Good grief. I don’t know what is up with the French.
Do they object to people marrying for money/financial support too?
Nothing special. These are views that have been common in the western world for a while. It’s just that for some reason, those who support it came close to have their dream of eliminating this form of “abuse” that outrage them almost fulfilled in the case of France (and actually fulfilled in the case of Norway, etc…). If they had been alone, they wouldn’t have come close to success. But here we have, once again, this weird alliance between the progressive left and the churches, feminists and people who want women back in the kitchen.
And for both groups (conservatives and progressists), it’s a moral issue. This brand of feminist wants the abolition of prostitution with the same zeal they would support the abolition of slavery (they often mention slavery, in fact). Those conservatives are as bent up over paid sex as they are about gay sex. None is really concerned about practical issues, like STDs, not even about actual violence to prostitutes. They’re on a crusade.
They object to different things though. The sex-negative feminists, insofar as I understand their thought process, object to the ‘paid’ aspect. Conservatives object to the ‘promiscuity’ aspect. So a cultural conservative would have no reason to object to a financial support - for - companionship deal that’s relatively exclusive, longer term, et cetera. I’m more sympathetic to the objections from the conservative side than from the feminist side, but I don’t think either one is really on strong ground.
Uh-oh. Looks like I’m going to need to lawyer up.
One difference is that both people in the bar are at least attracted to each other. They usually get to know each other, even a little bit. Hitting it off, they decided they want to make love.
The attraction by the trick is hardly ever reciprocated by the prostitute. The prostitute is only engaging in sex for money. The trick usually has to pay for it because either he or she can’t get affection/romance or not with the type of person they want to. But times are changing. You got Charlie Sheen bragging about tricking saying he’s not paying for sex, he’s “paying for them to leave,” so it helps to erode the taboo of paying to make love to someone who, without money, normally wouldn’t let you touch them.
In the US its a kind of a semi-legal gray area from what I’ve seen where the cops only bust those when it becomes a public eyesore. Streetwalkers are definitely frowned upon but those that only do business thru phone numbers and websites seem to get a pass.
If it were every “legalized” the underground market would still be there because all the legal outlets would be heavily regulated and taxed plus anyone using them would have to give their names out.
I don’t quite understand the distinction here. If you legalize something, you make it legal, i.e., it’s no longer a crime. If you decriminalize something, you make it no longer a crime. What’s the difference?
I think in general it means you don’t get a criminal record.
Sort of akin to parking tickets - and marijuana in some places. There are sometimes also limits in place and things like that.
So for example - a state may try and decriminalize prostitution, but (try and) keep sex without a condom a crime. I think many would call that decriminalization.
Legalisation means the legislature sets out the terms and conditions under which commercial sex can take place without attracting criminal penalties, and in any other circumstances it remains criminalised.
Decriminalisation means that criminal penalties are repealed and any regulation is done by way of things like planning law and labour law - the same way other businesses are regulated.
The distinction isn’t necessarily always clear-cut, but in practice there is a huge difference between “legalisation” models such as Nevada and Victoria and “decriminalisation” models such as New Zealand and New South Wales. The sex worker rights movement pretty much unanimously favours the latter.
The police certainly target street workers more actively, but indoor workers and their clients are also at risk of sting operations and raids. This is true pretty much everywhere I know of, not just the US.
Legalisation doesn’t necessarily require people giving their names out, but it is true that an illegal market will continue to exist side-by-side because of the heavy regulation. Which is another reason why decriminalisation is the better option.
Well, it may not be quite as neat as that. The decriminalisation model, as you point out yourself, doesn’t involve an unregulated sex industry; it involves a sex industry regulated through planning laws, labour laws and similar regulatory regimes rather than through the criminal law. But any regulatory regime creates a space for a parallel unregulated sector, and there is evidencefrom NSW (where the decriminalisation model is applied) that “many Sydney brothels operate without approval”.
It seems to me that, the more robust and/or restrictive the regulatory regime, the greater the space for (and the likelihood of) a parallel unregulated sector, and this is likely to be true regardless of whether the regulatory mechanism is the criminal law, the planning code, employment laws or some combination of a number of these.
Or neighborhood zoning laws. If someone attempted to open a legal brothel in most US neighborhoods their would be a battle.
Sure, any rule creates a space for people to act in breach of the rule. There are unlawful extensions on houses which wouldn’t be unlawful if there weren’t any planning codes on extensions. But there’s a big and important difference between councils investigating unlawful extensions and ordering property owners to either take them down or get planning permission for them, and police raiding such houses and prosecuting all the tenants. There are severe legal ramifications for sex workers operating in the “unregulated” sector in Victoria; not so for those in NSW. This is why Australian sex workers (as well as bodies like UNAIDS) prefer the NSW model to the Victorian.
(Anyway, I did say in my response to Evil Captor that the distinction isn’t always clear-cut.)