richer, too.
Prostitution should be tolerated, of course. But I don’t know that society owes any favours to people who deliberately put themselves in danger’s way. (In all my comments, I am obviously excepting girls who have been trafficked to Britain. Tony Blair should be occupying himself people traffickers who lure young women with the promise of work as nannies or in hairdresser’s salons. This is what the energy should go into curing.)
Anyone who wants to work can find work in Britain. Prostitutes are too ill-disciplined and too lazy to even turn up for interviews, never mind hold a job with regular hours. I don’t think government-mandated minders in whorehouses are a good idea.
Here’s another thing – I don’t believe prostitutes should have to go for regular health check-ups. Staying healthy is up to her and the johns and isn’t the government’s business. This is where nationalised health services end up. They interfere in every area of life with the excuse of being “guardians of the public purse”. Governments should get out of the health business and out of the prostitute business. Dear god!
Some people swear by bourbon and admittedly, a good bourbon is a very smooth drink. But I don’t like the taste and it kicks in too quickly. Even worse is rye.
Indeed, llamas. Liberalisation will not produce a perfect world. We can’t compel people to be wise or good.
What we can do is (1) relinquish the illusion that we have a right or duty to try to compel others to be wise or good (the libertarian moral line) and (2) avoid ‘cures’ that are worse for non-volunteers than the putative disease (the libertarian equivalent of an utility principle). That way we won’t get a perfect world, but we might get a more comfortable one.
Indeed, guy herbert.
Succinctness was never my strong point. So, in the classic creative-writing exercise, let me distill what I said to the least number of words.
“Legalizing brothels will reduce violence and exploitation of working girls to some degree, but will do little or nothing to abate the social ills which attend prostitution.”
For an example, we need look only to those Nevada counties where prostitution is gloriously legal in all its many and varied forms. The 100% legal brothels of Clark County all look like high-security jails, with high fences, razor wire, armed guards and the most elaborate security precautions – all the results of the foolish, anti-social and destructive behaviours which attend almost all participants in the trade – even when it is completely and utterly legal. Even in the middle of a Godforsaken BF-Nowhere desert, these places have to armour-up to protect themselves from the mopes, idiots and predators who are drawn to the trade likes flies to s**t.
I sure don’t know how to fix it, but the measures proposed are very unlikely to make the rest of us any more ‘comfortable’.
llater,
llamas
I agree about Bulleit whiskey, very good stuff.
I don’t know about Nevada, but in Manchester brothels are virtually legal under the thin disguise of massage parlours, and seem to cause few problems.
After the departure of “God’s Cop” aka Sir James Anderton, who did not approve of that sort of thing, the police seem to have decided to turn a blind eye to such establishments so long as they are well run and cause no trouble. Since the owners wish to stay in business, they make sure their parlours are well run and cause no trouble. QED.
A friend who works on the Manchester Evening News told me that a few years ago the paper was going to launch a shock horror campaign against the prostitution menace in our midst; however, the advertising department pointed out that the paper was raking in thousands of pounds a week in adverts for these “massage parlours” and the idea was dropped. Good to know that the press have got some principles!
Indeed. I am neither suggesting that prostitution is a ‘good thing’ nor that prostitutes be done any ‘favours’, just that they not be persecuted by the state for their chosen business.
John K. wrote:
‘I don’t know about Nevada, but in Manchester brothels are virtually legal under the thin disguise of massage parlours, and seem to cause few problems.
After the departure of “God’s Cop” aka Sir James Anderton, who did not approve of that sort of thing, the police seem to have decided to turn a blind eye to such establishments so long as they are well run and cause no trouble. Since the owners wish to stay in business, they make sure their parlours are well run and cause no trouble. QED.’
Agreed. Around here, the same sort of standards apply. Brothels operate on the ‘blind-eye’ principle, many using the same ‘massage parlour’ facade. It seems to work quite well, although it must be said that these places – especially the ‘massage parlours’ – often employ women, often from the Far East, who are exploited by Western standards, who are often in the country illegally. That being said, they do not seem to have the attendant problems of drunkeness, violence, drug abuse and general self-destruction that are common in more ‘traditional’ prostitution. Whether because they are not present, or because they are not visible to law enforcment – I could not say.
The real problem children in this area – around here, at least – are the ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, aka topless bars. These places, which operate on a carefully-designed business model of alcohol-lubricated escalated titillation designed to vacuum the wallets of punters, cause a lot of public-order problems which spill out into society. Part of this is due to stupid government oversight, part of it is due to rapacious greed in the business model – there’s those flies and s**t again. As I understand it, those with money and no serious criminal record go across the river to Canada, where the ‘Windsor Ballet’ offers 100% straight-up no-nonsense titillation, at whatever level your heart desires, for not a lot of money. They don’t appear to have the public-order issues that we have on this side of the river, where unsatisfied drunks with empty wallets are turfed out of these places at closing time – with predictable results. It is with the workers at these places that my buddy with the minivan and the large pistol makes a good living – the girls need secure, reliable transportation because they’ve all lost their licenses and their cars to their drug and alcohol habits, and they are constantly at risk from ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends and drunks who think that they going to get something more than they did for all those dollar bills.
llater,
llamas
From reading the comments, as well as reports in my local papers here in NJ over recent prostitution sweeps, there seems to be some common themes regarding prostitution and criminality.
For some, any sort of sex work is evil and must be illegal. This includes not just prostitution, but erotic dancing, adult film work, etc. Those that believe this will likely never agree to any relaxation or legalization of these laws.
For most others, the problems are with aesthetics, crime, annoyance and visibility to children.
Aesthetics involves objections to streetwalkers and thier appearance in areas people object to. If you have ever had to enter or leave NYC near the Lincoln or Holland tunnels, you will know what I mean. There are no doubt similar areas in any urban area.
Crime involves drug use, violence, trafficking, petty theft and public nuisance and health problems.
Annoyance comes from people doing things in inconvenient places, like the doorsteps of other peoples property, or in places or cars not well concealed.
Children get involved when these activities take place near homes, schools, churches etc.. As well as public advertising in news papers and other places.
Health problems of course deal with sexually transmitted diseases, and those that go along with drug use among many practitioners of the ancient profession.
Legalization can remove much of this. But legalizing it along doctrinaire libertarian lines would just upset even more people, if it was even possible to do.
I have always though legalizing prostitution behind closed doors, while retaining the laws against streetwalking, would be the best way to have your, er-ah, ‘cake’, and eat it too.
While licensing is always a problem for me, some sort of way to ensure health checks are made and women and children are not trafficked is needed. So I suppose some sort of minimal scheme would be needed, though realistic alternatives should be considered.
This change in UK law is a good move to help make life safer for all involved, and a start towards saner policies. The problem is if a public backlash occurs.
tomWright is right, and most of the issues can be solved by a simple means – zoning. If brothels are legal, they are a commercial activity, and folks have the means to keep commercial activities that they don’t want on their doorstep – off their doorstep. I’d see a legal brothel as being something like a motorway service area – open 24/7, to all comers, lots of vehicle traffic coming and going. The means already exist to prevent the disturbance and disruption of such activities, they seem like a legitimate application of state regulation, and the compliance burden is not onerous.
I don’t like the idea of the state getting involved in licensing any commercial activity, but must admit that there’s a side of me which would love to see this trade brought under the aegis of the HM Government – specifically, of the NHS. A better way to eliminate the trade, it is hard to imagine. After all – just think. Days or weeks to get an appointment. Weeks or months to see a specialist. Rationing. Waiting lists. Limited services in poorly-run facilities with massive overheads. But then, I suppose, just like with the NHS, there would be a massive wave of people who choose to ‘go private’.
llater,
llamas
Tom Wright writes – some sort of way to ensure health checks are made
Why?
And that is always a problem when their are so few retraints on the use of force via the political system.
I talked last night with my buddy with the minivan and the big pistol. And I have the answer!
He reminded me of a case around here, 7 or 8 years ago. An enterprising businesswoman got herself a really big RV – one of those 48-foot jobs that you see being piloted down America’s freeways with a sign on the back that says ‘Ed and Lureen Stepanowski, Piscataway, NJ – we’re spending our children’s inheritance!’
Who knows where she got it from. Probably it was stolen.
She took appointments, and would pick up customers at anonymous suburban parking lots. She would tell her driver – who was also her minder – to be back at the same place in an hour, or two hours, or whatever. He would pull onto the freeway, set the cruise at 62 mph, and business would be transacted unimpeded. And on to the next appointment. Sometimes, so it is said, she would park this thing in a WalMart parking lot – WalMart welcomes RV’s and lets them park overnight on the outer edges of their parking lots. A parked RV at a WalMart is completely unremarkable.
Completely anonymous, completely untraceable, and noone to be offended. And a change of jurisdiction every 10 minutes. It was a perfect set-up. I’m guessing she was at the upper end of the market scale.
It wasn’t this activity that got her busted. It was her habit of renting the rigging for high-st*kes c*rd g*mes. Players would be similarly collected up from suburban parking lots, and pay a cover charge for fuel, liquor and hors d’oeuvres, and the rig would roll for as long as they wanted to play. It is said – probably apocryphally – that this ride once ran for 36 hours straight on the freeways of the Detroit metro area, stopping only for fuel and to change drivers. Someone ratted her out and the rolling c*s*no was busted.
So that’s the answer – not mini-brothels on people’s doorsteps. Winnebagos.
llater,
llamas
Dear Perry,
Your numerous comments on your own post prove your anxiety on this subject.
One day a nice girl will accept to stay with you in the dark for free and might even accept to marry you without considering your family china, if you will just stop going to bad places.
Your opinion on married women is the result of the sad sexuality of the upper class crowd that you exhibit on line. I enjoy very much peeping at your party-book, as you encourage us to, but I think you deserve better. Another lifestyle would protect you from disillusions.
Have you ever heard of Arcopal, the most traditional French dishes? Also a successful, therefore exciting industry.
http://www.arc-vca.com/lesmarques/index.html
http://www.arcoroc.com/fr/quisommesnous/html/legroupe.html
As for adultery, professional or not, that you rightly fear so much, remember your prayer, women are human beings so “lead us not into temptation” by going hunting at dawn with the above mentioned crowd.
The reason to be against prostitution is that frustration makes people much more inventive, famous and successful than sex-dealing. And for instance, it’s improved your style a lot.