In Australia, prostitution is legal

We’re walking down the street and and my travel partner, who is from Australia, goes, “and this would be a brothel” …. one of the things I learned on this trip was that, prostitution is legal in Australia. That said, each state seems to have legalized it differently. In some, independent sex workers without any government regulation are ok, but whore houses are not; while in other parts of Australia, like New South Wales — where Sydney is– it’s exactly the opposite — sex workers are heavily regulated/tested, etc., and tend to work in whore houses. That said, I’m really no expert on this so I could be getting it wrong…

I will say this, Australian whore house, a country where it’s legal, are a lot harder to spot than the South Korean ones (where I used to work), where it’s not legal.

In Korea what you tend to see are “happy ending massage parlors” but everyone knows that they offer much more than that; and they are really easy to spot because they have two spinning barbershop poles side by side in front of them… even though in South Korea prostitution is “technically” illegal. In fact whore houses in Korea were so common and easy to spot that it was a running joke among my students.

What’s interesting to me is that while I’ve always heard about people traveling to Thailand or the Amsterdam and places like that, to partake of the sex trade, I’ve never heard of folks coming to Australia for it… live and learn.