I did not know that. My apologies.
I don’t believe that a prostitute working alone would have to legally accept all potential customers. A one-person business not involved in interstate commerce of any kind would not have to abide by federal civil rights laws (unless I’m missing something basic here). I can’t see that a brothel would have the right to refuse business under this argument but the individual contractors (hookers) probably would have the LEGAL right to refuse service. Her services at the brothel may no longer be wanted by her employer, but private business can basically fire anyone at any time without any reason.
I can’t see the confusion here. Sexual consent laws trump anti-discrimination laws. That appears to be the most reasonable interpretation. You can’t force someone to consent to sex if they don’t want to.
I don’t see why. I mean, it’s also illegal to kidnap someone and force them to cut your hair, isn’t it? Yet, if there’s a barber’s shop quindecatet that cuts the hair of only something-ethnic people, you can still sue them or something, can’t you?
I assume they’d have to either start cutting other-ethnic people’s hair, or go out of buisness, and possibly pay some fines, but I don’t think they’d just be held at gunpoint and made to cut people’s hair - frstly, that’d be so illegal, and secondly, after all that, something-ethnic people would probably want to go somewhere else anyway.
It seems there is some confusion as to the legal status of the brothel. There is exactly one room in a brothel which could be considered a place of public accomodation. The waiting room. Beyond that the Brothel does nothing more than rent rooms to licensed(in the case of Nevada) providers who work as independent contractors and handle scheduling of said rooms among several providers who use that establishment on a time-share basis. Well, that’s not quite fair. They provide a host of other services(housekeeping for the room, accounts receivable, client check/credit card verification, reservations, medical VD examinations of customers, ID/Age verification, etc), but most of them are between the provider and the brothel and are under contract. They are not offered to the general public and as such do not fall under the laws governing public offerings.
Nichole may have Room 14B for the hours of 8-5 Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Samantha could have it Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday(Sam prefers to avoid the whole “whore in church” dilemma). The customers come in and there is an interview process which matches them with available providers. The back rooms are not open to just anyone, only specifically invited guests of the provider are allowed to accompany them into that area of the establishment. The brothel itself doesn’t promise sex for a price. They promise the ability to meet providers and a general rate table to set expectations. There are prominent disclaimers that individual sex-for-money deals are entirely the business of the provider and the client and the rates may vary depending on the services requested and the provider who offers the services. As a place of public accommodation all they offer is a waiting room and the facilities to conduct interviews with independent contractors who may or may not decide to offer sex to individual clients. Of course if a independent contractor is seen as too picky the brothel management is perfectly within their rights to terminate that providers access to the brothel and bring in a provider who will hump pretty much anything(thus bringing a steadier and larger income stream). In fact this is a problem faced in Nevada as state law seems to put a large amount of the power in the hands of the brothel management. I give you the words of Laura, former Nevada prostitute. As Bricker notes, I’m not sure barring a racially picky prostitute from working in your borthel would stand up to legal scrutiny, but it probably would.
The actual house employees are not the prostitutes. They would be the housekeepers, booking managers, medical examiners, et al. All the “not alloweds” and such in Laura’s message are referring to being allowed and not allowed under the contract the provider has with the brothel. The provider would not be in legal jepoardy(except for possible civil breech of contract suit) for refusing to see someone they found unacceptable but was only willing to pay the minimum.
A brothel is far different from Burger King. To take the example and make it hit home, here’s what a BK would be like if it were run by a brothel.
Person A comes into the lobby. Representative of BK, an actual employee comes up and says “Welcome sir, to the Burger Ranch. We have a wonderful array of guest chefs here today and I hope you can come to an agreement with one of them to provide you with food. In the meantime, please enjoy our comfortable dining area. I will send any chefs who are available and willing to negotiate with you to your table.” He then goes back into the back. He rounds up all the chefs and one of them, completely sight unseen of the customer, says “I’m too tired.” The BK employee notes down that “Chef 1 refused to even see a customer and this lack of dedication to furthering the feduciary interests of the establishment should be noted next time her contract is in negotiation.” Chef 2 balks when she sees that Person A is a Republican. A similar note is made about Chef 2. Chefs 3, 4, and 5 come out into the lobby to speak with Person A. Chef 3 specializes in Mediterranean fare and Person A is more interested in Russian food at the moment. No penalty is assessed against Chef 3 by the management aside from a casual note “Greek isn’t popular, consider tossing this one if numbers are consistently low”. So far absolutely nothing in this scenario has violated any state or local law AFAIK.
Chefs 4, and 5 are both capable of serving dynamite Russian fare. Chef 5 refuses to serve Russian fare to Person A because they’re South African and this particular Chef can’t handle the paradigm shift. As this particular Chef is not an employee of the Burger Ranch, they had no particular duty to provide services to anyone who sought them. Moreover, services were never promised. Only the increased chance of meeting providers capable of rendering such services were offered by Burger Ranch. Burger Ranch fulfilled its obligations by hooking the client up with the chefs. If none of them could come to an agreement, this doesn’t affect BR at all(aside from loss of potential income). Luckily, for Person A at least, that didn’t happen this time.
So now Person A can either get Russian from Chef 4 or go home hungry. Chef 4 and Person A come to an agreement to provide two big mounds of Russian cuisine for a certain price. Chef A goes back to the kitchen and begins cooking. The Employee collects the agreed upon price from Person A and pockets the house’s percentage. Then he goes back and gives the remainder to Chef 4. Once the cooking is done, Chef 4 tips another Burger Ranch employee to deliver the food to Person A’s table and pays out another tip to have yet another employee bus the table and clean up the kitchen.
That is what SoP would be like if other businesses were run like brothels. They’re a reasonably unique business and many of our assumptions of what they can and should provide fall flat unless we study how they actually work.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t see why. I mean, it’s also illegal to kidnap someone and force them to cut your hair, isn’t it? Yet, if there’s a barber’s shop quindecatet that cuts the hair of only something-ethnic people, you can still sue them or something, can’t you?
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I couldn’t imagine you’d be able to sue them. I’d imagine you’d be able to complain to the government that they were discriminatory, and the business would have to start serving all customers or be shut down.
Your kidnapping example isn’t a valid comparison. It’s illegal to kidnap someone and force them to cut your hair because kidnapping is illegal. Our society considers forcing sex upon someone to be quite different to forcing someone to cut your hair. If you consider sex and hair-cutting to be of the same level of intimacy, then start a seperate thread arguing as such. I think, though, most ordinary people consider sex to be an activity quite different to hair-cutting, and one with different standards.
In short, it is ok to say to someone, “cut this person’s hair or don’t run a business.” It is not ok to say to someone, “have sex with this person or don’t provide the service at all.”
It’s an ANALOGY! Of course I don’t mean cutting someone’s hair and having sex with someone are EQUAL. I mean, they’re both things you shouldn’t be forced to do. Would it help if the barber’s shop was, I don’t know, perfoming intimate medical examinations?
The point is, you said, as I understood it: “The law says people can’t be forced to do X therefore anti-discrimination laws stop people refusing X to black people.” Your X was ‘having sex.’ I said in effect that “You can’t be right. If you were, you could replace X by Y, which CAN’T be forced, IS covered by discrimination laws.”
I’m sorry if my example was a bad one. Is my point any clearer now?
Your point was perfectly clear before. My point is: sex is a special case, due to its intimate and personal nature. Rules for other things don’t apply to sex. End of story.
Thanks for the information Mtgman. I found it interesting and informative, although I am a bit concerned about the breadth of your knowledge into the fine art of prostitution.
OK, I apologize for misunderstanding you. Thanks for responding.
But I’m still not sure what you mean. Sorry, I’m really not trying to be obtuse, help me here. Do you mean that there SHOULD be an exception? Or that discrimination laws DO make an exception? Or that judges just use common sense and say ‘but that obviously doesn’t apply to sex’? Or that rape laws imply that it’s always ok to refuse to have sex with someone, even if you’re breaking other laws? Does this loophole apply to OTHER things of an ‘intimate and personal’ nature or just sex? Or don’t you think anything else is ‘intimate and personal’?
Heh, between this and the “Cuban Child Prostitution” thing, as well as some notable comments on the “male prostitutes” topic in IMHO I figured someone would be getting this impression. I’ve considered addressing it, but quite frankly I’m not sure anyone would believe me if I did. Heck the truth sounds like BS to ME and I trust myself pretty much implicitly. I find it hard to believe anyone would buy the true explanation. I had one hell of a boring job during College(basically baby-sitting a mostly-automated radio station console) and was browsing usenet one day when I was bored of reading/writing about my primary hobby(Magic: the Gathering) and ended up browsing the entire list of newsgroups available. One of the groups was alt.sex.prostitution. I was intrigued and at first just wanted to see if the childhood teasing we used to do of each other on the order of “Your momma works Harry Hines(local industrial thoroughfare, known for seedy after-hours activites)” had any basis in fact.
What I found was a vibrant, suprising, and interesting, community of posters not alltogether different from the SDMB. The activities they spoke of were not nearly as interesting as the posters themselves. A former nurse from Mobile Alabama who worked as an escort to help support her children during some tough times in her area, but quit when she found another nursing job. Well, mostly quit. She continued to see a handful of “regulars” who were elderly or disabled, primarially widowers because her sense of compassion led her to believe they needed adult contact of the type she was willing to provide. Sometimes it was just companionship, sometimes sexual services, but all of it was geared towards providing comfort to those whose partners had passed away or were unable to seek it actively themselves.
Another woman was from Australia and she recounted the difficulties of overcoming prejudice and bigotry against providers, even in areas where her profession was legal. She posted a very disturbing account of an act of violence against her(please don’t ask publicly, I shudder even thinking about it. I may be able to stand a one-line reply to a query via email, but I don’t want to think about it any more than I would have to) by someone who thought they could get away with it because she was some sort of subhuman being. She now leads an organization dedicated to eradicating these types of stereotypes and hate crimes through educating providers on danger signs and defense techniques as well as lobbying the government for redress of harms caused by such crimes.
I came to know and appreciate the sexwork industry and the challenges they face. I know of message boards larger than the SDMB and with world-girdling membership where people who share the belief that sexwork should be a legitimate profession share their experiences and form friendships. It is a little like a tight-knit community of hobbyists(indeed they typically refer to themselves as “hobbyists”). One doesn’t have to personally partake of the hobby to find the people interesting and some of the information exchanged interesting. I don’t actively read the group much anymore(many of my friends have left the profession and/or no longer post there because of the spam on usenet) but I still have most of the resources at my fingertips if they are needed for debates like this one.
Enjoy,
Steven