A German lawmaker has proposed a controversial law to the government which calls on the nation’s healthcare system to expand its services to brothels in order to provide sexual services to the elderly and disabled.
Elizabeth Scharfenberg of the Green Party is arguing that doctors should be allowed to provide prescriptions to brothels to patients who have proven that they are unable to seek sexual relief elsewhere.
Prostitution has been legal in Germany since 2002, and since then, the free market has established over 3,000 red-light establishments across the country. It is Scharfenberg’s wish that these brothels may be used in a more therapeutic way, with the help of her bill.
According to the bill, patients must display an inability to achieve sexual satisfaction through organic means before being prescribed a trip to the brothel. Beneficiaries of the bill would be “unable to achieve sexual satisfaction in other ways, as well as to prove they are not able to pay sex workers on their own.”
Already in Germany, legal brothels have created more therapeutic services for elderly and disabled clients. This bill would just allow these sexual services to be prescribed by doctors as medical services.
Sex coach and author Vanessa del Rae told the Daily Mail:
“In Germany in recent years we have seen the advent of sexual companions, especially trained in relation to the sexual needs of elderly men and women.”
This possible step forward is another way that the German nation is paying attention to more than just the medical care of the elderly and disabled being cared for in their health system. To those who propose this bill, sexual satisfaction and healing can be vital to the recovery and mental well-being of patients.
While those of us in the U.S. can not imagine such a progressive, sex-positive law passing here, it will be interesting to see if the German government embraces this state-sanctioned sex act.
