I'm going to make three points. The first point is about the construction of knowledge. The second is about the source of harm in prostitution. The third is what I learned from doing research for three months in New Zealand.
Our default way of thinking about the world is patriarchal. Unless we've sought out feminist theories and are constantly working to unlearn the lies we've been taught, this is the frame we use to understand the world. This means that the majority of you use a patriarchal framework to understand prostitution.
Prior to 1983, men in Canada could rape their wives without penalty, because Canada had decided that men—husbands—were entitled to sex acts and that women—wives—were obligated to provide those sex acts. Rape in marriage was criminalized because feminists fought for it to be. Feminists knew that men weren't entitled to sex acts and that women weren't obligated to provide those sex acts.
I'm going to show you a little thing here. Here's one way to think about social issues. At the base, we have foundational values and beliefs. These foundational values influence our vision and what strategies we use to make change. If we look at an example of prostitution versus sex work, we can see the very different—