A sex tourism destination
Here’s something I didn’t know – Montreal is numero uno in North America in prostitution. Meghan Murphy writes:
A film by Ève Lamont called The Sex Trade (Le commerce du sexe) reveals that the situation in Quebec is much worse than many had imagined (myself included) — more women are sold in prostitution in Montreal than anywhere else in North America.
Lamont interviews pimps, johns, strip club owners, law enforcement, porn producers, and, of course, the women who work in the clubs, the massage parlours, on the street, and out of apartments and hotels in la belle province. A police officer explains that Montreal has 30 strip clubs and 200 massage parlours, never mind the escorts and street prostitution. In most all of these places, trafficking and underage prostitution exists. All this has made Montreal a sex tourism destination for American men.
It’s great for pimps and club owners, not so great for prostitutes.
…the women who sell sex and work in strip clubs rarely profit from prostitution. The clubs make thousands off of the women who work there, making them pay an $70 or $80 “bar fee” at the start of their shifts, never mind all the income the club receives from the men who pay cover and buy overpriced drinks. As one woman who has been working in strip clubs since she was a teenager says, at least 80 per cent of the women in the clubs are working for pimps.
And the work isn’t as much fun as the fans of “sex work” claim.
“Did I end up in prostitution by accident? No,” says one woman. “My grandfather started abusing me when I was four. He was part of a network of pedophiles, so he let his friends start raping me when I was five.”
She worked both as a hotel escort and on the street, saying her time as an escort was much worse. “You’re in a room, the guys are often wasted when you get there, and they think because they’re paying they can do whatever they want,” she says. “They get mad because you won’t do a golden shower or whatever.” She compares this to the men who picked her up on the street and “just want to come and go home,” whereas “the guy in the hotel wants to realize his fantasies.”
Many prostituted women echo these sentiments, saying that johns pay for sex so they can play out the degrading fantasies they wouldn’t (or can’t) subject their girlfriends and wives to.
Porn is inarguably a factor here. In a talk by Gail Dines featured in the film, she says that “porn drives prostitution.” Men watch more and more extreme stuff and lose the ability to get erections with “real women.” They want to play out the stuff they are masturbating to online, and even the most basic porn today is violent and degrading. Most women, of course, don’t want to have painful anal sex, be gagged with their boyfriends’ penises, or called degrading names by their husbands. So where do men go for “porn sex,” Dines asks? “You’re only going to go to those women who can’t say no. And who are those women who can’t say no? Trafficked and prostituted women.”
But hey, those women are empowered, right?
The most pathetic cases are those you come across in the dead of winter. I’ve often seen scantily clad women standing on street corners at 5:30 in the morning when the temperature was -26 or -28. How such pitiful sights could ever arouse a man, I shall never understand.
The only urge I’ve ever felt at the sight of them was to rush out and buy them a bowl of hot soup.
ONOH, male strippers here have it quite good. They’re not pimped, are independently employed, and when they get to old they just recycle themselves in other activities. A documentary on male strippers was broadcast recently, and most seem to have done quite well for themselves. I think the principle reason for their relative success is that, unlike pimped females, few take any hard drugs.
I’m going to take issue with one section of the last paragraph: ‘In a talk by Gail Dines featured in the film, she says that “porn drives prostitution.” Men watch more and more extreme stuff and lose the ability to get erections with “real women.”’ On a recent episode of the podcast The Gist, host Mike Pesca interviewed Maria Konnikova of The New Yorker about so-called “porn addiction,” and whether that second statement has any research to back it up. According to Kinnikova, while conducting this research is difficult due to having to rely on the self-reporting of people who say they are addicted to porn, there is decent research that found, in terms of the second sentence, that men don’t lose the ability to become sexually aroused, but rather the opposite. Also, the chemical signs of true addiction – decreased pleasure response, etc. – just aren’t there.
I’m in no way defending the porn industry or prostitution, but since I had recently heard about the topic I thought I would mention it.
Well, I’m going to argue it.
This idea–that porn drives men’s sexual desires/behavior–has been kicking around for decades, going back to Dworkin and Mackinnon at least, and there’s just no evidence for it. Everything we know about human sexuality is that it is imprinted: fixed at birth or early childhood and immutable thereafter. Look at the abject failure of the Ex-gay movement to reorient even a single gay man. Look at children raised by gay couples, who grow up no different than children raised by straight couples.
The claim that porn makes men impotent is absurd: if it did, fertility would be falling off a cliff. Men would be howling about it. (Porn made me limp!) (cf. meth and The Vampire Life, which is real.) More fundamentally, this claim gets the dynamic backwards: men don’t watch porn because they’ve lost interest in women, men watch porn when they can’t get the women they are interested in.
The most basic porn is pictures of naked women, and of people having sex. By sheer volume, that is also the huge bulk of the porn that is out there on the internet today. Yes, there is all kinds of fetish/niche/extreme material as well, and some of that depicts violence and degradation. The fetish material persists at maybe a 5% or 10% level. Obviously, there is an audience for this material, but that audience has always been there: there’s no evidence that it’s growing. In the 20 years since the internet went mass-market, the center of gravity of the porn world hasn’t budged.
Sexual orientation isn’t the same thing as a taste for violence.
I know a man who masturbates to porn daily and is now incapable of maintaining an erection with a real woman. I know this is a small sample size, but I very much doubt that I happened to stumble across an anomaly.
John, you don’t think the relative success of male strippers in moving on to other careers is that they are MALE?! And thus, not labeled worthless and shameful for having a job pertaining to sex.