Roooooooxanne...

Being an resident of East Anglia the fact that there is a serial killer doing the rounds just down the road from me is of course a little disturbing, even though his preferred target group does not so far seem to include small green fire breathing dragons (always assuming of course that there are any small green fire breathing dragons on the game in Ipswitch¹).

What I find puzzling is that we seem to have got a new phrase: "Sex Worker". What the hell is a "Sex Worker" when she (or he I assume) is at home; anything like a social worker but with extra special services? What, pray tell, is wrong with the good old English word "Prostitute"? Everyone knows what it means, it isn't gender specific and I think it sounds a good deal less clumsy.

What I find tragic is that if this government was a bit less, you know, run by a religious mafia and had the bollocks to stand up to the tabloid press then they may have introduced managed areas and legal, properly regulated brothels by now and five women (and counting) would probably be alive right now. But hey, after Iraq whats a few more dead bodies, eh Tone?

My opinion is that if people want to buy and sell sexual favours then that's just fine and dandy by me and it is no business of government to say that they can't; indeed if government had any common sense they should put it on a proper business footing with minimal, sensible regulation to protect consumers and workers from undue exploitation and risk and then tax it like any other profit-making enterprise. Now I know that, as Deborah Orr pointed out in her article in today's Independent, the management of any enterprise would not want to take on a heroin addict as an employee but at least we could have managed zones, as they tried in Liverpool a while back, where the ladies of negotiable virtue could work in some sort of safety and at least the social workers and drug outreach programmes could find them (and yes whereas I might be an unreconsitituted libertarian I do think people who have fucked up their life on drugs through bad choices should at least be offered some sort of help, if only because it's cheaper to the taxpayer in the long run).

Anyway I hope the back-to-basic moralists and fundy Xtians are sleeping well tonight... who am I kidding, course they are. They probably think it's God's punishment. Gits.




¹Bet they would clean up if there were - seem to be plenty of people interested in sleeping with dragons if what I see in the more exotic corners of the net is anything to go by.