Exploitation Canonized
- Globalwarming
2007 ► Awareness2007
As with BD/SM, issues of power and control are at the root of the sexual
abuse of children, and the way it is reflected in child pornography. I am
not saying that BD/SM is directly related to the exploitation of children,
only that they stem from the same psychological root. Other noxious plants
growing from the same root include rape, spousal abuse, and the non-sexual
abuse of children and animals. Some might say that it doesn’t stretch
logic too far to include abuse of the Earth, and war. One of the causes of
exploitation in any form is the perceived need to control that which one
fears, because of a sense of powerlessness and inadequacy within one’s
self. Although it would be intriguing to see just how deep this root
extends into our lives, I will limit this analysis to aspects of the
erotic (or anti-erotic, as the case may be).
Exploitative sexuality tends to become obsessive in real life, achieving
exactly the opposite effect of the alleged liberating elements of sexual
fantasy. A look at the numbers of the pornography industry is truly
staggering. The numbers I am using come from Internet industry analysts:
bean counters, not moralists.
The Internet pornography industry is estimated to generate $57 billion in
revenues worldwide every year, with $12 billion coming from the U.S.
alone. In comparison, the total revenues of the three largest television
networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) are $6.2 billion. Child pornography is
estimated to generate $3 billion of those annual revenues. The numbers are
not growing: they are exploding. In 1998, there were an estimated 14
million pornographic web pages available on the Internet. By 2003, the
number had grown to 260 million web pages. That is a twenty-fold increase
in just five years. Today, there are an estimated 4.2 million different
pornographic websites, which comprise 12-percent of the total number of
websites on the Internet; more than 100,000 of these websites are devoted
to child pornography, even though it is illegal worldwide. Every day, the
search engines report, there are 68 million separate requests for
information about pornographic websites.
Some people may call pornography fantasy. However, the rapid growth of
pornography seems to be matched in real life. In the U.S., the federal
Department of Justice and the National Victim Center compile statistics
related to sexual assault of children and adults. Those statistics show
that 683,000 American women are raped every year. Of these numbers, 54
percent of rape victims were under the age of 18 when they were first
assaulted. If one looks at so-called “date rape,” surveys show that 13.3
percent of college-age women say they were forced to have sex on a date.
In terms of childhood sexual abuse, one in five girls, and one in 10 boys,
have been molested. Adults known to the child and trusted represent 90
percent of the perpetrators.
Is there a connection between rape and child sexual abuse, and pornography
and feeding fantasies? Let’s look at some advertising blurbs promoting
various pornographic websites. Judge for yourself the meaning of the
descriptive (even if poorly written) words in the advertisements.
q A site called (ironically) sexual-abuse.net: “Here you'll be satisfied
by cruel sex action: bloody rape scene - virgin girls loose their
virginity, cruel incest action - father tired of constantly complaints of
her daughter, heart-rending sights from real life, uncensored shocking
materials from world's most brutal scenes! This is a cruel sinful delight
and it is available for YOU today! Thousands of rape photos, hours of
full-size videos and real life stories to prove it.”
q A site called Cruel Family: “Got sick of your wife's, mom's or
daughter's endless blame for your every action? It seems they take you for
a fucking idiot? Enough of it! Stop acting like a puppet! You are the MAN!
Forget what a loving husband, an obedient sonny and a kind daddy means!
These dumb, stupid bitches are nothing but a meat loaf with 3 cracks that
have only enough brain to part legs and squirm from both pain and pleasure!
It’s rude. But it’s right.”
q From ForceHer.com: “New rape paysite with 30+ hours of brutal videos! At
this site youl will learn how REAL MAN should treat intractable bitches!
You fell in love with her from the first sight, and yet she pays no
attention to you? You bring her gifts and flowers, take her for romantic
drives in your great car and yet she doesn’t allow you to even kiss her?
Enough of that bullshit! Stop being an idiot! Get what you want! Show this
bitch who the REAL MAN is! She doesn’t want to fuck you? FORCE HER!!”
q The “Sex in War” site: “Hardcore videos from Iraq (brutal = ) ).
Uncensored shocking materials from world's most brutal wars!
Hungry-for-fuck soldiers harassing helpless inhabitants! Marauding,
violence and humiliation.”
q How about BrutalMovies.com: “One of the largest collection of a violent
rape movies, only here! Rape with different objects, group rape, assault
and battery of victims in the moment is raped.”
The BrutalPorno site: “Here you'll be satisfied by cruel sex action! On
this site you can find 1 gb hard rape photos and about 3 gb exclusive
video of resistant victims and bloody sexual contacts with different
weapons, handcuffs assault and battery of victims. Admirers of violent sex
scenes are very pleased with this site.”
Lovely folks, wouldn’t you agree?
As horrible as those things are, the modern era has seen the rapid
worldwide rise of another form of sexual exploitation that combines the
worst aspects of all of them, and adds another ingredient that only a
decade ago would have been utterly unthinkable.
Exploitation Times Ten
Police and a drugged prostitute, (c)2004 Piet den Blanken
It has been said that people who fail to learn the lessons of history are
doomed to repeat them. When one looks at the rapid growth of sexual
slavery around the world, it would seem that people are choosing quite
deliberately to relive the worst parts of human history and to fully
embrace the darkest corners of the human heart. By sexual slavery, I mean
just that. Hundreds of thousands of women and children are bought and sold
like livestock every year, beaten and humiliated, held prisoner, and
forced into prostitution or pornography. The people who patronize these
slave prostitutes are, as often as not, your friends, neighbors, relatives
and coworkers. That slavery in any form can happen today is only because
people like you and me ignore it an allow it to happen.
To visualize the scale of modern slavery, it is important to realize that
many more people are slaves today than there were in 1860, at the start of
the American Civil War, which in part was fought to end slavery. The scope
of modern slavery is vast almost to the point of incomprehension. While
the majority of these modern day slaves are exploited for their labor, the
United Nations estimates that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 women and
children are sold into sexual slavery every year. The U.N. also estimates
that up to 1.2 million children are sold into slavery every year,
including many for sexual purposes. According to the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency, 50,000 women and children from 49 countries are being
trafficked into the United States every year to be slaves, with most
ending up as prostitutes. A University of Pennsylvania study showed that
8,500 child sex slaves were trafficked to the U.S. alone in the Year 2000.
Regardless of where you live, the odds are almost certain that there are
slaves in your county, if not in your town. The slaves may be prostitutes
in Asian or Latin massage parlors. They may be women enslaved to sexually
service agricultural laborers in California orchards and farm fields, or
they may have cooked and served your supper last night in a Chinese
restaurant. What we choose to regard as immigrant employees who don’t
speak English well, are just as likely to be slaves who are kept virtually
imprisoned, stripped of all identification and documentation so that they
are at their masters’ mercy, and beaten, robbed, tortured or killed if
they protest.
It is hard for me to imagine anything more unthinkable than slavery as a
growth industry, but it is. It is hard for me to imagine that slavery is
even possible in “the Global Village,” but it is thriving. It is hard for
me to grasp the fact that slavery results in more human death and
destruction than all of the political terrorists in the world combined,
times ten, but this is fact. And it is next to impossible for me to
imagine that Americans and residents of other industrialized nations are
the reason why it is profitable, and that our deliberate participation in
or ignorance of it are the only reasons why it exists.
Perhaps this is the strongest indictment of the sex industry is that it
has fed the cult of sexual fantasy and fetish, which is the important
first step leading to much more severe forms of sexual abuse. If we allow
human beings to become objectified in our consciousness, then they become
objects that (not who) are beneath our notice. The victims are fully
dehumanized. We see their bodies and the acts they perform, but we do not
see them. Unimaginable horrors unfold before our eyes, but we are blind to
them.
While most sexual slavery happens in far-off lands, we are the reason why
it is profitable and continues. Some of it is overt. When U.S. and United
Nations peacekeepers were in Bosnia, for example, the sexual slave trade
flourished, with the peacekeepers providing a reported 30 percent of the
income to prostitution and slavery crime rings. Testimony before Congress
revealed that supervisors of American companies, such as DynaCorp, worked
with Serbian crime rings to import women and girls as young as age 12 to
be sexual servants for American employees: a fringe benefit for working
overseas.
Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely), the American news media has been
quite reluctant to report this story. While many examples exist online of
fine and courageous reporting about sexual slavery, almost all of them are
from non-U.S. publications or broadcast networks. That is true even about
the reporting of events on American soil. The Mexico City newspaper, El
Universal, for example, did groundbreaking investigative reporting about
the sexual trafficking of children in San Diego, CA. Subsequent testimony
revealed that hundreds of girls from 12 to 18 years old were kidnapped by
a gang of Mexican slavers and brought to San Diego, where they were forced
into prostitution in farm labor camps and brothels throughout California.
The purpose of this venture was not to improve the morale of the
farmworkers. It was to make money for the slavers and the American
contacts they worked with. The men were charged $20 for sex, and the girls
did not receive a penny of it. This slavery ring also reportedly linked to
the largest organization of brothels in California history, with more than
25 houses identified along with proof of patronage by many thousands of
Americans. The way this ring recruited women is classic worldwide. The
girls were illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. They were promised
work in America and left home with recruiters, often with the blessings of
their families. The kidnappers’ true purpose soon became known to the
girls, and they were beaten and raped until they no longer resisted. Many
of them had babies, which were taken away from them and sold: the mothers
were told that, if they refused to become prostitutes, their babies would
be murdered. These girls were not forced into prostitution in the image of
the American myth of empowered escorts. Testimony revealed that they often
were required to service up to 10 men an hour in six-hour-long shifts
every day of the week. Not surprisingly, those girls wore out very quickly.
Many were infected with AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Authorities began to find dozens of dead bodies of Mexican girls (many
showing signs of having been tortured) in the Carlsbad neighborhood of San
Diego. Hundreds of dead bodies of young Mexican women also showed up in
the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. No one even knows their
identities. Newspapers and broadcast stations in the US rarely even report
the bare bones of the story.
A good example of this failure by the U.S. news media is shown by Time,
which published an extraordinary series of investigative articles by
British journalist Alex Perry. Perry is one of the most daring, principled
and competent journalists in the world. However, Time published the
articles only in its Asia edition, and not in European or American
editions. To do his article, Perry went underground in the Asia sex
industry and purchased two 14-year-old sex slaves from Burma who were held
hostage in a Thai house of prostitution. He bought the two girls for a
little over $1,000. He also told the story of how they became sex slaves.
In a part of the world with great poverty and even starvation, with
dollar-a-day wages as the norm, many parents feel forced to sell their
daughters to middlemen for small amounts of money. Then the girls are
brokered to the Thai sex industry, which thrives on the patronage of men
from the industrialized world: America, Europe, Japan and similar places.
This is euphemistically called “sex tourism.” Make no mistake about it:
it’s big business that results in the slavery of hundreds of thousands of
girls every year. Perry learned that virgins sold for up to $3,500, but
that “used merchandise,” such as the two girls he purchased, depreciate
quickly in value. The Thai government estimates that there are at least
60,000 child prostitutes living as slaves in Thailand, and some estimates
pegs the number at up to 200,000. Perry also documented the large number
of these children who are dying of AIDS.
In June of 2003, the British Broadcast Corporation published an article
about possible U.S. sanctions against foreign countries for human
trafficking, which were proposed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Powell threatened U.S. sanctions against 15 countries, including Turkey
and Greece, for not making a significant attempt to stop slavery. An
estimated 20,000 women, mostly from the countries of the former Soviet
Union, are sex slaves in Greece, and more than one million men are their
customers, according to Bonnie Miller, wife of the U.S. ambassador to
Greece The Greek press attacked Ms. Miller for her comments. Powell
alleged that other offenders included Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Burma, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Haiti, North
Korea, Sudan, Suriname and Uzbekistan. He estimated that more than 800,000
people were moved across international borders as slaves each year, and
that 18,000-to-20,000 wind up in America. Another 74 countries failed to
live up to even minimal standards of helping to combat slavery, he said.
The BBC also reported in 2001 that 500,000 people are smuggled into the
U.S. every year as slaves, that many become sex slaves, and that about
1,200 Korean people a year are smuggled into the U.S. from Canada alone.
Significant sex slavery also has been reported in Great Britain and
Australia. Government sources say that more than 500,000 women from the
former Soviet Union alone have been sold into sex slavery in more than 40
countries, and other sources report that the highest number of slaves stem
from Africa. A Christian publication, godspy.com, documented child
prostitution in Mumbai, India, through excellent reportage by Jennifer
Goodson. Goodson’s report talked about both abject sexual slavery, and an
impossible scenario of sexual indentured servitude where girls had to work
as prostitutes to pay off their alleged debts for being transported into
the country. The debts never got paid off, and girls who resisted were
beaten and raped by men who paid pimps to beat and rape them. This is a
common scenario around the world.
The numbers are numbing.
The Dark Ages of Eros
Perhaps there is no more powerful symbol of the Middle Ages – the
so-called Dark Ages of European history – than the gargoyle. Gargoyles are
monstrous architectural sculptures of human beings in the form of hideous
creatures who are distorted beyond any hope of recognition or redemption.
As such, they are portraits of the Medieval belief that human beings are
inherently evil, sinful and vile. The human image presented by BD/SM,
pornography, sexual exploitation of children and sexual slavery is
distinctly reminiscent of gargoyles. The images of the alleged nature of
human evil are basically the same. In both cases, people are seen as
essentially corrupted and beyond redemption that is more than heavenly
mercy for the undeserving.
It is clear that we are in the midst of the Dark Ages of sexuality. The
question, however, is whether or not we have ever been otherwise. Our
culture, based on Judeo-Christian traditions of sin and guilt, has defined
eros as the Devil’s work and has damned us for our healthiest instincts.
The so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s at first appeared to be
liberation from the ills of repression and suppression, and an assertion
of a human right to joy, beauty, pleasure and happiness. At best, however,
it was a very brief revolution that had limited permanent impact on our
culture. At worst, it was merely an illusion of liberation from the sexual
chains that have been around our necks since Christ was nailed to the
cross.
Perhaps we have never left the Dark Ages of eros, and now we are sinking
even deeper into its depths. Our culture has yet to experience a
Renaissance of the erotic. We remain gargoyles screaming in terror at an
incomprehensible universe populated by demons and devils.
A valid question is whether or not this is part of a larger pattern. The
Middle Ages were characterized by constant warfare, and today we are
facing an endless war against terrorism. The Middle Ages were predicated
on illiteracy and ignorance, and today reading levels have plummeted,
ifobites are substituted for knowledge, and schools are removing evolution
from science curricula. We think of the Inquisition when we think of the
Medieval period. Today, right wing students persecute liberal professors,
dissenters to war fear imprisonment, and pacifists are crucified as
traitors. Gays and lesbians are burned at the stake as modern-day witches.
The Middle Ages were characterized by the oppression of common people by
kings and popes, and today almost everyone is a serf in the New World
Order. The papacy was all powerful in the Dark Ages and, in the Bush White
House, the religious right is dictating national policy according to their
own beliefs. Plagues swept over Europe in the dark ages, and the modern
world cringes before AIDS and a hundred strains of fatal epidemics. The
Middle Ages were a feudal society where one’s place was determined at
birth and one’s life was locked into a predetermined pattern; nothing much
is different today. Medieval armies marched to the East in endless
crusades, and modern armies are spilling blood over the same bitter ground.
And eros? Eros is the choice each of us must make to stand for life or to
stand for death. Count me in on the side of life.
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