Sex workers are safer in massage parlours

Recently I was at a massage parlour being treated to a blissful and much needed forty minutes of curvy female company with a girl called Krystal, who sweetly let me have it for the price of thirty. (It was the first time in a month - I've been good.) Nearing the end of our time, as we were getting dressed, there was a knock on the door and a woman's voice asked "Everything alright in there?". Krystal called back a cheery "Fine, thanks."

This is exactly why the government is wrong to try to ban massage parlours. In a flat with a couple of girls and a maid, a girl gets some backup, not to mention some company. What if things had not been alright, if I'd been some aggressive creep wanting more than he paid for? I don't know who else was at that place but there would have been at least two women to chuck me out. A creep might not even try anything if he knows there are other people around.

Of course you will read sensationalist reports of women being locked up, beaten and drugged by pimps, of under-age sex and people-trafficking, but I have never seen any evidence of this. Of course the gun-running people-trafficking pimps would want to hide this from the customers so perhaps I should not expect to see anything, but I still find it hard to believe they could hide so much abuse so well, or that the girls could be so cheerful, friendly and enthusiastic under threat of gang violence. The phone is almost always answered by a woman. When you arrive you are almost always let in and shown to a room by a woman. In fact I have only ever come across one massage parlour where a man answered the door (and the girl I saw there told me she was leaving because the hours didn't suit her, unusual I would think for victims of people trafficking and drug addiction), and I find reports describing, for example, male brothel owners making misogynistic comments to researchers about the availability of dirty Thai bitches and the like quite unrepresentative of anything I have ever seen myself. In any case, pimps are surely less necessary now that we have the Internet. I don't need a pimp to find me some female company. I can just browse for services on the web and book them myself.

I mentioned Harriet Harman and the idiocy of the government proposals to Krystal, to be immediately cut short with "You're not going to talk politics, are you?" and I realised I had lowered the tone. I made my excuses and left.