When Mussolini was still a progressive, and was determined to give the Catholic Church a good kicking, he set up precisely this in State run brothels. The idea was that there was a lot of covert and very unpleasant prostitution in Italy and that this could be replaced by an enlightened system Apparently some of the State brothels were set up right opposite churches, with big neon signs.
I have to say that when I was told this I did think that maybe Mussolini wasn’t quite as bad as he’s represented, given the period - but the system apparently failed because people listened to the priests and hypocrisy triumphed. As we’ve seen with Berlusconi, Italians (and many others) will tolerate things so long as they are not forced to acknowledge their existence.
As someone who thinks of himself as a feminist I don’t know what to think about sex work, except that all the loud campaigners seem to me to want to fit human nature into one particular box and ignore the variety of human experience. It would be nice to think that the right answer is “what the sex workers want”, but as many of them have presumably had years of being physically or psychologically coerced or groomed, what they want may not be what they need. And yet that goes for almost all of us, because there is no book or standard to say what the “right” kind of society should look like.
I’ve never paid for sex though I have seen street prostitutes in London, Hamburg and other places. I live on the outskirts of a small town and there is no visible evidence of sex work but it would surprise me if there was in fact none, and I suspect that people are practising unnoticeably from ordinary houses. I doubt that any laws or regulations would stamp out below the radar work of this kind.
