morality wars

Yesterday a Superior Court justice in Ontario decriminalized prostitution, or so most headlines put it. Actually prostitution was already legal. It's just that all the laws around it made it impossible to perform this legal act without breaking the law. Can you spell hypocrisy?

I am not happy that prostitution exists. Not because I have any great problem with people having sex with whoever they want, nor with how many, nor with whatever kind of economic agreement they might arrange around the act, as long as everyone is a consenting adult. (Actually I can think of a few unfortunate occasions in my own life, when money changing hands would have been more honest, and oddly enough, might have left me feeling less used.)

What I don't like is coercion. I don't like it that the sexworker, female or male, is usually the coercee. And I don't like that the world views such people as somehow lesser beings and therefore unworthy of our protection. I am tired of the good girl/bad girl dichotomy. I am tired of restrictions on women's (and men's) choices of what to do with our own bodies.

Laws based on morality have over the years criminalized all kinds of behaviours that we now accept. Interracial, gay/lesbian, oral sex. They've all been against the law (and still are in some places around the world). If you think it's sinful, don't do it, but don't tell someone else they must live by your code. I think that is sinful.

Yes, I think it's a crime that some women are driven through poverty and a lack of choice to choose prostitution, but I don't agree that this should make the act itself criminal, or any more despicable than any other service desired and provided. I think it's the poverty that is the crime, and the lack of addiction support that traps people in lives they don't want. (And what is not really a digression in this discussion, I also think that drugs should be decriminalized, regulated and taxed, just as we deal with the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco.)

The law, as it now precariously stands, does nothing to protect women in the sex trade. It forces them to operate in dark corners with no protection, and results in horrid, and sometimes spectacularly gruesome scenes like that found at serial killer Pickton's farm in Coquitlam.

And whether we like it or not, prostitution will never go away. Why not start to deal with it in the light?