In ‘Girl Slavery in America’, a recent post published on Huffington Post, Executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, Malika Saada Saar, highlights (like this earlier piece I published) that there is a marketplace for the bodies of girls in the West as well as other parts of the world.  She also makes the very important point that it is not the girls who are victims of the prostitution trade who should be penalised, but the men who fuel demand for them in the first place.

…Unfortunately, in both urban and rural regions of the nation, American-born girls are being trafficked and sold. An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. According to the Department of Justice, the average age of a prostituted girl in the U.S. is 12-14 years. These sexually exploited girls are routinely raped, beaten into submission, and even tattooed like cattle by their pimps.

…we must …stem the demand for buying and selling girls for sex.

Men who purchase girls for sex are committing child abuse. They are not simply paying for sex; they are instead perpetrating brutal acts of rape against vulnerable children who do not choose to sell their bodies. No child wants to be sold for sex.

It is time to prosecute those who sell and purchase girls. If they are subject to punishment for their criminal acts against children, pimps and “johns” will be less interested in the marketplace of very young girls. The laws already exist—but there is minimal political will, at the state or federal level, to prosecute them–especially the “johns”. Despite all the political jingoism about being tough on crime or protecting our children, lawmakers are remarkably indifferent to prosecuting these child abusers.

How is it that in our nation, in the 21st century, any one of our daughters can be bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and without the severe threat of punishment? What is happening that girls’ lives are worth so little? In the context of a civilized society, this level of tolerated violence against girls is an irreconcilable contradiction. No girl in America should be purchased, sold, raped, abused or exploited — and with impunity. Read article here.

Women buying men for sex is not equality

Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.

Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.

We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.

Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age, which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (”She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).

But just because it’s women doing the buying — and the pimping — doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.

This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias – and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what ”freedom of choice” has delivered?

This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.

I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.

But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.

And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have ”the whole boyfriend experience” — hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1200-$1500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that ”make a woman feel special”?

Hiring prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.

The rise of male ”escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.

All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.

Published today online in the National Times.

Today, another example of  how rape is not named as rape.

The Australian reports today on a 51-year-old Hobart man found  guilty of  prostituting a 12-year-old girl. Men were charged $100 for half an hour, with $50 extra for ‘no condom’. One man used her to make pornography. The report states that 120 men were alleged  “to have had sex with the girl…” between August and September last year.

“Had sex with”?

No, they didn’t have sex with her. They raped her. One hundred and twenty men raped a child for six weeks. One perpetrator used her to make child sexual assault images. Now she has sexually transmitted diseases. And unspeakable trauma.

I’ve written about this before. It’s time to update the language and name these acts for what they are.

When we think of trafficking, we usually think of it as happening some-where-else, usually poor and desperate, and not in ‘enlightened’ Western countries. But that would be wrong: women and girls are traded everywhere. This forceful piece by Rachel Lloyd written for Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the US, highlights mainstream corporate support for the normalisation of prostitution through the sponsorship of men who romanticise pimping.
Corporate sponsored pimping plays role in US human trafficking

By Rachel Lloyd

January 11, 2010  

Don Magic Juan and Snoop Dogg arrive with his unnamed female companions on dog leashes for the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day and President Obama recently proclaimed January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Yet when we think about trafficking, we think about it happening to children from Asia, women from the Ukraine, domestic servants brought in from Africa and Central America. All of these examples are real.

But rarely we do associate trafficking and slavery with the girls and young women that we see on HBO specials like ‘Hookers on the Point’, girls sold for sex on the streets, on Craigslist ads, girls on the pole in strip-clubs. The primary face of trafficking in this country looks like an adolescent girl of color trafficked for sex, sold by adult men to adult men.

See also :Women and popular culture: The pimp chic debate

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