In an article for EyeWeekly, Kate Carraway calls out Maclean’s humour columnist Scott Feschuk for an listicle he wrote earlier today titled “Escort v. Hooker: How do they compare?” (The article has since been deleted, but not before Eye screengrabbed it).
Carraway takes issue with Feschuk’s derogatory language (an escort is a “Horse enthusiast; a hooker is “Horse faced”), but the problem is bigger than that, she notes: bigger even than being posted by a national publication.
The article in question was written in response to how the media characterise “escorts” vs. “hookers” in the wake of the Bruce Carson scandal (the former politco in under fire for offering contract deals to his fiancée, a former sex worker).
“That’s a good idea for a story,” Carraway writes, “but writing it in a way that indicates approval and participation rather than satire is a problem. Writing it in a way that reinforces a variety of popular and cruel misconceptions about sex workers is a problem. A header on Feschuk’s website reads “Words that are remembered”: words are remembered, internalized and made real, especially when they come from a big name at a national magazine.”
After tweeting her disgust, Feschuk apologized via a tweet, and noted that he posted the article without the approval of a Maclean’s editor.
Feschuk is hardly alone, Carraway writes, pointing to Barbara Kay’s National Post column calling prostitutes “shameful”, and a Torontoist story by Edward Brown about photos of peeping-tom photos of strippers on their smoke breaks, written with a “hateful” tone.
The real problem, Carraway notes, is “the set of attitudes and values—Canadian values—that these stories reflect, which is that sex workers are outside of humanity, somehow not just women with jobs, somehow both constantly threatened (Kay; Brown) and not worth protecting (Kay; Brown).” She adds that “it is, objectively, wrong to aggressively slut-shame sex workers, regardless of one’s moral and legal perspective on prostitution.”
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