Yet, if people are being prostituted, there are necessarily "prostitutors"- 99%
of them men - who buy or market these people being treated as consumer goods.
Prostitution is defined by male privilege, by the tastes and choices of a
sexist culture. Whether individual men choose to exert this privilege or not,
prostitution would not exist without them, their money, and their power.
By "disappearing" the role of men, the federal report obscures this
relationship of dominance and adds to the stigmatization of prostituted people
by holding only them to scrutiny. The sub-committee MPs can thus reject from
the onset the notion of sexual exploitation and limit that of pimping to
procurers who use physical coercion. They even co-opt the tragedy of women
assassinated in this context by attributing their deaths not to the misogyny of
male buyers but to the laws designed to hold them in check. By keeping out of
focus the male "demand" for prostituted bodies, the report implicitly makes it
into a standard that society should accommodate. Will we eventually hear of a
"right to fellatio" just as some invent a "right to a steak" at any hour of the
night to constrain the schedules of food store workers?
An insult to all men
As men opposed to the machismo of prostitutors, we are concerned by this
silence and wonder just whom it is protecting. Solid international research
demonstrates how efficient it can be to identify buyers of "sexual services"
and to intervene against them. Many male buyers delude themselves about the
nature of these "relationships." Statistics show they respond well to education
campaigns and dissuasive action. We also know that buyers are not driven by
biology. Male use of prostituted women varies widely (11%-70%) from one country
and one legislative regime to another (recidivism is less than 20% among
arrested johns). So buying reflects opportunity, not hormones. And we feel that
the committee is insulting men by treating the commercial sexual exploitation
of women as some unavoidable masculine trait, a kind of biological imperative
to be legitimated and coddled, preferably out of sight.
The authors' silence about male buyers of women and their support network
(pimps, owners, and some politicians) explains another major bias in their
report : its claim to not understand how sexual exploiters escape the laws
designed to hold them in check. No need to search very far for an answer :
eleven months before the report's publication, a Calgary-based pimp was
acquitted because he operated his "escorts" agency with a duly approved
municipal permit whereby civil servants even informed his employees of what
would be expected of them!
Is the State becoming a procurer?
In Montréal as elsewhere in Canada, such accredited pimps explicitly advertise
their business, openly flouting the Criminal Code. The system runs like
clockwork... men can have a woman delivered faster than a pizza, in their
choice of ethnicity and measurements. Police officers are given no mandate to
intervene. Yet, the federal report's authors claim to be puzzled by this state
of affairs. This allows them to justify, in carefully guarded terms, the
abolition of laws construed as "ineffective" when in fact, they are simply not
applied. An Osgoode Hall law professor already has his students working on yet
another brief to have the law against pimping struck down by the Supreme Court
as an "unjustified violation" of the freedom to "hire a manager."
We reject any proposal to make it even more legitimate for men to sexually
dominate the most impoverished of women, those most racialized as "exotic"
goods by pimps. We reject the trendy neo-liberal fundamentalism that would
reduce the common good to the sole interests of prostitutors. In solidarity
with feminists who are fighting sexual exploitation, we want a world where sex
isn't reduced to some "industry" and where women and men are not conditioned by
early sexualization, racist trafficking and an institutionalization of male
privileges.
The right to equality is fundamental
The majority report authors dismiss such analysis as "moralistic." It is no
such thing. Our action is driven by equality rights, the very touchstone of the
international human rights framework. This equality is under attack : the
current government has just culled it from the mandate of Status of Women
Canada, closing many of its regional offices. And now, Opposition parties are
proposing that sexual exploitation be legitimized!
Our stand against prostitution is in phase with the struggles against poverty,
violence and the social program cuts that make so many women and youths into a
vulnerable sub-class for prostitutors, exposing them to violence and to a
police and court harassment not meted out to their exploiters. We vigorously
protest this penalization of prostituted people.
We sincerely hope that federal MPs and candidates will demonstrate the same
concern if they hope to convince us of their respect for women and for the
essential human rights to which Canada has so often committed in the
international arena.
