Random Thought: 16

Hi again,

So in Banja Luka, I went to a museum of Contemporary Art. It was really great, and there was a temporary exhibit all about prostitution. It was so eye-opening, and also very relevant to my trip, as I’m going to be spending time in India working with prostitutes. There was this video shot from a really interesting perspective. Essentially, there’s this group in Italy that really wants to legalize prostitution, because the entire system in Italy is fucked up. This makes sense in the US too.

If you legalize prostitution, it empowers women. Not only can they be more in charge of their bodies, but you could regulate it and you could also diminish the power of pimps over these women. On top of all this, there was just this philosophical debate going on about the nature of prostitution. Some really great questions were raised in the video, such as “What gives men the right to think that they can buy women?” “What kind of work is prostitution? Is it a service? A family-job?” and perhaps the most interesting to me, “Why is it that prostitutes are grouped with criminals and other outcasts, but the men that pay them are usually seen in a more sympathetic light?”

I realized right away that this is so true. In the US, we often will think of the man as being lonely, or awkward, and you may tend to feel for him. For instance, there’s this episode of Dexter in season 1, where the victim of a serial killer is rescued, though his feet and hands have been cut off. A cop, feeling generous and sorry for this now amputee, allows him to have a night with a hooker as a sort of gift. I never forgot that episode because to me it was very striking…and now I can look at in a new, more important light.

If anything, we should feel more sympathetic to the women. So many women are coerced into prostitution (both in their native country or abroad) and really have no choice but to sell themselves. The Danes told me this story about these women in a documentary who were from Africa, and they were told to come to this event if they were interested in working in Europe. Upon arrival at the event, they were knocked out and fed drugs, and the next thing they know, they awake in Denmark and are forced to be prostitutes upon threat of death.

I wish I knew more about prostitution laws around the world.
Yours,
Josh A