Open Letter in Reaction to
La Paix Des Femmes

Hi Véronique, 

 I’m writing to you today to discuss your play, La Paix des femmes. To start, I want to say I have much respect for your body of work – both the literary and the theatrical. You directed me twice during my time at CÉGEP, and I adored you. I will never forget when République: un abécédaire populaire came out, and you canceled our rehearsal to take us to the cinema to see it. I thought it was so beautiful, so rad, I promised myself I would always live up to the energy and passion you shared with us. I read S’appartenir(e) and La vie habitable. I saw you in Mois d’Août, Osage County and Laurier Station: 1000 répliques pour dire je t’aime. I went to see Scalpée because you were the director. I was never disappointed. You are right and you have a gift for touching people.  

When I heard from friends earlier this summer about La Paix des femmes, I was excited. Because prostitution is a subject I’m passionate about and one that I know well. A little background on my life – after CÉGEP I did a bachelor’s degree, traveled, worked in restaurants and bars, and started playing music. I got a second college diploma and moved alone into a beautiful apartment with an old, adopted cat. During the pandemic, I meditated, worked on art projects, met a wonderful person with whom I share a deep, loving relationship to this day, and moved to Montreal. I ended my career in food service after being hostile with two customers in the same week. I was stretched to the max after eight years in the industry and knew myself well enough to pull back before I snapped. In 2021 I started working at an erotic massage parlour, which I still do today, as well as working from time to time as a nude dancer in bars. I love it. My life is balanced and dynamic. I am a curious, politically engaged, caring person. I make art with my friends, performances and I take care of myself, my family and those around me. I read Martine Delvaux and Judith Lussier and listen to Angèle Arsenault. 

My friends are aware of my work in the sex industry, so I quickly heard about your play being published. I was told it was a dialogue between an abolitionist and a pro-sex-work scholar. I was told it was nuanced and written from multiple perspectives. I was skeptical but eager to read it because you wrote it. That is until my mother wielded your text at me to convince me to stop doing sex work. My poor, terrified mother, who has brutally invalidated me since I first wrote to her almost a year ago telling her about my work. My own mother, so freaked out that she can’t even hear or listen, much less trust me when I try to tell her about my experience. My mom emailing me your play. And my stomach in knots because, at that moment, I realize that the play confirms all her most sordid fears about my existence. At first, I’m so exasperated I tell myself I won’t read it. Anyway, she has refused to read anything I send her for a year. But what I needed the most was to be considered and heard. So I chose to open a dialogue by offering her a reading in exchange for a reading, which she eventually accepted.  

 So I read your play. While camping in the Jacques-Cartier Valley with my lover. I understand that your writing comes from a feminist impulse, a place of benevolent sisterhood, but I find this text hurts. Because it’s not a dialogue. It’s a lynching that rehashes all kinds of clichés about sex work in which exploitation, human trafficking and prostitution are all the same. The conversation occurs between a young woman (Alice) who decides to brutally confront Isabelle, the former feminist studies teacher of her sister (Lea), dead of an overdose six months after having started to prostitute herself. Alice blames Isabelle and the feminism she upholds for having caused her sister’s death, relying on an aggressive and dismissive abolitionist rationale. The character of Isabelle, who supposedly bears the pro-sex work argument, is discredited in the blurb on the back cover and tends to make dubious statements. She keeps waving “agency” as the solitary white flag to defend sex work in her discussions. And yet it is this same agency that we lose when she suggests that, as sex workers, “it is all we have left “¹ and “they can’t take that away [from us].”²  Such claims strip sex workers of our agency, victimizing us and painting a bleak portrait of our reality. The story of Lea, dead after being recruited into a trafficking ring, inspired by the real lives of women who have been victims of coercion, extortion, abuse, and assault – is valid and alarming. We do need to talk about this reality, to denounce it. To shout out loud that as women in a misogynist and oppressive patriarchal system, we have lived and continue to live through appalling sexual violence. In this system, violence, as you say, is everywhere. It is intersectional. But I am so angry that these stories of exploitation are systematically used to represent prostitution in general, invalidating all those whose experience of sex work is ordinary or even straight-up positive. Ordinary experiences generally aren’t reported publicly or are labeled as isolated cases, creating an unbalanced and distorted image of our lives. Because If we are shown reports from Radio-Canada on “sugar babies” being manipulated and abused or women getting assaulted and killed, they also need to show us the story of the 45-year-old woman who has quietly worked for 20 years, and those for whom sex work is a means for empowerment and a good life.   

 Clarifying the difference between the consensual exchange of services and sexual exploitation, once and for all, would allow us to better combat pimps and fight to curb human trafficking more effectively. At the same time, SWers would benefit from improved working conditions to organize themselves and ensure their health and safety at work. Because this is indeed an intense job, and it is not made for everyone. The cliché of quick and easy money is totally absurd. Sex work is work. There are many security challenges, and strong relational, communication, and entrepreneurial skills are a requirement. It seems evident to me that all the energy used to discredit SWers and try to make them disappear would be much better used to help them obtain better tools for their trade and establish an empowering and safe social and legal framework. You infantilize a person when you suggest you are better at making choices about her life than she is. The worldwide abolition of prostitution is a legal and theoretical fable that only works on paper. I fail to see how the state could control the individual agency of SWers and their bodies without falling into repression and totalitarianism. And while it is indeed urgent to find ways to help women in extreme poverty who prostitute themselves to survive, it must be recognized that social and economic precarity would persist even if prostitution were made wholly illegal and/or magically disappeared. We can only make the lives of sex workers more difficult by stigmatizing them and working against them and their clients. Like with abortion, which can never be totally eradicated but can undoubtedly be dangerous when practiced under the wrong conditions, I believe that prostitution in Canada should be decriminalized ³ ; to allow SWers to self-organize according to their needs, which they know best, and create shared spaces, training opportunities, and unions to foster the improvement of their working conditions.

 La Paix des femmes, unfortunately, still contributes to the deliberate conflation of consensual exchanges of voluntary sexual services with human trafficking. Because if I understand correctly, the play was written based on only two testimonials (K. and C., thanked at the end of the book)? It seems that a sample of two individuals is not enough to get an accurate idea of how a whole environment, which one has not directly experienced, works. The contribution of your friend Martine B. Côté, student researcher and abolitionist activist who has worked with victims of exploitation, was no doubt highly relevant. If the play, and the attached essay, claimed to be about exploitation and sex trafficking, that would be fine. But because the works claim to speak “for women and against the system that exploits them” ⁴ about the concept of prostitution in general, I find the gratuitously violent and shocking images conveyed in the play to be shamelessly ridiculous and crude.  ⁵

 It seems to me that this willingness to see using one’s body in a sexual way as automatically dangerous, painful, dirty, dishonourable, and shameful is a throwback to the outdated Catholic thinking that once controlled sexual morality. Suppose we believe today that women have a right to their bodily autonomy and sexual freedom. Why should “dislocating your jaw from giving blowjobs”⁶ (which already strikes me as either a horrible experience of sexual violence or a stylistic exaggeration but not a frequent consequence of practicing fellatio) be a worse scenario than destroying your lungs by breathing in chemicals in a factory, blowing out your vertebrae by lifting people to wash them in a hospital or ravaging your mental health as an overworked teacher in an elementary school? The patriarchal capitalist system exerts economic and social pressure and dominance on all women and all workers, regardless of their field. I am trying to demonstrate how our system threatens the physical and psychological health of so many of us. The working conditions of migrant people are often compared to modern slavery. The average household is being held in a chokehold by the ever-increasing cost of living. In this context, prostitution can easily be, for some people, the most practical and appealing way to pay for rent and groceries. It can also be an appealing occupation simply because sexuality and social work (because I assure you that sometimes we do act as social workers in lingerie) interest and stimulate us more than working in a hardware store, making sushi or being an administrative assistant in a production company.