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
I don’t care, but I ain’t spinnin no fairytale about it either.
@Annie: Precisely. If they could make the same money doing something legal, they would. They can’t. They are motivated by the money, nobody is arguing about that. The whole question is this: Since it is perfectly legal for two consenting and mentally competent adults to have sex for free, even if they are complete strangers, why do you care if one of those adults is motivated to do that by being paid first to have exactly the same sex?
The pimps and the hoes are doing the flashin. It’s all about the Benjamins.
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@Kay: I have been to the dentist for a toothache. I didn’t just suffer the pain or yank it myself, I paid somebody to service my body and relieve my discomfort. I suppose I should be ashamed of the fact I can’t even remember his name. Drugs were involved, injectable ones. Now that you mention it, I am ashamed because I don’t think I have ever told my daughter about that act of cowardice; I am sure a well-aimed self-inflicted hammer blow would have solved the problem.
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Tony
Do you mean that kids learn good behavior from their fathers, the Johns, or that prostitutes don’t have children?
@Kay: That’s an idiotic claim.
Kids in poverty can’t learn good behavior from their father if their father is a John. Their behavioral problems are part of the external or societal costs of prostitution.
@Annie: Elvis didn’t start a millionaire. A song is a poem set to music, not a friggin’ documentary. It is condensed and streamlined to establish a point; it has to tell a complete story in 150 words or so.
And of course, based on your own vast experience, I am sure you are correct that poor kids don’t *really* learn how to steal or learn how to fight, they don’t buy guns, they don’t steal cars, they don’t resort to armed crime in their attempts to escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness, and they don’t get killed by cops.
That’s why we have so few gang or drug problems in the inner cities, that’s why you can feel so safe and secure walking those streets at night wearing your designer outfit, and flashing your gold and diamond jewelry while counting your wad of hundreds out loud, because you know magic will protect you.
There were worse neighborhoods than mine growing up; I don’t dispute that. I started poor, but not at the bottom.
Your white millionaire ghetto boy did not know a thing about the ghetto and neither do you. This sounds like a fairytale written in the 1950’s, Mr. Tony.
@reader: It is also legal for a woman to romantically pursue a man, or another woman. I’m just sayin’.
I don’t think a suggestion of pay should be illegal. I will call the call girl for whom I sat Zee (nothing to do with her real name, I just need a name because third person is awkward).
According to my mom, who was friends with Zee (for years before I even knew Zee was a call girl), Zee first became a call girl when propositioned in this way on an actual first date. According to my mother, on the way to an expensive restaurant some kind of joke by her date about just paying for sex became a joking negotiation and then actually just paying for sex, and that man became Zee’s first regular client.
I don’t think any of that should be illegal, I’m pretty sure just joking about paid sex is free speech. I assume the law was broken when money actually changed hands.
I personally don’t see any daylight between the **JOB** of a pimp and a talent agent for an actress, or a book agent for an author, or a booking agent for a band. An agent sells somebody else’s services. These are generally services they could not perform themselves; Julia Roberts’ agent can’t stand in for Julia. The value of a talent agent is that negotiation and ensuring the terms of the agreement are enforceable require skills which the ‘talent’ may not possess. Agents can be very valuable partners, and typically fair agents earn around 15% (talent) to 30% (contingency lawyers) for their expert services, and even after commission they have increased the compensation of their client by an order of magnitude (often even more in the case of contingency lawyers). It is a pretty fair deal. It can be abused by near-criminal agents, but usually it is a pretty fair deal.
However, as a *direct* result of prostitution being illegal, the agents for prostitutes must actually BE violent criminals. Prostitutes have no recourse to the courts, or small claims court, they cannot call the cops if robbed. It is the Old West in the underworld. Extra-legal violence and the credible threat of violence are how contracts are enforced, punishment is meted out, physical assault is compensated, and stolen property is recovered.
To do his job, a pimp must be a violent criminal willing to risk years in jail for a felonious assault. A contingency lawyer isn’t risking a prison sentence, so economically we’d expect the pimp’s risk to be even more highly compensated in terms of percent commission, even presuming the pimp is just a rational businessman weighing risk and reward. But of course he is not, he is a violent criminal, and as such I’d expect him to exploit his charges pretty ruthlessly, both sexually and financially and emotionally.
Preventing prostitutes from using any normal means of law enforcement forces them to use violent criminals as their agents, because violent criminals are the only law enforcement in the underworld.
Making prostitution illegal bars prostitutes from the normal free market. Based on our talent agents in this country, I’d expect with legalized prostitution that legal pimping should cost them around 15% of their pay, just like the agents for Julia Roberts or George Clooney take about 15% of the actor’s pay.
I don’t expect violent criminals to go away, but if prostitution were legal I would expect prostitutes to move away from them and toward entirely legal means of enforcing pay for services and protection against violent clients.
Making prostitution illegal probably does keep some women out of it, but that little moral victory has a high price. It means the women that do it anyway and subject themselves to this violent criminal management are the most desperate for the money and have nowhere else to go, they are the ones most in need of our protection. The willing women that stay out of the business because it is illegal are *willing* by definition, the moralist’s victory of successfully forcing thier patronizing and demeaning views upon others comes at the price of subjecting many more women to uncontrolled violence, exploitation and sexual slavery.
One function of the government is to protect the weak from the strong; to prevent coercion. The government fails these women because shallow-minded moralists insist that sex shouldn’t be sold, and their prescription for survival is empty and ridiculous rhetoric about “doing something else” when there is literally nothing else for the desperate to do except starve, steal, live homeless, or watch their children grow into desperate criminals.
Listen to Elvis, “In The Ghetto.”
It isn’t about prostitution but systemic desperation. Still, it makes the same point.
Tony C
So what do you think of the idea that it is legal for a man to pursue a woman but illegal to suggest that he would pay her $ x if she performs sexual acts?
Or similarly that pimping should be illegal?
I should modify a statement I made; even though it will probably be used against me. There is a class of legal acts I do not think it should be legal to do for money: Acts of public or corporate governance or representation, and I would include voting for a corporate officer or public servant in that class.
I do not endorse bribery; public servants and corporate officers are elected to represent the interests of citizens or investors, not themselves. The same goes for a cop or judge or D.A. or inspector or attorney or agent, they represent the citizens or their clients, not themselves, and should not be influenced by money to act contrary to the interests of those they represent.
I think that has nothing to do with sexual activity between consenting adults or prostitution; I just wanted to clarify that I said “any legal act” and that isn’t accurate. Nearly any legal act.
Canadian Eh!,
Check your e-mail. There is something I want your opinion on offline that has nothing to do with this thread.
I just got a “Change.org Action Alert” It says
“More than 150 million children younger than 14 years-old are child laborers — one in six children in the world. Those children do hazardous work in mines or on farms, often handling chemicals and pesticides or working near dangerous machinery. Others toil as domestic servants in homes or workshops.
Another 300,000 children under 18 are child soldiers used as combatants, messengers, porters, cooks, or sexual servants in some 30 conflicts worldwide. They are most often forcibly recruited or abducted, or feel so helpless and overwhelmed by poverty they are driven to join the fight.
Girls are particularly vulnerable. Some as young as 13 are trafficked as “mail-order brides.” Nearly 90% of domestic workers trafficked in West and Central Africa are girls.”
So you see the references to forced sexual activity mixed in this quote.
@reader…yep that’s right. If you were unaware…all health care services in Canada are publicly funded.
@reader: No. I do not believe in a cost/benefit analysis when it comes to human rights and government control of humans, because the ‘cost’ is essentially infinite, there is no ‘benefit’ to slavery large enough to warrant slavery, period. I do not think my right to life (and I am a fit and healthy man) is conditional upon whether it might cost you a billion dollars in economic benefit. I do not think it is okay to abridge somebody’s freedom of speech if it might cost Exxon a hundred billion dollars. I do not think a right to habeas corpus should be denied because we fear a terrorist attack, no matter how large the fear may be.
I think your goal is to compute, by some addled formula, that financially we are better off without prostitution. I do not accept the fundamental premise that everything important in life can be cast in terms of exchange rates. I won’t accept it or engage in it, it simply is the wrong approach. Rights are inviolate, that is the whole point of calling them rights. Rights are designed (the entire bill of rights) to **restrain** the government. That’s why we hold trials for people when we have clearn and unambiguous videotaped evidence of them committing a murder in front of twenty eyewitnesses: Because the government is constrained to jump through the hoops and prove it, no matter how obvious or easy to prove it may be.
I think prostitutes have the human right to prostitute themselves, period. The fallout from that is immaterial, like the fallout from free speech or voting or jury trials (that may let guilty criminals go unpunished) is immaterial. I believe it is a right to choose to have sex in exchange for money. As a general principle, I think it is a basic right to choose to engage in any legal act in exchange for money. Whether your computation comes up wildly negative or wildly positive, I don’t care, you are deciding on the wrong criteria.
It is like when a student gets the right answer after showing all the wrong work. They still flunk the question because they don’t understand anything, they just got lucky or they cheated and knew the answer without understanding, and the question tests **understanding** not whether or not the answer was correct. So I don’t care what your answer is, you don’t understand how to work the problem.
I am trying to pin down the benefits of prostitution vs. the external costs. You see these benefits of prostitution then correct? 1.) Some male or female prostitutes might enjoy it. 2.) Some male or female prostitutes need the income for basic necessities 3.) Some male or female prostitutes might be able to save money from their earnings as prostitutes.
@reader: No it does not. My position is summarized about a hundred times above; I think prostitution should be *legal*. I used negative examples to emphasize the difference between thinking something is legal and thinking something is good; I assume you insist on taking the wrong lesson because you are obsessed with what is “good” and what is “bad” and controlling the behavior of others. That behavior of yours is what is “bad.”
Whether prostitution is “good” or “bad” is a personal decision, like whether somebody likes green tea or hates it. It is not up to me to judge; I don’t want to be a prostitute. If some girl WANTS to be a call girl because she likes the money and/or is excited by paid sex with strangers and/or because she is being engaged by powerful or rich people and loves the reflected glory (as happens for free with some girls and band members), then prostitution is good for that hypothetical call girl. If another hypothetical girl truly believes she will go to hell for prostitution and the thought of turning a trick makes her suicidal, it’s bad for her.
So no, that doesn’t summarize my position. What summarizes my position is that prostitution should be legal and as safe as any other job; say as safe as being a personal physical trainer.
@Kay: I presume *free will* prostitutes keep more than they could earn doing something else in the same amount of time and the same hours. I presume for some of them, they have very few alternatives that fit their responsibilities, so that pay may be low.
However, notice in the ‘reader’ link, it says Canadian free will prostitutes earn an average of $170 per hour. That is roughly what I read in a study that put it around $125, but that was years ago. In Canada, due to the prohibition on pimping and brothels, I presume they would be keeping all of that, minus some phone-book advertising, transportation, and telephone expenses.
Is there a reason to focus on what they earn or keep? Do you care how much of his pay a janitor gets to keep, or what his expenses may be? I presume a typical prostitute could do some other unskilled labor and does not because she wants more money or has responsibilities requiring a more flexible schedule than a regular job would allow (perhaps children or frail parents or siblings to care for).
Tony C
How much do you think prostitutes end up keeping from their income?
Tony C
So you think that prostitution is “bad” (similar to smoking cigarettes or riding a motorcycle without a helmet) for the prostitutes and has indirect costs but should be legal for the woman or man who sells sex anyway, does that summarize your position?