Eye Weekly Letters
NO GOVERNMENT PIMPS
Re: “Responsible Hooking,” Editorial, Mar. 10. Your proposal for the legalization of sex work would be beneficial for the glorified pimps (the government and brothel owners) and harmful for sex workers.
The procedures you are touting — like forced health checks — have done little to produce a healthy environment where they’ve been tried elsewhere, but are great for encouraging clients to demand unsafe sex and brothel owners to force sex workers to provide it. And who pays for it in the end when the sex worker’s weekly test tells her that she is no longer grade-A disease-free meat? Let’s do safer-sex promotion, so all of us will be protected from STIs.
The system we want to see in place (decriminalization), works for all parties involved. Sex workers deserve a system in which they are not being forced to provide unsafe sex or made to work 12- to 16-hour days or forced to give out freebies. Sex workers deserve to bring home more than 25 per cent of their earnings. Decriminalization welcomes reasonable management, but pimps and handlers need not apply.
What we want is not to “have our cake and eat it too.” What we are demanding is basic human and workers’ rights. Oh, and we deserve it.LAUREL RONAN, SEX PROFESSIONALS OF CANADA