PAUL CARLUCCI — Eye Magazine
Call them sex entrepreneurs
OLD CITY HALL — In a perfect world, it would be like a sauna out here. But March is still young, and Old Man Winter can’t get his mercury up. A pity, considering the dozen dishy men and women from the Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC) gathered in front of Old City Hall to mark International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. They’re nearly lost in the folds of their winter regalia, the titillation they promised lost to the season.
They crunch around in the snow, waving signs and hollering slogans. Most passersby stop to pick up flyers, a few suits and a befuddled trio of peach-fuzzed boys among the few who turn away.
The protesters aren’t here to promote the complete legalization of prostitution. They prefer decriminalization, a legislative nuance they say delivers total control to the workers. (Think Karl Marx with a riding crop, and then see our editorial on page 6.)
“Legalization treats sex work like a vice,” says Laurel Ronan, a fetish sex worker and SPOC spokesperson. “In a legalized system, like in Amsterdam, sex workers have to go to the police station and get photographed and fingerprinted. Then they have to go to a registered brothel, which means they have to fuck the management for free to see if they’re good enough.”
Ronan says that such systems — Nevada has similar laws — make sex workers submit to intrusive police profiling. Even then, pros can’t work independently; they have to sign on with a legalized brothel and submit to a boss’ desires. Auditions and unsafe or coercive sex are prominent features of those industries, SPOC says.
SPOC also maintains that most brothels scalp 50 per cent off a worker’s earnings and that the government swoops in for another 25 per cent, a sort of sin tax. “So the woman who’s done the actual work is lucky to take home 25 per cent,” says SPOC’s Valerie Scott. “We reject [legalization] outright. You end up with a legal red-light district and an illegal one and it solves nothing.”
A decriminalized system, like the one in New South Wales, Australia, allows sex workers to function as normal entrepreneurs, SPOC says. They can work independently or open their own brothels, with each situation subject to normal tax laws. Their earnings are legitimate and can be spent accordingly. Like other entrepreneurs, they don’t have to go to the police for fingerprinting and photographing.SPOC, which has about 24 members on any given day, plans to take its message to a parliamentary committee on sex work coming through Toronto on March 15. Their supporters are encouraged to go to www.spoc.ca to sign the petition they’ll be bringing with them.