I’ve long thought of the Pivot Legal Society as a victim-baiting organization / Leftist front group. Perhaps elements of them actually are. But on the show that I photographed yesterday, I thought Katrina Pacey sounded more like a reasonable libertarian:
What say you?
The truth about libertarianism is that if you go far enough to the left …. you end up on the right…and vice versa.
It deosn’t matter ….libertarianism is simply anarchy all prettied up yeah yeah you can’t take some ones life or there sh!t but other than that anything …and i mean anything goes!!! and i have a rpoblem with that. so libertarians are stupid as a political group but i know some intelegent libertarians but they just don’t get the whole morality thing. they are part of the problem as well . sorry but it is true !!!
Even from a libertarian view I see no reason to change the laws as enumerated in the video. Hookers don’t get arrested for turning tricks, they get arrested for making a bloody nuisance of themselves. I’m sorry, but my reading of history indicates brothels and street walkers are not social goods. Its illegal to be drink booze in public too, same reason.
Certain women and men are going to be prostitutes, their lives are going to be nasty, brutish and short, I’d prefer they self-destruct someplace I can’t see them. They can advertise wherever they can buy an ad. Additionally, brothels are not constituted primarily for the safety and security of the prostitutes. They make money off them and accelerate their self destruction.
So yes Robert, she’s just another Lefty useful idiot. Nice cleavage though.
Paul, perhaps when you learn how to spell, we might take your drivel seriously.
Phantom: “…Its illegal to be drink booze in public too, same reason”.
It’s illegal to have sex in public too, but both are irrelevant to the question of legalizing aspects of prostitution.
“…and accelerate their self destruction.”
An interesting claim. One that you’d best justify.
“they get arrested for making a bloody nuisance of themselves”
No, they get arrested for solicitation. A salesman is perfectly fine soliciting to sell vacuum cleaners, but a prostitute is breaking the law soliciting for sex. If nuisance was the reason, then every single telemarketer would be behind bars.
“street walkers are not social goods”
Define social goods.
Phantom, I neglected this bit.
“Certain women and men are going to be prostitutes, their lives are going to be nasty, brutish and short”
Which “certain men and women”? Are you claiming that some people are “more moral” than others and if so on what basis? Is this inherited, economic, social?
“…nasty, brutish and short…”
Do I take that that you believe the law should make their lives nastier, more brutish and shorter than they would otherwise be?
Drinking in public is illegal (I disagree with that, but its the law). Still, I can walk into a neigbourhood bar. A brothel is only a nuisance when it is in a residential area, proper zoning solves that. Morality is all nice until you realize not everyone agrees with you.
One of the reasons that a prostitute’s life is often “nasty, brutish and short” is that they fear going to the police if a client or pimp beats them up, because then they will have to admit to being a prostitute and face criminal charges. Make the profession legal and these “negative externalities” would evaporate.
Drinking booze in public, BTW, is perfectly legal in Europe.
Prostitution already is legal in Canada. You’ve got the discrete consenting type with escorts and the pimp /crack whored type with street walkers.
Brothels are just trying to ramp up their business and increase productivity. You start by legalizing it and then it becomes normalized then it becomes really profitable.
Do we as a society want to be able to buy women for sex the same way we buy a Big Mac for lunch? Your answer says a lot about you.
“Make the profession legal and these “negative externalities” would evaporate.”
So, honey, what do you want to be/do when you grow up?
A prostitute. They make lots of money Mom and I can retire at 30.
Yeah, sure legalize it and make sure that they pay their “fair share” of taxes, too. That way you can hold your head high when in a social situation you get asked what your little johnny/jenny “do” for a living.
You actually think that the “organizers” who run prostitution rings will let that happen – a safe, work environment, free of coerced or “jenny/johnny, you only “did” five tricks today, what’s with that?” Quote the relevant sections of the Labour Standards Act and take your “employer” to court on it.
I guess if they wanted to they could claim to be “self employed” – for tax purposes anyway. Then we get into the realm of “Unemployment Insurance” and WCB account numbers and other government regulatory minefields.
The Law Society will love you for it. Might do wonders for the barter system, too.
Syphilis, HPV, AIDS, spreaders and if “pimping” is illegal then how can these call girls get any work? They want they’re cake and yours too.
Besides they never look like they say they do.
Rat, I agree with you completely, which is why government has no business dictating morality. It can however set safety regulations just as it does for any other occupation. What it must not do is set laws and regulations which make an occupation MORE hazardous.
Jeff: “Your answer says a lot about you.”
Typical moral extortion. Can’t come up with a better reason to defend an abusive system, so it’s the same sort of ad hominem that the green slime use against AGW critics. So freedom of the individual is all fine and good until people want to do things that you morally object to, is that it?
PO’ed: “You actually think that the “organizers” who run prostitution rings will let that happen…”
Seems like you’re in agreement with them. So you think it’s fine not to improve working conditions because the pimps and crack dealers want it that way? Does this mean the government should abandon any crackdown on narcotics because the dealers want the higher price from an illegal business?
cgh is a (C)ommunist.
In agreement with cgh.
Everyone here gets very upset at the thought of the government interfering with the teaching of religious beliefs to their children, banning firearms, telling us what lightbulbs we can buy etc.
If you want personal freedoms it comes at the cost of someone else doing something that you might not like.
I treat prostitutes on an occasional basis, they have a crappy existance – and yes I do think it is partially their own fault. Short of executing them, there’s no law that going to stop it. That being said if they want to create for themselves a place of business, better that then the street. And its none of my business anyway.
cgh
“Paul, perhaps when you learn how to spell, we might take your drivel seriously.”
and you try and browbeat others?????
lets see now, myself, A Einstein, S Hawking, Wright bros., A Gramhambell, JFK, & and GWB all suck at english, and ALL my be more accomplished in life than you are. Maybe you should find some leftist sh1thole to post at!!!!
Make prostitution totally legal, make it a crown corporation and let the Post Office or Air Canada run it.
They’d screw it up in six months and it would fold.
which is why government has no business dictating morality.
Every law dictates morality.
“Seems like you’re in agreement with them.”
Don’t put words in my mouth, sport, I’m just stating the obvious. You’re just belligerant and looking to start a fight just for the hell of it.
All you would have the current crop of prostitutes do is change their pimps from the current bunch to one run by government? You “own” any daughters, or sons cgh? Pimping or prostituting a good career choice for them?
Think E-Health, or the local gaming institutions like OLG and see where that get’s you, or ADSCAM. All that government regulated cash generating a flow of funds to government “’cause it’s safer” when government runs it. Yeah, sure. Like I pointed out sport, the Law Society will love you for it.
I wonder if the PSAC, CUPE, CAW crowd would get in on the act, too? Lots of money in union dues and they can get a pension, too. Sure like to see one of our mainline Parties advocating that come election day.
Which one do you vote for, cgh? Conservative?
Paul:
Anarchy means no rules at all. Libertarians just ask that we limit laws to prevent theft, force and fraud against others.
Legalizing prostitution, pot or any other ‘moral’ related activity does not equal anarchy.
Every law dictates morality
Yes, thanks to the Highway Act driving becomes moral and yes thanks to various tax laws stealing becomes moral.
With Conservative government majority, I’ve observe that neocons have became annoyingly obnoxious ..or are they just liberals in the new disguise?
Yeah, for every dilemma including moral there is a government solution: lawful, simple and wrong.
I have pondered and reflected upon this many times.
It is a given that anti-prostitution laws were initially puritan/moral edicts.
Then much like laws about drugs, booze etc it continued as a social engineering agenda.
There is no doubt that many turn to prostitution due to need, avarice…drug problems.
Then there is the reality that the need to avoid arrest, places “working girls” in hazardous situations…they seem to be a favourite target of serial killers etc. Then there are the “socialy transmitted diseases”…..
Aids scares the hell outa this old boy…
I have often marveled that the bureaucracy that abhours pimps readily avails the services of temp agencies….which are no better…exploiting the unfortunate….paying minimum wage while billing 2X the minimum….while paying no benefits and the temps subject to instant dismissal and non-severence, or benefits.
Nevada with it’s legal brothels, while licencing, regular health inspections and taxing seems to provide a safe environment, non-the-less the criminal element still intrudes. Same with the Netherlands.
Then there are the so-called “sex-surrogates”…..
Still pondering……..
Maple Leaf Party…
Anarchy means no government at all. The are always rules and limitations : social, natural, customary and functional.
There are many old Greek terms where modernity is trying to twist the meaning. Most notable word is ‘democracy’ , a system where any free citizen at any time can propose a law where enacting to be decided by a referendum.
Would I want my daughter to be a prostitute? No. But I don’t want her to be a Liberal, either, nor do I want her to be an exotic dancer, or any of a hundred different “careers”. Still, if she’s an adult and chooses that, without the coercion of drugs or violence, then I will have to accept her choice. I wonder if the only reason people get worked up about it is because she might get paid for it. If she slept with a lot of men for free would you still be outraged?
Do we want to buy sex like groceries? I am willing to accept that adult women (and men!) can decide if they want to sell sex, and that they then have the right to decide whom they sell it to.
As to laws on morality, most of those laws deal with the morality of doing something to another, not with doing something to yourself. We don’t kill others, steal from others, assault others. I can pay others to do a lot of stupid things to me, things that will have a much more visible and potentially negative impact on my life. Things like facial tattoos, piercing, branding, or cosmetic surgery. If it’s about the hurt that can happen in prostitution, then there are a lot of other things we can do that can hurt us as badly.
I’ll watch the video later but the topic reminds me of an excerpt of Thaddeus Russell’s “A Renegade History of the United States”. Russell argues that prostitutes in the Wild West had better lives and far more freedom than other women. Female brothel owners in particular produced some of the most successful and wealthiest women of that era.
“In fact, prostitutes won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted. Prostitutes were especially successful in the wild, lawless, thoroughly renegade boomtowns of the West. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, madams in the West owned large tracts of land and prized real estate. Prostitutes made, by far, the highest wages of all American women. Several madams were so wealthy that they funded irrigation and road-building projects that laid the foundation for the New West. ”
Personally, I think a more business minded prostitution model (brothels) will improve hookers circumstances. Exploiting underage girls and immigrant women, OTOH, should be severely punished. Those worried about the immorality of it are free to save hookers souls without the power of the state. Health issues should be dealt with by health professionals, crime by the police and nuisance issues with municipal by-laws.
After watching the transition from prohibition to government revenue-mongering of other vices like gambling, it wouldn’t surprise me if the government not only decriminalized prostitution but eventually became the chief pimp.
Its a form of human slavery in my opinion. The Women are usually used than discarded. If not killed by serial killers or perverts.
Males as well.
In the end its not the Ladies who make the money, but Men at the end of the cycle taking in most of the money.
The only way I can see to destroy it, is to make it Governmentnbusinessss.
It won’t matter if its legal, the people who do this will always be social pariahs.
Besides escort agencies have already made this behavior legal.
A Brief History of Prostitution
http://investigation.discovery.com/investigation/prostitution/prostitution-history.html
Read this: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/whats_wrong_with_legalizing_pr.html
Excerpt:
One study found that 80% of prostitutes were assaulted by their pimps, and over one-third receive death threats for themselves or their families. Nor does legalization end corruption — laissez-faire Amsterdam closed one-third of their legal brothels because of ties to organized crime while acknowledging that the illegal brothels are thriving outside the official zone. Neighboring countries call the Netherlands a “failed experiment.”
Legalizing prostitution increases sex-trafficking because demand exceeds supply. So traffickers fill the demand with girls and women from other countries — lured, tricked, or sold, they end up without their passports, assaulted and forced into sex slavery. After legalization in Australia, illegal brothels increased 300%, pulling thousands more vulnerable women into prostitution.
Legal or illegal,it doesn’t make any real difference to the girl on the street.
Solicitation laws are rarely enforced. There are ‘sweeps’ once in a while that move the ladies from one area to another. These are done to show that our elected officials are aware and on top of the ‘problem’. This is window dressing.
Prostitution is not a career choice. It is a means to obtain money to feed an addiction. They do not have bank accounts. They do not save. They go from degrading act to dealer,rarely making any stops in between.
Legalized brothels will not make a dent in street prostitution. These women are too broken to be able to cope in a regulated system. Many hope that Richard Gere is just around the next corner,unfortunately that is not the case. The bump around the corner is just another dysfunctional man with some spare cash,at best. At worst,he is their ongoing nightmare.
langmann’s comment at 10:40, esp. the last paragraph comes close to the reality of street prostitution. We shouldn’t execute them,but until the underlying cause,almost always crack addiction,is taken care of,they will be out there,barely enduring their lives.
Prostitution is already legal. Escort services provide consensual sex. The question is, do we want brothels “going mainstream”?
Who the heck is “we as a society” anyway? I hear that catch phrase from left-liberals as much as from religious conservatives.
It’s basically an attempt to rationalize the act of forcing everyone to conform to one’s own personal moral beliefs. When the situation revolves around consenting acts between adults, there is no justification for this.
Speak for yourself. Don’t pretend you speak for “society”, because you don’t.
“We as a society don’t want privatized postal services or the ability to buy and sell wheat freely” is no different, in principle, from someone saying “we as a society don’t want consenting adults to trade sex for money”.
GYM: “ALL my be more accomplished in life than you are. Maybe you should find some leftist sh1thole to post at!!!!”
PO’ed: “Which one do you vote for, cgh? Conservative?”
And best of all:
John QP: “cgh is a (C)ommunist.”
Heh, just what I thought. Can’t deal with the internal contradictions in your statements so you lot resort to crude insults and ad hominems irrelevant to the question. And even then you get it wrong.
The unpleasant truth is that we have a bunch of moral hypocrites here who want freedom but only for the morality that they espouse. It outlines perfectly the division between libertarians and social conservatives.
Do tell, boys? How does your squeamishness about prostitution make you any different in principle from islamism and its repression of women or others that they deem social outcasts? Fact is, you either believe in a free society or you don’t. And you lot have just laid your cards on the table.
There is a big difference between the Left and Libertarians even on social issues. The most important difference is that many, but not all, on the left advocate for relaxed social mores. The left has no problem using the government to enforce their moral preference: speech laws, racial quotas, etc. Libertarians, on the other hand, are far less likely to use the force of government to enforce their moral preferences.
Bill, I agree with you, but does this suggest that social conservatives have more in common with the progressive left given their mutual penchant for state regulation and enforcement? If so, that would give more than a few here a collective heart attack.
CGH, I think my position is perfectly clear, but I acklowledge my writing may not be the best so I shall re-state.
As a practical matter, history shows us that banning prostitution is both futile and creates problems that are larger than prostitution, namely tyranny. Therefore banning it would be stupid.
History also shows that prostitution is a threat to the general health of society by being a vector for HIV and other vernerial diseases, plus the normal garden variety kind like the flu, SARS being an example of how that could become a problem.
Prostitution itself, as a practice, is one of the worst things an individual can do to themselves, only brothel owners and their mouthpieces comonly say otherwise. There are exceptions, but as a rule the life of a prostitute is as I said above, nasty brutish and short.
Legalized brothels have not been shown to change any of that in an apreciable way.
Street walking brings with it the drug trade, with the attending violence and criminality. Lots of beatings, street noise and people screwing in back alleys and in other people’s shrubbery.
People who pursue prostitution as a “job” start out messed up and miserable, then go rapidly downhill from there in the majority of cases. Again, legalizing brothels etc. Has not been shown to change that much either.
From all of the above, I conclude it is in my personal best interest, and in the best interest of society as a whole, that prostitution be legal but discouraged by government, and that organized prostitution be squashed whenever it occurs.
You can try to read some type of moral/religious judgementalism into my comments, but really its just practicality. Public drunkeness is the same type of problem as public prostitution, as is public defecation. You don’t want drunks screwing crackwhores on your front lawn and then taking a dump do you? Me neither.
That’s what government is for.
I’ll comment again,after watching the video.
The main goal of Pivot is to get rid of the solicitation laws so that the women who leave the ‘trade’ do not carry that stigma further. I wholeheartedly agree.
This is not a ‘libertarian’ view. Pivot wants to make the lives of the women safer,with an eye to an eventual transition off the street.
The video is well worth watching.
BTW,Layton’s night at the Velvet Touch is an example of prostitution being taken off the street and into a more structured setting. Any NDP’ers out there care to comment?
I spent 17 years in the taxi business.
In every case, I witnessed with the “working girls” I found they really really hated themselves.
The ones that developed even an ounce of self respect left the “business”.
It doesn’t matter if its legal or not it it WRONG.
How can anyone sell there bodies like that and like themselves in the same instance?
All who advocate prostitution either haven’t seen what it does to the people involved or are lining there own pockets on the backs of others misery.
cgh – so should an individual have the right to sell themselves and their (as yes unborn) progeny into slavery? If you say yes, then you are consistent. Most of the arguments I’ve read above seem to me to be “it contains within it the potential for so much evil that we cannot condone it”. Are there any historical institutions that are so vile that they cannot be redeemed by proper regulation or public acceptance?
Sasquatch – yours is the best analogy that I’ve seen, and I was a temp for a couple of years while searching for a full time job after college. I didn’t feel good about it, but I needed the money…
Make it a government department. It will disappear if bureaucrats run the sleaze business.
“ I didn’t feel good about it, but I needed the money…
Were you feeling good after the job was done and you had money in hand,or were you feeling suicidal?
Just asking because I think temp agencies and prositution have little in common.
Certainly not suicidal, but down in an “Am I going to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life? I’m trying to get out to a better job, but nothing seems to be happening that way so is this my fate?” way. The pay wasn’t enough to keep me feeling good, and there was no sense of camaraderie with the full-timers at the places I worked. It felt stigmatized.
ibertarians but they just don’t get the whole morality thing.
Not true. We own the moral high ground. We respect other people’s rights-such as the right to prostitute oneself and the right to solicit a prostitute-without making BS exceptions in accordance with arbitrary standard. See, we’re conservatives without the love-hate relationship with freedom.
ibertarians but they just don’t get the whole morality thing.
Not true. We own the moral high ground. We respect other people’s rights-such as the right to prostitute oneself and the right to solicit a prostitute-without making BS exceptions in accordance with arbitrary standard. See, we’re conservatives without the love-hate relationship with freedom.
What is the Pivot Legal Society?
C_Miner at July 22, 2011 3:28 PM;
Sure,I agree,having done the temp thing myself.
However,in my case,and likely yours,I knew that sooner or later I would hit the right place,or another door would open up elsewhere. This was minor despair as I was much younger and believed in my capabilities. The stigma of temp work(low pay,no camaderie) and renting your body are only comparable to highlight the difference.
Robert – She sounds reasonable, but unfortunately, she sounds libertarian too. A whore is a whore is a whore! Truth is, they are not very nice people, and what they do is unhealthy all the way round.
“so should an individual have the right to sell themselves and their (as yes unborn) progeny into slavery?”
Sell one’s self into slavery? Isn’t that what a job is? I would think under contract law the permanence of slavery, and the unequal consideration would be the issue, not the selling part. Selling another into slavery, born or unborn, wouldn’t wash because it is one doing something without consent to another.
Comparing temp services to street level, crack addict prostitution is as incorrect as comparing street level, crack addict prostitution to escort services.
There is definitely an argument to be made for intervening on behalf of crack addicts who want assistance or arresting crack addicts who are committing robberies and fining them for having sex on another persons private property.
Comparing escort services to temp services, OTOH, might yield interesting pro and con results in terms of wages, working conditions etc.
Street “workers” or “escorts”, same sh!t different pile.
Social Conservatives or Socialists, same poo different pile, right Free?
Of course not, sure both are political and seek to use the power of the state to enforce their moral code but so-cons generally allow differing opinions without threatening to file a human rights complaint.
“….I conclude it is in my personal best interest, and in the best interest of society as a whole, that prostitution be legal but discouraged by government, and that organized prostitution be squashed whenever it occurs.”
By what standard do you reserve the right to make this judgement, on behalf of nothing less than “society as a whole”???
“…discouraged by government…”? No one in this thread made the point that prostitution should be encouraged by the state, any more than the government needs to encourage beer drinking. It’s a matter of individual choice.
“…organized prostitution be squashed…” As opposed to “disorganized prostitution”, which would presumably be legal??? What are you talking about?
I can’t believe how many people go through life hoping that the state will force them to make the right choices, because they seem to put more trust in the judgement of a bureaucrat or politician than they do in their own reasoning skills. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
How many people on this forum personally know an alcoholic? Probably most. I know several of them. A few even drank themselves to death. Alcoholism can be a devastating, sometimes deadly vice. I don’t see anyone here arguing that alcohol use should be criminalized as a result, because they know it would victimize countless people who use alcohol responsibly and save very few alcoholics.
Why the double standard? Because while most of us know alcoholics personally, few of us know any prostitutes. People unfortunately tend to demonize those whose lifestyles they are unfamiliar with. Alcohol use is regarded as socially acceptable, while prostitution is not. The distinction between the two is, however, an arbitrary one.
Phantom: I can agree with you that there is no moral or ethical preaching in your posts (that bit was directed primarily at the others). However, there’s one claim you made that I would like you to substantiate.
“Legalized brothels have not been shown to change any of that in an apreciable way.”
The experience in Europe would appear to establish otherwise particularly with respect to the public health problem. Do you have any evidence to show that such is not the case? I’m commenting specifically about public health and violence against those in the sex trade.
For the record, I don’t like the business any better than you do, but I have become convinced that legalization and discarding of the solicitation and common bawdy house laws is the only way to reduce some of its adverse impacts.
I was not in the slightest persuaded by the American Thinker article quoted by Alyric. Most of the article was about the evils of the existing conditions, and it cited only one study of how legalization had seemingly failed in one country.
Whoa, wait a minute here.
If the people against prostitution are going to use the “public health” argument, then we need to start talking about alcohol and cigarettes.
And cars.
The Rat – a job is to slavery as temp work is to prostitution, a much lesser version with superficial similarities. If a company is bought or sold then the employees can voluntarily terminate their services with the new owner (if the new owner wants them). A slave has no such choice.
As to making decisions for others that they cannot say, that’s segues into the abortion issue, and that’s why us conservatives are against both abortion-on-demand and slavery. That would derail the current discussion though, so I’d rather not delve any further into it on this thread.
wally – yup, agreed. I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel at the time, hence the despair. My way out was a hobby (computers) that got my foot in the door at a mine. Smooth sailing since.