I can understand that you may not want to be best friends with a prostitute for the sole reason that it’s illegal, but she believes that people who work in the porn industry are also people she should be avoiding, as “their values are different from hers and she doesn’t agree with those values.” Note that she knows no one in the industry and I suspect even less about their values.
Perhaps you know people in the porn industry and can tell me that they’re, as I suspect, individuals who aren’t defined by their profession and have values as ordinary as the next person’s? It seems to me that we should be standing up for people in the porn industry and for our right to be friends with them without hurting our careers. I see my friend’s stance as maintaining the status quo.
Dear Alisa,
Kathy Reichs is one of the world’s best-known forensic anthropologists and also writes popular novels about the topic. Reichs says in her profession, “one should always avoid association with individuals involved in criminal activity.” (Except when they’re dead of course, then by all means have a poke and write a book about it.) With some exceptions, porn is legal in Canada, so really, your friend’s only obligation is to remain impartial should she ever come across porn industry workers in her line of work. After all, they have lawyers too, some of them as relentless to expose a witness’s bias as others are to say the victim asked for it.
Prostitution is also not illegal in Canada, Alisa, and from what I understand, forensic anthropology deals in part with the study of decomposed or mutilated human remains for expert testimony. To be unfortunately blunt, given the flagrant and sadistic murder of sex workers worldwide, it does seem your friend will want to keep her naïve values in check, if only to assert her professional credibility in these cases. Someone who is inclined to use only a person’s profession as a compass to their criminality (or their legitimacy for that matter) won’t exactly make a credible expert.
Let me also disabuse you of another common stereotype by saying that several of the people I’ve met in the porn industry are, in fact, defined by their profession in that they take a profound interest in sexual pleasure and exploration. With all the fascinating and open-minded options available, why would you imagine they’d have any interest in befriending people who maintain clichéd generalizations about them?
And hey, speaking of books, if you’re looking for a fictional character to fall in love with this summer, I strongly recommend the graphic novel Skim by Torontonian Mariko Tamaki and her cousin Jillian Tamaki. Remember how amazing the movie Heathers was when it came out on the heels of so many fluffy teen flicks? Have you watched it recently? Time has not improved our heroine Veronica Sawyer, in my opinion. Where 20 years ago I saw her as the ultimate teen renegade, now she seems little more than a carefully crafted, unattainable man-child fantasy: wilful and clever yet a totally benign beauty.
Skim, on the other hand, is a female outsider created by and for female outsiders. Though she is keenly insightful, Skim is not preternaturally witty or cool, nor is she poised as the awkward beauty waiting to blossom, making her all the more endearingly authentic. Tamaki’s writing has the pitch perfect quality of a real teenager’s diary, written in private but with a hopeful eye to impressing a snooping audience.
The art is incredibly evocative too—it’s fall, of course, nothing could be more the scholastic season, and there’s always some dark, windblown street to plod down while you’re stalking your drama teacher or semi-forested area the suburbs present for moping and smoking in your school uniform. If there are any wrought up teenage girls in your house, former or current, male or female, please get them this book.
