Chester Brown: I'm Not Martin Luther King Jr!

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

The Forms Of Things Unknown (2017)
art by Chester Brown

I'm Not Martin Luther King Jr!

by Chester Brown

(first posted on Patreon, 1 May 2017)

My April 15th post titled Sex-Worker Pride was reposted on A Moment Of Cerebus on April 17th.

Erick had argued that prostitution is morally wrong because it’s like slavery. I shot that idea down in my April 15th post. Erick didn’t bother to defend the prostitution-is-like-slavery analogy -- instead he came up with a new one: prostitution is morally wrong because it’s like smoking:

“[M]ost who [smoke cigarettes] find it enjoyable and addicting, but it is proven to be long term deadly or debilitating.”

Someone going by the name Culpa Direct similarly compared prostitution to bestiality.

Because Sean Michael Robinson had complained that I was a "self-interested" advocate for sex-worker rights, I had, in my April 15th post, pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr and Harvey Milk had also been self-interested advocates for their causes. Robinson stated that I was comparing myself to King:

"No one’s going to bring up a john advocating for prostitution, comparing himself to Martin Luther King?"

In pointing out that I'm like King in ONE small way (that he had a self-interested reason for being committed to his cause), I wasn't saying I'm like him in any other way. I'm certainly not one of the leaders of the sex-worker rights movement. Those would be actual sex-workers -- people like Savannah Sly and Maggie McNeill, who've given more and risked more for sex-worker rights than I ever have.

A Fake Name also had a problem with my reference to King:

"I can’t believe you’re using MLK in a discussion about prostitution. I’m actually flabbergasted. You’re talking about women who have sex with strangers for money. It’s a business transaction."

A Fake Name seems to think that it’s not possible to violate someone’s human rights if they’re making money. Let’s say that the government started to censor and burn books. Would the fact that writers and publishers make money from publishing books mean that their rights weren’t being violated by having their words censored and their property burned? The laws targeting sex-workers and their clients violate their human rights -- the fact that money is involved is irrelevant from a rights perspective.

Culpa Direct wrote:

"If there’s no moral argument against prostitution, then I guess there’s no moral argument against it becoming Big Business either. Store-front brothels, appointments and walk-ins. Lunch-time customers served in 15 minutes or less. Drive- throughs eventually. BJs could even be an option at drive-thru car washes. TV commercials, billboards, trade schools, recruitment programs for young women. 'But Mom, I wanna be a sex-worker like Granny!’"

No, I don’t have a problem with sex-work becoming a big business -- with storefront locations, television commercials, and billboards -- as long as we’re talking about a genuinely decriminalized system in which there are many options for doing sex-work and individual prostitutes would be able to choose the type of work-place that would suit them, which would include more discreet work-places in addition to flashy storefront brothels. In such a system, few if any workers would choose to work in the brothel equivalent of a fast-food place, with high volume at low prices. In a decriminalized system of genuine sex-worker choice, it would be highly unlikely that a minimum-wage brothel-equivalent of a McDonald’s would be successful. I can imagine a big brothel franchise chain developing under decriminalization, but ONLY if it pays well. The reason why the vast majority of sex-workers do the work is because it pays well (and usually better than well). Who’s going to do the work if it doesn’t pay well?

A Fake Name objected to a passage from ex-sex-worker Virginie Despentes’ book, King Kong Theory, that I had quoted. I’ll again reproduce that Virginie Despentes passage here:

"[W]hen you hear that prostitution is an 'act of violence against women,’ we are supposed to forget that it is marriage and other things we put up with that are ‘acts of violence against women.’ We cannot ignore the fact that far more women die from domestic violence than from engaging in sex work. Women who are fucked for free must continue to be told that they have made the only possible choice, otherwise how can they be kept under control? Masculine sexuality is not in itself an act of violence against women, as long as they are consenting and well paid. It is the control exercised upon us that is violent -- the power to decide on our behalf what is dignified and what is not."

A Fake Name’s responded:

"Marriage as an act of violence? What? She’s comparing marriage with domestic abuse. Two different things! Most men want a happy marriage, still want love, family and love doing things for their family. That’s beautiful. It’s not violence."

What A Fake Name is missing is that Despentes is turning the logic of anti-prostitutionists against them. The anti-prostitutionists who’ve been posting on A-M-O-C insist that sex-work is morally wrong even when it does not involve violence, even when individual sex-workers like their work and their clients, even when it pays really well and benefits both sides of the exchange. But to prove that sex-work is wrong, they continually retreat to talk about violence and disease. If it’s legitimate to condemn ALL sex-work because SOME sex-workers SOMETIMES encounter violence and disease, then it’s legitimate to condemn ALL marriage for exactly the same reason. Yes, some sex-workers experience violence as a consequence of their work, but some wives also experience violence as a consequence of getting married. If you think marriage as an institution should be judged by the best-case marriages that result in loving relationships, then you should be judging prostitution by ITS best-case situations.

If Tim does post this on A-M-O-C, then I would ask the anti-prostitutionists on A-M-O-C to explain why one particular sex-for-pay relationship is morally wrong: the one I have with Denise.

Denise is not a desperate, underage runaway; she was around thirty when she began doing sex-work, and is in her forties now. (I’ve been seeing her for fourteen years.) She’s intelligent, educated, and has a regular (non-sexual) day-job. She wasn’t forced into the work and doesn’t have a pimp. She wasn’t “trafficked” from the former U-S-S-R, or anywhere else in the world -- she’s a Canadian citizen. She’s not in “debt-bondage” to anyone. She wasn’t sexually assaulted as a child. She never experienced violence with any of her clients, and certainly never did and never will with me -- I’ve never even raised my voice in anger with her. She’s not drug-addicted, and never was. She’s not mentally ill. (She’s actually extremely rational.) She always used condoms with her clients and continues to use them with me; we even use them for oral sex. (She uses a variety of flavoured condoms.) I’ve been tested for S-T-Ds and am clean so, even if a condom did break, she still wouldn’t get a disease from me. (And I’m not having sex with anyone else, so I’m not about to catch something from someone else and pass it on to her.) The sex we have is completely vanilla, and I’ve never ejaculated on her (or even suggested the idea of doing so). (I don’t necessarily disapprove of all of the things that this paragraph implies disapproval of. For example, as I’ve made clear before, I have no problem with consenting adults ejaculating on each other or engaging in non-vanilla sex, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to have consensual sex with someone who’s been diagnosed with a mental illness. I’m just trying to think of things that A-M-O-C commenters have disapproved of.)

Denise and I are two friends who genuinely like each other and often hang out for reasons that have nothing to do with sex or money. If some confirmation is needed that a sex-worker can feel positively about a client, I refer you to a blog entry by the sex-worker Brazen Lee:

"Amongst the many things I never expected [from escorting…] forming long-term connections would have been way at the bottom of that list. But it’s dawned on me recently that some of the best relationships I have with men outside of my social circle are with clients. […] I love the client-hooker relationship. It’s straightforward. For all of my hiding of parts of myself, clients are typically open with me in a way reminiscent of a therapist. […] I love feeling satisfied after an interaction, especially a sexual one. With clients, I am always satisfied, whether I got off or not. […] The few clients with whom I have had long-term relationships are the best."

In the above, Ms Lee compares her role to that of a therapist. I would agree that Denise plays a therapeutic role in my life in the sense that friendship is generally therapeutic. She’s willing to listen to me talk about things that are bothering me and sometimes has good advice for me. And there have been numerous times where that role has been reversed and I’ve listened while she’s told me about something that’s upset her. Of course, the therapeutic value of friendship isn’t just about listening to problems — it's just as much about enjoying the nature and presence of a particular person and of having people in your life who are excited and happy for you when things are going well for you. There is significance in having sex with someone you care about and who cares about you, and that can be achieved in a sex-for-pay relationship, as my relationship with Denise has shown me. A sex-for-pay relationship can be as bad as a relationship between any two people can be, and it can be as good as any relationship between two people can be. Each relationship should be assessed by what it gives (good or bad) to the two people in that relationship. In automatically judging all sex-for-pay relationships as morally wrong, one would be condemning many relationships that are beneficial to the parties involved in ways that go beyond sex and money.

So, A-M-O-C commenters, deal with my relationship with Denise. What is the morally bad thing thing that this beautiful, generous, thoughtful woman is doing in having sex with me and accepting my money? Or, what is the morally bad thing that I’m doing in having sex with her and giving her money? Don’t refer to the experiences of other people -- stick to my relationship with Denise. And don’t use analogies -- don’t say it’s wrong because it’s like slavery (it’s not), or like smoking cigarettes (what?) or like bestiality (we’re both human). When I wrote about why slavery is wrong (in my last post that was put up on A-M-O-C), I didn’t need to use an analogy to do so. If prostitution is ALWAYS wrong in ALL circumstances, then you should be able to articulate why my relationship with Denise is wrong without resorting to other people’s violent experiences or to analogies.

Sean Michael Robinson posts an article on why decriminalizing sex-work would be a mistake by someone named Daniel Read. Barry Deutsch points out that Read relies on material cowritten by Melissa Farley, whose research has been thoroughly discredited. Read claims that sex-work has been decriminalized in Germany and Holland. Read is wrong, those countries haven’t decriminalized the profession, they've legalized it (and no sex-worker-rights-advocates favour legalization). If Read doesn’t know the difference, then he doesn’t know much about the issue. If he does know the difference, then he’s being deliberately deceptive. Stripped of its false statistics and misinformation, 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.

Thanks to Barry Deutsch, Damian Lloyd, Craig Johnson and Mike Battaglia for making points in my favour on A-M-O-C. Thanks, also, to the anti-prostitutionists on the board for their contributions. I disagree with them, but there is value in having one’s ideas challenged and in being forced to try to articulate them better. I hope they appreciate that I’ve dropped whorephobe here in favour of the term anti-prostitutionist. Presumably those of you who are against prostitution wouldn’t deny that you’re anti prostitution. (I am going to continue to use the word whorephobia elsewhere. Until someone can make a convincing case explaining why sex-work is morally wrong, I will continue to see anti-prostitutionism as an irrational prejudice.)

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.