I rest my head upon your stomach
In the space below your navel
Between the upswell of your hips

I breathe

We are sweat and skin and the sheets that I’ve kicked off the bed
And when I fall asleep
I dream the tree whose branches scratched against our window
Is whispering to the others

“I’ve found it! I’ve found it! The kind of love that remakes worlds. The love our grandparents told us is only born once every three hundred years.”

And the trees looked in our darkened window—
While I dreamed upon your stomach
And you hugged me with your legs
And brushed your knuckle on your lips
And mouthed a silent O—
And they rejoiced

The fundamental evil of our time is that we have allowed some people to grow so rich that they have forgotten how to love, they have forgotten why we love, and, in fact, they have forgotten what love is.

What those who have grown so rich that they have forgotten how to love know is greed and what they feel is fear. Where greed goes, fear will always follow. But fear is the opposite of love. A society that is afraid is a society that does not know love.

What are the rich afraid of? Many things, but ultimately it comes down to this: they are afraid that they will one day be treated the way in which they have treated others.

Therefore, because the rich are greedy and afraid, and because they are always vastly outnumbered by those whom they are actively and continually dispossessing, they propagate ideologies, academic disciplines, political economies, religions, ethics, and social imaginaries, designed to teach all of us—no matter how poor we are—to forget the how, why, and what of love and to, instead, know greed and feel afraid.

In this effort, the rich are ever only partially successful. This is so for a few reasons including the following: many among the dispossessed know that life without love is literally unliveable; many among the colonized remember other ways of structuring life together; many among the oppressed see through the lies of the oppressors; and babies, themselves, come into the world loving unconditionally.

This final point suggests that love (and not some kind of neo-Darwinian notion of “selfish genes” or “survival of the fittest”) is what exists at the core of being. To be is to love. Only a sustained assault upon our being, thinking, hearing, seeing, and imagining, from the time we are born until the time we die, can make us forget this.

Given this ontology of love, to forget love is to embrace nihilism. We see this nihilism playing out all the time in the mass destruction of life we are witnessing today, in the merciless laws crafted by the rich, and in all the ways cruelty and ruthlessness are justified and valorized. If we allow some people to grow so wealthy that they forget the how, why, and what of love, the end result is the annihilation of life as we know it.

If to be is to love, then life is impossible in a world without love.

Therefore, if we are to confront the fundamental evil of our time and contribute to the formation of a world where it is easier to be good, the rich must be dispossessed of both their wealth and the fear that accompanies it. In this dispossession lies their liberation. It is an act of love that presents the rich with the possibility of, once again, remembering what love is, why we love, and how to love. It is an act that makes life possible—for them and for all of us.

[What follows is a Position Statement pertaining to sex work in Canadian-occupied territories. In addition to the Position Statement, I have provided a considerable amount of context and research to assist others in negotiating what (initially, especially to outsiders) appears to be a very confusing, complicated, and contradictory terrain. This is a live document, meaning that I may still be altering it based on feedback received from sex workers, sex worker led and organized groups, and others whom I trust and respect (just as voices from all those groups provided feedback on earlier draft versions of this Statement). Feel free to copy and share this as you see fit. I can also email you a PDF version of the document, if you provide your contact information in the comments.]

Position Statement

This paper proposes that individuals and organizations take something akin to the following public position pertaining to sex work in Canadian-occupied territories:

We believe that sex work is real work and, although any form of labour that is determined by the dynamics of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, is necessarily exploitative and harmful, we believe that sex work is not any more inherently violent or oppressive than the other forms of labour that are available to those who are not born rich. Therefore, we believe that workers who choose sex work are just as free (or not free) as workers who choose any other form of real work. By recognizing this, we distinguish sex work from human trafficking and affirm sex work while opposing human trafficking. In our affirmation of sex work, we recognize that the overwhelming bulk of evidence-based research demonstrates that full decriminalization (of both supply and demand) consistently produces the best outcomes for sex workers, victims and survivors of human trafficking, and the community more broadly. By affirming this, we stand in solidarity with sex worker led and sex worker organized collectives who, like other organized and organizing workers’ groups, are fighting to determine the conditions, supports, and protections they need in order to do their jobs.

Therefore, although we recognize that the Canadian State and most State-sponsored social services are heavily invested in perpetuating capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, we urge the Government of Canada and those who offer support services to people who engage in sex work, to abandon the harmful Nordic Model and, instead, to learn from New Zealand’s much more successful (but still somewhat problematical) Prostitution Reform Act, and enact the full decriminalization of sex work. In the meantime, we will refuse to contribute to or participate within the surveillance, oppression, and abuse of sex workers that is currently sponsored by the Canadian State and its juridico-political and carceral apparatuses, we will refuse to support non-governmental organizations that equate all sex work with human trafficking, and we will follow the lead of sex worker led and sex worker organized groups and do what they suggest is best for finding our way forward together.

In order to unpack and defend this position, this paper will proceed in three sections. First, a number of dynamics that complicate the conversation around sex work will be explored. These include: setting out the basic terms of the conversation and how various parties deploy them, examining whose voices are prioritized and how or why those voices are prioritized by various parties, and highlighting further contextual factors related to capitalism’s exploitation of labour, the context of Canadian settler colonialism, and the ways in which men who engage in sex work are often overlooked (and why that might be the case).

Exploring these dynamics paves the way for the second major section of this paper wherein I will examine the two main positions taken on sex work, prostitution, and human trafficking. Here, I will begin by looking at the abolitionist position (sometimes also referred to as the “prohibitionist” position), its equation of all “prostitution” with “human trafficking,” and its support for the Nordic Model, which criminalizes consumers and third-party managers rather than the direct suppliers of sex as a market commodity. We will then look at criticisms of the Nordic Model and the full decriminalization approach advocated for by those who are personally involved in sex work or who are motivated by research pertaining to health, safety, de-stigmatization, and the lessons learned from the Prostitution Reform Act that became law in Aotearoa (so-called New Zealand) in 2003.

Finally, in the third part, I return to examining contextual factors and briefly comment on the notions of “root causes” and “upstream interventions” as they pertain to the discourse on sex work.

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[On March 28, 2018, I was invited to both moderate and participate in a panel discussion about Trauma at an event hosted by a group called Sarnia Speaks, located in Sarnia, ON. What follows is the transcript I used for both my introductory moderator remarks, and the presentation I did as a panelist. It was a wonderful evening and I am very grateful to those who invited me to participate.]

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Sometimes, I think we valourize brokenness.  We romanticize it, ennoble it, and tell beautiful stories about it but, baby, I’ve been broken, really really very broken, and the truth is that it just hurts.  All the time, everywhere, it hurts.  And the heart that is broken weeps in a million ways that words can never touch or reach.  It just weeps. All the time, everywhere, it weeps.

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I once read a book by some guy named Cormac about this guy who likes to fuck dead people.  He would kill them when they were parked in cars up on some lover’s lane or lookout or whatever and then take them down to this cave where he stored all the bodies of the people he liked to fuck.  Cormac is all into telling us that this corpse fucker is human like you and me and that guy who fucks watermelons in another story Cormac wrote, but he doesn’t describe the actual corpse fucking.  Like does the guy use lube or does he fuck ‘em dry?  Where does he fuck ‘em?  Just the usual orifices or does he fuck the holes he made when he stabbed his victims up, like a bed bug engaged in traumatic insemination (“male bedbugs have saber-like penises, that they use to stab females in the abdomen. The male releases sperm into the females [sic] circulatory system, not into their reproductive tract” as The Smithsonian Mag tells us) or like that when James Spader fucks the gash in Rosanna Arquette’s leg in that Cronenberg movie?  Cormac never actually describes much fucking in his stories, which is a pretty good thing, I guess, because, for Cormac, it seems like fucking always has to do with horrible or violent things – like fucking corpses, or that little kid with the Judge in that other book about the sunset, or the watermelons I already mentioned, I suppose, but I think that’s supposed to be funny.  Come to think of it, I think the watermelon fucking is the closest thing Cormac gives us to a sex scene.  I’m not sure I can trust a guy who only talks about sex in this way.  But anyway, yeah, this corpse fucker is supposed to be a child of god just like you or me or whatever, for whatever that’s worth, and maybe it’s worth something and maybe it isn’t, in which case it’s all the same anyway, but I don’t know if I buy that.  I mean, I don’t know, but if we want to blur the lines between all of us – corpse fuckers or just regular fuckers or people who aren’t fucking at all and who are fucking mad about that or whomever else – in order to suggest that, well, we’re all just human, and we’re all just specks of dust, and we’re all just equally loved or abandoned by god (take your pick), I mean I guess I get your point but, yo, isn’t that a little played out?  And where has that gotten us?  And, really, don’t we still want some lines in the sand somewhere?  Because isn’t that rapist anthem by Robin Thicke called “Blurred Lines”?  Don’t we want to say, hey, sorry Cormac bro, this dude ain’t just like me?  Come on.  It’s like when Sufjan sings that sweet, sweet love song to that guy who dressed like a clown and raped and murdered adolescent boys.  When Sufjan proclaims that “in my best behaviour / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid,” I don’t think, “Man that’s a really profound post-Evangelical point about the universality of sin and the fallenness of man [sic].”  Instead, I think about how R. Kelly openly sang, for years and years, about all the adolescent girls he kidnapped and raped, and I think, fuck me, better start digging up Sufjan’s floors.  Because maybe it’s provocative or sweet to relate to all these horrible men and say, “don’t we really have more in common than not? should we not all say, ‘there but for the grace of God, go I?’” but if we don’t draw some kind of line and say, yo, that ain’t me, I ain’t like that and I never will be, what all do we let slide?

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