Sex is a primal urge. Yet libido rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
Most humans have sex, sometimes with love, just as often without. In marriage, outside of marriage, as a side dish to marriage. It's not ours to judge.
But if you pay for it — or charge for it — a kind of atavistic wrath, from a disapproving society, will fall on your head.
Prostitutes are just about the last breed of people who can be publicly excoriated for what they are, in a language of loathing that would be intolerable if applied to anyone else. It's the argot of shaming. And the attitudes that lie beneath — their lesser status as human beings, because they trade in flesh — is precisely what permits the widespread abuse of women and men who retail their bodies, such that even their murders can pass without vigorous investigation.
In the antiquated semantics of policing and criminal code legislation, sex is still a vice. Merchandising it is a crime, soliciting it is a crime, purchasing it is a crime, in all but the most narrowly defined circumstances. But using sex to sell product — that's advertising. Using sex to titillate — that's entertainment. Using sex to snare a partner — that's courtship.
It was interesting to read an
investigative report on the front page of Saturday's
Star, detailing what was described as "brothels-in-the-sky'' — prostitutes working out of residential high-rise buildings in Toronto, a phenomenon that is clearly bugging the snot out of many fellow tenants who, presumably, get their own sex by more conventional means. Bully for them. Others don't have sex so close to hand. They have to go looking for it. Fortunately, there are plenty of sex-trade workers willing to provide the service. That doesn't make either prostitute or customer a monster.
The prostitutes and their clients were portrayed with ripe descriptors, variously derided for their provocative clothing, their cheap cologne, their contaminating presence. A property manager likened them to "cockroaches.'' One morally upright resident said she felt like bathing her kids in Lysol after elevator encounters with the whores. Is this because of exposure to their moral depravity? Or the toxic aura of the stigmatized sex they make?
Insofar as any of this is a genuine quality-of-life urban issue — and I do understand the discomfort zone created by overt sexual entrepreneurship, although I don't share the repugnance — it was created by a circle-jerk dance of the deviant: The forces of good shutting down pseudo "holistic centres'' operating as de facto bordellos. Two decades ago, it was massage parlours.
Only to arise anew, this time burrowing more deeply into residential neighbourhoods. Whence, it should be noted, come their clientele. Those are your husbands and sons and brothers, looking to get laid. And what of it? Maybe sex is just an uncomplicated grunt with a stranger for them. Maybe they strike out in bars. Maybe they come from cultures where dating isn't permitted, much less sexual intimacy. Maybe they're not getting any at home.
There's no point trying to figure out motive. The groin wants what it wants. And there's even less point trying to smother biological imperatives. It's bred in the bone, if steeped in hypocrisy. Righteous preachers who bible-thump about sin get caught with their pants down. Cops who arrest johns coerce hookers into giving them freebies. Politicians who promote "family values'' fall victim to honey-traps.
Even in our sophisticated, judgment-neutral society, there is a resistant puritan streak that thinks it can and should control lust. Apart from creating a sexual bureaucracy— the vice squads that arrest them, the Crown attorneys who prosecute them, the lawyers who defend them — nothing has changed. The sex is still there. It will always be.
Over the years, I have covered countless commissions and task forces and public consultations on prostitution. Inevitably, somebody will propose creating red-light districts — sex ghettos — where prostitutes can operate legally, under a stern regulatory eye, subject to health inspection, taxation, and otherwise treated with odious paternalism. The implication is that prostitutes require looking after, as if they were children or morons, and the rest of us need to be protected from them. They have to be segregated.
This is so palpably not the way to go. But nobody listens to the core pleading of sex-trade workers that prostitution be "decriminalized" so they can work safely from their homes, without threat of arrest, in control of their environment and their patrons.
"Here's the major problem,'' says Valerie Scott, executive director of Sex Professionals of Canada (founded 1983, née Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes), and a practitioner for decades. "The existing legislation sees what we do as a vice. It doesn't see it as a legitimate business.''
Bawdy house rules make it illegal to work from their homes. "Living off the avails," intended to curb pimping, isolates them. "That criminalizes all of our healthy and normal relationships. We're not allowed to have a lover, a spouse, a roommate. We're so dirty, so morally bankrupt, that anyone who associates with us should be in jail. If I send a Christmas present to my parents, technically even that's illegal, because it comes from the profits of prostitution.''
This is what happens in most jurisdictions, such as Amsterdam, where prostitution has been legalized: The house gets 50 per cent, the government takes 25 per cent, the women work 10-hour shifts, they're not permitted to decline a client, and the brothel operator commonly extorts sex for himself into the bargain. Dutch women on the game won't accept those conditions so they work illegally. "Those women in the windows? All foreigners, from Eastern European countries,'' says Scott. "They're the only ones willing to put up with that level of extortion.''
The international trafficking in sex slaves, that's an entirely different problem and should not be conflated with prostitution as a legitimate career choice. "If there's extortion, charge their handlers,'' says Scott. "Assault, intimidation, coercion, forcible confinement — charge them. If prostitution is decriminalized, it will make it a lot easier for those girls to get away. Deal with it as an immigration matter. As it is, we can't get to her. She's terrified of the police, of being deported."
Scott is equally contemptuous of the perception that prostitutes are unclean and need to be monitored up the wazoo. In fact, health studies in the United States have shown that sexually transmitted diseases are far less common among prostitutes than the general population. "I don't see anybody demanding that our clients be tested for STDs. See, they're morally clean. But prostitutes have been taking care of their own sexual health since before the invention of penicillin. And if the state tries to go poking around in my vagina, I won't allow it.''
It was Pierre Elliott Trudeau who famously declared that the state doesn't belong in the bedroom.
It doesn't belong in a prostitute's $-spot either.
