Last Saturday night I squirmed when Michelle Miller said "It's time for clear speech. Men drive the demand for paid access to women and children's body parts . . " I may have misquoted her slightly at the end there.
And I gasped at Tricia Baptie's courage to ask if we Torontonians even knew if buying sex was right or wrong. Is it just work, like any other job? Or is it something else . . . the robbing of a person's equality. Rape in a clean environment is still rape . . . Tricia's conclusion on the debate on legalizing prostitution in Canada.
Maybe it was the setting - a gorgeous old Baptist church in downtown Toronto, all warm lights and burnished wood. An odd yet right place to surface the discussion about paid sex.
Funny though, last night (Friday), at the end of a wonderful dinner with members of my house group, the issue of paid sex hit me again, and I didn't know what to say.
The 30-something guys in our group who grew up playing video games were talking about one game where they'd take the prostitute out behind the hotel, "do the thing" and then kill her. One of the guys then said: "My friend's eiight-year-old son came up to his parents one day and said 'Dad, I took the hooker to the hotel, had sex and then killed her . . '" I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
It starts there . . . with the assumptions we make as we play the games and watch the movies and read the books. Were my house group guy friends being salt and light? I dunno. Sure, they'd say "It's just a game . C'mon Ren!"
But I'm not so sure anymore. Not after listening to Michelle and Tricia at the forum last Saturday night. And not so sure when I tucked my two-year-old son to bed and wondered about the video games he may want to play and whether or not I'll have to ask him one day: "Do you pay for sex?"
