If the male boss in some office asks a female secretary to retrieve some documents and, when bringing them into his office, give him a blow job before she collects her pay cheque, there is no court in the land that wouldn’t convict the man of sexual harassment in the workplace, if not the even more serious charge of sexual abuse. It doesn’t matter if the secretary is an adult who appears to consent to this arrangement: in the context of two people engaged in exchange of money for labour, in this case a boss and a secretary, no degree of consent can mitigate this clear-cut case of sexual harassment or sexual abuse.
It also wouldn’t matter if it happened in any other location besides the office—in his car, in a restaurant, even over the phone, each in their own homes. Is there one person reading this paper who is willing to argue that it isn’t wrong, let alone creepy and disgusting, for a male to withhold pay to a female working for him unless she agrees to give him a blowjob first? Of course not.
So, okay, how about if the boss tells the secretary to forget about retrieving the documents, just give him the blowjob? That hardly changes things, does it. It’s rather beside the point, and anyone who agrees the first scenario is wrong is certainly compelled to agree the second scenario hardly makes it better.
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How then can we support the legalization of prostitution? Is that not by definition sexual harassment, if not sexual abuse, in the workplace? Have we not already decided that a woman should not have to perform sexual favours in any working context, and that it isn’t even a matter of her consent?
This was only one of the points raised by a lawyer speaking at the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network’s discussion entitled Decriminalization, Colonization, and the Normalization of Sexual Exploitation: The World's Oldest Oppression Attempts to Go Legal, held at the Britannia Learning Resource Centre the night of July 30.
It was a good point, as was another regarding unemployed women: to continue receiving benefits while out of work, government welfare and employment agencies typically require the applicant to seek out and accept any work they can find. If prostitution were legalized, would those on welfare or Employment Insurance be required to accept a position at a legal brothel or risk losing their benefits? It suddenly doesn’t sound like just another shitty job like any other shitty job. It sounds downright abusive to force a woman into the sex trade to turn tricks by threatening to cut off her government support. It makes the government into the worst kind of pimp—the government being us.
The legalization of the sex trade may sound like an acceptable pragmatic solution to what is regarded as an age-old problem to which there is apparently no hope of an end: the sex trade, what they say is the oldest profession. It isn’t the oldest profession, though. The idea of paying to rape women is a fairly recent innovation in the history of mankind and that’s the only part of this profession that is truly old: the raping part. What some men found is that the victims of their habit for raping acquiesce a lot more quietly and less dangerously when a little money is put on the table.
Alright, alright, not all prostitution is rape, but certainly what passes as prostitution in the distant past, the past we refer to when we only half jokingly call it the oldest profession—before the advent of money or the innovation of paying for sex—is undeniably rape. What else can we call it when a woman wouldn’t ordinarily give a man sexual favours were it not for his cash payment, and when there is no cash payment forthcoming for those sexual favours?
There are those who would argue that most dates are a form of prostitution of a more gaming and gentle kind: the woman accepts a meal and drinks, and both know this acceptance implies there may well be sex for him at the end of the night. How, some argue, is this different from prostitution?
But differ it does, in a few major ways. The scenario totally dismisses the woman as an active and willful agent in the unfolding scenario. It assumes the woman isn’t thinking about getting sex herself, and isn’t engineering things according to her wishes. It assumes the act of sex at the end of the night is completely a case of the man winning something and the woman being the prize, as though she isn’t pursuing anything at all. In reality, the buying of the meal and drinks is as much an implied acceptance of an unfolding ritual as accepting a meal and drinks is. By accepting his role as buyer of meal and drinks, the man is offering himself as a suitable mate for sexual pleasure every bit as much as the woman accepting the purchase of the meal and drinks is.
The straight up payment of cash directly from john to prostitute in no way has any resemblance to our species’ complicated mating rituals that involve the settling of cheques at the restaurant table. It is as ridiculous as suggesting that a man asking “how much?” out his car window is a re-enactment of the love-letter part of our mating rituals.
There is no question that prostitution is an old problem that has thus far eluded public policy solutions, but total legalization of prostitution is no more a pragmatic and acceptable approach as the legalization of rape—an even older and even more insoluble problem—would be for that problem. We must remain at the drawing board and keep trying.
The position of AWAN is to remove all legal penalties for the sellers of sex, male or female, in the understanding that they are, generally speaking, victims, and to concentrate legal constraints and penalties on the buyers of sex, who are, generally speaking, nothing more than paying rapists.
As for the people who don’t get sex any other way besides through prostitution, that’s simply too bad. There’s a lot of people who don’t get money, also an important element in a full life, except by working, but that doesn’t mean we should legalize theft for those who can’t find money by working.
The comparison doesn’t quite apply: there is no even half-way reasonable substitute for money, but there is for sex: it’s called masturbation, and it’s free, it’s easy, it’s readily available and runs no risk of hurting anyone. John’s might consider it.
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