Heather Mallick Star Columnist. Is the buying and selling of adult sexual services:. You have to choose, because a change is coming and you are going to have an opinion on it, probably a loud one, if the new law allows, for instance, prostitutes to work from home. Their home might be next door. It will likely appear in June, the rush mandated by a Supreme Court decision that says the bodily safety of prostitutes can no longer be dismissed as irrelevant.
You might say that the court ruling was made for them. To assist, I travelled in May across central and northern Europe to learn what three countries β Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden β have already learned. What would suit Canadian values best? I proposed this story out of deep loyalty to other women, dated and scorned as that kind of feminism may be. I talked to legal and police specialists, the young creator of an app for sex work, brothel workers, prostitution historians and commentators, writers, documentary filmmakers and most importantly to current and former prostitutes.
It was a difficult trip in that it ranged, as humans do, from misery to sturdy hope, from cold to warm. I think back on the people I talked to across the continent, see them chatting away in a montage of human concern in the belief that I will not let them down. I am a practical, not an ideological feminist, and if I may boil things down here β this often makes people angry β it is part of extremist ideology to drain the life out of tangible things and turn them into theory.
Abstract art is better than figurative art, video installations better than paintings, and sex work is just another kind of retail.
I disagree. It is, for once, accurate to call it Orwellian in that she has his simple prose style, with profound analysis that hauls in shocking memories with a fish hook. It is a modern Down and Out in Paris and London , except she was a girl, terrible things were done to her, and this all happened recently.
