Prostitution: World’s oldest oppression of women
Victor Malarek has written two books on the global sex trade, one about the supply side—women involved in prostitution—and a just-released volume about the demand side—their customers. He found that booming demand for paid sex has spawned huge increases in sex trafficking and forced prostitution.
Men who hire women for sex, he says, would prefer that women did not have the right of self-determination.
The majority of men who pay to use another person’s body are “profoundly uncomfortable with empowered women,” Malarek writes. Their preference is for women from poor, undeveloped countries that have yet to be invaded by what these men view as the “feminist plague.”
“For them,” Malarek writes, “prostitution is the last bastion of manhood, where the old order they all long for remains intact.”
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Malarek scorns the idea that legalizing prostitution would serve to protect the women and children trapped in it: “Legalization sends a message that it’s OK to purchase women for sex, to impose their sexual will via the almighty dollar,” Malarek writes.
Malarek argues that Canada and other countries should do what Sweden did in 1999: decriminalise prostitution while outlawing the purchase of sex.
On Sunday, Malarek was in Montreal to talk about his book, one of the speakers at a Books & Breakfast session. He said that he had had it with all the clichés that are still trotted out about prostitution – about how it’s the world’s oldest profession, how we’ll never get rid of it, and how boys will be boys.
“It’s the world’s oldest oppression of women,” he said. I looked around to see practically every woman in the audience vigorously applauding.
Amen to that. Real men don’t exploit women.