Chester Brown: "Daniel Read"

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

Paid For It (2016)

by 'Chesty Matt' aka Joe Matt

(being a satire of Chester Brown's "Paying For It")

Daniel Read

by Chester Brown

(first posted on Patreon, 27 May 2017)

In response to my Sex-Work Pride piece (April 15th, reposted on A Moment Of Cerebus on April 17th), Sean Michael Robinson posted (on A-M-O-C) an anti-prostitution article by Daniel Read. I posted a short assessment of the article on May 1st, which was reposted on A-M-O-C on May 2nd. Read saw it there and responded in the comments section.

I noted that one of his sources — Melissa Farley — has been discredited. Read half-heartedly defends Farley — who is an academic — by putting down the source I linked to: Maggie McNeill. Read tries to invalidate Maggie’s perspective by noting that she’s not an academic. That is correct; while Maggie did receive a university education (and worked for a while as a librarian), she is not an academic. She’s a sex-worker and has been one for many years. Thinking that Farley knows more about sex-work than Maggie is just ridiculous. Farley’s interviewed some sex-workers, but Maggie knows the business inside-out and has many sex-worker friends (and fans) all over the world. Maggie is obviously going to be much more knowledgable on the subject than Farley. As for my charge that Farley has been discredited: once the courts start to dismiss an academic's “research” as being too biased to be useful, I’d say it’s fair to say that that academic been discredited. (Here’s the link again to Maggie’s piece on Farley, which includes a quote from Justice Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court on why she considered Farley’s work to be of little substance.)

Apparently Read worships academics and doesn’t recognize that they’re humans who are capable of being biased, making mistakes, and even lying. Do academics know more about the professions they study than the people who are in those professions? If an academic claimed to understand cartooning better than I do, I’d be sceptical.

As for Read’s other sources: point-for-point, Read’s statistics are countered by Maggie’s. Anyone who thinks Read’s partisan stats are convincing really should look at the other side’s numbers.

“Vapid” and “semantic” are the words that Read uses to characterize the idea that there’s a difference between legalizing sex-work and decriminalizing it. It’s not a semantic matter to prostitutes.

All of the legalization systems that I’m aware of have required that prostitutes register with the government for a licence. All people engaged in the work without a licence would be breaking the law. In the 1960s homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada — one didn’t need a licence to engage in gay sex, one just needed the consent of an adult partner. What if, instead of decriminalizing homosexuality, the government had legalized it, requiring gay people to acquire licences to have gay sex. Homosexuality was heavily stigmatized. (It still is stigmatized, but the stigma was much more intense in the 60s.) A lot of gays would not have wanted to go to a government office to admit their private sex-life to some bureaucrat. Could they trust that the law wasn’t going to change? Could they trust that the information would be secure? No, if the Canadian government had legalized homosexuality in the 1960s, most gay people would not have registered for licences, and so they would have continued to be criminals for engaging in consensual sex.

Sex-work is as stigmatized now as homosexuality was back in the 1960s. In regions where governments have legalized sex-work, the majority of the workers have refused to register for licences. The result is that a few workers are legal and the majority are still working illegally and are subject to the dangers of working illegally, including the greater likelihood of encountering violence.

Many years ago I asked Denise if she would get a licence if sex-work was legalized. Of course she said no. And why should she? It’s none of the government’s business what she and I do in the privacy of her bedroom — we’re not hurting anyone. The negative consequences of requiring prostitutes to have licences outweigh any potential benefits. Indeed, I don’t even see any benefits.

Decriminalization would allow any adult who wants to engage in sex-work to be able to do so without needing anyone’s permission. And it would allow anyone to pay such a sex-worker for consensual activities. In other words, sex-for-pay should be like all other sex — you should need the consent of your sexual partner (or partners) and that’s the only person (or people) you should need consent from. On the other hand, legalization requires sex-workers and their clients to also get the consent of the government. That’s a big difference, not an inconsequential one as Read seems to think.

Read chides me for ignoring the part of his article that dealt with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed widespread “trafficking” of eastern European women that resulted. I ignored it because, from a 2017 Canadian (and American) perspective, it’s irrelevant to the subjects of decriminalizing sex-work and the morality of the profession. The majority of sex-workers in Canada are not from the former U-S-S-R and have not been forced into the work. Criminalizing ALL prostitution because a small number of prostitutes have been forced into it makes no sense. Police should endeavour to identify who has been forced into the work, punish whoever did the forcing, and leave willing sex-workers and their clients alone.

In my May 1st post, I wrote this about Read’s piece:

“Read’s article boils down to a familiar argument: because SOME prostitutes SOMETIMES encounter violence, ALL prostitution is wrong. Why is it wrong in instances where there’s no violence or force? Read avoids that question, no doubt because he doesn’t have an answer for it.”

Read avoided answering that question in his article, and he avoided answering it when I directly posed it, even though he saw that I’d posed it. I’d say that pretty much proves that he doesn’t have a rational explanation for his negative opinion of sex-work.

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In my May 1st post I asked the A-M-O-C anti-prostitutionists who think all prostitution is morally wrong to explain what’s morally wrong about about my sex-for-pay relationship with Denise. Most of the A-M-O-C anti-prostitutionists ignored the question. Perhaps they’ve gotten bored with the discussion, but I suspect that they don’t have an answer to the question. Only the individual going by the name A Fake Name addressed the question. He-or-she writes:

“[I]f you and her [sic] have found a way this works and are both happy, then I’m glad for you, as glad as I can be for someone I’ve never met. I’m not condemning your relationship.”

On April 20th at 19:38 A Fake Name wrote that “paying/charging for sex is pathetic/scummy.” On May 4th at 19:58 A Fake Name wrote that sex-work is “damaging in the long term for both men and women.” A Fake Name WAS condemning my relationship with Denise — he-or-she called it pathetic, scummy, and damaging. If A Fake Name genuinely thinks there’s no problem with my sex-for-pay relationship with Denise, then he-or-she is either contradicting him-or-herself or he-or-she has changed his-or-her mind on the matter. (And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with changing one’s opinion, but A Fake Name doesn’t seem to be acknowledging that that’s what he-or-she is doing.)

If someone wrote that gay people are pathetic, scummy, and damaged, almost everyone would recognize that person as a homophobe. If someone wrote that black people are pathetic, scummy, and damaged, almost everyone would recognize that person as a racist. A Fake Name has a prejudice, and so do the other anti-prostitutionists on A-M-O-C, and so does Daniel Read.

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.