> You can in fact get issued an escort license in some cities (e.g., San Francisco or Grand Chute, or Jefferson County, WA). I don’t know if this is a good idea, neither I nor anybody I know has applied for this, though I seriously considered. It’s possible it might grant you some legal protection, but also possible it might give you some legal issues, as it puts a lot of information about you in a government file that clearly states you are in fact an escort.
Based on that, from an escort viewpoint, the legal protections are not a worthy tradeoff for privacy.
Ultimately, in the context of the country/culture, legal protection is a progressive position, but it's not sufficient, unless complemented by a degree of anonymity. Not sure how that could work, though!
Legal, non-anonymous and socially respectable escort services used to exist, you know. It existed in south india as a practice for hundreds of years before the british came.
You can also look up Bangalore Nagarathnamma, Veena Dhanammal, Mylapore Gowri ammal, Coimbatore Thayi, Balasaraswathi, Muddupalani. Some of them have books written on them.
If you'd like more sources, plz let me know -- I'll send some book titles your way.
Devadasi as an institution was shattered first by Islamic invaders - who even record this in their journals. In-fact most Islamic historians explicitly declaim this as liberation of women in India and how Islamic conquest uplifted backward society in that era.
You can still hire no-sex escorts to accompany you to an event - such as a work event, or anything where you don't want people to think you're a saddo who can't get a girlfriend. I can imagine a closet queen employing such a service.
It seems clear to me anyway that what she was referring to is a similar trap marijuana growers have here in CA and other legal states. Namely that just because SF gives you a permit doesn’t make it legal (in that everyone who could come arrest you would not), and it may actually make it worse by putting you in a database of ‘known offenders’ for the next higher level of law enforcement to come after you. The state of California doesn’t recognize any permit in SF, and neither do the Feds, and if she crosses state lines in her work, the feds could go after her for it.
Would they do that right now? Probably not. Would some future different administration? Possibly.
And, since it’s required to use legal names and the like, and these records are permanent, it could be a decade or whatever in the future when politics have changed, or there could be a records leak and now your real legal name and occupation and home address or whatever is all over the Internet, and who knows when or if something weird happens.
Gun owners recently started having their records shared with various universities for instance, which include home addresses, names, and what they own - and have no legal recourse near as I can tell.
I don't think it really conveys any meaningful legal protections. I suspect it allows you to operate, but it won't mean that you will be treated with the same respect that a non escort would have got.
They are still not allowed to use normal payment providers, they cannot form companies, they cannot operate their own premises, with security (as that would border on prostitution, which is a stupid distinction)
Think of it as the police allowing pot dealers, even though it was still illegal to posses.
> future johns would avoid her if they knew that she had filed charges against a previous customer
So maybe she wouldn't tell them. Obviously, legalization should also imply a certain protection of their identities (e.g. if they are witnesses in a trial).
Social workers and police can of course make outdoor areas in which prostitutes work safer even if prostitution is not legalized. So that is not an argument in favor of legalization.
I didn't present an argument for the legalization of prostitution. In my opinion, there is no need for an argument since it's completely obvious to any normal human being that it is not a crime. Why on earth would selling sex for money be crime? Is it the sex that makes it a crime? What's wrong with sex?
There is a lot of hypocrisy in the discussion of this question, though. People frequently confound other crimes with prostitution that already are crimes and would continue to be crimes after legalization such as human trafficking, rape, coercion, sexual assault, etc.
Besides, it is completely obvious that legalization improves the working conditions of prostitutes. Contrary to what you state, the police cannot make outdoor areas where sex workers work secure if prostitution is illegal, since the police is forced to persecute crimes. They'd have to arrest these sex workers. Consequently, these will conduct their business far away from the police, which is exactly what makes their work particularly insecure when it is illegal. This is just one issue. There are many other reasons why illegal activities are generally less secure than the same activities when they are legal. Illegality attracts all kinds of shady people you can avoid if you are allowed to go legit. That's not even a controversial thesis.
In Europe, laws around prostitution varies a lot. In some countries buying and selling sex is legal, in some only buying sex is illegal, and in others prostitution is completely forbidden. There appears to be no correlation between prostitutes' working conditions and the legality of prostitution. In Germany prostitution is legal, yet a massive number of women are trafficked from Eastern European countries to Germany, ostensibly because they are willing to sell sex cheaper than German women.
Yes, police and social workers can make outdoor areas safer whether or not prostitution is legalized. That's a false dichotomy.
The prostitutes country of origin somehow proves that it being legal does make it safer? Where do you take information about this or that country prostitution working conditions from?
> Yes, police and social workers can make outdoor areas safer whether or not prostitution is legalized. That's a false dichotomy.
But that is different topic. The area being safe for general public is not the same thing as prostitutes being protected or able to call cops or able to use those social services.
> There appears to be no correlation [...]
Citation needed - but in any case that wasn't the point and you know it. There is no sound argument why people shouldn't sell sex for money, besides religious and other ideological arguments which are not sound (otherwise, why not use them in mathematical proofs, too?). Usually at this point people with ulterior motives shift their rhetoric to arguing that the clients rather than the prostitutes are committing a crime - aka "the Swedish model", where you order a very expensive pizza and it gets delivered by an attractive woman. They then go on to lay out that those clients cause great harm. That's not true either, they cause small harm like in many other stressful customer-oriented jobs such as working as a stewardess. But I'm resting my case here. Suffices to say that going from very high income to zero in a short time is problematic...
That's the point, you don't want rapey Johns as your customers.