proposed legislation in scotland - licensed saunas and legalised prostitution

[weeonion]

A consultation is currently happening in Scotland to make charges to the laws around prostitution, brothel keeping and pimping. No matter what you think - it would be good to have your voice, experiences and opinions heard in this. They have just extended the deadline to the 8th December so if time has been an issue for you - you now have another week!

Responses prepared electronically should be sent by e-mail to:
[email protected]
Responses prepared in hard copy should be sent by post to:
Jean Urquhart MSP
Room M3.20
Scottish Parliament
Edinburgh
EH99 1SP
You may also contact Jean Urquart’s office by telephone on (0131) 348 5052

Normalising prostitution affects all women detrimentally.

Normalising prostitution affects detrimentally all women, men and children who discover themselves living next door or even worse, on the same tenement stair , as a brothel. The latter due to the demographics of Scottish city living is the more likely.

Playswell that is disgusting. I have known women forced into prostitution, they are certainly not in the same job as me

You're ignorant and I can see why now. No doubt many sex workers have hit a brick wall with you attempting to show you the true nature of UK sex work and the difference between sex work and trafficking

@lass

I am normal. What I do is normal for me. It is different to forced prostitution ?

Did you reply to the consultation Sapphire?

Do you want brothels popping up all over Scotland? Do you want people from all over England travelling to Scotland to go to one of these legal brothels?

What if a brothel popped up on the same street as yours?

Wow? So I suffer from cognitive dissonance now?

This is actually amusing now. What a condescending bunch

I am a prostitute I do in calls and out calls from home see between 3-8 clienta in a shift.

And I'm at uni doing psychology so I'm perfectly capable of making and understanding my choices

And then there would be rapey men coming and going at all times of the day and night. Do you have children? If you did would you want your children to walk past these men?

"Normalising prostitution affects all women detrimentally. "

Yup.

Sapphire We will have to disagree. I don't think "sex work" is just work like any other.

I think the "sex industry " is degrading and debasing and incompatible with human dignity.
I think the idea it is acceptable to hire another person to masturbate into or over is unacceptable and incompatible with a society where everyone is treated with respect.

I sincerely hope a trafficking victim never has to encounter you Fran, my orifices aren't raped multiple times a day

Vestal

I don't want another job. Not until I graduate and can hopefully get into a qualified job.

Sapphire- Yes they are. The "consent" you think you are giving is not meaningful. I can see I'm wasting my time even replying to you but maybe one day you will understand.

OK I can't try any more to have a serious discussion.

I wish you all the best of luck in your noble efforts to save prostitutes.

Luckily you won't impact the sex industry, and hopefully those of us sensible enough to see the distinction between prostitutes and trafficked women can do something to help this situation. You lot are clearly useless fools watching way too many Hollywood films

As someone who reads graduate application CVs I expect to see evidence of work experience and work history.

What are you going to say on yours? Will there be a blank or will you explain how you earned your money?

If you explain then, in my particular case, I might wonder if you have a rather casual concern for money laundering and the black economy, which would probably mean you won't make any short lists of candidates.

Tell me Sapphire - if this is a normal job, I'm assuming you pay your tax and NI, that you have personal liability insurance, pay business rates on your place of business (and meet all appropriate fire and health regulations), that all activities you perform have written risk assessments? Frequent assessments and certifications of your services/ability by your governing professional body?

That is the reality of what you would need if what you were doing if this was a profession.

Not that I would support it anyway. Just because you're happy doing it, doesn't mean it's not harmful to society. I'm pretty happy in my job, and I can reasonably say that there aren't any people trafficked to do it. You can't say the same thing at all - your job promotes a culture that encourages human trafficking, and I just can't get on board with that.

Personal attacks aren't allowed on MN, Sapphire.

We are absolutely entitled to have an opinion on a social issue about whether sex should be a sellable commodity .

No doubt you have a view on paid surrogacy, say, or paying for blood donations or kidney donors, even if none of those things are in your personal future. But do you want to live in a society where those things can be sold... Yes, of course you have an opinion on that and no one would call you a fool for holding it.

I pay tax yes as I work from home and hope to get a mortgage in the future.

I'm attacking people?! Wow, just been told I am responsible for trafficking victim's getting awful men visiting them, questioned on my taxes and told I get my orifices raped multiple times a day.
You're not feminists, simply an extremely misguided bunch with no real lifew experience or understandingof what you claim to care about.
Your attitudes are damaging to society

I don't want another job.

You will want another job if/when buying women is outlawed, because by then, you will need another job. And I am all for you being able to get another job then.

However, I do very much not care whether you don't want another job.

When the Spinning Jenny was invented, lots and lots of spinsters lost their livelihoods.

Would you happily pay thousand times as much for your clothes, just so that spinners and weavers can have jobs?

No?

Then don't complain that other people don't want you to do what you do for a living.

I'm saying that it's a foolish misguided opinion.
I have views on other things as you said and if someone who has direct experience in dealing with or being involved in that situation tried to explain to me ways in which I was ignorant I would certainly not be pompous enough to shout them down and behave in a pig headed manner and claim they were incapable of making their own choices and that theyou were wrong.

It's a shame people can't take a back step and actually look at things from another's point of view, one based in reality. Anyway I imagine this shouting down sex workers has probably been done many times on this forum as the pig headedness is astonishing

Playswell that is disgusting. I have known women forced into prostitution, they are certainly not in the same job as me

I'm sorry the truth disgusts you. Can be hard when you first try and understand how your actions impact others, but it's never not useful in the end. Your choices adversely affect other women. You don't give a shit about those women right now because you're ok.

If only my knowledge came from Hollywood films, but it doesn't. Hollywood films rarely show even a small part of how awful the majority of prostituted women's lives are. It's something you would do well to look at, but you won't, because, as I said, you simply don't care about those women.

Luckily, we're having a huge impact on the pimping industry. I look forward to many more victories to come. None of which will affect your money making ability, so don't you fret, but should hopefully help women who have no choices.

When your choice is to allow men you'd never choose to have sex with fuck you or to watch your kids go hungry it's not choice. It's not trafficking either, it's much more insidious than that. It looks like choice though, and that seems to be enough for the type of men who rent womens orifices. It means that they don't have to look at what present social policy is doing to women. It means they don't have to look at what foreign policy is doing to women abroad.

While this thread is about the situation in Scotland, it has to been seen as part of a global issue. There are women all over the world who, for whatever reason, have chosen to prostitute themselves. To a limited extent, good for them, although their choices adversely affect the women and children around them, their choice is a real choice. However, in this country and elsewhere, the majority of women involved are women who have no real choices.

Where the rich West leads, the world sadly tends to follow. If we decide that women's bodies are commodities here, where we have access to good health services, sexual health services and some form of justice system, we are throwing women under the bus in countries where that simply isn't that case. It is facile and ridiculous to suggest otherwise and no amount of insults to the women on this forum will change that.

Anyway I imagine this shouting down sex workers has probably been done many times on this forum

And you'd be horribly wrong. I doubt you'd want to hear about that though.

Calling posters a load of useless fools is a personal attack. I'm not going to report it because but it would be deleted if reported.

Vestal I think you're right that the sex industry can't go on like this . It's just a shame you can't see the difference between prostitutes and trafficked women though.

Surely you all must be aware that prostitution is here to stay, so why not focus energies on helping actual victim's instead of a futile attempt to abolish something that you as an outsider are against but for many it's a happy way of life.
But of course trafficking is a portion of the industry so why not tackle that and help people who need and the most important thing 'want' help

I can't understand your constantly saying I don't care about trafficking victim's pkayswell, I seem to be the only one here concerned with having a ficus on that

Playswell I u can't get what you're saying regarding choice/kids going hungry. But with all these constraints you want to bring to these women whato options are you leaving them with? Even less by the looks of it

"Surely you all must be aware that prostitution is here to stay,"

Yeah. We don't accept that thesis.