This essay first appeared in Cliterati on June 8th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
According to the popular narrative, sex workers are “bad” or “defective” or otherwise abnormal; we are not to be trusted even to run our own lives, so when “good” women who claim to want what’s best for us say that we need to be criminalized for our own good – that our statements should be ignored, our clients demonized, our workplaces raided by armed thugs who drag us away to cages where we can be subjected to degrading attempts to “correct” or brainwash us, and our organizations branded as a “pimp lobby” – the politicians side with them and the legions of the ignorant mindlessly parrot their drivel about “sex trafficking”. There are many of these righteous guardians of female purity; in Ireland, for example, they are led by Ruhama, an organization founded by the exact same nuns who ran the infamous Magdalene laundries, where sex workers and other “sinful” women were condemned to slave labor until they were completely broken. Among these outcasts were unwed mothers, whose children were ripped from them and incarcerated in hell-holes like St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home:
The bodies of 796 children…have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns…historian Catherine Corless discovered the extent of the mass grave when she requested records of children’s deaths in the home…The vast majority of the children’s remains, it seemed, were [simply dumped into] the septic tank. Corless and a committee have been working tirelessly to raise money for a memorial that includes a plaque bearing each child’s name…death rates for children in the Tuam mother and baby home, and in similar institutions, were four to five times that of the general population. A health board report from 1944 on the Tuam home describes emaciated, potbellied children, mentally unwell mothers and appalling overcrowding. But, as Corless points out, this was no different to other homes in Ireland. They all had the same mentality: that these women and children should be punished…
And yet, these nuns still receive funding from the Irish government and their lies about sex workers are still accepted unquestioningly by the Irish media. In the United States, laws and old prejudices prevent the Catholic Church from gaining quite such a powerful hold, but nothing short of absolute exposure stops sociopaths like Somaly Mam or the woman whose supposedly “true” story the movie Eden was based on:
…Chong Kim whom [sic] has claimed to be a survivor of human trafficking is not…after thorough investigation into her story, people, records and places, as well as, [sic] many interviews with producers, publishers and…organizations, we found no truth to her story. In fact, we found a lot of fraud, lies, and the most horrifically capitalizing [sic]…We have found several other organizations…who have been defrauded by Chong collecting money in their name…
When Eden came out many sex worker activists condemned it as a pack of lies; we’ve done the same about Somaly Mam for years. And despite their being exposed as charlatans, others very like them continue to cash in and exert such powerful influence over politicians that outrages like this are the norm these days:
…This cynical, dystopic model does not resolve the problems found by the Court in Bedford to be unconstitutional, and adds new ones such as the prohibition on advertising. The Charter rights…[of] life, liberty, security of the person, freedom of expression and equality…are [all] breached…It is an unconstitutional variation of our broken laws that impose more danger, more criminalization, and fewer safe options, contrary to the requirement of the Supreme Court of Canada…All that will be required for police to surveil and target sex workers is the suggestion that a person under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present…purchase [of]…sex…[carries] mandatory fines…from $500 to $4,000, to five years in jail…Without the ability to advertise in newspapers, online, or other forms of media, sex workers will now have severely limited means for working safely indoors…
How many more skeletons need to be found in closets or cesspools before the public wakes up to the evil of prohibitionism? How many more lies until the self-appointed saviors lose their credibility for good? And how many more women have to die before governments abandon their mad dream of controlling the sexuality of every individual within their borders?
Indeed – how many? I find it extremely galling that the few amendments permitted to Canada’s Bill C-36 include one that stipulates a review after 5 years – how much grief and how many deaths is that going to lead to?
As for the “reasons” for that egregious situation, I’m reminded of the Twitter home page of Kerry Porth – who, I see from a page you linked to, made a presentation to the C-36 Committee hearings and castigated them for ignoring sex workers – features a rather horrific and damning woodcut of “witches” being burned at the stake, circa 1500. Given that the anti-prostitution programs and policies are little more than “modern-day” witch-hunts, it is rather depressing to think that we haven’t , in general, progressed much since then.
As you put it in your commendable interview on Reason – which I note was published on Bastille Day; one might argue, without too much hyperbole or egregious flattery, that you and many other sex workers qualify as the latest incarnations of Rosa Parks: “hell no, we won’t sit at the back of your fucking bus when it comes to civil rights” – “I think we just need to grow up.”
the dippers had originally filed the amendment to review the legislation after 2 years, but that was changed by the con majority to five years before it was passed. The five years is meaningless. In five years this piece of shit will have already been struck down or will be arriving on the door step of the SCOC.
Most likely. But the question is, I think, what will be the consequences in the interim?
I’d really like to ask Harper & MacKay, particularly given their apparent fundamentalist Christianity, what Cromwell asked of Christians of the same ilk in his day: “I beseech thee, in the bowels of Christ, think that thou mightst be mistaken!” And to reflect on the consequences if that is the case.
At least some Anglican clergy have come out against C-36.
Yea, it’s nice to see that at least some “Christian” groups don’t let their dogma interfere with their humanity.
Although I wonder how widespread that is, but at least some 34 groups have gone on record with their “statement of concern”. Hopefully that will at least give some pause to the Christian ideologues in the Conservative Party.
But I think something more needs to be done – maybe a “Charge.Org” petition? A 100,000 person protest march?
To me, there is a thread of eudemonism to put it more delicately than to say, hedonism which sounds selfish for some reason or more deterministically to my mind at the moment, utilitarianism in the position taken by sex workers. I had a nasty argument with my ex over the past few days and to begin with, what he said made no sense given that he is living with another woman and says he loves her. What is more, he nonsensically made a comment about changing phones as if that would guarantee I saw his hatefilled reply that he will never love me and never intends on speaking to me again. I asked him to apply to the peace corps with me and he responded by saying he loves her but I am just a physical attraction. Personally, that is not going to work for me for any reason but that is who I am. I can’t change that. Period. The other irony is that there was an article in Redbook last week I think and a male LMT pitched a fit on Linked in. I typically tow the party line unless I suspect something is truly wrong for some reason, but this was about a unsatisfied married woman using 30 year old terminology to describe massage therapy and she and the magazine made no distinction between professions. Given that sex is subjective in the first place and all the things that go along with personal choices and decisions, I found myself voicing the opposite view than usual and pointing out some of the flaws in idealism and it’s variants and how discourse creates and destroys when you ‘go there’. Given that I am being baited and humiliating myself chasing a man who hates me and has abused me mentally and emotionally with a variety of methods, none of which produced any pleasure of any kind, but a sense of filling up on anger and narcissism of a kind possibly, romantic idealism is the last thing I have any business being involved in at all. This post just produces fresh tears.
Well of course. All of the children thrown into that sewage cistern (and I’ve seen no info on whether they were alive or dead) were damned bastards under Roman Catholic doctrine. The real damned bastards were the people who did it.
(Imagine me, running around the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, in the hope that a little primal scream therapy might get rid of the near homicidal anger I am currently feeling.)
You have no idea how I actually identify with that analogy. Primal Scream therapy was indeed something one of my massage instructors talked about as ‘continuing education’ and of course, to even practice that method safely requires a degree and license to practice psychotherapy not psychology and a license. What interests me but I don’t have the patience for some reason to sit down and research is how Freud claimed to have hit a wall in his search for ’embodied’ psychology. Wilhelm Reich made an attempt but his theories are more conspiracy with a dash of cognitive emotions added if I am not mistaken.
There weren’t 796 bodies in that extemporized crypt, indeed nobody has emptied it to find out how many are there. About 20 was the last guess I heard. They were buried there, so dead. Harsh as the nuns could be, infant mortality was no higher in their care than in any comparable contemporary organization.
Where did you get the number 20?
Reblogged this on Borderlands of Health and Wellness and commented:
I made some comments on Maggie’s blog about Freud supposedly hitting a wall in his search for an embodied psychology but I have not researched the issue to see what theory of emotion and mind body he claimed to have exhausted. Freud apparently had a more random view of how the mind functions than those who came after him. He still takes a beating but I am not sure that this is not an open door to nihilism and anti Semitism than a real criticism of his approach and method.
I consider Freud to be the first faltering step. Jung took it further, and others, further still. Read “Discovering the Mind, vol. 3” by Walter Kaufmann for more on this subject.
[…] How many more skeletons need to be found in closets or cesspools before the public wakes up to the evil of prohibitionism? How many more lies until the self-appointed saviors lose their credibility for good? And how many more women have to die? – Maggie McNeill […]