Just another example of the failure of the law to provide moral guidance to peoples lives. The recession of Christianity leaves us with an ever increasing mire of contrived and contradictory laws and regulations. and a generation of people who have no idea of what is right and what is wrong.

Just a few points: It is not the case that paid s e x is not part of a mutual agreement. A female prostitute’s motivation is different from her male client’s, but there is agreement to the transaction.
It is also not true that prostitutes are always the poorest women in society. Or at least, high-priced escorts don’t stay poor for long. Not every prostitute is a desperate, beaten, drugged and trafficked street-walker. You are poisoning the well by insisting on this.
Brooke Magnanti (AKA Belle de Jour) part-funded her doctoral studies as an escort and got a book and TV show out of it.

The fact that s e x is not an essential need like food and water is not an adequate reason for criminalising the purchase of it. On the contrary, making something a crime places it into the hands of criminals and criminals behave badly. The War on Drugs has been underway my whole life. It hasn’t worked yet except to enrich drug lords..

Again, we have thrown away something that provided great benefit to nearly all who practiced it without being aware of our action. The fringe dictated the new norm we live under today, and we wonder why most people are unhappy – we built a world to accommodate and please the exceptional and odd, not the standard and “normal”.
It’s quite tragic really, because even though many former believers see the problem clearly, getting back to what was lost is damn difficult.

The Bloomsbury set were wrong. How do we undo their damage?

This article would be enhanced if it were stated that Julie Bindel is in fact an anti-prostitution activist.

It is reprehensible that the author attempts to hijack this case to make her biased and inappropriate point. There are of course many issues about this case that beg questions, especially around mental disorder and offending, the role and responsibility of health workers to meet their patient’s needs and the right of such a patient to have consensual carnal relations with another person. The article sees the whole right to an intimate relationship (I understand I cannot use the word I require!) as one sided. I know several women who demand to be fulfilled, There are hundreds who use their bodies, willingly to earn a living or to simply enjoy themselves. Look at Pornhub etc. I have known several women who conduct intimate relationships on-line and who take the lead in instigating such trysts, even on poetry sites! The relationship between men and women is complicated and the legitimacy of the whole thing (the bargain) revolves around willingness and consent and of course mutual desire if it is to have any feeling and meaning. To suggest men are all demanding misogynists and women innocent victims is really rather offensive, shallow and sick! It is also manipulative and immoral to use this case to try to make such a point.

Of course having access to s e x isn’t a basic human right.

This gentleman, if he has the ability to have s e x, also has the means to relieve himself and privately satisfy those urges without causing immediate obvious harm to others and without putting his unfortunate carers in the invidious position where they effectively have to ‘pimp’ for him and the state has to pay, doubtless handsomely, for this pleasure.

Furthermore, if he holds a genuine threat to the public at large, as this piece suggests, then he should be made by law to take the appropriate medication to suppress those urges, presumably along with the others he is required to take for his own safety, let alone that of those around him.

Whatever the mitigating reasons for them might be, all too often it is the rights and freedoms of those who likely pose a very real and present, yet perfectly preventable danger to everyone else that we obsess about, rather than those of their poor, unsuspecting potential victims by simple virtue of the obvious fact that they have yet to become one.

In the pomo world all the value giving narratives of the culture have been “deconstructed”, the entire metaphysical dimension, elided. We are just another species driven by appetites in accordance with the laws of nature. Which being the case all societal ‘laws’ are purely expressions of the will-to-power of the alpha she/male –in our case, corporate capital. There are no “rights” in the old sense, only approved management practice. Neither is there any basis for the Right to ‘consent’ –they have only to submit or fight it out.

However the West is not yet fully transitioned from Modern to Postmodern, so the judge is faced with the contradiction of an old dispensation concept of acknowledged ‘rights’ sued for as applied in to postmodern sexual practice. Way to go, Zed!

I’m not convinced that you can draw rules that apply to the whole prostitution debate by finding a very unusual case like Z. His ‘right’, or not, to have sex doesn’t have a strong bearing on whether the industry should exist. I liked the point about whether sex is a human right or as trivial as getting your nails done, but I guess it’s like a drink of water. It’s only becomes important when you don’t have it. Has no-one ever died for want of sex? I’d say a lack of opposite-sex companionship is fairly high on the list for depression and suicide. I don’t care about Z, but I’d be careful about using him as the rule.

I can’t imagine the basis on which TLC is a charity – educational? religious?

‘ find someone prepared to have sex with him.’ How depressing.

Good work Louise, thanks. Sex as a commodity is a wicked ideology.

This case isn’t about men’s right to sex, it’s about the right of a disabled person to sex, in fact, to pay for it while in state care. It could just as easily apply to women. The court judgement should be considered to apply to both disabled men and women in state care.

Sex industry workers do not generally consider their work to be at their expense. Unless they are being forced into such work, sex workers have made a decision to engage in sex for money. Which some would say that competent adults should be allowed to do.

Whether the state wants to cover paid sexual activity for the disabled is the question.

the “right” of disabled people to access “sexual service providers”

Ah – so not actually the right to sex at all!

So a misleading headline and largely misleading article.

I’m afraid the author has out bindelled Bindel with this one.

She shows no empathy whatsoever for people with disabilities, has made Z a stand in for all disabled people, has misconstrued the arguments involved (no one is proposing a universal male right to sex regardless of consent) and has used the whole thing to launch yet another anti male rant. There’s even the customary nod to this being a western problem.

She also fails to see that our attitudes to sex are completely ambiguous – we want it to be special, sacred even – but at the same time we know it isn’t. It’s not an ambiguity that can, or should, be resolved. And it certainly can’t be resolved to launch a specious argument.

She ends by suggesting that the only right we really have is the right not to die:

no one has ever died for want of sex.

“It will also affirm the idea that sex is both meaningless and a “right” to be claimed by men, at the expense of women.” It certainly won’t be meaningless to Z and will never be a “right”, since a willing partner is required, even for Z. Not all prostitutes are poor defenceless girls who are down on their luck, some have a very good lifestyle and work hard to maintain it, the author seems to view all sex workers as poor kittens with no say in their own lives, it’s simply not true.

Charming how society always turns out to support a man’s access to women’s bodies, but rarely does society turn out to support a woman’s right to total legal ownership and decisions about her own body.
That in itself is all one needs to look at to see what the situation is.
Men do not have a right to sex, nor to use tax money to procure it. Unfortunately, government sets a precedent by using tax money to gain access to sex quite a bit from what we see in the news.
As for those supporting prostitution, even the highest paid escorts and porn stars are coming forward to speak of their abuse and having been raped, as they are eventually (and often frequently) coerced under circumstances they know they’ll never be able to fight back at since the courts and cop shops are ruled by men, and those men still believe it is their right to do as they please to the “lesser sex.”
Women still have a fraction of the rights men have. But hey, let a dude put on a dress and some makeup, and that sacred cow can’t be touched. If only women had this magical ability to shape shift and have the law protect us under all circumstances.
Here’s a thought: why don’t men just f**k each other?
The Nordic model is the only system that actually protects and cares about the well-being and safety of women who are selling sex. Let’s make it a criminal act to traffic, pimp, or buy another human being, and decrim8nalize the desperate act of being the one being sold.

Some exaggeration and conflation going on here. Wants versus needs – an entirely unnecessary dichotomy. S e x is one of our basic drives so let’s not be sidetracked into trying to define it as (merely) a want or (essentially) a need. Nothing wrong with a person desiring s e x nor for recognising that this can be painfully and unhealthily experienced if not satisfied. None of which means that anyone has the right to impose sex on any unwilling partner.

Off course that desire can only legitimately be consummated through consensual s e x and if no other willing partners are available – then going to a s e x worker is one way to get it fulfilled consensually.

Sadly we live in a world where we still suffer from the malign influences of repressive religionists who saw (some still see) s e x as only available as a mechanism procreation aka recruitment of children into the religion. S e x for pleasure from such a perspective is wicked – hence all our restrictions.

So, IMHO – nothing wrong here. All the stuff about the s e x industry being (in parts) oppressive doesn’t alter the case. Where oppression exists it should be dealt with – most easily by legitimating the industry – then by dealing robustly with those who don’t follow the rules. We manage clubs and bars where a dangerous drug (alcohol) is sold and consumed – often with harmful consequences. So s e x clubs and brothels should not be beyond our wits to manage.

The argument about the charity organisation which might facilitate the arrangement, being only “technically” a charity makes little sense to me. Either it is or it isn’t. The person quoted seems as though she didn’t approve of sex being sold in any circumstances.

[…] today most people look with horror at an idea that implies women’s bodies are a resource.

Would these be the same people who support ‘sex work’ as a career option?

this is an excellent companion piece to the lead story on the current splash page…How the mob can silence you

It amazes me how the concept of “inalienable”, “universal” human rights time and time again finds itself pushing more and more ridiculous frontiers and yet somehow more people don’t see it for the nonsense it is. Instead they bicker over where the boundary line should be for this castle built on sand.

Article 16: One has the right to found a family [which requires and implies a right to the act of s e x].

Article 24: One has the right to leisure [which includes access to paid services].

Article 25: (1) One has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and of one’s family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26: One has the right to education. Education shall be free.

From articles 25 and 26: One HAS the human right to s e x ually satisfy oneself as much as one is consensually able, and it IS the responsibility of the state to foot the bill for the consequences for this DESIRE, regardless of the cost, the long and short term effects of subsidising this moral and social morass or the effect of raising increasing numbers of children in this morass or how unpleasant and distasteful some find subsidising this practice and its consequences .

The above is inalienable and one’s birth right for existing and if anyone were to deprive one of these rights (presumably financial difficulties aren’t an excuse for violating human rights), they would be committing a grievous sin. We are entitled to be free from the consequences of s e x (at great financial and societal cost) and even to have the act financially incentivised but the state paying for the act is beyond the pale?

Article 22: One is entitled to realisation of economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for one’s dignity and the free development of one’s personality. [presumably including access to and financial support for articles 16, 24, 25, 26.]

Article 27: One also has right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community [which in our increasingly libertine age, includes the commodification of s e x.]

There is a precedent for:
– a right to the act of s e x
– a right to financial subsidy for the consequences of s e x
– a right to leisure
– a right to state subsidy for personal and social fulfilment

States providing access to s e x services is a natural progression of the sacred texts of human rights, no matter how distasteful Ms Perry finds it.

Ms Perry’s problem is that she has seen a glitch in the matrix and is no longer in communion with the progressive faithful (presumably why she is writing here). Unfortunately for her, one cannot stop “progress” while still in the progressive frame of equalities and rights, as any embittered conservative here will tell you.