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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
TinaS1
Published Letters: 780 Editor's Choice: 21
I'm of course against pressing charges against prostitutes or harming them. I'm 100% for jailing the johns.
This is what Sweden has done. Prostitution is legal--for prostitutes. But the men can be arrested for buying. This seems to be working. In the past it's been backwards--the hookers and not the johns were criminalized. Now we see Sweden finally getting it right. The power, and therefore the offense, has always rested with the buyer.
Prostitutes have a union in Germany, where I used to live, and a health certificate they have to get, and all the other things people here are suggesting. But all the prostitutes are from other countries--German girls hardly go into it. They are too well off financially. This tells you what it is really like. Germany still has a problem with human trafficking, and, in squalid train stations, you can find hookers that are refugees from Iraq. There are girls from Africa with visible injuries.
The reality of this work is simply such that no amount of unionization or normalization can do anything. It's a societal evil. You have to get rid of it while not victimizing the women involved (true that not all prostitutes are women. The celebrity designer Moshammer was killed by an Iraqi refugee he picked up in a Munich truck stop who was a young man. In a fight over payment, Moshammer was killed by the Iraqi).
It will never fully disappear, but we can seek solutions refuse to normalize the indignity of people having to sell their bodies in this intimate way under any circumstances. Tough luck to all you guys who think this is just another way to have sex. It isn't.
Illegal labourers working construction jobs under unsafe conditions for less than minimum wage, and people in the military joining up during wartime, are also products of financial desperation. They would be doing something else if they possibly could.
However they are not really comparable to prostitutes, who truly risk their lives every time they shut themselves--alone--into a hotel room with a possibly diseased and/or deranged john. And I don't think any amount of legalization can do away with that risk. It might make the johns feel better about what they're doing, though.
You start out talking about how prostitutes are in financial desperation, and then launch into a set of extremely sexist cliches about how men aren't gettin' any because women are mercenary, witholding bitches. Which really tells me all I need to know about you, but I'll just say this:
So you think it's okay to take advantage of a woman's desperation to level your own sexual playing field.
I'm not going to misdirect the discussion by telling you what you are. But read the sentence I just wrote above. And think it over, will you?
Yes, that's right. Prostitution is not about sex, it's about money and power. Much like rape is not really about sex.
Does anybody seriously think that the millioniare Moshammer needed to troll the back alleys of Munich to pick up a traumatized kid from a war zone...just for the sex???? Of course not. (Americans should know he was not a closet gay or anything like that). And then on top of that Moshammer tried to stiff the guy.
Does anybody believe that Hugh Grant...you know, Hugh fucking Grant, sex symbol, boyfriend of Elizabeth Hurley....needed to pick up a drug addicted streetwalker to get sex???
I doubt seriously that very many men who patronize hookers have no other way to get any kind of sex. It's the money, baby, and the pleasure of lording it over another human being. It's saying, I have these dollars and I'm gonna give them to you by literally stuffing them up your a**. And you're gonna smile and tell me you love it.
That's what prostitution is, and that's my problem with it. It's a huge violation of a person's dignity, totally incomparable with any other kind of "work", and difficult to argue that anybody really chooses it freely. As has been pointed out repeatedly, you do not see girls with other options in life lining up to be prostitutes. The guys on this thread who think that women can choose this life and enjoy it or express themselves creatively in it or some such bullshit are living in a pipe dream of their own wishful thinking. Your boss ever make you take home your wages in your anus?
No? Thought not.
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