Red Lights and Looking Glass

In the evening, we headed off toward the red-light-district (singing Les Miserables in bad taste). I'm not sure what I expected, but what we saw was a series of typical beautiful streets along and across narrow waterways, lined by tall stone buildings, and filled with a rather smartly dressed crowd of 80:20 men:women. It was like the Las Vegas strip had been somehow magically transported to Venice. The crowds looked almost entirely wealthy and well dressed, usually in the late twenties to early thirties. Very much resembling the evening crowd in Vegas. Odd. And, red lights there were, illuminating glass doors behind which young, attractive (in the 'nice' areas) women in lingerie, usually grooming themselves in some casual manner or talking on cell phones. I saw one blonde woman, with long straight hair, and thin, even features shake her head and finger at one man who approached the glass-door, turning him away.
As I walked by, looking at the women like soulless barbie-dolls, looking at their bodies like a commodity, like produce to be weighed and priced, once in a while we would make eye contact. And for a second their features would fade from sur-reality and become instead a reflection of mine in the glass, a window into another dimension, that could so easily be our own. It was a good thing to see, a thing I'm glad to have seen, a thing to dissolve the Pretty-Woman notion of the wayward harlot awaiting her chivalrous client-prince, a thing of such complicated and still undeniable vulgarity. And I wonder who they are, what they think and believe, and how many seek to soften the daylight with the profits from the night.
And yet, human beings are sexual. Assuming that society is meant to (in part) restrain both instinct and perversion (the later defined by that society) what role do brothels play? I remember realizing in some teenage epiphany that any creative outlet (poetry specifically) was simply a component of societal repression, built into the system, to quell a larger rebellion by satiating anti-social tendencies on the small-scale. Is that the role of a brothel? To give outlet to those who cannot be satiated within traditionally acceptable means? Does this point to a flaw in the society? Are we too sexually oppressed?
The Comfort Stations that mainly kidnapped Korean women filled in World War Two were used to, well, service the Japanese service-men, and hopefully (according to the Japanese military) avoid another massacre like Nanking (in which 300,000 Chinese were raped, mutilated, killed). How is this defended? Where do we find morality or value in any part of this structure? And who is to blame? Is society the mother-hen checking the indulgent, violent, sadistic nature that humanity cannot help but fall prey to? Or is society the tyrannous, squeezing, grasping fist, the military-monster, the conquering-warlord, forcing men and women into passions of violent expression?
I have gone off subject...write comments. Propose a solution to the master-slave dialogue which will ensure a world where we don't breed children for brothels or battle.