For instance, there are legal brothels in Nevada, USA, due to the legalization of prostitution in some areas of the state. Prostitution and the operation of brothels are legal in some countries, but illegal in others. Sex work in a brothel is considered safer than street prostitution.
Ī brothel is a commercial establishment where people may engage in sexual activity with a prostitute, though for legal or cultural reasons they may describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs or by some other description. Yet even where it is illegal, a thriving underground business usually exists because of high demand and the high income that can be made by pimps, brothel owners, escort agencies, and traffickers. The legality of prostitution and associated activities (soliciting, brothels, procuring) varies by jurisdiction. Institutionalized racism in the United States has been cited as a reason for the prevalence of sex workers who are Black or other people of color, as this leads to inequality and a lack of access to resources. Other reasons include displacement due to conflict and war. Socialist and radical feminists have cited poverty, oppressive capitalistic processes, and patriarchal societies that marginalizes people based on race and class as reasons for the continued presence of prostitution, as these aspects all work together to maintain oppression. Reasons as to why an individual may enter into prostitution are varied. In some cases, the prostitute is at liberty to determine whether she or he will engage in a particular type of sexual activity, but forced prostitution and sexual slavery does exist in some places around the world. Prostitution involves a prostitute or sex worker providing commercial sexual services to a client. Often this is arranged through a pimp or an escort agency. Prostitution is a main component of the sex industry and may take place in a brothel, at a facility provided by the prostitute, at a client's hotel room, in a parked car, or on the street. When people talked of commercial sex they meant Playboy." A 1976 article in The New York Times by columnist Russell Baker claimed that "ost of the problems created by New York City's booming sex industry result from the city's reluctance to treat it as an industry", arguing why sex shops constituted an "industry", and should be treated as such by concentrating them in a single neighborhood, suggesting the "sex industry" was not yet commonly recognized as such. A 1977 report by the Ontario Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry ( LaMarsh Commission) quoted author Peter McCabe as writing in Argosy: "Ten years ago the sex industry did not exist. The origins of the term sex industry are uncertain, but it appears to have arisen in the 1970s.