Letters to the Editor
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tina schrier
Prostitutes can be defined as screwed up by virtue of the fact that they are risking their lives for $25 an hour.
Do you have any idea how dangerous a lot of construction jobs (done mostly by men) are?
A lot of construction workers risk their lives for far less than $25 an hour and have to pay taxes on top of it.
I've seen a guy die right in front of me when he fell four feet off a scaffold, landed on the back of his head on a concrete floor and there were brains leaking out.
Alive one second, dead the next.
He was an illegal making about $5 an hour.
Are all construction workers "screwed up" because they don't work in a nice, safe, air conditioned office?
And I won't even get into soldiers and Marines who risk their lives for way less than $25 an hour.. I guess in your mind they are "screwed up" too.
You have no idea how many good, hard working people you just insulted with that idiotic comment.
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the pro-legalization crowd...
...likes to point towards the Netherlands as a society that isn't sexually repressed because it accepts prostitution. To which I'd always argue, why, if prostitution is just another job over there, are most of the "girlies in the windows"
1. Eastern European
2. Thai or Vietnamese
3. African
4. West Indian
You don't see that many girls from middle-class Dutch homes going into the business.
Do I know whether it should be legal or not? No. But you can't argue it's the same as a dancer using her feet to make a living (even if she does destroy them with pointe shoes in the process). With prostitution, you are selling not your body, but a process of your body that either God or evolution designed TO MAKE MORE HUMANS.
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Leeandra Nolting
With prostitution, you are selling not your body, but a process of your body that either God or evolution designed TO MAKE MORE HUMANS.
No more so and probably less than a surrogate mother.
Should that be made illegal also?
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Anonymous, nobody's hating....
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.
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Aycharach proves my point
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.
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tina schrier
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.
You would deny people the only means they have to keep themselves fed and housed?
Your story makes it clear that these women are street prostitutes out of desperation. Dire straits make for desperate measures.
And in the US we do not have the social safety net that they have in most of Europe. If you fall below a certain point financially you end up on the street and the chances of climbing back up in the employment market today are slim to none. A lot of jobs, even menial ones, require a phone, credit check and a lot of other things which a person living on the street simply does not have.
There is an old saw about men putting up with marriage to get sex while women put up with sex to get marriage. Like most cliches it certainly isn't completely true but there is an element of truth to it.
All most women have to do to get sex is just stop saying no. Men on the other hand have to go through an elaborate and often expensive ritual with no promise of the reward they seek at the end of the ritual.
The sexual playing field between men and women is not level and prostitution to some small extent helps level that field. Your position could easily be interpreted or misinterpreted as wishing to maintain the unequal sexual playing field between men and women.
Sex with a loving and enthusiast partner is far preferable to hiring a prostitute for most men but there are a large number of men for whom that simply isn't an option.