Not cleaning up after themselves is a valid complaint but doesn't seem something specific to prostitutes.
I'm all for legalization, but if you run a brothel out of my place I'm going to be seriously pissed off and not just get all libertarian about it. I will after all, have rented under non-commercial grounds anyway; I'd be pissed if you ran a pop-up restaurant there too.
Needless to say, when you don't intend to rent your home out as a business, it's equally unacceptable if someone decides to use it as one.
Edit: I... just realized how Freudian my analogy of "discharging firearms into the air" is. I really should get more sleep.
So... time to rethink your position; I'd be absolutely furious in this guy's position, and "The risk is incredibly low," would frankly piss me off even more. Your argument is about as weak as someone smoking a ton of pot in someone's house, then bitching about prohibition. I'm against prohibition, and also against you stinking up my house.
If you try to pigeonhole all of the people you disagree with, you will turn into a caricature no less absurd than the ones you're trying to create.
Plenty of people who think that prostitution should be legal still disapprove of it, by the way.
Because, not to be too snarky, yes, that actually does seem like a regular day in the operation of an accommodation business.
I've even heard it rumored guests might leave the toilet in a less than pristine state...
The horror!
/ok, that was a bit snarky, but my point stands.
At least you can track who they are. That's entirely different from a guest setting up a gang bang in an apartment rented on Airbnb.
If you rent your house to strangers then you're obviously okay with those people having sex at your place, in your bed, anywhere really where they fancy it.
What's different if it's prostitution or if it isn't??
(Personally I would really prefer not having anyone I don't know engaging in any normal activity in my home, and that's why I will probably never be an Airbnb host; but if you are then surely you have to accept the consequences?)
In this specific case it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex; it's not illegal for a woman to sell sex from a brothel; it is illegal to keep a brothel; or to let a property be used as a brothel.
The whole concept of "sharing economy" seems to be based in large parts on the idea that individuals who got unlucky take the damage for the herd and are somehow expected find solace in knowing that the fearsome zero star retaliation rating they gave will maybe help someone else. A bit like mixed cost calculation, where the easy customers subsidize the difficult case, but reversed: the happy path transactions reap the benefits.
Doing it in a more peer to peer fashion using a website improves the flow of information about these kinds of risks, but can't eliminate them. No reasonable person would think renting out their apartment overnight to strangers is risk-free; it's just a question of whether the risk is worth the reward.
Somebody has faulty reasoning here and it's not the poster you replied too.
Statistically, gay men are more likely to be HIV+ than the general population.
Thus if a gay couple who were having safe sex in your apartment left behind lots of used condoms, there would statistically be a higher probability that those condoms contained HIV+ semen than with a couple chosen at random from the whole population.
It has nothing to do with people deliberately engaging in risky behavior. For the sake of argument, we might say that the HIV+ person in the couple contracted HIV as the result of a date rape. (Not that I in any way endorse your judgmental suggestion that most people who get HIV somehow deserve it.)
Consider a comparable headline: "My Airbnb flat was turned into a pop-up bathhouse, because my gay renter had gay sex with a man he met on the gay app Grindr."
Would this headline be deserving of a similar level of sympathy/moral weight/etc?
You're not going to make me change my viewpoint by making it about gay people
Lets admit it, its the moral angle that's getting folks all spun up.
Hotels are facilities which cater for all sorts of people and can cope with all sorts of eventualities. When you rent your house out for the night to a couple, you do not expect them to have used it as a base for prostitution, and should not be as happy to clean up as everybody in this thread seems to be.
All that remains is, wishing to regulate the morals of the renters. Which is an iffy proposition at best.
I wouldn't expect guests of AirBnB to not do anything they would do in a hotel - after all you are attracting the same audience.
Bottom line - if they left a mess, then call a cleaning company and charge the guests a cleaning fee. Pretty much every AirBnB has a cleaning fee in terms of rental.
Would the reaction here be any different if an actual couple left the host with a pile of condoms? If yes,why? If no, why?
There's a mild difference in that a couple means the risk of infected material is lower.
In England you can't give blood if you've ever received money for sex, and you must wait for at least 12 months if you've paid for sex.
These restrictions exist because there is a higher risk of infection.
BTW. I wonder what's the chance of getting infected when cleaning up used condoms after someone who's infected?
If we're talking about HIV, then it's roughly zero. In theory I guess it could happen if you had a cut on your hands, but then, it's easy enough to take the appropriate precautions if that's the case.
What do you mean by "infected material"? Handling used condoms is gross but perfectly safe (and of course you can just use gloves if you're paranoid).
Ahhh, lovely England. I spent about 9 months there, about 35 years ago. And now I can't give blood in the USA. Because of mad cow disease (the human name is too hard to remember).
So, either all the English are giving each other mad cow disease all the time by giving blood, or nobody in England who was alive 35 years ago can ever give blood, or the USA is over-reacting. Truth be told I'm happy I can't give any more, because it made me feel tired.
Management isn't a fan of it, but unless you can prove something concretely what are you going to do? The money is as good as any other and if the escorts are respectable to the property and rules, why not?
Personally I'm on good terms with a few of the local escorts, they always have great stories and are fairly personable. Not a fan of their line of work, but hey revenue!
Albeit, granted I'm sure the regulars weren't generally in the practice of wrecking the rooms... but cleaning up after the horrible things people do in their rooms is pretty stock standard for the hotel industry...
No one "likes" it, but no one likes cleaning toilets either, and that still needs getting done and people do it and its stock/standard of being a cleaner...
And if you're not hiring a cleaner to clean your rooms and doing it yourself, you can bet 100% you'll be cleaning up some pretty horrible stuff in the accommodation industry. If they leave the room in a bad state, that just makes them bad customers...
A little of both, depending on the "class" involved, and the location.
You might be surprised to learn that a lot of prostitution happens during the day-time. In largish-hotels a bloke going up to a room, spending 30-60 minutes there, and coming down wouldn't stand out. Even if the same host entertained 5+ people in her day.
(Unless you get involved in high-end work you'll virtually never have an overnight booking. Average duration amongst the people I knew was 60-90 minutes.)
I was not under the impression it was common for several clients to be booked during the one night.
I believe the girls would either use the hotel room for:
a) A place of work for regular specific bookings: it has the benefit of not being at a brothel/not at their home if they aren't comfortable with that, and it can become a familiar place and you'll be "reasonably" safer than going out to a clients house.
b) A way to work if you're in a different city/having another girl coming from another city.
Obviously, if you remember your freakonomics, there are levels to the prostitutions market. So there is the possibility of:
c) Its a place to drum up new business. I imagine places like hotels in Washington/Canberra where people are there on business, have money, and are away from their families, is, in the prostitution business, a place of relatively high demand. So the clients might have a room there that they're already paying for...
Now to be fair, this is at the relatively upper-end of the prostitution market.
Ironically, in the context of my other discussions in this thread, in this country at least, if there's a super low-end part of the prostitution market, i'd expect it to be operating out of illegal brothels...and probably out of unmarked houses out in the burbs...
The state of the flat is unfortunate but goes with the territory for AirBnB / hotels etc.
Surprise: not the escorts book the rooms, but the clients, and the most weird stuff is usually found within the wealthier client groups.
Cleaning weird stuff is a regular thing in hotels and hostels; and condoms aren't even weird, they'd be probably the most common stuff found in hotel room trashcans.
They underhandedly used a person's house for illegal activity and left the owner to clean up afterwards. There's really no excusing it by trying to make it seem like a bunch of kids having a cool fun time.
And the criminalisation of prostitution isn't a grey area, it's the law in that jurisdiction.
No. Prostitution per se is not against the law in the UK (except in Northern Ireland).
As for the rest, that's why the OP said "grey area". It's not entirely clear that they were doing any of the other stuff.
See e.g. the 'legality' section in the following Wikipedia article. It's not black and white whether or not anything illegal was going on.
It's not a grey area at all. And paying for prostitutes is illegal full stop in NI and Ireland, and is illegal in the case that they have a pimp in Great Britain
We have no way of knowing that the prostitutes engaged in soliciting. “Soliciting” doesn’t just mean “finding someone to pay you for sex”, it has a specific meaning to do with advertising for sex in a public place. If the prostitutes met their clients by, e.g., chatting to guys online, then that would not count as soliciting.
Similarly, we have no way of knowing that more that more than one woman actually had sex on the premises, or that the prostitutes have a pimp.
So this is at worst a grey area in terms of legality. And it’s effectively straight-up legal, given that the police have made no attempt for decades to target this kind of prostitution via laws against pimping/soliciting/whatever, since it’s impossible for them to construct a prosecutable case.
And again, it IS illegal to pay prostitutes in the entire UK under certain circumstances (they have a pimp, they were trafficked, they're under duress).
He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
>He said there were two prostitutes listed as guests, and that they advertised their services and rates online, which can be classed as solicitation.
You have a kind of genius for spreading inaccurate information. Advertising yourself as a prostitute online is not illegal in Britain and is not classed as solicitation.
To prove that a crime was committed, the police would have to show, at minimum, that both of the women actually had sex with a client in the same property. That is obviously not going to be possible.
So you did, apologies
The physically disabled? Nervous silly college kids?
Cheaters? Low lifes? I've got news for you, they might visit the brothels, but they live out in the burbs near you :P They live near all of us.
Perhaps I'm just jaded/acclimatised from having worked in the suburb of Fyshwick in Canberra (where operating a brothel/in-home prostitution is quite common), knew there were prostitutes regularly working out of hotels/their own houses, and I'm pretty sure there's probably a couple of brothels around where I live.
Honestly, I can't say I keep track of them...I can't say they're even on my mental radar...
Don't misunderstand me, i know there are a significant number of people who wouldn't want to raise children in such an environment. But it doesn't bother me, nor the other families living here, and the general property prices around here suggest it doesn't sufficiently bother most of the people who live here :\
But I also knew prostitutes were working frequently out of suburban homes and hotels, so i'm a bit "you're not actually that far from prostitutes..." to all my suburban friends.
It's pretty safe actually. Or at least no more dangerous than other parts of Sydney. I've never heard of any crimes or violence related to sex workers in Sydney. I'm more worried about alcohol and drug related violence. If there are any unsavoury characters about they are much more likely to be at a night club. Ban night clubs (they kind of did that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_lockout_laws and it worked).
And why would anyone care if it is great environment for families ? Are US suburbs great environment for families where Ms. X who has 4 kids all from different people living with her boyfriend ? Is that a good environment ?
Edit: Look at everybody pretending that cleaning up dozens of men's bodily ejections after they used your house as a brothel is just one of life's little chores. You've all spent too long on Reddit.