par Richard Poulin, sociologue à l’Université d’Ottawa

Several countries have legalized prostitution since the start of the new millennium. Canada is currently reviewing its policy towards prostitution. There is accordingly an urgent need to discuss the impact of the legalization (regulation) of prostitution in light of examples of countries that have legalized this industry with a view to drawing conclusions from these experiences which can contribute to the process of collective reflection in Canada.

ANDREA DWORKIN, an inspiration to so many women, died last week at the age of 58. Over the course of her incandescent literary and political career, she also became a symbol of views she did not hold. For her lucid work opposing men’s violence against women, she lived the stigma of being identified with women, especially sexually abused women.

In their attempts to make the mysterious complexities of the natural
world understandable, scientists have over and over again used
metaphors. Descartes likened the animal body to a machine, and
physicists tell us that if we are to understand the way molecules of a
gas behave we should think of them as billiard balls that, unlike any
real ball, undergo perfectly elastic collisions. Hanging on the wall
of my study is a German scroll from the 1920s, The Human Factory,
which depicts the inner workings of the human torso below the neck as
an interconnected series of assembly lines, supply pipes, spray guns,
crushers, storage vats, wheels, and pulleys.

On May 5, 2004, President of the United States George W. Bush, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces and the man with the authority to launch the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, alleged-architect of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, went onto two Arab news channels and laid himself before the Middle Eastern public like shirtless King Henry II taking his licks at the tomb of Thomas a Beckett.

What goes around, comes around.

The Russians didn’t say it in 2002, but the hauteur of the Bush administration toward their own aspirations, the vestigial inferiority complex/resentment of having only in the 1930’s begun their own forced march into modernism, the humiliation of having collapsed under the strain of the Cold War, and the very tangible new reality that the US was about to kick the Russians into the global periphery, all coalesced into icy retribution.

The usual lens we use to examine social and political developments is ideological and political. This country is a democracy. That country is a dictatorship. This country is a social democracy, that one capitalist, this one communist, et cetera.

While this can sometimes be useful shorthand, it more often than not obscures far more than it reveals. For the purpose of examining the role of the Gulf oil states, a clearer and deeper interpretation can be found by viewing societies from the perspective of development.

HAMMOND: It’s just a delay. All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked.

MALCOLM: Yeah, but John, when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

In the film Jurassic Park, there are four consultants who are brought to the island to write testimonials for investors, a paleontologist, a paleo-botanist, a lawyer, and a chaos theorist. When they have only just arrived, their tour jeeps pull onto a grassy hill and stop. One at a time, their startled heads turn to see a living brontosaur.

HAMMOND: How can we stand in the light of discovery and… and not act?

MALCOLM: What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent, penetrative act that scars whatever it explores.

The State of Pennsylvania convicted Nicholas Yarris of rape and murder in 1981. Yarris was sentenced to die, but in 2003 – thankfully, after an appeals process had kept him off the execution table – DNA evidence was presented in the face of relentless opposition by the state that exonerated Yarris. Yarris was then released from Greene State Correctional Institution’s death row.