Vice to meet you

Prostitution is a jolly good laugh on the sitcom Respectable; less so in real life. I could have probably worked that out by myself, but a report released today emphasises the position of women who are basically treated as slaves thanks to human trafficking. It also uses this catch-all explanation: "Divorce rates, sex tourism, stag weekends, lads' mags and the ubiquity of internet pornography". So boys' leisure activities are to blame for keeping the people traffickers in work, rather than the traffickers themselve. Hmmm ...

Incidentally, it's interesting to see the BBC reproducing internet brothel reviews on its news website. These are probably extracted from Punternet, a brothel creepers' site linked to by the Guardian and already featured extensively in a recent Guardian report. If I couldn't find a local brothel before, I sure can now.

The obscurantist French philosopher Michel Foucault had a point: the more vocally a society disapproves of sexual vices, the more its members get to know about them.