Prostitution is a rotten thing, dangerous, filthy and soul-destroying. And yet male customers keep it going, along with an endless PR campaign — in tandem with activist prostitutes — about catering to its inevitability.

But is it inevitable? Throughout history, people have taken dangerous drugs, committed suicide, raped their offspring and behaved appallingly and self-destructively in a huge expandable array of acts, but we don’t shrug and say, “Such is life.” We work with great passion to put a stop to it. As we should.

So why are Torontonians suddenly so passive in response to the Ontario Court of Appeal decision allowing brothels? We aren’t even waiting for the appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. We’re rolling over for the sexual small-business mentality and considering making it easier for brutes to rent the bodies of desperate women and men.

We are now earnestly discussing how brothels are okay really, and accepting the self-serving advice of madams that condo towers are full of lite-whorehouses anyway and that a red-light district is simple good sense. You know, for that type of person, we think patronizingly. But we’re being scammed.

It’s patronizing reverse-liberalism. We think we’re being kind to prostitutes when in fact we’re skating away from the hard work of helping them. It’s too much trouble to contemplate fixing the root problems they face: their poverty, despair, drug addiction and sheer lack of life options. And for so little gratitude! So we curl up like possums and pass ourselves off as humane.

If Toronto is in fact thick with mom-and-pop brothels — the implication being that these cosy places offer butter tarts in the parlour for gentleman callers — then we and our children are sharing the elevators with johns. We’re in more danger inside than we are outside from falling glass. If I don’t want prostitute-buyers in my neighbourhood, I shouldn’t be blithe about their marching about the neighbourhoods of the poor.

I don’t like these men and I won’t tolerate feeding their sexual ineptitude. Let them wash up, buy women a drink and take their chances like the rest of us. This is Toronto, not a Chicken Ranch.

Street sex workers have to be protected from violent men. It’s up to the police to do that. The fact that the Vancouver police aggressively ignored the Vancouver women who disappeared at the hands of serial killer Robert Pickton is not a reason to give the police a pass. As Angel Wolfe, the daughter of Brenda Wolfe, one of Pickton’s first victims, said tearfully and angrily after the ruling, “I believe that all women should be shown a viable way out of the sex trade.”

Who knows better than this brave young woman? When we give up on fighting prostitution, it means we are bowing not just to johns but to incompetent cops.

Why not fight prostitution itself? It’s a great battle that should never cease. In 1847, Charles Dickens came up with an idea for a refuge for London women selling their bodies to survive. This “house of fallen women,” named Urania Cottage, was financed by Dickens’ friend, an heiress named Angela Burdett Coutts.

For 16 years, until Dickens’ own domestic life fell apart, it provided a home, care and feeding for street women so poor we can hardly imagine it today. It trained them for the meagre work available to poor Victorian women — mainly sewing and housekeeping — and also offered passage to the colonies for female Oliver Twists wanting to escape their past lives.

Yes, it was patronizing. Yes, it was punishing. But it offered a life raft.

The magnificent Dickens always wanted to improve lives being lived, throwing himself into causes with a scary energy and eloquence. I can’t imagine what he’d say if he heard us today saying, yes, if our daughters “want to” provide oral sex to buy the drugs they’re hooked on, who are we to deny them?

And how wearying it would be to try.

I see this fatigue in many fields now. Why shouldn’t wealthy Canadians pay South Asian surrogates to endure embryo implantations and bear them children? If vaginas are nice earners for prostitutes, why shouldn’t underperforming wombs be pressed into trade too? By all means, buy the kidneys of the poor of Eastern Europe. They do have two, after all.

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We’re sliding down the slipperiest of slopes. Every organ is a commodity. Where’s the harm?

The harm can be seen on the faces and bodies of prostitution’s victims. The damage to their heart’s core is invisible, but that doesn’t make it incalculable.