Who will play Heidi Fleiss?
Recently, the former call girl announced that a Hollywood movie about her
life is in the works. Pandering, her new book about her misadventures as a
Hollywood madam, has been getting airplay on the talk shows.
Fleiss spent almost two years in federal prison. When she was arrested in
1995, there were rumors about celebrity sex, wild partying, inflated dollar
amounts. This is the American way of seeing prostitution: as a fantasy gone
bad. We're hooked on the glitter and the punishment.
America's prostitution fantasies are also reflected in our laws, which are
among the strictest in the world. Outside of Nevada, buying and selling sex
is always illegal. Even in Nevada, prostitution laws are more complex than
most people realize. We are out of step with our closest neighbors, Mexico
and Canada, where prostitution laws are similar to those of Europe or
Britain. In Canada, federal solicitation laws will soon be reviewed by the
Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, to assess their impact on
the safety and health of prostitutes. Although prostitutes in every country
face discrimination, the actual exchange of money for sex is
not a crime in most democracies.
We are also out of step with the United Nations, where prostitutes have
worked hard to have their human rights taken seriously for the last 15
years. Last month, at a two-day UNAIDS conference in Geneva, prostitutes
from Europe, Asia and other regions met with representatives of the
International Labor Organization, UNICEF, the World Health Organization,
and UNESCO. The Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) - a global coalition of
sex workers and their advocates - played a crucial role in designing the
agenda by forcing onto the table a number of issues that had been overlooked.
"We insisted that the conference talk about ethics in research and health
care," says Paulo Longo, a former prostitute, practicing psychologist, and
co-founder of NSWP. Prostitutes are often subjects of HIV studies, but too
much of this research has been astonishingly careless and inhumane. That's
why Longo, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, got involved with prostitutes' rights.
Involvement brings empowerment. At the Geneva meeting, a bar girl from one
of Bangkok's busiest red-light districts criticized Thailand's health
policies, bluntly addressing the coordinator of Thailand's national AIDS
program. She represents a global trend. One sex worker explained:
"Empowerment is not only about getting free airfare to a U.N. meeting. It's
also about having the courage to say what you think to a government official."
On the last day of the conference, the NSWP proposed (and got) a moment of
silence for 10 South African sex workers who had recently been victims in a
Cape Town shooting. "It was important for all those U.N. officials to
observe that moment of silence," one participant told me. It's equally
important to note that, in these circles, the shooting or death of a sex
worker is not seen to justify anti-prostitution laws. Instead, this silence
was a demonstration of support for a prostitute's right to work safely.
Aurorita Mendoza of UNAIDS described sex workers as "one of the biggest
mobilizers in the AIDS response." She deplored laws "that criminalize them
and prevent them from receiving needed information and services."
Twenty-five years ago, the pioneers of the prostitutes' rights movement
could not have envisioned the Geneva event. A marginal movement has come of
age, spawning a whole generation of human-rights advocates who are turning
sex workers into a mainstream cause.
Acknowledging that prostitutes have basic rights - that we are an important
part of every society - is no longer radical. Those who refuse to do so,
those who continue to defend the persecution and arrest of sex workers, are
increasingly seen as extremists. America's prostitution policies are so
backward in comparison to those of most advanced countries - and a number
of developing ones - that we provoke sarcastic comparisons with Islamic
theocracies. Given our self-image as a secular democracy, this is more than
embarrassing. It's bizarre.
This commentary first appeared in
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 25, 2003.
Tracy Quan is the author of the novel "Diary of a
Manhattan Call Girl." Her Web site is
www.tracyquan.net.
