To think the use of prostitutes just isn't that big a deal?

*Having lived in both Germany and The Netherlands women choosing to sell sex is normal and is heavily regulated. As long as the women have freedom of choice then its up to them.
*
Sorry but that's just so naive. I've read so many accounts of trafficked women working as prostitutes in Amsterdam. There are trafficking gangs operating that terrorise their victims so they're not able to leave. (I work with a charity project supporting Central Asian victims of trafficking.

Yep. A failed DBS check rules you out of even the lowest paid caring jobs, and If you are in the prostitution racket it’s easy to pick up a caution for soliciting or drug possession.

I'm talking about the difference between dancing on stage in front of a group of people and having an intimate interaction, usually in a private room, with one other person.

In my experience, these kinds of jobs aren’t real/are unsustainable. Dancers have to pay a nightly house fee to the club, and you can’t make enough via stage dances to come out with a profit over the whole week (no one* is allowed to just work Friday/Saturday, you have to do your fair share of the quiet nights to be rota’d on for the money making nights).
It’s a spiral. You start out thinking you can just dance on the stage and by the time you find out how it all really works, you’ve already danced near-naked and gone home in debt to the management. Then it’s a kind of emotional sunk costs fallacy - you’ve made the mental leap and danced topless in front of strange men, now you want to make some actual money out of it. It’s hard to stop at this point, walk away, get a bar job, whatever. You’ve seen with your own eyes that some girls make big money in the club, you’ve just got to get over the next mental hurdle and do some private dancers. It’s like a whirlpool, you think you are in control, but it turns out you are on the edges, you get sucked down into the home whether you intended it or not.

(*well, you might be allowed to only work weekends, but likely you’ll have to do sexual favours/freebies for the management in return)

Having lived in both Germany and The Netherlands women choosing to sell sex is normal and is heavily regulated. As long as the women have freedom of choice then its up to them.

Sadly, it seems that there is a great deal of concern that a high proportion of the 80% of sex workers in Amsterdam that are immigrants are trafficking victims. So, really, this model is not working either.

@justasking111 here's a good one

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/AMA/3662207-I-used-to-be-a-prostitute-AMA?pg=1&order=

It’s no different than selling my brain to my employer.

If you think of sex as only a bodily function, that you are protected by employment rights and provided with the protective gear necessary to remain healthy, and without any emotion involved and that every sex interaction gives you nothing but pleasure and never any pain nor discomfort or risk ...

, I don't have a need to

Haven't you just answered your own question, OP?

You don't NEED to.
You are not at rock bottom looking for the only options to get money.
In other words it's not really a choice at all is it?!

Yes, and a lot of prostitutes would also happily take a job as a carer too over that...but what you are failing to understand OP is that not every woman has the option of getting care work or any other work. As I’ve previously mentioned, what is a woman with a criminal record and no qualifications supposed to do?

magnifies

Cheeseandwin5

I don’t agree with prostitution but in terms of what a prostitute does with her money that is her choice. I don’t think criminalising prostitutes is right, it’s the punters and the pimps that I would target.
It’s more that very few “successful” prostitutes are truly benefiting from the money they earn or they are paying a very high price for it. Also the drivers that drive them to prostitution may be utterly destructive and the trauma of prostitution magnified that.

Caring is a tough job. But if someone stuck their fingers up your nose, in your mouth, or god forbid in your vagina, it would be considered to be unacceptable and possibly assault. You would not be asked to tolerate it. In 'sex work' the whole point is for someone to stick things in your body. That fundamental difference is absolutely key.

There are lots of jobs in society people wouldn't do if given a free choice. This doesn't make it acceptable, but it is a fact of living in an unequal society. I hated my job in a care home (nothing wrong with being a carer, it was just an awful home with a nasty manager), I didn't purposefully choose it, but it was better than the alternatives of unemployment or an even worse paid 0 hour contract cleaning job.

This is exactly the trouble with the rebranding of prostitution as "sex work". It becomes thought of as just another rubbish job. It's not a job, it's the sexual exploitation of women.

Take the caring job you mention - you have to manage other people's bodily fluids, and because it's a job you get gloves, face masks and washing facilities to manage the risk. You are protected by health and safety legislation. No job would require what is required of people in the sex trade.

It’s true that a punter might be paying for a cheery nymphomaniac who loves their job. It’s a hell of a lot more likely, however, that they’re paying for a poor woman who has been abused at some point in her life and would rather be doing anything else but feels trapped. And how would you know? It’s the latter’s job to act like the former.

I agree entirely DuLang. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that people who compare being nice to others they don't like in an office to having a stranger insert body parts into them is either 1) a total idiot or 2) having such a bad time at work that they should quit, immediately.

I would judge someone no matter what the circumstances.
Men who go after women on the streets are the lowest of the low, absolute monsters. Men who go with high end escorts are still paying for intercouse.
I don't know how anyone could have sex with someone when they know 100% that the person is probably repulsed by them and would never have sex with them if there wasn't money involved.
Some of the women make a lot of money exploiting these idiot men but nevertheless if the men didn't do it there would be no business in the first place.
Ive been with my husband for 18 years and if he told me he'd been with a prostitute, even before we had met, I couldn't be with him anymore. I could go on and on about how disgusting I think it is

Having lived in both Germany and The Netherlands women choosing to sell sex is normal and is heavily regulated. As long as the women have freedom of choice then its up to them.

I kind of feel like this - especially when a huge part of work these days tends to involve pretending to feel things you don't really feel - eg. being nice to a client you really despise

I know you meant this in a lighthearted way, but I promise you, pretending to be nice to a man you despise in an office is much easier than sucking his cock in a hotel room/back room of a club/in a parked car.

@Cheeseandwin5 - I'm not sure where definitions come into it. I'm talking about the difference between dancing on stage in front of a group of people and having an intimate interaction, usually in a private room, with one other person. Stripping has its problems but it is different to, say, giving someone a HJ, purely from a health and safety point of view. Being alone with a strange man is dangerous for any woman, being alone with a strange man who believes he can pay to use you to give himself sexual gratification is very dangerous, no matter what type of use that is - sex or a hand job.

OP you’re being very naive if you think most sex workers consent. It is not true consent. Many of them are being run by pimps. Many of them have substance dependency issues, many of them are in debt. Many of them are subject to slavery conditions. This is not some profession where women are happy to be selling their bodies. There may be small number who are happy with it but you have to ask what kind of conditions is a woman being subjected to, or living in, to have sex with strangers for money.

Thanks again Freddie for answering. I am afraid though, I am of the camp that those women that are very happy with their work choice of having sex for money are very much the exception, even here in the uk. They are also probably those that have always had a choice of client and never been forced into situations that are risky or dangerous.

Why? Because I tend to believe that the amount of women who are in the line of work through coercion or through the feeling of not having a choice due to circumstances is under reported. I suspect sex slave statistics are drastically under reported. Therefore, how do you support an industry where there is so much harm being done to vulnerable people.

I happen to also believe the stories of the women on this very thread who have shared their stories and their in-depth, and hard gained, knowledge. Who have shared just why they were doing what they were doing.

Maybe I am wrong about the number of vulnerable people being exploited and I am open to be told this as I have said.

As far as the subject of this thread is concerned, I also totally agree that sex is NOT a right regardless of whether a person has a disability, is dying or is a virgin. If someone is paying for sex, I would be very very concerned having a relationship with them as this is a very important value for any potential partner to fully understand.

@TheDailyCarbuncle
Strippers who work in a club and don't do private dances, are dancing in full view of many people - they are not alone with men and they don't have to have anything inserted into their body. It's not an ideal job but it's not the same as exchanging bodily fluids with somebody else.
And this is the difficulty, if a woman gives a man a HJ for cash is this not prostitution? By your definition there has been no insertions so no but there has been an exchange of bodily fluids so maybe yes.
Please understand I am not saying one way or the other, but I think that the argument that stops prostitution will only stop certain types or can be used to cover all sorts of activities.

how do you know I don’t? Very presumptuous of you.
Know what?about prostitution first hand? I never said you didn't. I was pointing out that so do lots of others on this thread!

Also, DuLang you paint a very accurate picture.
I will also say this to the punters on here: I never met a stripper/escort/lap dancer who didn't, on the deepest level HATE men.
Seriously. You can't really do that kind of work without developing total contempt for men in general. They won't show it (bad for business) but honestly, the way women in that life talk about men you can tell they think they are scum.
It's not really surprising, given that I never met one who hadn't been abused by men in multiple ways since bring a child.
Yup, I'm sure there is one in a million totally sorted women who just love sex with randoms and, hey, why not get rich while they are at it but it is pretty irrelavant because the 999999 others are in the life for very disturbing reasons.

You know though, we can tell the truth until the cows come home, but nothing will interfere with the desire some men have to pay to use another human, and they will refuse to hear. Because, who wants to come to the realisation that they are a total shit?

Theirs a Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix about escorts.

It shows a young man who had no confidence after a relationship ended who used an escort. I felt sorry for him but he said it’s helped him in a way.

Also a disabled man who it helped too, it was heart breaking.

The lady who was an escort knew what she was doing and making a lot of money aswell.