for Shannon.

I’m resisting the urge to email this story to all of the people who have, over the last two and a half years, told me that I’m too serious, too angry, too intense about my work. “What’s your problem?” I’ve been asked. “Why do you have to take it all so personally?”

Because women I know are dying. That’s why.

A few months ago it was suicide, then chronic illness, that took the lives of women I've worked with. Today, it's murder.

This morning, nine women piled into two vehicles, all smiles, on their way to soak up some of this precious sunshine at a local beach: a couple hours of fun amidst some pretty serious struggles they’re all experiencing. They packed along a picnic lovingly prepared by one of our dedicated volunteers (wraps, veggies, fresh cut fruit, homemade cookies), affixed bedazzled sunglasses to their faces, flushed with excitement. As they pulled out of our parking lot, the hourly news released a few more details about the woman whose body was found in a local park on Sunday, another piece of the puzzle of whether she’s one of “ours” snapped sickeningly into place. My stomach drops, my head starts spinning. I’m hoping they’re not listening to the news in the cars; but some of them know her, and whether they do or not it’s naïve to think they’re not already thinking about her, wondering.

We’ve been fielding calls and giving interviews to local media for a couple of days now, since the story broke. Reporters want to know: Is there cause for concern among sex workers in Victoria? Do we have any reason to believe the woman, who according to news reports already filed lived a “high-risk lifestyle,” was a sex worker? We use what counselors sometimes call the Broken Record Technique. Yes, we are aware of the case. No, we don’t know the woman’s identity yet. The police haven’t released her information yet, we don’t know anything you don’t. No, we’re not willing to speculate about who she is or why what happened to her happened. Repeat. Over and over.

It’s hard not to feel like they want this woman to have been a sex worker. It’s as if involvement in sex work and drug use are accepted as answers in and of themselves to the questions of this case. In the absence of any actual information about who she was and what happened to her, blanks can be filled in with details like these that carry a lot of weight, if not accuracy.

I refresh the local news website I’m following and the timeliest headline possible comes up: “Prostitution laws continue to allow women to be victimized, court hears.” I feel like commenting, “Hey, thanks Captain Obvious!” underneath the story, but I don’t. I have to remember that this ‘news’ is not as redundant to most people as it is to us, my coworkers and me, who see scars and bruises and the deep, long-lasting effects of psychological and physical trauma on the hopeful, resilient women we work with every single day.

That conversation is happening right this minute in a courtroom in Toronto, as the federal and Ontario provincial governments try to convince the Ontario Court of Appeal that Justice Susan Himel (a heroine in our community) was wrong to rule that the federal prostitution laws do more to harm sex workers than to protect them. The Harper government argues that since sex workers choose a dangerous profession and one that is contrary to the law, that they are not entitled to protection or safety. What they’re essentially telling people who engage in sex work is, we won’t entertain the idea of changing the laws so that you can work safer because the work you do contravenes those laws. If your head’s spinning trying to find the logic in that, you’re not alone.

But make no mistake: for our government, this debate is not a question of legality at its essence. It’s a proclamation based on moral judgments that divide people into deserving and undeserving of the violence that is done to them. According to Statistics Canada, the top three most dangerous jobs you can have in Canada are taxi driving, policing and sex work. If any politician (let alone a head of state) were to publicly state that police officers don’t deserve protection from violence on the job, heads would roll. The fact that the Prime Minister can get away with this exceptionalism is deeply indicative of the way that sex workers are judged and (de)valued in our communities. Harper said last December that sex work is "bad for society." This opinion, enforced by outdated laws, literally results in death, which is, I'm just going to go ahead and put this crazy idea out there, worse than his, or my, or anyone's discomfort with the idea of sexual services as valuable commodities.

The top three pieces on the hourly news are still about the Stanley Cup playoffs when we get the call that the woman is indeed “ours.” The grieving begins in our community as the celebration begins outside. "It's never going to stop," a coworker said to me, jaw clenched, as I headed out the door for the day. How heartbreaking, how utterly infuriating it is that even rational people who dedicate their working (and often private) lives to providing advocacy and support for sex workers are sometimes forced to conclude this.

I have to be clear: we don't yet know what happened to Shannon. Whether her death is related to her work, we can't say for sure. But the angry grief on the teary faces of my coworkers and the fear in the voices of clients who phoned us for information about the missing woman today is proof enough that their response isn't just about her. "We live in an ocean of violence," another of my coworkers said earlier. "When you've known a lot of people who have died violently, you're always just waiting to hear who the next one will be."

That's my problem.

Red Light, Green Light

I recently had the incredible good fortune to spend nearly a week with some of my favourite people in a city I now have a swooning crush on: Amsterdam. Its winding canals and cobblestone streets and unbelievably, impossibly ubiquitous bicycles (not to mention its accompanying civilized cycling culture, in which bicycles always have the right of way) hooked me.

Our hosts, my friends Wanda and Craig, had made Amsterdam their home for the past 8 months, and made sure we had ample opportunity to explore by creaky, fixed-gear fietsen. They lead us down narrow streets, over canal bridges, through densely populated parks and throngs of other cyclists with an easy familiarity that I found baffling. A couple of days into our visit, we decided to pass through the fabled Red Light District. I have dim memories of my first visit there, nine years ago, recalling mostly that I felt then that the city had two faces, a glossy, shiny one for daytime and a decidedly more debaucherous one at night. As you no doubt know, prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, and many sex workers ply their trade openly, in street-level windows illuminated by red lights. I remember walking through the streets back then under the overprotective arm of an American rugby player, who I met (along with his girlfriend, who had the other arm) while traveling and spent a few days with. We watched with wide-eyed fascination as women in g-strings gyrated and beckoned in our direction, and men in actual trench coats offered us drugs. We scurried through the streets, trying to be cool and take it all in, none of us wanting to admit to the others that we were freaked out. This time around, I thought, my matured gaze could handle it better. I couldn't wait to see it all again with fresh eyes.

Amsterdam's Red Light District is controversial for those of us in the business of trying to work out how sex workers' safety, human rights and dignity can best be preserved. It is, for some, upheld as a bastion of freedom, in which sex workers can join unions, receive health benefits, work in secure spaces and find widespread acceptance that their work is valid and respectable. It's also seen as a way of ghettoizing sex workers and their patrons, keeping them separate and removed (physically, and by extension conceptually) from the rest of 'civilized' society. I was raring to meander the streets and to see for myself, and had plans to visit the Prostitution Information Centre, where visitors can learn about the Netherlands' sex work laws, have a walking tour of the Red Light District by Centre staff (all former sex workers); but even sex work advocates take Easter Sunday off. It was closed, and I didn't return to it.

So we wandered the neighbourhood ourselves. “I never really go down there,” Wanda had said to me the day before. “I don't like it. It's not the women that bother me, though, it's the groups of guys, I'm disgusted by them.” This got me thinking about something we talk about at work sometimes, about the tension between being pro-sex work and still feeling discomfort (and judgement) about Johns, the (mostly) men who pay for sex workers' services. I squared my jaw and thought to myself, “You can't be grossed out by the customers if you believe the business is a legitimate one. That's the just and non-hypocritical way to look at it.” And then we entered the neighbourhood.

It was teeming with men. Groups of foreign, mostly english-speaking guys crowded every bar's patio, and individuals and pairs of men wandering the streets, stopping to point and gesture at women separated from them only by a pane of glass. The looks on some of their faces reminded me of that cartoon wolf (was it a Looney Toon?) who used you drool and snarl and howl and look hypnotized when that woman in a hot red dress would pass by. They seemed delighted with themselves, confidence bolstered by morning beer. They snapped photos (despite the signs on every agency wall insisting we refrain from doing so) and made lecherous, immature comments. We were followed into a store (comically named SexyLand Erotic Supermarket) by a group of tall, stocky English guys who clearly thought it was ok to invite themselves into our personal space, sidling up beside us while we were looking at underwear and stockings, and ask “See anything you like? I'll get it for you if you do.” They'd chuckle wildly and loudly at each other's banter; we left. “They were enjoying that way too much for us not to be getting paid for it,” I sighed to my friends when we were away from their gaze. As a sidenote: this was the precise moment when I realized how much my perspective has shifted over the past decade.

Of course, there are customers who don't behave this way; we just didn't see them, because they're so much quieter and less conspicuous than the ones who do. While the Dutch men (friends and family of Wanda's) I talked to about my work back home and about the Netherlands' prostitution laws had mature and nuanced approaches to the issue, throngs of tourists to the area are clearly leagues behind in having any kind of analysis about prostitution as an industry, like any other, whose workers are entitled to operate free from harrassment and degradation. It makes me doubt that the Red Light District really accomplishes what I think should be broader goals of communities that embrace either legalization or decriminalization of sex work: normalizing and integrating the industry into the rest of society. The spectacle of it, the erotic supermarkets, the women (and some girls) in windows, the drunken, sunburned guys making obnoxious gestures through the windows, the tacky souvenirs (my favorite: a sex worker in a glittery snowglobe), trivializes the industry, invites voyeurism without requiring any standard of behaviour in return, and distracts from any semblance of intelligent conversations about sex work. While sex workers may receive a generally positive social response from Dutch citizens, the Red Light District feels like something of a theme park both staffed by and designed for visitors (as many as 95% of sex workers in the area are from other countries). I expected better. “You imagined emancipation and you got a freak show?” my office-mate suggested.

Exactly.

"To days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing..."*

I have the pleasure of knowing some really creative folks whose drive, imagination, talent and humility inspire me and make me excited about art, music, writing and (especially) collaboration.

My friend Tak recently asked me to take a listen to the album he had just completed and to write about my experience of it. I can't get this music out of my head lately, so it was an easy task. Here's what I wrote:
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The Pawnshop Manual's debut album, Parcels and Polaroids, is a meditative self-reflection that explores a particular kind of desire: to make changes and connections in an isolating world. Five Inch Step invites an awakening to the superficiality of our interactions that Falls Over Whole (Believing Through) then depicts. We've Become Here (Believing In) swells with an intense longing that evokes deep empathy in anyone who has found themselves bouncing between hope and despair. A gentle instrumental begs for simplicity and focus in a world of contradictions, and the sweet duet that follows, the title track, delivers that focus with its revelation that “all that I need is here.” 4:37am (Things That Follow) is an energetic, clap-along song that makes you want to play it loud and sing it with your friends on your way to somewhere you can't wait to be. It celebrates hope, happiness and togetherness. A slowed-down refrain from We've Become Here brings the album to a contemplative close.

The Pawnshop Manual has made an intellectual and infectious pop record that will satisfy your yearning for music that asks big questions and mulls the answers thoughtfully and creatively. Parcels and Polaroids is dynamic and evocative from beginning to end, and its aural meandering will stay with you long after the road trip is over.
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You can download Parcels and Polaroids on a pay-what-you-wish basis from The Pawnshop Manual's website or on iTunes, or buy the actual cd. The website offers multiple ways to experience the music and interact with the artists involved in the project, including other talented local musicians as well as album art designer and photographer Eric Anderson. Also check out Tak's own blog, T's Contrapunctus, for his analysis of new and exciting things happening musically around the world.

So here's to the people whose desire for things to be different in the world takes the shape of creative projects.

The rest of us lead richer lives because of it.



*Johnathan Larson, La Vie Boheme

stigmata

We are summoned to the bedside of one strong woman, whose prognosis, delivered callously over the phone by a doctor she had never met, was "just a few months" a year ago. The last time I saw her she told me she felt better now than she ever has in her life, and that she was grateful. She was keeping busy fighting the cruelty of her neighbours towards the animals in their household, and was successful in getting an abused dog removed from its home and the owners both charged with cruelty and evicted from her complex. We've been asked to go to her immediately, but not by her. Her partner called to tell us we should come, that she didn't want to bother us by calling herself. What I keep thinking is what a bizarre thing it must be to have someone tell you that you are in the "final stages" of your life. To know that; to have everyone else around you know that, and to still not think that sort of thing worthy of others' attention.

And the young woman who, the last time I saw her (just a month ago) was impeccably dressed, nourished, determinedly optimistic, enrolling in school, writing poetry. A report from a friend today tells me that she was seen stumbling around, scars on her face, dirty and bleeding, ten pounds lighter. She wouldn't seek support from us in her state, "not like this," she said, ashamed, to the woman who, although she barely knows the girl, gave her a hug and a sandwich and money and smokes. "We pray for our fallen angels," the woman wrote to me earlier this evening; i don't even believe in angels or prayer, for that matter, but I felt like starting tonight, because I didn't know what else to do with the pain in my heart, and that seems to work for some people. I know how this young woman would be judged, what problems she'd be diagnosed with, and it isn't what you'd think. It's almost absolutely never what you'd think, i can swear to that. It is not her failure to stay clean that has her in the state she is in; it's her child being ripped away from her from an inhumane system of "protection" that fails families over and over. It's the impacts of chronic street-level as well as domestic violence and a staggering lack of support for survivors. It's the culture we cultivate within which a mother can spend years calling her neglected, disabled and victimized daughter a 'junkie whore' and that blames only the daughter for the choices that she makes believing that, because she is deficient, she has no other.

Stigma is so powerful that it prevents people from even seeking the support of people whose sole role in their lives is to do so. This is the third woman today (today) who I found out chose to go it alone because she was too ashamed to ask for help, and didn't believe she deserved it. I'd likely feel the same way. A female who does sex work (strike one), lives in poverty (strike two), experiencing structural or physical violence, or both, (strike three) recieves triple the blame for her situation. It is not, in this context, a stunning revelation that mass murderer W. Pickton for years got away with the slayings (and attempted killings) of dozens of women even though in 1998 a woman who he stabbed and who escaped him risked further violence to tell her story, including that of seeing abandoned purses and bloody clothing on the infamous farm, to police, but was dismissed as not being a credible enough witness. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/844124--pickton-jurors-not-told-of-victim-who-got-away

http://www.missingpeople.net/

welcome.

I haven't been writing much lately, even though I'll swear up and down that I love to. Because I belong to both the generation and class of people for whom navel-gazing is considered a hard day's work, I've been thinking a lot about why I don't write, even though in those mental exercises when you're supposed to picture what you want to be doing in ten years, it's one of the only things that is certain. I guess I've been waiting for it to "roar out of (me)," Bukowski style, and it hasn't, so I haven't.

Which is, of course, because I've been scared to. There is no simpler, more truthful way to say it. But I've realized in recent days that the kind of paralysis that stops me from doing something that I love, and that isn't necessary in the world, is an utter privilege. The kind of dismay that many people I know (myself included, at times) feel over their stagnant lives is, rightfully, laughable to anyone who operates in survival-mode, who loses sleep over tangible things like food and housing and adequate medical care and staying safe from violence.

I know a woman who works in the indoor sex trade by choice who recently participated in a fundraiser at her workplace to benefit outdoor survival sex workers. She had recently learned about some budget cuts at the organization I work for, a support agency for sex workers, and that the cuts had affected outreach services so severely that all that was available to hand out to the folks working the stroll at night were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The woman told me, although the fundraiser at her workplace involved participation and performance in things that made her feel sick, that "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches aren't acceptable to me, and they shouldn't be to anyone else. I had no idea how bad it was out there." Her indignance at the injustice of the working conditions of street sex workers was strong enough to propel her through her perfectly rational fear of taking a lead role in an event that involved a live sex show, toy demonstration and a raffle whose prizes were half-hour "rentals" of herself and her coworkers; "you know that means blow jobs, right?" my office-mate told me earnestly.

As she talked, I swallowed loudly and tried not to distract from her storytelling by breaking down like a blubbering fool. Here in front of me was a woman with a set of personal challenges that I have a sneaking suspicion would make it hard for me to get out of bed in the morning telling me that she faced her fear of participating in an event that she herself described repeatedly as the very last thing on earth she'd want to do, in support of a bunch of strangers because she found it "unacceptable" that they not have something more nourishing to eat. She somehow managed to get past the sickness and perform not only the work that was required of her by the agency, but a piece of radical political activism as well. She engaged the male clients of indoor sex workers in the support of outdoor survival sex workers by both educating them about the survival workers' often violent work and life experiences and enabling them to act on their concern by donating money. As my coworker pointed out, for most of the history of sex worker support organizations, the (mostly male) clients have been missing from the equation of how to make things more safe.

Since hearing this woman talk about her fear which was so intense that she felt sick, while at the same time detailing the hundreds of dollars she and her coworkers raised that night, i've started thinking about all the things I don't do, every day, because I'm afraid, and how not one of them quite stacks up to this woman's defiance of her own fear in support of someone else whose poverty was "unacceptable" to her. So I'm going to write, and hopefully you, invisible readers, will have something to say about it; it has become ridiculous to me that there's anything that I don't do because of fear.

The name of this page comes from bell hooks; she says that "It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego." I'm really into that idea, moving past our narcisism and navel-gazing (my own, as much as anything) into conversation and acts that move things forward and make tangible change.

thanks for reading.