Buying Sex

Should prostitution be legalized? Decriminalized? Should prostitutes be afforded legal status but johns criminalized? This film doesn't take a position. It gives thoughtful discussion showing different views and goes on location to Canada, New Zealand and Sweden, countries which revamped prostitution laws in fairly recent years.

A central character, the lawyer responsible for forcing Canada to legalize prostitution, looks like a nice enough guy. He argues that some people really do want to be sex workers (true!) and they should be allowed to do that despite what anyone thinks. But in the end, he seems like a self-satisfied blowhard and somewhat shallow, blustery showoff with no deeply thought out solutions for how to help protect vulnerable women from violence and exploitation.

I wished he could have sat down directly with the prohibition movement people after they toured Sweden because at least one of his theories (that it's human nature and raw impulse and therefore unavoidable) seemed profoundly rebutted by Swedes defending the Swedish model of criminalizing the john but protecting and supporting the prostitute.

If you watch this film, have the grit to finish it all the way through to the end. Don't just stop midway because the subject matter seems salacious, unpalatable or embarrassing. This is a good topic for dialogue and this film is a good way to jump-start the dialogue. Nothing dark and sinister is glossed over in this film. It does not trivialize or argue for prostitution. It tries to get at real truth. One is left thinking, a very good way to be left sometimes when issues are complex. I wish it had been longer and there'd been more interaction among the different people involved.

No doubt there are many people out there who have very strong opinions both for and against prostitution and its legalization.

This "Buying Sex" documentary offers the ever-inquisitive viewer a fairly well-rounded perspective on prostitution where interviewees voice their candid opinions covering both the pros and the cons of the ever-debatable sex trade.

This documentary is really engaging because it doesn't intervene in the expression of perspectives on prostitution. There is no narrator: You hear directly from people who are vocal about the laws around prostitution. They each get a chance to say what they feel, and their arguments speak for themselves. Importantly, the majority of the platform is given to current and former sex workers who take different stances on the way laws can best protect women in an undeniably gendered profession.

There was no direction of message at all in this documentary. Anything that got to the issue was a 5-7 sec sound bite and then gone. Ok you like being a sex worker, ok you didn't...blah blah. Sex work is work. This should have gotten to the real issues of safety, organized crime, child involvement, health, drug addiction, mental health, and physical abuse. This needed to be more clinical/statistical and less individual anecdotal. Unpopular decisions need to be made by politicians to put in place a safe system for sex workers. Idiots talking about morality need to be silenced because they are roadblocks to progress. The only morality should be focused on keeping kids safe. The documentary felt poorly edited and lacked a real end goal.

The people in this documentary who are encouraging prostitution are overlooking what this implies. It continues to objectify women by selling them as commodities. The men on this documentary who buy sex won't their faces because they claim to be married. As if it isn't hard enough to keep a marriage together, now this documentary is trying to promote the legalization of prostitution to tell men that it is OK to get sex elsewhere and it is not cheating because it is not a relationship. There are YOUNG, naive girls in this documentary who are prostituting themselves, legally in various countries. This documentary reveals a part of humanity that is completely regressive.