Boners are the lifeblood of the seventy-eight strip clubs that dot roadsides from Ottawa to Windsor, but most boners know nothing of the recondite bawdyhouse laws at work around them. Boners know nothing of the degree of duress of the women onstage, let alone their immigration status.
Never do we seem so zoologically governed—as if we were cattle or corn—than under the microscope of sex laws. In the Ontario of , someone can dance in your lap. This is where human polities read their own as low fauna, where MPs see all of it—hair in the colours ketchup and turquoise, air-conditioned gooseflesh, body glitter and cocoa butter, yellow-and-purple pole-blisters—as the idiosyncrasies of a biome to be goodly governed.
The argument goes that, to meet this hyper-demand, clubs must secure work visas for women from the Second and Third Worlds, where everyone is always new. From Russian to Mexican and other European countries. Some of the girls look amazing and I find them a lot more friendly and chatty than the Canadian girls. This girl has the softest skin and a very sexy look to her Not a bad night considering there was not much to do in Windsor. Sentiments like this disgust a broad coalition, from evangelicals to anti-sex feminists.
In July, this coalition found its political expression when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced that the Harper government would deny all foreign work-visa applications for stripping in Canada. Since the s, a specific visa process for foreign strippers has been in place, although it has vacillated between expedient carte blanche and Victorian prejudice. So many people want this visa window closed for so many noble reasons. A RCMP report said that criminal groups exploited the visa policy to induct foreigners into the underground sex trade, the stats slippery but terrifying.
So: this is for the women. Many people have told me to celebrate the long-delayed death rattle of a policy that once shelved strippers, in terms of visa-queue privilege, alongside IT guys and university research chairs. Their message is clear, their logic unassailable: strippers should not work in Canada with such facility. Few Cold-War exoduses rival that of the post-perestroika stripper, when the women of Moscow and Petrograd filed into clubs all over the world, from Hong Kong to Cairo to Toronto.
