By Mike Tanner

Pretty Woman is a beautiful movie. It’s thought of as one of the most honest and inspiring love stories of our entire generation. It’s about a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who falls in love with a man who’s got the world in the palm of his hands. It’s West Side Story, it’s The Outsiders. It’s wonderful. And it’s all about hookers. It’s about a man who breaks the law and a woman who breaks the law and their wonderful love affair. It’s Bonnie & Clyde except no one gets shot and no one steals anything. But is it illegal? And is really nothing stolen?

Let’s talk legality for a little while first. In Canada, paying for sex is not illegal. When an adult pays money to engage in sexual activities, the laws seem to suggest that this is fine, UNLESS: you are operating a brothel, you are advertising publicly, you partake in other activities, or the person is under age. This all seems to make sense, but whom are these laws actually protecting? It SHOULD be illegal to advertise sex publicly, but at this point if you AREN’T inundated by advertising on the internet that in some way or another is advertising sex, I don’t know what internet you are on. Sure, you’re not looking at advertisements for hookers, but if you pay just a small fee, you can join a website and someone on that website is GUARANTEED to have sex with you. So, is the website a pimp? As for the law ensuring that those under the age of 18 are not paid for sexual relations, this is simply protecting our youth, as much as possible, and preserving their innocence for as long as possible — although the regulation of such things is obviously difficult to enforce. But the real question I have here is about the “common bawdy house,” or as most of us know it, the brothel.

It’s illegal for someone to organize a house that allows people to congregate in a large group for this purpose. That makes sense. You wouldn’t want a whole BUNCH of people doing something illegal all in one place…. But wait. I thought you said the act itself isn’t illegal? So then, what’s the problem with a brothel? Well, the brothel makes it public. We don’t want people to know that businessmen pay upwards of $400 an hour to spend time with a woman. That would be terrible. We need to protect these businesses from people knowing that they’re doing something illegal. But wait, I thought they weren’t doing anything illegal? Well, they aren’t, but we would hate for people to know about it. Because we need to preserve this ridiculous sense of moral integrity, when we’ve created a system where women have to partake in incredibly dangerous situations in order to work as sex workers. This is where street prostitution comes into play.

Street prostitution is the main target of Canadian law enforcement. Despite the fact that standing on a street corner in a very short skirt waiting for someone to pick you up and pay you to have sex with them is still SORT of legal, the government doesn’t want to have to see that. It’s bad for tourism (unless you’re Amsterdam). The issues surrounding street prostitution are that it will more likely lead to violence statistically and will more likely involve some sort of drug use. If brothels were allowed to operate, on the other hand, the girls would be provided a safe place to go about their business. Sure, news vans might sit outside and wait for important politicians and officials to come out so they can snap a quick pic, but is that really that bad? The current laws don’t protect the worker, they protect the patron. We need to make sure people don’t know that the mayor, or senator, or prime minister pays for sex by making it very difficult for people to find them. While they may state that they are doing this for the good of the people, they are not protecting the people that need it: the sex workers. We seem not to want to protect Julia Roberts. but Richard Gere.

And along comes Craigslist. Craigslist is the inbred uncle of kijiji and eBay. While the latter two sites pride themselves on a documented system of dealing with legal products and services, Craigslist might as well be the black market. Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll are all available for the taking. You can go on Craigslist and post an ad stating that you are available to spend time with someone and that you HAPPEN to be good at oral sex, or that you give a really good Greek Massage (this is NOT the same as a Swedish Massage, I looked it up). Basically, you can contact a girl on Craigslist, who provides you with pictures and a list of things that she likes and how much it would cost to “hang out” with her for a period of time. The ads I have looked at on this site are atrocious. They are offering sex for money, including large numbers that offer to engage in activities that could be incredibly dangerous to all involved. Now, I’ve never actually answered one of these ads, so maybe when you show up there is a bug guy named Bubba that makes sure the girl gets paid and that nobody gets hurts, but I don’t imagine most of these girls as having a staff. And no law is attempting to stop prostitution from happening, because escorts are legal and is a clear case of prostitution. So, what’s the issue? What are we really trying to do?

We’re trying to protect people’s moral sensitivities. These are the same people who surf porn, spy on their neighbors, and even go to escorts for a massage with a “happy ending”. These people watch Pretty Woman and they applaud, they watch The Secret Diary of a Call Girl and they applaud. They think, What strong, amazing women to be who they are, get paid for something they enjoy doing. And then they vote that those women should be kept as far away from their neighborhood as possible, likely lest their husbands have roving eyes when they become too readily accessible. We like to keep a lot of things behind closed doors, and the sex trade is no exception. However, the difference in this case is that by doing so WE are the ones creating the dangerous work environment. We may not think of it as a work environment, and if you don’t, I would recommend you watch The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Not only does it do a really good job explaining the dangers and the professionalism involved, all the while glamorizing it using Billie Piper as the poster girl for escorts everywhere; it also has a good soundtrack and deals with the personal problems that most of these women have to go through.

George Carlin probably said it best. “Selling is legal. F*cking is legal. Why isn’t selling f*cking legal”. It’s not like the drug trade or something else where you’re talking about an end product that is illegal. People are ALLOWED to have sex. In fact, it might be the only thing in the entire (free) world that is absolutely and entirely legal, UNLESS you sell it. Does that make sense?

According to Aziz Ansari, you can trade “concert tickets for a topless blowjob in the backseat of your car, even if there are tickets AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR”. I guess when it comes down to it; it depends almost entirely on your vision of what sex should be. Is it a good time, a time best shared by two consenting adults, an act of love reserved for marriage, a free-for-all or a commodity? The saying “dance with the one that brought ya” comes to mind in this particular case. I don’t entirely know why, but it just seems appropriate. What I mean by this is that you have to lead your own life. People should be kept safe, assuming they are not breaking the law, especially if the law is designed to keep them from being safe while they live their life and don’t commit a crime, except for the crime that was created to stop them from doing something legal, safely. Confused yet? So was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada who said:

“We find ourselves in an anomalous, some would say bizarre, situation where almost everything related to prostitution has been regulated by the criminal law except the transaction itself. The appellants’ argument then, more precisely stated, is that in criminalizing so many activities surrounding the act itself, Parliament has made prostitution de facto illegal if not de jure illegal.”

Just so we’re all VERY clear, that’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of our great nation stating that basically, this is a series of laws that doesn’t make any reasonable sense, unless you just go ahead and ban the act all together. But then, where would the politicians go for sex?

Here’s where it all comes together. If there is nothing fundamentally wrong, in our government’s eyes, with the act of prostitution itself, then we should make it safe for women to earn a living participating in this trade. And if we DO believe it’s wrong and our government DOES decide to put a stop to prostitution, then ACTUALLY do something about it. Go after hookers… ahem… escorts…. that advertise on Craigslist, shut down massage parlors that offer a “happy ending” and if a “personal fulfillment facilitator” is offering Greek Massages, let them know that this isn’t something using extra virgin olive oil (far from it in fact) and shut it down. I will leave my personal beliefs aside at this point, but either make it safe, or make it illegal, don’t prance around the issue.