Canada: Our borders, ourselves: Thoughts on double standards and slut-shaming in the media

By Clay Nikiforuk
April 11, 2013

I am the Condom Girl — the one flagged as a suspected sex worker at the U.S. border and subjected to a series of escalating bizarre treatments and attitudes. I had no idea when I wrote my personal account for rabble.ca that my story would result in radio interviews, headlining Metro, more re-tweets than I care to count, and, of course, hate mail. It’s been one of the craziest weeks of my life, and certainly the most public.

 There’s no doubt in my mind that one reason my story gained the attention it did was that it screamed “sexy” at every juncture. Between adultery, lingerie, condoms, nude modelling, prostitution and a picture of me (young, white, female) which I now realize features my shirt practically falling off, there’s no way the media could resist. But another reason I have to suggest is that I was positioned as, and am, so darned privileged that this “shouldn’t” have happened to me.

I wasn’t featured nationally in Metro as “Uneducated girl is accused of sex work” but rather as “UBC student.” I didn’t join CBC’s Daybreak show as “Sex worker/adulteress treated as second class citizen” but rather, “Woman files complaint after border crossing nightmare.” So long as I was positioned as privileged, and, sometimes by proxy, innocent, my story had shock value. Because when bad things start happening to innocent, educated white people, they could happen to anyone — or rather, other privileged people. And that is very, very scary.

Discussion of my story has centred around U.S. border control — as if slut-shaming, whorephobia and rape-supportive beliefs could exist in a vacuum or an isolated social site. True, steps taken at the border were vaguely disguised as measures to prevent human trafficking (although it was never actually brought up; one Aruban Immigration officer did lackadaisically mention that I should tell her if I was a slave), or as necessary to protect the security of the United States or women in general. But the people I met at the border were not necessarily bad people, but rather, (dare I say it) were acting in the context of a slut-shaming, whorephobic and rape-supportive society.

We can’t disown their actions as having nothing to do with the status quo that we live in everyday simply because they were border guards or American. Canadian guards have given American friends of mine remarkably similar trouble. And since when has Canadian policy or society opened its arms to warmly embrace sex workers as citizens, as workers, as complex individuals with complex relationships with their work?

Continue reading at:  http://rabble.ca/news/2013/04/our-borders-ourselves-thoughts-on-double-standards-and-slut-shaming-media