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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?

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