It’s inspiring to see media investigating injustice as opposed to profiting from it. In December, MSNBC premiered its undercover investigation of “Sex Slaves in America” (article and videos). Here are selections from the transcript. Ask yourself, do these prostitutes sound like freely consenting adults living an attractive life?
2 years ago a 20-year-old university student [Katya] signed up with a friend to study English abroad in a program that involved waitressing in Virginia Beach, but the girls would never reach Virginia. And they wouldn’t be waitresses…
…they were told that, you know what? Plans have changed. You’re going to be going to Detroit. You need to get on this bus… They didn’t even know where Detroit was. They didn’t speak much of the language…
[Katya:] They brought us clothes. It was strip clothes and shoes. And they say, you guys gonna work at the club named Cheetah. And you guys gonna work Monday to Saturday, double-shift, 2:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M…
[Katya:] I was threatened every single day. When we go, go into work, in the car, he was telling us, you’re gonna have to make 1,000 a day. If you’re not making this money, we’ll find a way when you can make this money. That was really scary too. He was telling us that he can sell us to any country, to any person any time…
[Katya:] Almost every girl who I knew was sexually abused, raped…
The 12 hour shifts yielded up to $1000 a night but the women saw none of it…
[Katya:] I was even thinking about suicide many times because I didn’t have a choice to get out…
[Katya:] Alex’s father, he knows my mom. He knows where she lives [in the Ukraine]. And he visited a couple of times after I ran away. He threatened her. He used very aggressive words. He said, if I will not stop talking, that will blood come out from me…
Katya is one of the few women with the courage to come forward. She testified in congress last month…
FBI agent Maritza Conde-Vasquez says the men who frequent these secret brothels should understand the girls they buy work under duress…
In just 2 years, the Houston field office of the FBI has interviewed over 100 women who say they were virtual prisoners. Prisoners forced to sell their bodies for cash, 14 hours a day, 6 days a week.
They were usually young, as young as 14 years old…
Every month the girls were given birth control injections. If the girls became pregnant, they were forced to have an abortion…
On the third night of our surveillance [in Houston] we got to experience firsthand the threat and severity with which traffickers guard their profits. Men spotted our cameras and we were followed for several blocks before losing the car…
30 year old Cholanda says that trafficked girls in Houston are everywhere not just in cantinas.
And she should know because she was trafficked from Thailand to Philadelphia before ending up at this massage parlor in Houston. Cholanda says everyone knows that massage parlors are houses of prostitution…
This petite Thai woman says instead of the American dream she was promised she ended up working for 12 years, forced to have sex with hundreds of strange men to pay off an impossible debt [$55,000]…
Massage parlors like these don’t even bother hiding the fact that sex is for sale. Websites offer detailed reviews of women and the sex acts they offer so men can know what to expect…
Expert Judith Momoh says every American should be alarmed about the public health consequences that comes with the explosion of cheap sex to go offered at these massage parlors and secret brothels.
[Momoh:] They have sexually transmitted infections like gonorrhea, syphilis, one person takes it and then passes it on to the other person and by the time you look at it, you have 15, 20 or even 100 people infected from this one little lady who was trafficked. And they are right in your neighborhood…
[Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco:] …Every single one of these massage establishments, almost every single one, this is happening in all of them…
Norma Hotaling, the founder of an international organization to help women forced into prostitution, says the only way to make a real dent in stopping what she sees as a global epidemic is to attack the demand. The men who spend thousands on sex to go…
[Hotaling:] …behind the smile that they pay for is an incredible amount of pain and fear and terror…
While MSNBC is busy investigating the sex industry, the Valley Advocate is busy making money from it. The Massage/Escort ads in the 1/10/08 edition below include an advertisement of “FOREIGN FANTASIES” where “Everything Goes”. The acronym GFE presumably stands for “girl friend experience”, which MSNBC says can mean “sex without condoms”.
See also:
Call to Action: Ask the Valley Advocate’s New Owner to Drop the Sex Ads
Many of the escort ads in the Advocate appear to be blatant come-ons for prostitution. The life of these escorts is miserable… “In one study, 75% of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide. Prostituted women comprised 15% of all completed suicides reported by hospitals.” A great deal of research demonstrates that the adult industry exploits women, perpetuates sex trafficking, harms communities and trains abusers…
Ask the Valley Advocate to stop profiting from the sexual exploitation of women
In the back pages of the Advocate, and on their websites, you will find ads like the following:
Escorts, Massage, or TVs/TS
REBEKA Sweet, Sexy & Sophisticated w/Hot, Tight Body 413-433-xxxx Most Saturdays 10am-6pm
LIPS OF AN ANGEL Will Grant U 3 Wishes Multiple Hours Avail. 413-657-xxxx
SOMETHING SPECIAL “Tiffany” “Emilly” N. Hampton to Keene to Brattleboro Hiring 18-25 yo 413-588-xxxx
HOT COLLEGE Co-eds Rule Summer! School’s Out, Clothes Off, SEXY Co-eds NAKED! 413-244-xxxx
Jessika & Jenni We Aim to Please! 2 Girls Avail, 24/7, in/out 860-268-xxxx
“EXOTIC HEAT” At Your Service! Cum See The Summer Sizzlin Special 413-657-xxxx
CONSENTING ADULTS Experienced professional service. Special rates for new clients. 413-977-xxxx
WET & WILD! Super Soaked & Sexy Sexy, Fresh New Faces 413-244-xxxx
“EXOTIC ENT.” Sexy Prof. Discreet 20 minute Specials! Cum See The End of Summer Specials 413-657-xxxx
EXXXQUISITE COMPANIONS 413-537-xxxx
NOTHING LIKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND Slim, pretty, 25, smart & *wild* 413-695-xxxx
Adult Employment
Personal Assistant Hiring attractive female 18-30 for back rubs, oral and more. Call anytime 413-233-xxxx…
Testimony from Northampton: Porn Entwined with Years of Domestic Abuse; Sex Ads in Alt Weeklies (explicit language)
After an unwanted visit from him, when he was abusive and once again insistent on sexual acts, I discovered later when receiving my phone bill, that prior to the abuse, he had made many phone calls to the 1-900 sex calls that he had [seen] in the Valley Advocate…
“New York Press No Longer Marketing Arm for Prostitution/Trafficking”
Another Victory for NOW-NYC: New York Magazine Drops Sex Ads
One would think that this would be exactly the kind of exploitation the [Village] Voice would revel in exposing. But because the Voice is free, it apparently needs the revenue brought in by, this week, 10 pages of these ads.
And so its press release yammers on about how our freedoms are “under attack by the Bush administration,” and makes NOW sound like the Taliban, and finally trots out the same pathetic excuse New York once made: “If there is evidence that any advertiser in our pages engaged in…sex slavery…” Blah blah blah.
It’s hard to be part of the solution, when you’re part of the problem.
Pasadena Weekly: “Lives for sale”
“They’re always a point of concern,” Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian told the newspaper. “We follow up on them fairly regularly. I have always been surprised that the [Pasadena] Weekly underwrites the exploitation of women to some degree.”
Belltown Messenger: “Greed, Lust and Ink”
…the only motivation for running escort ads in the first place is unbridled greed-and these supposedly liberal publications can’t have it both ways when defending the rights of society’s underdogs in their editorial content…
S.M. Berg: Hey, progressives! Cathouse got your tongue?
“Trade – A Film Brings Sex Trafficking Home”
Trade makes it clear that traffickers do not operate in a vacuum. Theirs is a complex and determined industry, enslaving both women and children through coercion, violence, and drugs. It is painfully apparent in the film that there are often moments when everyday people could intervene – but choose not to…
New York Times: “The Girls Next Door”; Worldwide Sex Trafficking; Role of Porn
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ”The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person’s mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can’t think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you’ve made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she’s trapped…”
Gloria Steinem at Smith: Cooperation, Not Domination
…there are more slaves in proportion to the world’s population–more people held by force or coercion without benefit from their work–more now than there were in the 1800s. Sex trafficking, labor trafficking, children and adults forced into armies: they all add up to a global human-trafficking industry that is more profitable than the arms trade, and second only to the drug trade. The big difference now from the 1800s is that the United Nations estimates that 80% of those who are enslaved are women and children…
Prostitution: Factsheet on Human Rights Violations
Carolyn McKenzie: Disease, Intoxicants Prevalent Among Strip Dancers (explicit language)
Harvard Public Health Review: Many sex trafficking victims contract HIV and radiate the infection
Strip Clubs Are the Next Hot Thing on Wall Street, Fund Manager Tells Barron’s
“…the girls who work there, the dancers, or what the industry calls the “talent,” pay $150 to $200 a shift for the privilege of working…
“I asked one guy in the business, ‘What’s the biggest risk to your business model?’ He said if the government stops immigration from Eastern Europe.”
Sweden’s Prostitution Solution: Why Hasn’t Anyone Tried This Before?
In 1999, after years of research and study, Sweden passed legislation that a) criminalizes the buying of sex, and b) decriminalizes the selling of sex…
The hang-up, the place where their best efforts had snagged, was that law enforcement wasn’t doing it’s part. The police themselves, it was determined, needed in-depth training and orientation to what the Swedish legislature already understood profoundly. Prostitution is a form of male violence against women. The exploiter/buyers need to be punished, and the victim/prostitutes need to be helped…
Today, not only do the Swedish people continue to overwhelmingly support their country’s approach to prostitution (80% of people in favor according to national opinion polls), but the country’s police and prosecutors have also come around. They are now among the legislation’s staunchest supporters. Sweden’s law enforcement community has found that the prostitution legislation benefits them in dealing with all sex crimes, particularly in enabling them to virtually wipe out the element of organized crime that plagues other countries where prostitution has been legalized or regulated.
Herbert, Brooks and Osayande on Misogyny, Money and Power; Amazing.net’s War on Women and Blacks (explicit)
Let’s now build on the analysis of Herbert, Brooks and Osayande with a detailed examination of today’s mainstream porn. This is perhaps the most extreme intersection of the pimp ethic, cruelty, racism, sexism and callous corporate avarice, and yet it enjoys remarkably little censure from public commentators. Don Imus got fired last year for calling a women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos”, but Capital Video gets no flack for selling movies with this phrase and other derogatory expressions…
Punishment Porn: “Whether-She-Wants-It-Or-Not” (explicit)
Strictly Speaking Spanking, a magazine on sale at Bookends of Enfield, calls itself “entertainment for consenting adults”. On reading the magazine, however, one could be forgiven for becoming confused about the role of consent in the entertainment…
SSS reports on “The Truly WHACKY World of Pro Wrestling!”:
[T]o the delight of the frenzied mob of young & old fans who’d just love to see her so shamed, The Shadow…blows Angie’s plan by ambushing her from behind & dragging her right to the manly man who is ready, eager & more than able to turn her over his muscular thigh & give her saucy seat six good whacks that tame the fiery female & have her singing a totally different tune when she’s finally released & forced to apologize to all.”
