This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published Nov. 16, 2024

An Unjust Burden — by Mr. Fish

I just got off the phone with the Canadian feminist and activist Lee Lakeman. She is in hospice. The battles she has spent her life fighting, including her advocacy for impoverished aboriginal women prostituted in desolate urban landscapes such as the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, which once had the highest HIV-infection rate in the West, lay behind her. When she is gone, we are the ones who will be impoverished, bereft of her searing intellect and unwavering fight for justice. She will leave in her wake a sterling example of what it means to live the moral life, a life of meaning.

“Everything you and I have spent our life fighting for is worse,” she said to me ruefully over the phone.

Yes. Worse. But her clear, steely-eyed view of the world, her understanding of power and how it works, never dampened her commitment or passion. To fight battles in the face of almost certain defeat, to demand justice for the oppressed no matter the cost, and to know that despite all your efforts, the forces of oppression are growing stronger and crueler, is the essence of nobility.

Prostitution, she argues, is the quintessential expression of global capitalism. Our corporate masters are pimps. We are all being debased and degraded, fleeced economically and stripped of basic civil liberties and political agency, to service the cruel and lascivious demands of the corporate elite. Jeffrey Epstein surrounded himself not only with prostituted underage girls, but the powerful, including Donald Trump, who 27 women have accused of sexual misconduct, along with Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. The hard drives found in Epstein’s safe at his Manhattan mansion, which purportedly included videos of sexual encounters filmed on his properties, have disappeared. It is unlikely they will reappear. The wretched of the earth are reduced in the neoliberal model to serving the desires and fetishes of the wealthy and the privileged.

The widening income disparities, the collapse of the social contract and the grotesque entitlement that comes with celebrity, political power and wealth, has deformed all institutions, including the courts, into instruments that serve the exclusive interests of the entitled. The fight for equal pay, equal distribution of wealth and resources, access to welfare, legal aid that offers adequate protection under the law, social services, job training, healthcare and education services, have been so degraded, they barely exist. This is especially true for poor women and girls.

When the elites tire of us, or when we are no longer of use, we are discarded, like the women and girls men exploit. We are being transformed into serfs on a global plantation ruled by corporations and oligarchs. The fight against prostitution, Lee says, is not only the fight for women and girls, but the fight against a dehumanizing neoliberalism. Poverty, she reminds us, is not an aphrodisiac. Those who sell their bodies most often do so out of desperation. They are usually women and girls of color trafficked from the Global South, as well as refugees from countries at war such as Ukraine. They end up physically injured, with a variety of diseases and medical conditions, and suffer severe emotional trauma. The average age at which a girl enters prostitution is estimated to be 12 to 14. Their life spans are often short.

This fight against prostitution – Lee seeks to decriminalize those who are prostituted and bring criminal charges against the clients, pimps and traffickers – along with her insistence that we should not abolish the police but strengthen its mandate to go after those who abuse women and girls, makes her an anathema to the left. But she has as little time for a feckless left as it does for her. The left, with its woke politics, lack of class consciousness and naiveté about “sex work,” she argues, is bankrupt.

“Selling your body for sex is not a choice,” she says. “It is not about freedom. It is an act of economic slavery.”

You can see an interview I did with Lee and Alice Lee, one of the founders of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, here.

I met Lee in March 2015. I did not know that my few hours with her would trigger a firestorm. I was in Vancouver to give a lecture. I had admired her as one of Canada’s most important radicals and collective member of Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter. I arranged to speak with her and other women from the shelter along with the women who run Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution the morning before my talk in the shelter’s storefront office.

In the 1970s, Lee opened her home in Ontario to abused women and their children. By 1977 she was in Vancouver working with Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter, which was founded in 1973 and is the oldest rape crisis center in Canada. She built alliances with groups such as the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network and Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution to mount court cases to challenge the prostitution industry.

Lee and the shelter refuse to give the provincial government access to victims’ files in order to protect the anonymity of the women. They also deny this information to the courts, in which, Lee says, “defense attorneys try to discredit or bully women complainants in criminal cases of male violence against women.” This defiance has led to losses of government funding.

“It is still impossible to work effectively in a rape crisis center or a transition house and not be breaking the Canadian law on a regular basis,” Lee says.

But Lee is not only the bête noire of the state, but of liberals who, she says, think physical abuse of a woman is abhorrent if it occurs in a sweatshop, but is acceptable in a rented room, an alley, a brothel, a massage parlor or a car.

She stands with the feminist Andrea Dworkin who writes:

Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the w***e, profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell c**t; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black c**t or yellow c**t or red c**t or Hispanic c**t or Jewish c**t has her legs splayed for any man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, w****s, c***s. The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its w****s and ...