Yeah, "public space for women" is such bs! Especially when the women were forced there and not allowed to leave: > Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (18

Yeah, "public space for women" is such bs! Especially when the women were forced there and not allowed to leave: > Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: "the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep… later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw" ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw ... While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out. ---- Perhaps I am being puritanical here, but I've never understood this obsession of some trying to associate women's right with prostitution. Everywhere in the world, even in countries where prostitution is legalised / regulated, it is only the desperate and economically weak women who are pushed into this trade and it invariably gives rise to a parallel and illegal industry of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Worse, where it is legalised, the administration and police largely ignore such illegal sex trafficking as prostitution is now an "economic activity" (until of course there is a public outcry and / or international outrage - Denmark made child pornography illegal only in 1980's!). Even where religious sanctions for prostitution are available, the prostitutes are both admired and looked down upon by some and face repeated sexual violence (God’s Wife, Every Man’s Woman: The Lives of 'Joginis' in South India - https://thewire.in/rights/photos-sexual-slavery-ban-telangana-south-india-dalit https://thewire.in/rights/photos-sexual-slavery-ban-telangan... ). I do know that there have been periods in the Islamic empire and in Asia, where courtesans, who also sometimes prostituted themselves (often not out of choice), had some semblance of respect and rights largely because they were also highly talented artists (singers, dancers, musicians etc) but mainly because they had the patronage of the rich and the powerful. But once that patronage was lost, they were often vilified by society despite their talents. (All said, I am really unsure on whether glorification of prostitution in the media is good or bad though).