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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

People who aren't prostitutes also have sex in hotels you know.

Not cleaning up after themselves is a valid complaint but doesn't seem something specific to prostitutes.

Higher rates of STD's however...

I'm all for legalization, but if you run a brothel out of my place I'm going to be seriously pissed off and not just get all libertarian about it. I will after all, have rented under non-commercial grounds anyway; I'd be pissed if you ran a pop-up restaurant there too.

This STD argument is silly. You aren't going to get an STD from cleaning up used condoms.

Hep C is more than able to survive outside of the body (especially in a little pocket of nutrient-rich fluids) for quite some time (as in weeks). I grant you the odds of contracting it from even sexual contact, never mind casual contact with a condom is extremely low, but it's still a fucking biohazard you shouldn't have to deal with. The odds of being struck and killed by a bullet fired up into the air is vanishingly small too, but it's happened, and since it's unconscionable to randomly discharge your firearm into the air, it's unacceptable too.

Needless to say, when you don't intend to rent your home out as a business, it's equally unacceptable if someone decides to use it as one.

Edit: I... just realized how Freudian my analogy of "discharging firearms into the air" is. I really should get more sleep.

It's an insignificant risk. Virtually zero if you just use ordinary cleaning gloves. It surely can't be the risk of infection that is the issue here.

...It's an insignificant risk that a reasonable person renting their home under AirBnB contract should neither expect, nor tolerate. As to the rest, I've talked about the other reasonable concerns a homeowner might have in other parts of this thread.

Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. If the risk is insignificant then of course the owner should tolerate it. All the stuff about STIs is transparently just a post-hoc rationalization of people's disapproval of prostitution.

I specifically am for legalization of prostitution.

So... time to rethink your position; I'd be absolutely furious in this guy's position, and "The risk is incredibly low," would frankly piss me off even more. Your argument is about as weak as someone smoking a ton of pot in someone's house, then bitching about prohibition. I'm against prohibition, and also against you stinking up my house.

If you try to pigeonhole all of the people you disagree with, you will turn into a caricature no less absurd than the ones you're trying to create.

But you wouldn't be furious because you were worried about getting HIV or Hep C from handling a used condom. If you want to be furious for some other reason, fine.

Plenty of people who think that prostitution should be legal still disapprove of it, by the way.

I truly don't care; the notion that somehow fucking someone makes you a bad person, while fucking an economy or a nation doesn't, never sat well with me.

Sure, I just don't understand why you're insisting on this point about STIs. Disposing of a used condom with gloves is a zero risk activity. Without gloves the risk is still too low to be quantifiable.

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