To the delight of civil libertarians and libertarians alike, the Canadian courts have been leading the world in dealing with conflicts between privacy principles and morality legislation. I am serving as an expert in the review of Canadian polygamy laws in British Columbia. In the meantime, the Ontario Superior Court may allow three prostitution laws to die this Saturday.
In September, the Court struck down the laws. The federal government is charging that this is nothing short of a “social experiment unprecedented in this country.” However, it is also a frank acknowledgment that consenting adults came engage in sex for money as a consensual choice. Currently, an individual can have sex with any number of partners but can be arrested if they accept anything of value in exchange for sex. They can receive gifts as part of a “relationship” no matter how fleeting but not as payment.
The Court previously noted that criminal laws force prostitutes in the shadows where they are easy prey for abuse and even homicides. Once legal, protections and regulations can apply to the world’s oldest profession. With the demise of the laws, street walking will be legal.
Source: Star
Jonathan Turley
Dear Tony C
There was a 60 minutes study of porno a few years ago and they said that women are really hurt when pornographic photos of them surface. Most prostitutes seem to be marketed through pornographic photos.
You statement above that if women weren’t prostitutes, then they might be homeless. That implies that prostitutes are otherwise unemployable. Since they are all good looking, that implies they can’t read well enough to stock a shelf. That implies that they were unable to make an informed decision about the risk of being a prostitute.
If college girls work as waitresses instead of strippers then they are more employable in the field they major in because there won’t be potentially embarrassment interacting with former customers or men who have seen photos of her genitals. Employers will be less worried that she will sell the company secrets. And she is more marriageable and more likely to raise her children with a father present. Prostitution undermines fatherhood.
Where do you live Tony? Do you want a brothel next door?
Tony you keep talking about your daughter. Did you get a DNA test? How do you know your wife didn’t turn a trick 9 months before she was born?
Tony, if your wife’s husband went to jail for insider trading and the government took all their money, would you want your daughter turning tricks?
Have you ever heard of the difference between primary employment and secondary employment? The idea is that jobs produce other jobs but in different amounts and different kinds. When a man spends $1,000 at a brothel that is a $1,000 not being invested in the stock market, in his children’s education, or in purchase of a new car. The $1,000 diverted might fuel the consumption of alcohol or guns. Has the State of Nevada where there are apparently tens of thousands of prostitutes produced any reports showing their earnings were invested in R&D, venture capital or education? Have any former prostitutes emerged and said they invested in Apple or Google?
Did you see any on-line criticisms of the Swedish Fine the Johns plan?
Legalization means that the state condones and taxes the acts and that unemployment benefits will be withheld if a position as a prostitute is not accepted. HIV tests are available regardless of one’s employment status.
Canadian Eh, are you a John? Do you purchase BJs?
Please expand on why you think that prostitution doesn’t hurt the prostitutes, why you think that prostitution doesn’t hurt prostitutes would have been husbands, why you think that prostitution doesn’t hurt neighborhoods, and why you think that a society in which 20% of the women between 20 and 30 are prostitutes would be better than a society in which less than 1% of the women between 20 and 30 are prostitutes?
@reader:
>>> Have you ever heard of any lawyers or nurses who used to be prostitutes?
First, we should not legislate against professions (dishwashing, waiting tables, flipping burgers, bartending, print modelling, construction grunt, prostitution) because they are unlikely to produce any lawyers or nurses or some other profession you respect, instead of one you disdain.
Have you heard of any homeless people becoming lawyers or nurses? Because that is the profession you push them toward by outlawing prostitution.
However, to answer your question in kind: When my daughter was in college, two of her friends were working their way through college as strippers, and according to my daughter, “making good money.”
Let us take this step by step: There are 7,000 colleges and universities in the USA.
Out of **all** the thousands of girls attending my daughter’s average-sized state college, say the two strippers my daughter knew were HALF the total girls working at that college as strippers. That would mean there are about 30,000 strippers in the USA going to college at any given time.
Suppose 14,000 drop out (a very high rate), and 16,000 will graduate.
About 1/4 should graduate every year, that should be about 4,000 strippers graduating with Bachelor’s degrees every year.
For a 40 year work career, that should be about 160,000 professional women in the work force at any given time, between the ages of 22 and 62, that worked as strippers in college. These are former strippers with real college degrees.
One Hundred Sixty Thousand. I say this because I personally have *never* known a former stripper that became a lawyer or a nurse or a CEO or a doctor or professor. But I do not doubt such women are out there, because a professional, well educated, degreed woman would understand that even though stripping is legal there is some social stigma attached to being a former stripper. Because of that I also think that if one of the more beautiful professors in my university *were* a former stripper, she’d probably keep that bit of personal history to herself. Ya think?
The same goes for prostitutes. If there are 30,000 girls working their way through college as strippers, I would not doubt that 1% (300) might be working their way through college with sex work. How do you propose I discover that my doctor or dentist paid her tuition 30 years ago by working as a discrete call girl using a fake name?
Just because you have never heard of something doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen; it may just be kept secret for obvious reasons. And like I said, we don’t legislate life outcomes, if we did then college and graduate school would be legally mandatory.
I have the slogan for it: Get a D, go to Jail.
>>> Lot’s of crimes are an alternative to dire poverty. Such as money laundering, insider trading and operating a ponzi scheme.
Ahh, but notice that those crimes are inherently crimes that harm others. Sex between consenting adults, even complete strangers, is perfectly legal. Any kind of sex. The crime is paying for something that is legal. The legislation against prostitution is saying “Sex must be free.”
To me outlawing prostitution is like outlawing paid sports, for example “Nobody can be paid to play football. All football playing must be free and for the love of the sport.”
People are maimed and killed in football. I’ve never heard of a pro NFL football player becoming a nurse. Why can’t we outlaw football-for-pay?
>>> I think the issues about prostitution have to do with the fact that it really does damage the participants, their families, their neighborhoods and society n general. Like water pollution which is considered a crime.
No it doesn’t. That is your assertion and nothing else. Does casual sex with strangers damage the participants, their families, etc?
Casual sex is pretty common. Women have sexual hookups with men they have just met ALL THE TIME; I have personally known two men so skilled at that barroom seduction they had a new partner just about every weekend.
What, **precisely**, is more damaging about being a prostitute than the same amount of legal, casual sex for free? What is it about a hundred dollar bill you find so offensive? Why should every single sex act be legal but the exchange of a piece of paper be deemed ‘damaging’?
If it is the amount of sex, do you believe we should legally limit the *amount* of casual sex any citizen is permitted to have?
If it is the partners, should we limit the number of sexual partners any person may have in life?
In general, should we regulate people’s sex lives and strictly enforce those regulations?
I don’t see how any of that is any of my damn business.
>>> Prostitution does not create anything of value. It is not primary employment and it does not increase productivity.
That is wrong on the face of it. Men (and some women) pay for it, and ‘value’ is in the mind of the purchaser.
Consider these legal jobs: Topiary artist. Acting on stage. Telling jokes on stage. Singing a song. Playing a clarinet. Painting pictures of imaginary landscapes. Juggling chainsaws. Playing baseball in a stadium. Writing fictional horror novels.
These jobs create a very temporary ‘value,’ because people enjoy them. As it turns out, if you haven’t heard, people (both genders) can enjoy sex and orgasms, even without any particular love or affection. It is how our bodies work. That is what prostitution delivers. Prostitutes create value the way a stand-up comic creates value, or a swimsuit model creates value; it is a form of entertainment for the client, and pays more than flipping burgers for all three.
It can certainly be primary employment. A study in Canada says legal prostitutes there earn the equivalent of about $125 per trick and can turn multiple tricks per day. Say ‘multiple’ means two, the minimum qualifying number. That is $1250 a week for a five day work week, which is, say, 15 hours of work if a trick takes 1.5 hours with travel. So, allowing for 20% loss due to booking difficulties and time off, that would be $52,000 a year in gross income. That’s more than the median wage in the USA, and about 10 times the median wage of actresses or models in the USA. And by the way, actresses, models and prostitutes all probably have a similar professional ‘shelf life,’ they all rely on their sexual attractiveness to some extent.
As for productivity: maybe it does. Maybe sexually gratified men work harder than men depressed because they can’t get laid. In any case, even though I reject the premise that we should legislate based on how some job affects ‘productivity’, prostitution’s impact on ‘productivity’ is no more or less than that of any other entertainment job. Does juggling knives ‘increase productivity’? Plus it looks dangerous, maybe we should outlaw it.
>> Do you believe that prostitution causes economic growth?
Who cares? Should we coerce other people to act against their will because it will benefit *us* monetarily? That is morally repugnant.
But to answer in kind: Sure it does. Prostitutes have sex for money, because they need the money. Not all money is needed for drugs or to feed addiction; the money might be needed for tuition and books, or to feed children, or to provide medical care for their children, or to get children into a school where they learn something instead of just being incarcerated for the day. That can produce children that go to college and then perform one of your ‘approved’ jobs.
Prostitution is a job, the regular working men that frequent prostitutes *obviously* value their services by laying down legally earned money for them, and the prostitutes may use that money to buy food, clothing, education, ballet classes for their little girls, football uniforms for their little boys, college tuition for themselves or their children, or to pay the mortgage on the house they love — Do any of these things contribute to ‘economic growth’? Of course they do, prostitutes have money to spend and they spend it.
Now if you complain that prostitutes spend money on drugs, well so do many lawyers and businessmen and professors, and bartenders and waitresses, I don’t see you advocating to outlaw those jobs.
As for the Swedish model: I am opposed at any attempt to starve the prostitutes of customers, that is just a morality law. We don’t pass laws trying to starve stand-up comics of customers, or demanding all dinner-theatre actors be unpaid volunteers.
I don’t think it is any of my business if a man wants to have sex and a woman is willing to provide it for pay.
Notice if the cash is filtered through gifts, it is legal: Do the Swedes outlaw men buying drinks for women in bars, or dinners in restaurants, or flowers or jewelry, if their ultimate intent is their own sexual gratification?
Do they outlaw women going to bars to implicitly trade casual sex for free drinks? Didn’t that old ‘three date’ rule before sex put a ‘minimum price tag’ on the sex? Hmm, from my own ancient experience, I’d guess that minimum price tag today would be about $300.
I think laws prohibiting prostitution are both hypocritical and morally wrong. I think it is fine to have laws that prevent one citizen from harming or coercing **another** citizen, in person or in property or in finance. I am fine with laws that prevent people from engaging in acts that abet or enable illegal activity, like money laundering, or hiring a hit man, or hiring a contract thief. If the act is illegal, then hiring it done should be illegal.
But prostitution is the opposite of that. The acts are all legal and will be for the foreseeable future, and (I believe) the vast majority of people would not outlaw the ACTS.
I think laws should be against *acts* that harm others, and I think when the government passes a law against a *motiviation* for performing an otherwise legal act it strays into the realm of thought police, Theocracy, Dictatorship, or something similar.
How Alex gets Brittany (just names starting with A & B, folks) into the sack is none of my business as long as Brittany engages in the act of her own free will. Brittany may not enjoy it — My daughter did not care much for her paper-filing courthouse internship during one semester in college, but she did it anyway. I **hated** cleaning toilets but I did it for the money, not some personal joy I take in working with other people’s shit.
Lots of jobs are not enjoyable and produce no lasting results and nothing to brag about, that doesn’t mean they have no value. People voluntarily choose to pay for them, and that is all the proof of value they need.
Thank-you SM we’re having a discussion over the matter here at work this am. This following word that a local Sex Trade safety agency has opened it’s doors here yesterday. Also following news that 2 inmates at a local Max. Security Pen were charged over the weekend with running a prositituion ring from prison on the city of TO. Only in Canada!!
I will give it a try, Canadien EH. Legalization means regulation of prostitution with regards to where, when and how prostitution takes place. The brothels in Nevada are an example of this. Decriminalization means removal of the criminal penalties for prostitutes.
Quick question for anyone who may be around and able to answer…..what is the difference between de-criminalization and legalization?
Dear Tony
Have you ever heard of any lawyers or nurses who used to be prostitutes?
Lot’s of crimes are an alternative to dire poverty. Such as money laundering, insider trading and operating a ponzi scheme.
I think the issues about prostitution have to do with the fact that it really does damage the participants, their families, their neighborhoods and society n general. Like water pollution which is considered a crime.
Prostitution does not create anything of value. It is not primary employment and it does not increase productivity.
Do you believe that prostitution causes economic growth?
@reader: Prostitution is a job, a service, it is an acting job. It pays. Who cares about short run or long run? In the short run, it puts food on the table. In the long run: You didn’t starve in the short run.
A minimum wage worker earns something like $250/week. In Canada, the *average* legal prostitute earns about $125 per trick and can easily perform ten tricks a week. That is six times as much money as the minimum wage worker, and about $60,000 a year. More money means more security, more savings, better nutrition, and better across the board. It is a middle-class job.
Who does better in the long run? Somebody earning $60K a year with a few hours of physical labor a day, or somebody performing 40 hours of physical labor a day and living on the poverty line?
Maybe the prostitute job doesn’t last, maybe the women hit their 40’s and have to quit. But they know that is coming, they can plan for that, go to school, become lawyers or nurses or whatever.
In any case it makes no difference. The government is not our life planners and not there to keep us from making stupid choices. Teens that choose to spend their lives working a series of minimum wage jobs and never getting an education are entirely free to do so. It may be a stupid life choice and bad for them in the long run, but it is their choice to make. We have no right to make other people’s life choices for them.
@annie: ???
I don’t judge whether people have rights based on whether those rights will fix some problem or cause some problem. Rights are rights.
I am not advocating for “more” prostitution either, I am advocating for leaving people alone to decide what they want to do with their own body.
More specifically, I am railing against morality laws, because anti-prostitution laws are only about pay, not about acts: Nothing a prostitute does is illegal if s/he does it without being paid, only the pay is in question. So I am arguing against prohibiting pay for an otherwise legal act, I think that is simply wrong.
If striking down prostitution laws results in more prostitution, well I don’t care. What it would mean is that there are women that would rather be prostitutes than work at Burger King or Walmart, and presumably they can earn more money being prostitutes than working at Burger King or Walmart, and presumably there are men willing to pay them, and why should I get in the way of two willing consenting adults exchanging money in return for services if the services are something the prostitute could have legally done for free?
I don’t get it. I am opposed to having the government enforce some Christian, Puritanical view of morality, I think that is wrong in principle. I don’t care what economic ramifications there may be to upholding principle, I really don’t.
Tony C Are you saying we should have more prostitution to fix the unemployment problem?
@Reader:
Seatbelt laws are a form of oppression.
Drug laws should be abolished.
The government is not here to be my nanny, or daddy, or mommy, or guardian. I wear my seatbelt because it improves safety. I don’t care how many lives they have saved: Ends do not justify means, even beneficial ends. Just because lives are saved does not mean the law is a “good thing.”
Again, we can outlaw skiing, and NASCAR, and skydiving for sport, and hunting, and gun ownership, and driving over 20 mph, and alcohol, and cigarettes, and transfats, and leaving the house after 9pm except for work. We can outlaw consuming more than 3000 calories a day. We can pass laws against obesity.
LIVES WOULD BE SAVED! Freedom would be lost, but lives would be saved.
For the dense, all of that is intended to show the emptiness of the argument that a law is “good” if it saves lives. It is not. The government has a role to play in society, even a big role, but that role is not authoritarian control over your life and safety. Preventing you from doing harm to others — Yes. Seatbelt laws for children or minors fit that bill. Seatbelt laws for adults capable of making rational decisions are not, even if it kills them.
Dear Tony C
Glad to hear you are not a John
How does prostitution help the hopelessly poverty stricken in the long run even though it does in the short term?
In Africa I read something claiming something about that 42% of children will prostitute themselves for food.
I hope you don’t think that in Nevada prostitution is required for food.
So what do you think about the Swedish Law that fines attempts to purchase sex?
@Reader:
>> It sounds to me, no offense, Tony C, like you are a John.
Hey reader, no offense taken. I don’t stigmatize Johns either. It sounds to me, no offense, like you are a moralizing dumbfuck moron that, like most of your tribe, cannot comprehend anybody growing up any differently than you did or concluding anything about life different than your piggish minded pathetic self.
No offense.
I have never engaged or required the services of a prostitute. I have been married and faithful to a woman I love for decades. What’s different between us is that I can empathize with the plight of the hopelessly poverty-stricken and you are so lacking in imagination and so selfish and self-centered that when you encounter somebody like me, you assume I have some hidden agenda and must be lying for personal gain. Perhaps because that is what you would do. No offense.
The Swedish Law does allow women to make stupid choices and makes it easier for them to leave prostitution.
In Sweden a mother doesn’t have to work as a prostitute to support her children.
I have a hard tome believing that you were babysitting for a prostitute when you were 14. Your story, Tony C, doesn’t sound credible.
It sounds to me, no offense, Tony C, like you are a John.
It sounds like you are against the Swedish Law being expanded into this country, because you want to continue being a John.
If prostitution is not always a stupid choice, and not always involuntary, then in Nevada where there appear to be thousands of prostitutes, they would produce a few hundred who say they are glad they chose the profession of prostitution.
Do you think that seatbelt laws are a form of slavery? What about drug laws?
You are here professing about morality but all you want is to get BJ’s and not from a woman who is your companion.
@reader:
>> If a woman finds it difficult to get a faithful husband who trusts her after working as a prostitute,
First, something like 10% of spouses are unfaithful without any prostitutes of any kind being involved. That is their legal right I think. I don’t think adultery is illegal in any states.
Second, what about being a former prostitute would destroy trust? Should being a former actress or model destroy trust? I think in your porn you mistake scripted, feigned enthusiasm for real enthusiasm. Prostitution is an acting job. Should the husband of a film actress not trust her *in real life* because she feigned passion in a sex scene with another man?
The only reason for prostitution being different I can guess at is if you think it is the result of a lack of willpower or an inability to refuse sexual advances.
For voluntary prostitution not driven by drug addiction, I do not think that is the case. I think it is an *act* of willpower, to brave the stigma and cultural stereotypes imprinted since childhood and real physical danger in order to make enough money to survive.
Third, the difficulty you speak of may be a consequence of her life choice, certainly. Most men (and most women) are bigoted idiots incapable of original thought or independent analysis. But I believe it is HER life choice to make, not mine to make for her either way. Adults are free to make all kinds of decisions that may cause difficulty for them in the future, heck they are free to make life-threatening decisions, like becoming a cop or soldier or stuntman or race car driver or skydiver or buying a motorcycle.
Prostitution is not necessarily a stupid choice, but even if in a particular case it would be, people are free to make stupid choices in their life and I think they should be, because I think the alternative, where other people use their own moral compass to determine whether they think you are making a stupid choice and have the right to prohibit it, might as well be slavery.
CEJ,
Nice, very nice
@Kay:
I am not a hunter, I never have been, but I do not think hunting should be outlawed.
I am not a skier. I have never been skiing. How would I feel if my only child were killed skiing? Awful, probably suicidal, but that isn’t enough for me to even ask her politely to not ski; and definitely not enough for me to demand that skiing be outlawed.
You don’t understand that how parents FEEL is immaterial to what we should outlaw. My daughter is an ADULT and makes her own decisions about what to do with her body. My opinion carries emotional weight with her but that is IT, I do not control her, I do not WANT to control her, I think it is primitive and perverse when parents think they OWN their children.
I do not stigmatize prostitution. I have known a prostitute I liked, I babysat her children. Thanks to proximity I got over my idiotic, immature bigotry at 14 and saw a heroic woman determined to give her children a better life than she had, even if it cost her dignity or her pride. I saw a beautiful woman with an iron will, dealt a bad hand in life and succeeding despite it. I have no idea if she was happy, but she was determined to make something happen and it was happening.
My morals do not matter, I don’t get to dictate my morals to ANYBODY, including my daughter. I taught her to think for herself, I taught her the difference between emotion and rationality, I taught her cynicism, and I taught her about thieves, and sociopaths, and takers, and human parasites, and self defense, and manipulative tactics, and I think she learned those lessons. Now she makes her own decisions, and from what I have seen good ones. In the extremely unlikely event she decided to be a hooker I’d presume she felt she had to do it for some valid reason.
If my (non-existent) son married a hooker, I’d presume he had seen beyond the stereotype and the social stigma and had fallen in love with her.
As for other women: Who cares about percentages? I don’t hate prostitutes. It isn’t up to me to tell them how to make a living. If 20% of the women in my city were prostitutes, I’d think “Man, there must be one hell of a lot of rich horny men in this city if demand for prostitutes is that high.”
Then I’d turn on the TV and watch the SyFy channel, because I don’t really care. I’ll tell you what: Replace every burgler, mugger, murderer, pickpocket, stick up man, con man, and fraud in my city with a street-walking prostitute, and I’ll take that deal in a heartbeat. Prostitutes don’t coerce anybody into using their service, it is VOLUNTARY, on their part and on their client’s part.
Hey Tony C
If a woman finds it difficult to get a faithful husband who trusts her after working as a prostitute, how is that the fault of law enforcement?
Kay, Kay, Kay,
If You See Kay, what will you say?
HenMan,
Todd Rundgren is going to be really upset you stole his old band.
I wish to meet you all in HenMan’s Utopia!