Go meet your needs, dude
A man charged with killing a Quebec City sex worker was allowed to have what the Parole Board of Canada deemed “inappropriate” sexual relations with women — despite the “serious and worrisome risk.”
Eustachio Gallese had been allowed to meet women “only for the purpose of responding to [his] sexual needs,” since he was granted day parole in March 2019, according to parole board documents.
What was he in prison for? Murdering a woman.
He was in prison for murdering a woman, so they gave him day parole so that he could get his “sexual needs” met…by another woman. Whom he murdered.
Heads up: there is no such thing as “sexual needs.” Wants, yes, urgent intense importunate wants yes, but needs, no. Nobody dies of wanting sex. If you frame male sexual wants as “needs” you make it seem as if women owe men sex, and that’s just to institutionalize rape.
Gallese, 51, was charged Thursday with second-degree murder in the death of 22-year-old Marylène Levesque, whose body was found by police in a hotel room in Quebec City’s Sainte-Foy neighbourhood on Wednesday evening.
Gallese’s desire for sex was not more important than Marylène Levesque’s life. That’s not even a close call.
Gallese was sentenced in 2006 to life in prison with no chance of parole for 15 years for the 2004 second-degree murder of Chantale Deschênes who, according to parole documents, he struck on the head with a hammer and stabbed several times, enraged by her decision to leave him.
So, maybe possibly not the kind of guy who should be on day parole to get his sexual “needs” met? Granted, many violent criminals mature out of their violent tendencies, and long prison sentences are not a self-evident social good, and retribution is even less so, but all the same…if they’ve decided he’s not safe to release yet, they have no business deciding he’s safe to release for the few hours it takes to fuck and then kill a woman.
Véronique Hivon, the justice critic for the Parti Québécois, said the case shows a certain “nonchalance” in the way violent crimes against women are treated.
Coupled with a deadly seriousness about the idea that men have sexual “needs” that require giving them access to women’s bodies.
Sandra Wesley, the director of Stella, a Montreal-based sex workers’ organization, said the case is “very concerning” because the parole board appears to have given Gallese tacit permission to hire prostitutes, knowingly putting them at risk.
“They identified that this man was a potential danger to women and wasn’t ready to have proper relationships with women but figured that he could then go see sex workers.”
Oh no, I’m sure they were thinking he could find a genuine girlfriend in the course of an afternoon.
I know a way he could have his sexual needs eliminated altogether. Preferably without anesthesia.
On a less reactionary note, the people who let this murderer out to play are complicit in his subsequent behavior, and I would venture to say accessory to it. Common sense tells me this is not a policy issue, but one of failed assessment of the threat, and bad decisions of the parole board.
I’m sure we can all be glad to know that Ms Levesque was fully empowered by her career in ‘sex work.’ Without all those privileged cis-het-feminists trying to spoil the fun.