Good Grief, Chester Brown

Paying For It - Chester Brown (B)

(To a long-time alt/indy comic fan like myself, this is catnip to a Siamese. To a layman who may have possibly heard of Brown through 'Louis Riel', however, this could be like dog shit to a socialite. Though you can't go wrong writing about whore-mongering, in terms of salacious subject matter. As an example of Brown's unique narrative skills in the comic book terrain, it's beyond reproach. He's developed a deliberately dispassionate style of writing for comics which suits a subject like this perfectly. His style even allows for some humour, in the way his friends Joe Matt and Seth react to his turn to compensated 'dating.

Brown the polemicist, on the other hand, has some issues...

I'm reminded of the Aesop fable of the Fox Who Got His Tail Chopped Off. It happened that a Fox caught its tail in a trap, and in struggling to release himself lost all of it but the stump. At first he was ashamed to show himself among his fellow foxes. But at last he determined to put a bolder face upon his misfortune, and summoned all the foxes to a general meeting to consider a proposal which he had to place before them. When they had assembled together the Fox proposed that they should all do away with their tails. He pointed out how inconvenient a tail was when they were pursued by their enemies, the dogs; how much it was in the way when they desired to sit down and hold a friendly conversation with one another. He failed to see any advantage in carrying about such a useless encumbrance. "That is all very well," said one of the older foxes; "but I do not think you would have recommended us to dispense with our chief ornament if you had not happened to lose it yourself."

The moral here being: Distrust interested advice.

The interested advice in this case, it seems to me, is that since Brown has found a measure of quantifiable equilibrium vis-a-vis his interactions with women, the logical conclusion that he's come to is that all intimate relations by everyone should be conducted in such a straight-forward manner. The problem is that not all women, and certainly not all men feel comfortable with such an arrangement, obviously. Another problem is that Brown makes the assumption that everyone in the sex industry had a variety of employment options open to them, and chose that particular line of work to earn their daily crust. Try explaining Brown's point of view to someone in Eastern Europe, or Thailand, or your basic streetwalker here in North America, and they'll look at you like you just grew a second head. Yeah, there's sex-positive workers like Tracy Quan here in the First world, but I can't help thinking that people like her are way more the exception than the rule.

Which brings me to my next point, Brown's curious objection to legalization. He's using the single example of Nevada's regulations regarding the sex industry to argue against it. It's a poor example, and really, bringing up a single example to refute a point of principle is bad rhetoric. At the very least, if prostitution were to be regulated, you'd at least want the staff to undergo regular health checks, wouldn't you? I certainly wouldn't want a short-order cook with hep C bleeding into my curry fries, so it just stands to reason that I (hypothetically) wouldn't want a sex worker that I hire to give me a raging case of crotch crickets... Secondly, the advantages of regulating it would go a long way to keeping the number of people being exploited way down, and taxing the service would pay for the above mentioned health care and other benefits like con selling and the like.(It's like rationalizing smoking.)

All discussions about regulating prostitution in Canada are academic, of course. Firstly, with the rise of Harper's majority Conservative government, it's highly unlikely that regulating sex work here will ever come up under serious discussion. (An amusing side note: before the election, NDP lead Jack Layton was revealed to have visited a 'common bawdy house' for the intent of getting a 'massage'. The end result of this last-minute revelation was that the NDP is now the official opposition. The moral of this seems to be, if you want to visit whorehouses and you're a public figure, and you get busted, being a left-leaning political candidate is probably the best position to be in. I'm being facetious, of course.) Secondly, we've already got a sort-of solution to the issue, and you'll find it under 'E for Escort agency' in your local phone book. (or on the internet, more likely.) It seems to me that escort agencies, at least here in Calgary, tend to fly under legal scrutiny for the most part. I suspect it's more of an 'out of sight, out of mind' thing than a practical solution. Unless rival agencies rat each other out to the cops, that is. Anyways, the vice squad here, as I suspect in most cities, tends to concentrate on the streetwalkers, since they're the ones at the most risk for abuse.

I guess at this point I should point out that my interest in all this is in the abstract as well. I can't ever see myself 'paying for it', mainly because I couldn't be sure I wasn't contributing to exploiting someone else's misery by supporting their possible bad career choice, (my halo's in the mail.) and secondly- let's be honest here, any escort I hired would see me less as a client and more as a mark. ("Ee-yeah. I'm gonna hafta ask for the cash upfront. See, I gotta take it to my driver downstairs. I'll be right back! See ya!")

At the end of the day, the comic in itself is certainly worth a look. Hats off to Chester Brown for having the guts to discuss such a button-pushing issue, and to put such a personal take on it. I suspect one of the side effects of this might be adding to the stereotype of professional cartoonists being creepy, asocial nerds but them's the breaks, I guess.