TheRiddlerMan

Once upon a time I would have said yes, you should be honest and tell her about your past. As the years have passed though, I've come to realize that some skeletons should remain buried. Attitudes towards sex workers may be changing, but johns remain a despised group. In most cases, you'll be seen either as not much better than a sex offender and/or too pathetic to make it with a woman without paying her. I would strongly advise caution in future relationships, and keep in mind that if you tell someone and it ends badly, you've given them a weapon to hold over your head.

piano8950

 

I just read about your experience.

 

I'm glad that you have no regrets! Good for you.

 

Part of what is holding me back right now is a seed that a good friend planted in my head. Is your experience something that you feel the need to keep to yourself? In other words, if you find a partner and have a serious relationship, is this something that you'd feel the need to tell her as part of your history OR keep it from her?

 

Thanks and good 4 u!

Foolish move, more ppl would flock there if it were common.

 

Along with LE, who would shut the place down. That's illegal even under the current laws, let alone what we'll see with the new bill.

I think at this point we're beyond opinions pro or con, and are simply going to have to deal with the facts. The law is going to pass. It may have some minor amendments and tinkering around the advertising restrictions, but the bulk will be going into effect no later than the fall.

Is it unconstitutional? Quite possibly, but that does nothing for today, tomorrow or next year. It'll still be working through the courts when we go to the polls in 2015, and probably years past that point. In the meantime, we will all have to adjust to this new situation and what impacts it will have on real world scenarios.

Definitely a compartmentalized life, I trust no one with this aspect of it. It's just the way things are. More so now than ever with the massive negative publicity around the new law, which reinforces all the usual stereotypes.

Thanks for the info Kathryn Bardot. Seems there are still a lot of fine details to be worked out. I'm all for the sex work industry, NOT against it.

 

So, yes Kathryn you are correct in what you said. Sex work is not illegal, I was wrong. Although still some finer details to be worked out. I hope for the best outcome of course. Keep it Rosey xo xo

It's about to be made illegal for buyers and with various restrictions for sellers (no potential exposure to kids, limited advertising venues, etc). The new law will be in place by the late fall.

The best SP/MA encounters I've had have always been with women who I've clicked with. It's still about the sexual release, but that's so much better with someone I can talk to.

I would caution the original poster though to remember that it is a service industry. I've talked to several providers who've been hounded by men who lost sight of the difference, guys who forgot that the "girlfriend experience" was on an hourly rate. It's great if an encounter can reduce your loneliness, but it's important to always keep that fact in mind.

So, there's a good chance that after the next challenge prostitution will be decriminalized?

You're dreaming if you think the Liberals would support decriminalization. As others have said, the Conservative bill is not really the Nordic model. You guys keep thinking that the Nordic model is a social conservative thing. It's the opposite, a progressive idea out of socialist Europe. It's being used by Harper as a means to an end, that's all. I suspect that if this bill is struck down during a Liberal government, they will strip out the restrictions on the sex workers and go with a straightforward "charge the johns" bill.

Keep in mind that while texting in the traditional sense will certainly be risky, there are mobile apps that are specifically designed not to keep a record of anything. I suspect that will be the direction things will move in for providers who maintain an online presence. It's good for clients but it has the side effect of eliminating any means for sex workers to verify if the guy is legit (which is why most providers don't take blocked calls now). That's exactly what the sex provider groups claimed would happen, of course.

 

 

And that is definitely an issue. I think i posted probably in this thread regarding public opinion (based on reading thousands of comment posts in a few articles that came out (against this bill), and it has been suggested that the govt plans for this bill to fail. Not just a little bit of a failure, but a huge failure. At which time they can say to their abolitionist and NIMBY supporters how hard they tried to do the right thing, but those evil pot smoking harlot loving Liberals/NDP/Bloq perverts resisted the chance to help the victims, so it failed. Oh well, see you next election, where we will be sure to remind you about those other political party perverts who want 15 year old forced sex work labour on every schoolyard corner!

They have a majority. In a Parliamentary democracy, when the government has a majority our only recourse is the courts or a wave of negative publicity. Look at the election act bill, where the Conservatives made it harder for first generation immigrants, aboriginals, the homeless, etc to vote...despite universal opposition and massive negative publicity, they only backed down slightly in the end. If they're willing to effectively disenfranchise the most vulnerable sections of the population, do you really think they'll hesitate here?

We should expect the bill to pass as is. It'll be up to the courts to strike it down.

Additional Comments:

You will not be prosecuted but it is still illegal and no one is allowed to take money from you for advertisement. Also the government can force such advertisements to be taken down.

That's the thing, someone has to host the ads. Anyone willing to run such a site will probably have to take a page from the Pirate Bay and find a country that hosts anything, no questions asked.

Additional Comments:

One thing that I find particularly nasty relates to this story:

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/05/24/420000_in_police_database_never_convicted_analysis.html

Basically, any interaction with the police for any reason puts you into a database. Mental health issues, false charges, even just talking to a cop could flag you. The next time you try to cross into the US, or renew your government security clearance or even rent an apartment they'll pull the previous incident. Anyone who works in a bureaucracy can tell you that these databases just grow and grow, and no one cares if it makes any sense for you to be in there. A criminal background check will pick it up, and it's game over.

 

Sex workers are largely hidden too, and also frequently despised.

 

Of course they are, they're the real victims of this law. It's a bizarre hybrid, a combination of reactionary conservatism which considers them to be fallen women and progressives who believe that they are products of misogyny and unable to decide for themselves. It's cynical and sad, especially when we all know some of the writers of this bill were checking their watches to see when they could get out to see their favorite provider. I'm just being realistic about how it will really go, when the dust settles and the law is in place.

No one says you have to out yourselves. But staying under your rock helps no one. As Charlotte said in another post: Donate to sex worker orgs like POWER, Stella, and Maggie's. Go to protest events incognito. When prostitution/the law comes up around the water cooler, speak up and say that you do not support criminalization which only begets more violence.

 

There are ways to speak up that do not out yourself as a client.

Those are all good suggestions, and I'll see what I can do along those lines. My point though was really more that the heavy lifting is inevitably going to be done by the sex workers. The ones marching, giving interviews, being out in the open and exposed to the violence and social disdain. I think that's important to be clear on, more important than just saying "I'm with you" and going on with life as normal.

That bolded bit is exactly the kind of thinking that keeps this movement from getting anywhere. If clients actually spoke up, as a group, and said, we are not perverts--the sheer numbers of you would send a very strong message. And please don't take this the wrong way, but sex workers have a lot more to lose than you do--like our lives.

Absolutely sex workers have to more to lose overall. Your clients will never speak together as a group though. If even a hint of this activity reached my "real life", I'd lose my home immediately and my job would soon follow. That's true whatever law gets passed, or if there's no law at all. That's just the way it is, and I know that's true for a lot of other guys reading this.

It may be unfair, but that's reality. The fight will be waged by sex workers, and we will stay underneath our rocks.

So... reading stuff in this thread, and elsewhere on the interwebs, I've realized that there's another very important point that needs to be made.

...

There's a long way to go. We've seen the government's opening salvo; now it's up to us to return fire. And some version of this bill, be it more or less bad, will probably become law in the not-too-distant future... and that'll be the end of another battle, which we'll have fought on fundamentally unfavourable ground. But after that, there will be legal challenges, and the campaign will once again move to the courts.

...

In any event, we're on the right side of history, and we'll get there in the end.

I agree that it's wrong to be bitter about the original court challenge, as sex workers have a clear right to work in safety. They had no way of knowing which way the winds were going to blow politically. To be honest though...there is no "we", not when you get down to actions and not words. Johns are a hidden group, despised by society. People may or may not see sex workers as victims, but everyone detests their clients. It'll be up to the sex workers themselves to fight this law. We'll cheer from the sidelines, but the vast majority of us have far too much to lose to do anything openly.

One of the ironies of this law is that it will create the adversarial relationship its creators believe is already inherent in sex work. Where will the trust be, especially for people new to the industry? We will have to assume the worst, due to the potential consequences if we don't. All the critiques are accurate when it comes to how it will impact sex work, but this government has never listened to criticism unless a political gun was pointed at its head.

I'm not sure why some people here think this is going to be amended or defeated. They have a majority, so even if the opposition was willing to fight hard against it wouldn't matter. I doubt very much that either the NDP or Liberals would fight it anyway. The only political reaction I saw was quite muted. This is not a major issue for the public and won't affect the next election at all.

The only chance I see is that Harper decides to ignore his own law again and call a snap election before the bill is done in Parliament. If so, it would die on the table with everything else and the next government would have to reintroduce legislation. That's pretty remote though.

It's clear that this is intended as an easy "we're tough on sex trafficking/pedophiles/perverts" win and also to mollify NIMBYs. I doubt it will survive a court challenge but that will take years to go through the system.

It's also clearly aimed at backpage.com style advertising, which sadly encompasses this site and others like it. Independents may have the right to continue advertising, but they'll have to do it on foreign-hosted forums or through their own sites. Agencies and (depending on how broadly sexual services are defined) massage parlours are done. Certainly the spas with casual attitudes towards "extras" will have to be a lot more careful. So will the strip clubs.

There's a lot of latitude also in the bill for zealous municipalities to greatly restrict the "legal" sex work. Any residential area, apartment building, etc has the potential for children to be exposed if you interpret it broadly enough. It could mean we're heading back to the days when hotel outcalls were the dominant way to meet.

I hope you've all been careful with what you post in public and in private about your real identities, addresses, etc on sites like Cerb. It's true that the government lacks the resources to really police at that level, but they only need to make a few examples to put fear into the rest. Normal text messaging would certainly require burn phones - if you were trading texts with a sex worker and she was busted for working near kids, all her saved numbers would fall into a police file. Not where I'd want my name to be, whether they act on it or not. At least there are existing mobile apps which can be adapted for this, the ones that delete all traces after a set time.

Get your fun in while you can, kids. A brave new world is about to begin.

In my case it's more for organizational purposes and convenience, but really both cash and credit leave paper trails. If I actually shared my accounts with my SO, I'm not sure how unexplained $200 cash withdrawals would be more discreet than generic credit charges for that amount. If someone were to look at my account activities over the years, 99% of withdrawals in amounts like that would have been paying for the time of a lady friend soon after.

Of course, if the credit card transaction is billed to "Suzy's Hot Sex Services" or something like that it'd be a problem, heh.

For various reasons it's easier for me to pay on a card than by cash, but only a few providers offer this (which I can understand, given the paper trail, extra costs, etc). Jessica Massage is one, are there any others?

I'd direct this at SPs too, if any happen to be reading this forum.

That's the thing, they won't need to enforce it often. They just need a couple of client busts of known providers and make sure the word gets out. Most of us can't take even a small chance of having it happen.

With regards to sites like this, just the other day it came out how aggressively the government has been going after user data from the ISPs. Once paying for sex is illegal, they would be within their rights to obtain our information without any notification to us. If you arrange a meeting through an online forum, you could end up with a nasty surprise on the other end.

It would be incredibly stupid to go that route, especially for the Barefax which is already in the public eye due to the Brazeau affair. A "now they sell sex where a Senator worked" story would make a great lead for the Ottawa Sun. I don't know about you, but media attention isn't what I look for when I go to these places.

I do think the clubs are turning a blind eye now to activities they would have clamped down on in the past. The smarter ones are probably waiting to see what happens with the new law being drawn up by the Conservatives. If the government puts the hammer down I'm sure the clubs will go back to enforcing limitations on what goes on in the CR.

Harper personally is clearly anti-abortion, and has declared that numerous times. However, he does not believe that it is right for the Government to dictate on the issue as it is a complex and personal question. For that reason he has stifled all attempts by the anti lobby to raise it again as an issue in the House. Something that goes against his own interests and beliefs but that he sees as an issue that the government should not dictate on.

That's funny, you make it sound like a principled decision. The reality is, social conservatism is the ticket to a political grave in this country. Harper knows that, which is why he muzzled them as soon as he took over the party. Start talking about abortion or same sex marriage and watch the seats vanish before you can say "Stockwell Day".

This issue is much the same, and I know he does not want to live or die on it. He may be opposed to legalization because of his own beliefs, but he does credit most Canadians with being able to decide for themselves what is right and wrong for them, without having the Government dictate it for them. Stop reading the Toronto Star and listening to CBC radio, Robert Fife and all the rest of the sensationalist journalists. See what the law says before we start crying gloom and doom.

This issue isn't even remotely the same. You're completely mistaking support for decriminalization as a lesser evil solution for social acceptance of prostitution. People may not believe sex work should be illegal, but johns are universally despised. No one is going to go to the mat to defend our right to pay women for sex, and no one is going to care if we end up in jail for doing so. No one except for the sex workers themselves, the people the Nordic model considers to be our victims. Quite ironic, really.

Had a great session with Jessy today. She's super hot and a nice person too (my favorite combination). Highly recommended.

I fully understand the need for the confidentiality of Sex workers and clients to be protected in any "In Person" consultations that might be undertaken what I fail to understand is why no sex rights workers or so few if any sex workers or clients were aware of the consultation process. Due process and fairness would suggest that the Government should have put in place a process that would gave made the industry aware of the consultation and sought expressions of interest from parties interested in appearing.

 

If you secretly hold a meeting that you either don't invite people to or you hand pick the representatives don't go expecting a great airing of the issues in the industry.

 

Just my opinion

Of course they weren't consulted. This is a government in the process of effectively disenfranchising the most vulnerable groups in society who oddly enough also happen to never vote Conservative. Do you really think they would engage in real discussion over this issue? The consultations are a smokescreen, one they can use to pick a few responses which coincide with what they're going to do anyway.

I'm amazed that some people actually believe they would care what either providers or their clients think they should do. They're the last people on Earth the Conservatives would value for input.

I find that with strip clubs there's a clear division between types of clients. You have the groups that come in, drinking beer and laughing their way through the stage dances. They ogle the girls and talk to them, and might or might not be convinced to go upstairs with one, but that's not the primary reason they go. Those are the people who probably also miss the good old days.

Then there are the ones who come in alone, sit by themselves and are looking for a private dance as soon as possible. For them the stage dances are at best an advertisement for who to go somewhere private with. The club is just a means to an end.

I fall into the latter group. I don't drink, don't like loud groups of people of either gender and generally am bored with the stage dances (with the occasional exception, when the stripper actually seems to be enjoying herself). I'm there for the private dances, and that's it. The sooner I find what I'm looking for, the sooner I'm out the door. For me, the way things are now is just fine.

It's funny though - the first group makes more money for the club, and people like me are the bread and butter for the dancers. I suppose everyone is making money or it wouldn't work, heh.

This is one time where I'd love to be proven wrong, but I really don't think I will. We'll know soon enough.

I agree that it would be difficult to enforce, but all they need is a few high profile arrests making news to put the fear of god into the rest of us. Also, how could we continue posting reviews of providers online? There's no issue now because paying for sex isn't illegal, but once it is we'd be admitting to a criminal activity every time we posted.

Seems to me that sites like Cerb would have to evolve into pure advertising sites. The providers could post their ads, but the clients could no longer interact the way we do now. Using aliases is no real defense, after all.

I answered in more depth in the 'Ask a hobbyist thread' but in short...

 

The Nordic model would be extremely difficult to enforce in respect to indoor sex workers. Even sex workers who widely advertise specific services and fees still have private sex lives and having sex with a guy is no proof he paid. This is also assuming the cops have somehow got a warrant to enter a private hotel room or residence. There has to be proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Without actually viewing the exchange of money this is virtually impossible in the indoor world.

 

What is at risk are new providers (they could be under cover cops), agency-run incalls (possible to get a warrant, more justification that the reason for visiting is to pay for sex).

 

I really, really doubt our indoor will be affected very much at all.

 

Personally I don't see the verification systems doing well at all. Signing up for one as a male (where you pay a fee) would be a step towards establishing proof you intended to purchase sex and could get used against you. A review by a trusted hobbyist here on CERB is all I'd need to know the lady wasn't an undercover cop. These systems are more common in the U.S. where its most often the women charged.

I've read stories in the Citizen, Sun and even CBC now about the Barefax, complete with video feeds and pictures. I enjoyed going there but I'm not coming within a mile of the place now, can't take the chance of ending up as background on some reporter's update on the crooked senator turned strip club manager.

Makes me wonder about strip club economics. I'm sure Brazeau will bring more groups of people, the ones that spend their money on booze while they ogle the girls. I sit by myself and never get more than a token drink, but I spend plenty in the back. If guys like me avoid the place but they get more groups buying beer, are they making more money? They must get a cut of the upstairs dances, and the strippers certainly don't want their regulars going elsewhere.