Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Turismo del Sexo

Just another efficient market, say the Spanish:

Prostitution is legal in Spain. The Spanish themselves have open minds on the subject and see no real social stigma in going with a prostitute.

....Club Paradiso is large, three floors high, with a huge bar - clean, smart, gaudy, brash.

....You pay the uniformed bouncers EUR 5 to enter. You get a drink, and you get the girls.

Experienced women - working, professional prostitutes, who pay their taxes, pay the club for the use of its facilities, pay for their own weekly medical examinations.

The men stand at the bar, laughing and chatting with their friends, and the girls approach them, girls who speak several languages, girls from all over Europe and Asia.

....Leave morality out of it, and it’s just a business, like any other.

Beyond the cruelty, the depravity of the lowest end of the business, the virtual slavery of the roundabout girls, and it’s just another, lucrative business, supply and demand, market forces at work.

Josie Brennan is in her late forties, is still attractive, has a good figure and takes care of herself.

Josie comes from South London, where she worked as a self-employed prostitute for years, earning well in excess of GBP 100,000 a year, after tax.

....“I came out here to visit friends, and saw the opportunity to make a career change. Well, sort of,” she says.

Josie reasoned that Britons like to deal with their own kind.

“If they’ll pay extra for British builders, well, I figured they pay for a British working girl. So I came out here for a season, rented a flat, put an ad in the paper, and made twice as much as I would have done in London.”

Josie is an entrepreneur. She bought a villa, contacted a few other working girls from Britain, and opened what is, essentially, a brothel.

Each girl pays Josie for the daily use of a room, and for shared resources, telephone answering and security.

“The girls work around three days a week, not in the evening. They make more than, say, a builder would make in a fortnight, and they’re their own bosses," says Josie.

"Most are saving up, two or three years of this and they’ll move on, with a good little nest-egg to buy a business.”

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