German insurance firm rewards top employees — with an orgy

[LadyHawkAZ]

224. These are my issues:

This
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/police_pretty_s.php
and this
http://theduckshoot.com/blog/eleven-albuquerque-prostitutes-murdered-%E2%80%93-so-what/#.TwIi4fmwXSE
and this
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,234078,00.html
and this
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/lorenzo_gilyard/10.html
and this
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/student-charged-with-craigslist-prostitute-murder-1672256.html
and this
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-02-19/news/28634946_1_green-river-killer-life-terms-gary-ridgway
and this
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-5292868.html
and this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maury_Travis

I could go on and on and on. That is my biggest issue with prostitution; that "moral" people prefer to see us slaughtered than admit we're not actually doing anything wrong.

I know I've said this before: any one of those could have been me. Easily. Because I chose to do something that someone else found "immoral"; because I had sex in ways they did not approve of; because I chose to work 4 hours a day on my own terms rather than dump my son in daycare for 10 hours a day and work 8 of them on their terms; because I refused to grovel for welfare or clean toilets or sell French fries for minimum wage and be grateful for my "moral" money that didn't cover the bills. For that I had to risk my life. That's wrong on every possible level. I have a difficult time looking abolitionists in the eye when they talk to me face to face: not because I'm ashamed but because I will want to knock their teeth in and am afraid one day I'll follow through. I get sick of hearing how I should have died so that they could use my corpse to feed their ideology.

There's always hysteria about "trafficking increases in legal areas!!!" but no one troubles to notice that what has increased are ARRESTS. As in, people have stopped GETTING AWAY WITH IT. To me, that's a win. If you want to see the numbers on a real trafficking problem, try Thailand or the Philippines, where it's illegal.

There are other benefits. Senegal, Africa, has legal prostitution. It hasn't made life fantastic for the prostitutes; the area is poor and life for prostitutes there is pretty much as you'd expect for dirt-poor people in a dirt-poor country. What Senegal does NOT have is an AIDS problem. Prostitutes have to be registered, get health checks, and use condoms. The country has been pushing condom use to combat disease for decades, and it's worked. It hasn't solved all the country's problems, but legalizing anywhere isn't going to solve all the problems. It did take care of one important problem, with the result: lower disease transmission, less dead bodies. Win.

That's my biggest problem. I have smaller problems: the idea that it's OK to tell an adult what to do because he/she was molested as a child; the idea that two adults can consent to the same act but it should only be a crime for one; the idea that women are too stupid, too weak, too childish to consent but the men that do it are not; etc. But those are all legal and philosophical arguments. Dead bodies are my biggest problem, and they're piling up by the day. I will never understand why this is not enough of an argument.

I will agree with you that it's not about sex. I think that a lot of people get confused here when presented with the idea that a prostitute might "like" her job or find it "fulfilling", or any such language. That doesn't necessarily mean enjoying the sex. People are fulfilled by many things, not just orgasm. Money is one of those things. Control and working your own hours on your own terms is another. Orgasm can be gotten elsewhere; most of the women I knew, myself included, had a partner at home. When you have workers who can't make the separation between work and home life, and confuse their job with their sexuality, that's when you have the problems.

Enough for now. I need to put my temper back in its box before I say anything else.

/rant off