"Progress"

“Just three more tricks tonight, my dear, and then you may have tomorrow off.”

Belgium decriminalizes prostitution and grants the working girls (and anything else in the trade) a lot of goodies, like so:

But, alas, there are strings attached — they have to sing (or mumble, or whatever) for their supper:

In one sense, why not? If only the United States required welfare recipients to show up for work 8 out of 10 days; instead, we give the permanently retired (at 16) a monthly stipend, free medical care, permanent maternity leave, and old age payments when they’ve worn themselves out overseeing their children’s early morning street activities. If Belgium wants to see its ladies of the night perform at the dictates of their pimps, well, who are we to intervene? That’d be like telling Israel how to conduct its own self-defense, for instance, or a third world country to eschew cheap energy and fertilizers and embrace starvation.

But this still strikes me as somehow dehumanizing and grotesque. It’s back to reeducation camp for me, I suppose.