Dark heart of Britain’s legal prostitution zone

[PelicanDeuce]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8558667/Dark-heart-Britains-legal-red-light-district.html

Every single Labour councillor in Leeds - they all vote for its continuation - should hang their heads in shame.

Shame on you all. Again and again.

"We see academics enthralled by “sex positivity” while they would never live in Holbeck, nor entertain the notion of themselves, their daughters or their wives “working” there."

Absolutely this.

Awful decision.

I totally agree. As this article I read a few days back by Julie Bindel states the council is endorsing " paid rape."
unherd.com/2020/07/how-authorities-in-leeds-enable-paid-rape/

I saw a documentary on the legal zone last year and it was just horrific. The women interviewed were all totally dependent on drugs, really out of it and had lost their children to the care system. They had all suffered chidlhood sexual abuse and rape. One woman slurred that she was just damaged goods and it was better that men had sex with her than maybe abuse someone not used to it. So utterly heartbreaking. Appalling, it costs a lot of money to run the zone, money that would be better spent actually helping and supporting the women. But men have their "needs" don't they? It's sex "work" not abuse.

Well done to the Daily Mail for covering it. Much as I depsise a lot of their editorial line, they are absolutely on the money with this article (as they were over Rotherham).

@SapatSea yes I agree. That documentary remains, to this day, the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. I can't possibly imagine how anyone could put Holbeck and "success" in the same sentence. The only way you could think like that is if you don't see these women as full human beings.

The comments are mostly awful

"Men who are equally desperate and destitute have no recourse to sell their bodies for sex so will presumably suffer and starve more than these women"

Urgh I feel so sick even reading them. Should have known better.

"Men who are equally desperate and destitute have no recourse to sell their bodies for sex so will presumably suffer and starve more than these women"

As we know from Ipswich, the girls on the street were also supporting the men's drug habits.

Actually, men can sell their bodies, too, though the buyers are almost never women but other men (with the exception of some sex tours to poorer countries). I don't know if the demand in the sex market is as high for male bodies but it certainly exists.

Whenever I read anything about prostitution (or sex work, for the wokerati) these days I spot the same old same old blind spot in the coverage. It is as if the customers are invisible.

So here the problem is the pimps or the litter left on the street and so on, and only fleetingly the article mentions that the place attracts men from a larger area.

Yet in almost all other contexts an article about a marketplace would also talk about the demand side: Those who pay money to get a blow job and so on from the women working these streets.

This is the only market that I can think of where almost everyone on the seller side (with the exception of the bosses or pimps, of course) is female and where essentially everyone on the buyer side is male.

It may not be an accident, therefore, that when people write about various proposals to change laws concerning prostitution, the fact that legalization greatly benefits the buyers is usually made quite invisible.

Whenever I read anything about prostitution (or sex work, for the wokerati) these days I spot the same old same old blind spot in the coverage. It is as if the customers are invisible.

I've been saying this for years - why does no-one among the wokerati ask the obvious question of "what about the menz?"

What sort of a man sees a woman who is cold, desperate, in abject poverty, obviously in need of a fix, and thinks "yeah, fucking her would be fun..."? Just how inhumane do you have to be to be capable of doing this?

Have you come across the Invisible Men Project?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1749598-The-invisible-men-project

P**nters (aka skidmarks on the underpants of humanity) talking about what they think about the women they abuse. It's grim reading.

(I've used asterisks because previous experience on here suggests a fucking bat signal goes up every time we talk about this, and we get swamped by sleazy men who want to tell us what a wonderful public service they provide by raping women for pay.)

The comments from men on that article are sickening.

Have you come across the Invisible Men Project?
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1749598-The-invisible-men-project

I had not heard about that and will read the thread later tonight.

It may talk about those online sites where the men who are consumers of bought sex rate the women who provide that sex. They may not, of course, be representative of all men who buy sex, but neither are they necessarily unrepresentative.

They make for vomit-inducing reading.

In particular, the ratings of prostitutes are the higher the younger the girl appears or is, the less inexperienced she is, and the more abuse she allows.

So clearly it is not the sex worker's skills and experience that increase her standing but the reverse, and that shows what it is that is truly being sold here. It is not like dental cleaning, a comparison I recently read somewhere.

So has Leeds council voted for this to continue?

Well, there you go: Another excellent pro-woman article from The Daily Mail. They effortlessly run rings around the Guardian these days (not sarcasm!).

The top-rated comments on that article all express disgust over the situation, which is good to see.

"Men who are equally desperate and destitute have no recourse to sell their bodies for sex so will presumably suffer and starve more than these women"

As PP said the women in the documentary were also making money for their "boyfriends" to eat and take drugs as well as themselves. On a couple of occasions one of them would say to the boyfriend "why don't you go out and sell yourself?" (or something less PC than that). And the men would just laugh. There was no way in hell any of them were going to countenance doing that.

Exactly. The destitute men will use the destitute women. They are not the bottom of the pile here.
When 50% of imprisoned men are there through helping support the drug habit of a partner we'll talk about it more.
Can't believe when we're talking about vulnerable, young women struggling with addiction selling their bodies for £30 we're still meant to wring our hands and think about the poor menz.

Holbeck always puts me in mind of this ghastly piece (well-written, it's the situation that is beyond disturbing):

“Flat-rate brothels” offer all-inclusive deals similar to all-you-can-eat buffets.” In some cases, snacks and drinks are included in the deal. A flat-rate brothel chain made headlines when, on its opening day in 2009, 1,700 men lined up to get in. The long lineups outside women’s rooms lasted until closing time when many of the women collapsed from exhaustion, pain, injuries, and infections. It was shut down a year later for human trafficking.

Flat-rate brothels are very common in Germany, as well as “tabuslos,” meaning “no taboos.” In practice, this translates to “everything without any protection.” As a result, STDs are on the rise in Germany (HIV rates have gone up after several years of stagnation), and it’s common for married men to infect their wives.

Competing for customers means that brothel chains offer gambling games with the chance of winning a free hookup. A brothel in Berlin gives customers a “collection card” like coffee shops do — five visits will grant you a 50% rebate, and your 11th visit is free.

In Germany, both convenience and frugality are key, and patrons can go to parking garages for drive-in sex, or visit stalls called “Verrichtungsbox” (“getting things done” boxes). They can now even order women the way one would order a pizza thanks to a mobile app produced last year.

fightthenewdrug.org/germanys-legalized-prostitution-industry-looks-like-a-real-life-horror-movie/

Does anyone remember the name of the documentary on the legal zone?

Oh god that bit about the all-inclusive brothels actually made me feel like I was going to be sick. I really struggle to understand why other people don't have the same reaction to this.

I was watching the TV series The Wire last night and there's an episode where they are trying to bust a sex trafficking ring. The plan is for one of the detectives to go to the brothel pretending to be a john and for the other police to follow and make arrests. The other police take too long to get there meaning he's already having sex with two of the women by the time they arrive. The scene is dressed up almost as a piece of comedy when they walk in and find him naked in one of the rooms. And yet all I can see is that he's gone there and raped two trafficked women.

It really demonstrated for me how so many people just cannot empathise with these women. Why though? Is it because a lot of men think getting paid to have sex sounds like a great time? Or is it because they don't see these women as full human beings?

@WeeBisom here is the link to the Holbeck documentary:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p04nllxx

It's bonkers. We are clearly seeing vulnerable women being used and abused in the most risky way possible yet instead of agreeing they tie themselves in knots trying to argue that this is somehow a good, progressive thing.
I'm ashamed.

The peopleof Leeds need to kick out Labour as soon as they possibly can.
And this is from a life long Labour supporter.

@dyslek

The peopleof Leeds need to kick out Labour as soon as they possibly can. And this is from a life long Labour supporter.

They won't, though. Back when I lived in Leeds donkey's years ago, I lived in the constitutency with the lowest turnout in the UK - 20%, pretty much all of which went to Labour.

A minority of die-hard Labour activists continue to vote for them, and the rest of the population has so utterly lost faith in the political process that they don't even bother any more. With situations like Holbeck, and the obvious "fixing" of the independent enquiry, who can blame them?

I remember reading a similar article about prostitution in Germany a few years back - "Welcome to Paradise" in the Telegraph (the title was heavily ironic; the article was definitely strongly against decrim). It's horrific. It also baffles me how anyone could support decrim, because Germany and Sweden provided us with such a neat, almost "controlled experiment". Germany went for complete decrim at about the same time as Sweden went for decrim of prostitutes but criminalising the buying of sex. Both countries are demographically similar, similar wealth, similar-ish welfare states, similar-ish moral attitudes (both more open and less moralistic about sex than the UK, for instance). Germany has evolved into this nightmare situation, with sky-rocketing levels of trafficking and abuse of women, Sweden has significantly cut levels of trafficking and supported many women in leaving prostitution. It's about as clear-cut a comparison as you could get in the real world, and the Nordic model wins hands-down.

[quote twoHopes]@WeeBisom here is the link to the Holbeck documentary:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p04nllxx[/quote]
This series did me.
I watched it but it left me feeling almost complicit in the abuse.
It was left so open ended, no help offered to the women (afaik) just completely exposing their dreadful situation for us all to enjoy. While the responsible bodies congratulated themselves on their liberal attitude.
Meanwhile vulnerable people who society should help just continue to be raped.

Oh god that bit about the all-inclusive brothels actually made me feel like I was going to be sick.

That was my reaction.

And I grew up on an estate with a lot of sex workers - and at various times we had 4 brothels within 10 houses on our bit of the road (my household wasn't one of them but we were mithered all night long by punters chapping on the windows and doors of the wrong house).