Feminist Peace Network

Many thanks to the authors for allowing me to reprint this excellent statement:
“Federal Report on Prostitution: A Missing Link

There is something amiss in the divided report on prostitution published
four weeks ago by a Canadian House of Commons sub-committee: we men seem to
be invisible.

The authors of the majority report focus the whole issue of prostitution on
“persons selling sexual services” but say almost nothing about the buyers
and procurers in this trade. They would have deserved commendation for
depicting and deploring the desperate conditions of “survival sex” and
“sexual slavery” if they hadn’t somehow managed to keep under wraps those
mainly responsible for this exploitation.

If people are being prostituted, there are necessarily “prostitutors” -
almost always we men - the people who buy or market the “sexual services” of
the women and youths being merchandised. Male privilege, desire and sexist
culture have a lot to do with this institution. Indeed, prostitution would
not exist without our will and our money.

By “disappearing” the role of men, the federal report obscures this
relationship of dominance. This may be why the report rejects from the
outset the very notion of sexual exploitation (cxontrary to sex worker
organizations such as Vancouver’s SWAN), limiting it to that of minors. As
for pimping, the authors apply the term only to procurers who explicitly
coerce the women they profit from.

A disservice to men

Are our MPs fulfilling their social mandate by keeping male demand out of
the limelight and unchallenged, making it some kind of biological axiom that
society should accommodate? Even the threat of the continued murders of
women in prostitution is turned to this purpose - they are described as
stigmatized by the laws that hinder their exploiters rather than by men’s
misogyny.

Men ought to be surprised by this eerie silence around male buyers; whose
interests are being protected by implicitly lumping all men in this
category? Solid international research exists demonstrating how efficient it
can be to identify buyers of “sexual services” and 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 know that buyers are not driven by biology. Their
use of prostitutes varies widely (11%-70%) from one country to another,
based on opportunity, not hormones.

In summary, we feel that the committee is insulting Canadian men by treating
the commercial sexual exploitation of women as some inherent masculine
trait, a kind of biological imperative to be legitimated and coddled, with
no more than attempts at “harm reduction.”

The invisibility the authors grant to male buyers of women and to their
support network (pimps, justice personnel, politicians) may explain another
major bias in this report: their 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 pimps explicitly advertise their
business and are treated as corporate citizens, despite their open flouting
of the Criminal Code. The system runs like clockwork. men can have a woman
delivered faster than a pizza, with their choice of ethnicity and
measurements. Police officers are given no mandate to intervene. Yet, the
federal report’s authors seem content to be merely 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. Meanwhile, 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.”

Would it be serving men’s interests to make it even more legitimate for us
to buy the most impoverished of women, those most racialized as “exotic” by
pimps? We think not. We are not all free-market fundamentalists and have
other interests at heart than those of prostitutors. In solidarity with the
feminists who oppose sexual exploitation, we want a world where sex isn’t
reduced to some “industry” for which men and women would be conditioned by
early sexualization, human trafficking based on racist stereotypes and the
general fetishizing of power over others.

The authors dismiss this analysis as “moralistic.” Some caution is indeed in
order; we men have often claimed a position of moral authority, despite our
exploitative actions. But the right to equality is morality of another order
and it is the one we are working toward, in solidarity with the women’s
movement against poverty, violence and the social program cuts that make so
many women and youths into a vulnerable sub-class for prostitutors and
selective penalization by the State.

I am hopeful that Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc québécois MPs and candidates
will demonstrate the same concern if they hope to convince us of their
respect for the human rights to which Canada has so often committed on
paper.”

Martin Dufresne
Nicolas Doyon
James Douglas

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