Farhan Wahab
A Step Forward To Become A Full Mature Capitalistic Nation
Sri Lanka is thinking about decriminalising prostitution. When I read opinion pieces relating to this subject, I often think: are we relapsing into an era of darkness, or are we moving forward in civilising ourselves?
Of course, it won’t be a big deal to legalise prostitution in a country like Sri Lanka as it is one of the few aspects which are yet to be fulfilled, in the path of Lanka becoming a fully mature capitalistic nation!
The problem is that who actually is thinking about legalising prostitution?
The answer is not that mysterious, and it reveals lots of notions and stories about so-called civilised ideas and about the people who hold them. Whatever the terms we use, somebody has to feed the perversion of elitism.
Dehumanising women and pushing men into the deep belly of insensitivity is a well-known phenomenon. Capitalism and neo-Liberal ideas encourage materialising everything that exists in this world. Nature is not as poisonous as human inventions. Tobacco is not as harmful as nicotine-loaded tobacco. Humans poison nature.
Legalising prostitution is the further step of neo-liberal consumerism. What we, our NGOs and activists don’t understand is, that by acting in an insensitive way, we will be working on implementing the very idea of global capitalism.
Often it is being argued that prostitution should be seen as empowering women and legalising it would protect the women who are prostituting themselves. But that is not what is happening.
Women are being tortured. They often end up physically injured, and with severe sexually transmitted diseases. That leads them to a high stage of depression. Finally, they will leave this world, and this life, in desperation.
On the other hand, sex traffickers, pimps, and other collaborators in this scam are personally torturing these women, and treating them as commodities. Promoting the very idea of this global capitalism, will we be doing any justice to these women?
The people who choose prostitution as a profession are the ones who are being denied access to decent living and basic healthcare. Poverty is not an aphrodisiac. These women come to it out of desperation. Selling themselves is their last option, to put the food on the table, for their kids and their siblings.
What we do is we go there and dig up falsifications. We come to our own kind of conclusions to shape the representations of their lives to serve our perversion. We make theories and new ideas out of their vulnerability and their stages of desperation.
Accepting this dehumanising of the poor is utterly self-serving propaganda for corporate pimps and other corporate big shots. Legalised brothels are not as local as your neighbourhood whore house. It is an industry that generates a significant amount of money: more than what our modern retailers do.
Banks and investors are also involved in this soul-corrupting business. In our high tech world, the customers of these legitimised whore houses pay their fees by credit cards. The brothel is a centre for distributing corporate alcoholism.
It’s a great mess, and this is where we have to ask ourselves: who are we working for? Does our civilised consciousness consider this as a further step of human civilisation, where humans are being sold wholesale like cattle, for meat?.
What kind of message are we trying to model for our next generation?
Already the Sri Lankan economy and the way it functions have created a large gap between the middle class and upper classes. Inequality is at its peak.
On a daily basis, an average Sri Lankan consumes adulterated debased groceries to fulfil his/her basic needs because no middle-class person could afford to buy the right food. Just think about the bottom level breadwinners. At the top of everything, our intellectuals and ruling elites are dreaming about another version of Thailand in this class-divided country.
None of our human rights organisations or women’s rights activists stood up or fought against this legitimised dehumanisation. What have they been doing is teaching those poor women ‘how to use a condom or how to have safe sex.
Is this an encouragement campaign or a protection campaign?
One film director says, ‘Fear is the condom of your life, which doesn’t let you experience the real happiness.’ It’s a humorous statement, but yet it makes sense. Yes, it is a fear of reproductivity and the fear of an overwhelming population, and it ends in the fears of the destruction of the entire human race.
It’s a foreshadowing of the death of mankind. Our intellectuals are on a free marketing binge for corporates and fear-fueled authorities.
Who is manufacturing condoms? It’s a highly profitable business in the modern world. Every large corporation has a condom factory too! This is additional information! Artists became brand icons and symbols for their products, and activists have turned themselves into marketing professionals.
Thus fueling and carrying the very idea of that male chauvinism, the depraved misogynistic notion in the name of feminism and human rights.
This wasn’t the notion of Frida Kahlo or Virginia Woolf or any other hardcore feminist. They stood up for humanity and equal rights, through their art and activism. Activism is all about humanism. It is there to challenge: to take political positions on defeating evilness and ripping off hegemonies.
The prostitution sums up all the forms of feminine slavery at once
–Simone de Beauvoir
Finally, our contemporary activism indeed has done something progressively which is that it replaced the word ‘prostitute‘with the phrase ‘sex worker’ – how fabulous!
This struggle for justice took them a hundred years! This mostly sounds like calling of a new slavery paradigm. It is encouraging exploitation, which serves in significant part to implement the last stage of Wall Street legitimised economical theories.
What has happened to our sense of imagination, that we think that prostitution cannot be wiped out from our social and economic arena?
Or is it an inevitable nature of this planet or human life?
These are sensitive but straightforward questions! If these questions are tough to be answered, then this world must be a cruel place! We can answer these questions, but our corporate fueled education system is lacking in sociological ideas and does not let us think. We are controlled. Our minds are inactivated. Our sexuality and humanism have been hijacked. Our imaginative brain cells are dried up.
But some people have come out from this ignorance, and even in their carelessness they have shown us a path, an alternative imagination, and that finest imagination has come true somewhere on this planet!
Norway, Sweden and Iceland have criminalised the consumption of paid sex and invented rehabilitation centres to rehabilitate former prostitutes. Now those individuals can apply for jobs in various fields, according to their qualifications.
Canada is seriously contemplating within itself to criminalise this dehumanisation. China is the workshop of capitalistic nations, but they have also criminalised prostitution and had sent those women to sweatshops to make iPhones (!). It’s a different argument.
Prostitution still being operated illegally. But, at least this corrupted Chinese regime has shown that it can construct models of alternative imagination, to bring up new ideas to upgrade such desperate people’s lives.
Being radical against this misogynistic corporate propaganda is not being conservative. It is a brave stand to oppose or defeat this oppression against humankind.
Some corporate douchebag could claim this idea is some old school thinking, but it isn’t. Because this radical stand could eliminate the ideas of neo-liberal capitalism. It could save us from human depravity to sustain in this world.
I think we still cry for our fellow humans: we still throw some food to homeless men, we still pour water into thirsty animals’ throats, we still stand up to support the victims of disasters, so we are still humans.
We still have love and compassion towards our fellow humans! So why can’t we stand up for these desperate people?
Our elites and other corporate pimps can legalise every kind of dehumanisation, after we have lost all these emotions, and stopped shedding our final tear for the fellow humans!
