In 2003, Jeannette Maier was sentenced to serve six months in a halfway home, fined ten thousand dollars, and given three years probation for running a brothel in New Orleans. New york-based Filmmaker Cameron Yates contacted her while she was serving her sentence and they began making a documentary. While still in production, the few clips of it that have been shared are incredibly strong, exploring issues of gender, power justice and a whole lot more.
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I am fascinated. Does anyone perceive a woman, or a man, selling sex as immoral? And since when is the person who sells an illegal item considered no more morally culpable than a person who purchases an illegal item?
Does anyone actually believe you can be your own person, pursuing the life you inwardly know is proper, maximizing your personal potential, and then tell yourself, I think I’ll sell my body for money????
I certainly do not believe that has ever occurred.
There is nothing powerful about these clips, unless it is the powerful demonstration that many people in our current society are sick.
Warren Metzler
By WarrenMetzler on April 4th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
This short video raises a number of profound issues. The woman, referred to as “the Canal Street Madame” makes a short reference to her home life where the narrator refers to abuse. While this fact is not elaborated, research shows that the overwhelming majority of women who have been prostituted have suffered physical and or emotional abuse and many have been the victims of sexual abuse.
It is common for women who live with such unresolved pain to attempt to rationalize their own degradation by referring to it as “work”. For what better way to try to normalize what is hardly normal at all by making their life sound “normal”, and hopefully feel like what is normal for most people — getting up and going to work every day.
Ms. Maier is absolutely right that the real focus of our laws ought to be on the demand side, not the supply side. Despite laws in most states that call for the punishment of John’s and prostitutes it is common practice in most jurisdictions to ignore the men, and arrest the women.
I hope this film explores this issue in greater depth, so that we might see in the lives of the three generations of these women the real experiences that led them to be prostituted over and over again. What was going on in the life of the daughter that caused her grandmother to believe that her only “choices” were the brothel or the street?
If the politicians of Louisiana are serious about this issue they might try adopting what is becoming known as the Swedish model. The laws of Sweden focus almost entirely on the John’s who ask, and even demand that women be turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold. It is not consensual sex between adults that is a crime–it is turning sex into a commodity and selling women’s bodies for profit.
Sweden criminalizes this behavior but accurately recognize that women who have become prostituted are for the most part acting out of a lack of choice in their lives rather than choosing to live this way.
While our society professes a strong belief in the principle of equality, we are reminded by films like this that real quality for women and girls requires not only changes for them, but also changes by men who too often like the idea of equality more so than its reality.
By victorgoode on April 6th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
04/07/09- Tuesday
After seeing the clips of the documentary, I attempted to login to the website as noted:
http://www.cameronyates.com but it was rejected. I checked spelling etc., perhaps i missed something? or picked up the incorrect address? Can someone help me out on this. Fascinating story, I would like to follow this documentary & process. thx. karen in california email: mcclellankl AT yahoo DOT com
By mcclellankl on April 7th, 2009 at 1:53 pm