Chester Brown: "Dave Sim Again"

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
(see also "Getting Riel" from 2003)

Ladies Of The Night (2014)

Art by Chester Brown

Dave Sim Again

by Chester Brown

(from a Patreon Update, 14 March 2017)

Tim of A Moment Of Cerebus reposted my March 4th post about Dave Sim, so Dave responded again in the comments section. And I feel compelled to respond to some of those comments.

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I had speculated that Dave had been "affected by the whorephobia that surrounded him as he grew up". He denies this:

“Far from being a “whorephobe”, my parents were fine with me buying PLAYBOY magazine when I was 14 or 15 and were fine with me reading my Dad’s copies of PLAYBOY from about the age of 11.”

Plenty of people who read Playboy are whorephobic. Liking to look at pictures of naked women doesn’t mean that one does not have a problem with the idea of paying for sex. Nevertheless, I didn’t say that he was a whorephobe when he entered those strip clubs forty-or-so years ago, I said that he’d been affected by the whorephobia that surrounded him as he grew up. It’s possible that, if someone had asked him about prostitution before he ever walked into a strip club, he would have been either in favour of legalizing it or wouldn’t have had a opinion one way or the other. But he’d encountered countless negative depictions and accounts of sex-work in movies, books, songs, and television shows and had also heard the things that people around him said about strippers and prostitutes. All of that was in the back of his mind and influenced his perception when he looked into the eyes of strippers and imagined that they looked dead.

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To prove that I wasn’t really his friend, Dave recounts an incident from an event that he attended:

“Seth [was] interviewing Chester onstage. And, at some point, Chester mentioned that although he’s a Libertarian, all of his friends were Liberals or Socialists.”

And because Dave isn’t a leftist, he therefore supposedly thought that I was indicating that I wasn’t his friend. I was exaggerating for effect (rather like Dave does later in his comments when he writes that "anyone from Toronto is going to think I’m a misogynist", even though many Torontonians have signed his petition). I do have friends who are not leftists, like Jason Kieffer (who I’m almost positive was there that night) and Ella (who I knew back then and who would actually agree with Dave about sex-work). Dave came up to me after the onstage interview with Seth and mentioned my statement that all my friends are leftists and, with a smile, pointed out that he isn’t a leftist. I thought he might be joking in implying that I didn't consider him to be a friend but, in case he was serious, I apologized and affirmed my friendship for him. 

Dave seems to think I was trying to keep my friendship with him some sort of secret:

"[Y]ou definitely don’t want to admit, publicly, that Dave Sim is your friend. And there was no danger of that happening with Chester.”

No one around me was in any doubt that I considered Dave to be a friend. I certainly didn’t avoid talking about him to my other friends and didn't hesitate to make my real affection and admiration for the guy clear. And if I was trying to keep my friendship with him secret from a wider public, then why would I have mentioned that I was his friend on page 163 of The Little Man? (That would be page 163 of the 2006 second edition.)

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Some guy going by the name Sean R defends Dave's position about sex-work:

“Individual lives have value, and pain is real, ergo, actions that cause pain and decrease that value are morally suspect”.

Sex-workers are no more likely to experience physical pain during the consensual sex that they have with their clients than non-sex-workers do with their sexual partners, so (unless he sees allsex as morally wrong) Sean is presumably talking about emotional pain, and is assuming that sex-workers hate their jobs and experience emotional pain as a result of doing them. That assumption is not necessarily true. In this piece, sex-worker and blogger Maggie McNeill references various studies showing that significantly high numbers of escorts report increased self-esteem after taking up the work and that their lives had improved. According to the Canadian study referenced in a report from the National Post, “70% of sex workers are satisfied with their jobs”:

" 'They talk to us about the amount of control they have over their work situation,’ said researcher Mikael Jansson. ‘They have a lot more control over the timing of their work, the pace of their work than journalists.’ " [National Post, 23 September 2014]

Britain's newspaper The Independent reports that a Leeds University study discovered that, of the sex-workers that were surveyed for the study, “over half find their job ‘rewarding'."

Yes, there are sex-workers who hate their jobs — but so do lots of people in all other jobs. There are cops, dentists, and lawyers who experience emotional pain as a result of their jobs, but that doesn’t mean that it’s therefore wrong to use the services of cops, dentists, and lawyers. Sex-worker-rights advocates point out that their right to do the work should not be contingent on enjoying the work. 

Sean R further writes:

"To Mr. Brown […] what are the incidences [sic] of mental illness among sex workers? What percentage of that population was abused as children? How does the life expectancy of a sex worker compare to a non-sex worker? Do you think any of these issues are causal, or just correlated with that choice of profession? How many of these things do you expect would change with legalization, and how would such a legalization scheme avoid the problems with essentially indentured servitude seen under the German legalization scheme? [...I]t doesn’t take much exposure to the sex economy for an empathetic person to see the damage that’s being done ”

The website Tits And Sass (which posts material by sex-workers about sex-work) had a good piece recently titled We’re Not Crazy For Doing This: Sex Workers With Mental Illness. Here are two excerpts from the essay:

“People diagnosed with mental illness frequently have their decisions invalidated and undermined by the dominant culture. Many individuals who do not have much experience with mental illness will attribute any socially unacceptable behaviors to “mental illness.” In much the same way, people who have never been in the sex industry tend to sideline the decisions of sex workers by inferring that trauma or abuse must have predestined them to a life in the sex industry. When people who are neither mentally ill nor in the sex industry say these things, they are robbing us of our ability to exert agency.[…]

“Sex work is not a dysfunctional behavior stemming from our disease. Rather, it is often the best choice we can make to adapt to our mental illness. In truth, many people with mental illness find sex work helpful in a variety of ways as an occupational choice. It gives us a less rigorous schedule which allows for more emotional stability. Sex work can affirm us as something we can excel at when mental illness has hindered our success in more traditional pursuits.”

I recommend reading the whole article. While I don’t know what percentage of sex-workers have mental problems, I strongly suspect that the majority are completely sane — certainly Denise is. (She’s the sex-worker I’ve been seeing regularly for fourteen years now.)

As for Sean R's implication that a high number of sex-workers were sexually abused in childhood, I wrote this in Paying For It:

“I think we’re stepping into dangerous territory when we start saying that certain adults are not allowed to make choices because they had bad childhoods. If women-who-were-abused-in-childhood aren’t competent to make the choice to engage in paid-sex, then are they competent to make other sexual choices? Regardless of what happened to them in childhood, adults should have the right to make sexual choices”.

It’s probably not even true that a particularly high number of sex-workers suffered such abuse. Maggie McNeill has this to say on the subject:

“The original source for this claim [that 85% of prostitutes report childhood sexual abuse] was a 2004 study of incarcerated street workers which actually claimed that 45% reported sexual abuse and 85% physical abuse. Furthermore, there are serious methodological problems with the study, which is typical when biased researchers use an unrepresentative convenience sample and then extrapolate the results to a much larger population with which it does not correlate to any meaningful extent.”

In asking "How does the life expectancy of sex worker compare to a non-sex worker?” Sean R is presumably implying that sex-workers have shorter lives because they’re exposed to dangerous clients. Let’s say that it could be established that taxi drivers experienced more violence and tended to have shorter lives than accountants. Would that mean that it’s wrong to use taxis? Should it be illegal to drive people around? It’s wrong to use violence against taxi drivers and prostitutes, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to peacefully ride in a taxi or pay money to a prostitute and have consensual sex with her (or him). 

The laws against sex-work exacerbate violence against sex-workers: criminals know that prostitutes are vulnerable because they’re reluctant to go to the police. Decriminalizing sex-work wouldn’t completely eliminate violence against sex-workers (any more than violence against taxi drivers has been completely eliminated) but it would be easier for sex-workers who’ve experienced violence to go to the police if those sex-workers knew that neither they nor their clients could be charged with committing a criminal offence.  

It should also be pointed out that the vast majority of johns are not violent, and most interactions between sex-workers and their clients go as they’re supposed to. (Denise, for example, tells me that in the years that she was working as an escort she never had a violent incident with a client.)

As for Sean R’s mention of the problems associated with the German form of legalization, I completely agree that the German system is bad — all legalization schemes are bad. Maggie McNeill says that “legalization is criminalization under a different name”. Sex-worker-rights advocates support decriminalization, not legalization. The government should repeal the laws that affect sex-workers and their clients, not set up new legal regulations to control them.

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Carson Grubaugh writes in the comments section for that same Moment Of Cerebus post:

“Started reading Paying For It for the first time last night, thanks to this discussion. Entrancing book. I had to force myself to put it down about halfway through because I needed to go to bed.”

Did I mention that, even though I disagree with his opinion of life, I like the work by Grubaugh that I’ve seen? 

Grubaugh:

“If sexual release is all there is to it I default to the classic cynical viewpoint of Diogenes, take the most expedient route and just jerk off.”

I seem to remember that there are stories of Diogenes visiting brothels, although, flipping through my books on the Cynics, I can’t locate them at this moment.

I hope the ending of Paying For It makes it clear that I’m experiencing more than just "sexual release" with Denise.

Grubaugh makes these two observations in relation to Paying For It:

“I am much more interested in getting the woman off than I am in getting off. I need that aspect to enjoy it. It doesn’t seem like that would be a big focus of the interaction in prostitution. Like does Chester ever perform oral sex?”

“[Chester] never really addresses the woman’s sexual gratification in Paying For It”.

From what I’ve read in accounts written by sex-workers (and I’m sure there are exceptions), they tend to find it annoying if their clients want to sexually please them. They’re doing the work for money, not pleasure. They see the job as satisfying the desires of the client, not satisfying their own desires. That said, after I had been seeing Denise for a while, she began to tell me what I was doing sexually that was annoying her and what I should be doing instead to make the experience more pleasurable for her. I suspect that she wouldn’t want me going into the specific details of our sex-life here, like whether I perform oral on her. But I’ve always been very willing to perform oral on sexual partners who’ve wanted me to.

I’ll also add that physical pleasure doesn’t just come from sex. One day, many years ago, Denise complained that her back was a bit sore. I offered to give her a massage. She was so satisfied with that massage that now I always have to give her a massage when we get together. I massage her for as long as she wants, which is always much longer than the amount of time we spend having sex. A few weeks ago she called me up out of the blue to ask if I could come over to her place and give her a massage because she wasn’t feeling well. I was happy to do so — we didn’t have sex and no money was exchanged -- this was just about helping a friend feel better. We had a very pleasant afternoon together. (Sook-Yin and Amanda also frequently ask me to massage them. Sook-Yin tells me that I’m a much better at giving massages than Adam. If only I’d given Dave massages he'd have wanted to stay friends with me.)


Chester Brown has been writing and drawing comics and graphic novels since the 1980s: Yummy Fur, Ed The Happy Clown, I Never Liked You, Louis Riel, Paying For It, Mary Wept Over The Feet Of Jesus. You can help provide him with a stable source of income while he works on his next graphic novel by donating at Patreon.