And here's Chris Hedges on the subject again. He does not recognize the
distinction between decriminalization and legalization. He also makes no
distinction between those women who choose prostitution out of necessity and
those who are coerced, nor the difference between the highly paid prostitute
who is white and works on her own. But I certainly agree with what he says
about how large numbers of poor women are treated and about the relationship
between prostitution and war.
Miriam
Amnesty International: Protecting the 'Human Rights' of Johns, Pimps and
Human Traffickers
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/amnesty_international_protecting_the_hum
an_rights_20150816/
Posted on Aug 16, 2015
By Chris Hedges
After a government raid last year on an illegal mining camp in La Pampa in
the Madre de Dios region of Peru, a discarded bra lies on the ground outside
an informal bar that allegedly employed sex workers. (Rodrigo Abd / AP)
The decision by Amnesty International's decision-making forum, the
International Council Meeting, to call for the decriminalization of
prostitution is another in a long line of triumphs for heartless neoliberal
economics and the grotesque commodification of human beings that defines
predatory capitalism.
Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said: "Sex workers
are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances
face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse. Our global
movement paved the way for adopting a policy for the protection of the human
rights of sex workers which will help shape Amnesty International's future
work on this important issue."
In the sickness of modern culture, the ability to exploit with impunity is
distorted into a human right even by a renowned and respected humanitarian
organization. That is quite a card trick. We live in a global culture where
the wretched of the earth are chattel and where sexual slavery-which is what
most prostituted women and girls around the globe endure-is sanctified by
market forces. These women and girls are among our most vulnerable. After
being crushed by poverty, racism and sexism, they are unable to find other
ways to make a sustainable income. They are treated little better than
livestock transported to markets for consumption. That a so-called human
rights organization parrots vile justifications is emblematic of the depth
of our moral degeneration and the triumph of misogyny.
Women and girls who are prostituted should be treated not as criminals but
as victims. The criminals are the johns and the pimps and traffickers who
profit from the sale of human flesh. Decriminalizing prostitution, which
allows these modern slave masters to openly ply their trade, means the
exploitation will grow explosively. We must work to create a world where
those who are dispossessed of their human rights are not forced into this
dilemma. We must not accept a world where poverty destroys the lives of the
weak and the vulnerable, including children. Those who profit from
prostituting women and girls must be driven out of business.
"In sheer numbers, it is the poor brown women of the world who pay with
bruises, humiliation and deaths for this ignorant and hideous decision that
has brought Amnesty International so low," Lee Lakeman, the Canadian
feminist, told me by email. "When Amnesty International's 'progressive
leftists' blithely refer to 'free choice to prostitute,' do they choose to
forget prostitution as imperialism? Third world brothel cities, the tourist
brothels sprung up where once armies were stationed, man-camps of resource
thieves that overrun indigenous communities, UN troops buying sex from women
in refugee camps by offering them food? Abandoned migrant addicted kids and
women in the ghettos of the world's cities being bought for the price of a
quick hit? Or are they [Amnesty and those who support its decision]
imagining this free choice: the women, babes in arms migrating from war
zones and environmental deserts who are bought with rides, food, water or
with a chance to save a child? Surely they know how indigenous girls are
groomed with drugs and alcohol and rides to the city from hopeless
homelands. But they cannot have missed the inherent racism of prostitution
that exoticizes every racial stereotype of woman on the back pages and
internet sites of the world. And those of us, women of the global north, who
have food and shelter? We fight now for the public life of full citizens.
Are we obliged every time we leave our houses to face a barrage of men
bloated with entitlement of class and race and sex, who sit scanning as we
pass for our price tag? Consciousness is in part knowing who is standing
with you. We know Amnesty International sold us out."
Among those, including women, who have no concept of what being prostituted
really means, it has become hip and edgy to talk about the legitimacy of
"sex work." Movies like "Pretty Woman" and the pro-prostitution lobby's
slick portrayals of the "sex industry" bear as much resemblance to the
reality of prostitution as "Sands of Iwo Jima" does to war. If you want an
honest window into what the prostitution industry is like, read "Paid For:
My Journey Through Prostitution" by Rachel Moran, who at 15 was prostituted
on the streets of Dublin. She endured this nightmare for seven years.
Moran says, based on her experience, that there are three types of men who
use prostitutes: those who treat women as if they do not have human
emotions; those who are conscious of a woman's humanity but choose to ignore
it; and those who derive sexual pleasure from crushing the humanity of the
women they buy.
Our culture, manipulated by sophisticated forms of propaganda, mesmerized by
commercially created images that glorify violence and sexual exploitation
and consumption, cannot untangle fantasy from reality. Many, maybe most, men
have been indoctrinated by pornography. Pornography has taught them that
their personal gratification at the expense and degradation of another is a
human right. This indoctrination has twisted feminism, which once fought for
oppressed women and girls, into an accessory to misogyny. Why would genuine
feminists organize or consider taking part in "SlutWalks"? Why is the
election of a female president or the appointment of a female CEO an advance
when at the same time-often with the collaboration of elite women-social and
governmental programs that provide assistance to poor and working women are
abolished? The current generation of neoliberal "feminists" cite the
empowerment of a tiny, predominantly white female elite as proof of feminist
advance. Women and girls who are poor, racialized or part of the working
class, like all of the vulnerable in our age of predatory capitalism, are
ignored and discarded, along with most of their advocates. This is not an
advance for women. It is a profound setback.
"Capitalism and prostitution are the new method of imperialism and
colonization," said Alice Lee, a member of the Asian Women Coalition Ending
Prostitution, whom I reached in Vancouver. "It is no coincidence that
pornography and prostitution use racial stereotypes to sell and exploit
women. Prostitution is a tool that subjugates women, especially women of
color, reinforcing sexism and the global racial hierarchy. The normalization
of sexualized racism entrenches the idea that women of color and poor women
are dispensable/disposable in all nations. The global north no longer has to
occupy our lands. They can occupy our bodies and define our worth. This
othering enables them to see us as less than human."
The world has been turned upside down. Every sentence uttered by the
pro-prostitution lobby-that prostitution is about choice, that prostitution
is about empowerment, that legalizing prostitution protects women-is a lie.
But we are a culture awash in lies, and amid this flood it is hard for many
to separate illusion from reality.
Being prostituted is perpetual rape. Being prostituted means your orifices
are penetrated a dozen or more times a night by strangers who often insult,
maul and beat you. This happens in cars, in alleys, in "massage parlors," in
brothels, in motel rooms. And those who make the real money are not the
exploited and the abused but the pimps, traffickers and brothel and massage
parlor owners. Being prostituted means vaginal and anal tears, bruises,
broken bones, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, and severe
psychological damage. And it can mean death. It almost always means early
death. Those who must endure this abuse are almost always women of color,
many shipped by traffickers from poor countries to relatively affluent
countries for the sole purpose of being sexually exploited.
"Rape, wife battering and pornography serve to put women in their place,"
Lee said. "That is the function of male violence against women. When women
hear and see other women being raped, battered or prostituted, we know this
could easily happen to us. Sometimes in the pro-prostitution argument you
will hear that prostitution will prevent men from raping ordinary women. But
by accepting prostitution we are accepting a class of women being
expendable, as if that will prevent men from raping and beating us. Only
when all women achieve liberty and autonomy can we be free."
I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from my years as a war
correspondent. I instantly recognized fellow sufferers of PTSD in
prostituted women and girls when I interviewed them in refugee and
displacement camps in Latin America, Africa and the Balkans. Prostituted
women in and near war zones are as commonplace as corpses. Once a culture
descends into the sickness of violence, once a culture allows human beings
to become racialized objects of exploitation, there is an explosion of rape
and prostitution, along with pornography. War, like neoliberal economics,
sees only commodities, not sentient beings with the ability to feel pain and
joy. And making war on people, as well as the planet, lies at the heart of
neoliberal economics.
Prostituting women and girls is a lucrative business. Germany, which
legalized prostitution in 2002, is now being called "Europe's biggest
brothel." It has industrialized sexual exploitation with a terrifying
corporate efficiency. Over a million men a day engage in these transactions,
sexually exploiting women and girls who come mostly from poor countries in
Africa and Eastern Europe. These women and girls have been shipped to
Germany to satiate the physical desires of the affluent and enrich the pimps
and traffickers who control them. The women and girls do not do this because
it is a choice. They do this because they are desperate and poor. The German
magazine Spiegel published an investigative piece that lays out this abuse
in detail, "How Legalized Prostitution Has Failed."
Amnesty International has, in essence, legitimized the weapon of male
objectification and violence in the war against women. This weapon exists
apart from the evils of global capitalism. The fight to end male violence
against women has to be integral to those of us who also fight global
capitalism. We need the liberation of women and girls, including those who
are poor and of color. Women cannot join the fight for a better world until
male violence and male entitlement are eradicated. Freedom from
exploitation, especially for women and girls, will define the success or
failure of our struggle. To be an anti-capitalist, to be a member of the
authentic left who stands with all of the oppressed, is to embrace radical
feminism-not the mock feminism of neoliberalism but the true feminism of
Andrea Dworkin. It is to recognize that no assault against capitalism is
possible, or morally permissible, unless it is accompanied by an assault
against male violence and the exploitation of women and girls.
"Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore," Dworkin
wrote. "Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female
piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the
corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is
not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or
Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure;
poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women
who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the
powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not
wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel
when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is
left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has
gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Amnesty International: Protecting the 'Human Rights' of Johns, Pimps and
Human Traffickers
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/amnesty_international_protecting_the_hum
an_rights_20150816/
Posted on Aug 16, 2015
By Chris Hedges
After a government raid last year on an illegal mining camp in La Pampa in
the Madre de Dios region of Peru, a discarded bra lies on the ground outside
an informal bar that allegedly employed sex workers. (Rodrigo Abd / AP)
The decision by Amnesty International's decision-making forum, the
International Council Meeting, to call for the decriminalization of
prostitution is another in a long line of triumphs for heartless neoliberal
economics and the grotesque commodification of human beings that defines
predatory capitalism.
Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said: "Sex workers
are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances
face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse. Our global
movement paved the way for adopting a policy for the protection of the human
rights of sex workers which will help shape Amnesty International's future
work on this important issue."
In the sickness of modern culture, the ability to exploit with impunity is
distorted into a human right even by a renowned and respected humanitarian
organization. That is quite a card trick. We live in a global culture where
the wretched of the earth are chattel and where sexual slavery-which is what
most prostituted women and girls around the globe endure-is sanctified by
market forces. These women and girls are among our most vulnerable. After
being crushed by poverty, racism and sexism, they are unable to find other
ways to make a sustainable income. They are treated little better than
livestock transported to markets for consumption. That a so-called human
rights organization parrots vile justifications is emblematic of the depth
of our moral degeneration and the triumph of misogyny.
Women and girls who are prostituted should be treated not as criminals but
as victims. The criminals are the johns and the pimps and traffickers who
profit from the sale of human flesh. Decriminalizing prostitution, which
allows these modern slave masters to openly ply their trade, means the
exploitation will grow explosively. We must work to create a world where
those who are dispossessed of their human rights are not forced into this
dilemma. We must not accept a world where poverty destroys the lives of the
weak and the vulnerable, including children. Those who profit from
prostituting women and girls must be driven out of business.
"In sheer numbers, it is the poor brown women of the world who pay with
bruises, humiliation and deaths for this ignorant and hideous decision that
has brought Amnesty International so low," Lee Lakeman, the Canadian
feminist, told me by email. "When Amnesty International's 'progressive
leftists' blithely refer to 'free choice to prostitute,' do they choose to
forget prostitution as imperialism? Third world brothel cities, the tourist
brothels sprung up where once armies were stationed, man-camps of resource
thieves that overrun indigenous communities, UN troops buying sex from women
in refugee camps by offering them food? Abandoned migrant addicted kids and
women in the ghettos of the world's cities being bought for the price of a
quick hit? Or are they [Amnesty and those who support its decision]
imagining this free choice: the women, babes in arms migrating from war
zones and environmental deserts who are bought with rides, food, water or
with a chance to save a child? Surely they know how indigenous girls are
groomed with drugs and alcohol and rides to the city from hopeless
homelands. But they cannot have missed the inherent racism of prostitution
that exoticizes every racial stereotype of woman on the back pages and
internet sites of the world. And those of us, women of the global north, who
have food and shelter? We fight now for the public life of full citizens.
Are we obliged every time we leave our houses to face a barrage of men
bloated with entitlement of class and race and sex, who sit scanning as we
pass for our price tag? Consciousness is in part knowing who is standing
with you. We know Amnesty International sold us out."
Among those, including women, who have no concept of what being prostituted
really means, it has become hip and edgy to talk about the legitimacy of
"sex work." Movies like "Pretty Woman" and the pro-prostitution lobby's
slick portrayals of the "sex industry" bear as much resemblance to the
reality of prostitution as "Sands of Iwo Jima" does to war. If you want an
honest window into what the prostitution industry is like, read "Paid For:
My Journey Through Prostitution" by Rachel Moran, who at 15 was prostituted
on the streets of Dublin. She endured this nightmare for seven years.
Moran says, based on her experience, that there are three types of men who
use prostitutes: those who treat women as if they do not have human
emotions; those who are conscious of a woman's humanity but choose to ignore
it; and those who derive sexual pleasure from crushing the humanity of the
women they buy.
Our culture, manipulated by sophisticated forms of propaganda, mesmerized by
commercially created images that glorify violence and sexual exploitation
and consumption, cannot untangle fantasy from reality. Many, maybe most, men
have been indoctrinated by pornography. Pornography has taught them that
their personal gratification at the expense and degradation of another is a
human right. This indoctrination has twisted feminism, which once fought for
oppressed women and girls, into an accessory to misogyny. Why would genuine
feminists organize or consider taking part in "SlutWalks"? Why is the
election of a female president or the appointment of a female CEO an advance
when at the same time-often with the collaboration of elite women-social and
governmental programs that provide assistance to poor and working women are
abolished? The current generation of neoliberal "feminists" cite the
empowerment of a tiny, predominantly white female elite as proof of feminist
advance. Women and girls who are poor, racialized or part of the working
class, like all of the vulnerable in our age of predatory capitalism, are
ignored and discarded, along with most of their advocates. This is not an
advance for women. It is a profound setback.
"Capitalism and prostitution are the new method of imperialism and
colonization," said Alice Lee, a member of the Asian Women Coalition Ending
Prostitution, whom I reached in Vancouver. "It is no coincidence that
pornography and prostitution use racial stereotypes to sell and exploit
women. Prostitution is a tool that subjugates women, especially women of
color, reinforcing sexism and the global racial hierarchy. The normalization
of sexualized racism entrenches the idea that women of color and poor women
are dispensable/disposable in all nations. The global north no longer has to
occupy our lands. They can occupy our bodies and define our worth. This
othering enables them to see us as less than human."
The world has been turned upside down. Every sentence uttered by the
pro-prostitution lobby-that prostitution is about choice, that prostitution
is about empowerment, that legalizing prostitution protects women-is a lie.
But we are a culture awash in lies, and amid this flood it is hard for many
to separate illusion from reality.
Being prostituted is perpetual rape. Being prostituted means your orifices
are penetrated a dozen or more times a night by strangers who often insult,
maul and beat you. This happens in cars, in alleys, in "massage parlors," in
brothels, in motel rooms. And those who make the real money are not the
exploited and the abused but the pimps, traffickers and brothel and massage
parlor owners. Being prostituted means vaginal and anal tears, bruises,
broken bones, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, and severe
psychological damage. And it can mean death. It almost always means early
death. Those who must endure this abuse are almost always women of color,
many shipped by traffickers from poor countries to relatively affluent
countries for the sole purpose of being sexually exploited.
"Rape, wife battering and pornography serve to put women in their place,"
Lee said. "That is the function of male violence against women. When women
hear and see other women being raped, battered or prostituted, we know this
could easily happen to us. Sometimes in the pro-prostitution argument you
will hear that prostitution will prevent men from raping ordinary women. But
by accepting prostitution we are accepting a class of women being
expendable, as if that will prevent men from raping and beating us. Only
when all women achieve liberty and autonomy can we be free."
I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from my years as a war
correspondent. I instantly recognized fellow sufferers of PTSD in
prostituted women and girls when I interviewed them in refugee and
displacement camps in Latin America, Africa and the Balkans. Prostituted
women in and near war zones are as commonplace as corpses. Once a culture
descends into the sickness of violence, once a culture allows human beings
to become racialized objects of exploitation, there is an explosion of rape
and prostitution, along with pornography. War, like neoliberal economics,
sees only commodities, not sentient beings with the ability to feel pain and
joy. And making war on people, as well as the planet, lies at the heart of
neoliberal economics.
Prostituting women and girls is a lucrative business. Germany, which
legalized prostitution in 2002, is now being called "Europe's biggest
brothel." It has industrialized sexual exploitation with a terrifying
corporate efficiency. Over a million men a day engage in these transactions,
sexually exploiting women and girls who come mostly from poor countries in
Africa and Eastern Europe. These women and girls have been shipped to
Germany to satiate the physical desires of the affluent and enrich the pimps
and traffickers who control them. The women and girls do not do this because
it is a choice. They do this because they are desperate and poor. The German
magazine Spiegel published an investigative piece that lays out this abuse
in detail, "How Legalized Prostitution Has Failed."
Amnesty International has, in essence, legitimized the weapon of male
objectification and violence in the war against women. This weapon exists
apart from the evils of global capitalism. The fight to end male violence
against women has to be integral to those of us who also fight global
capitalism. We need the liberation of women and girls, including those who
are poor and of color. Women cannot join the fight for a better world until
male violence and male entitlement are eradicated. Freedom from
exploitation, especially for women and girls, will define the success or
failure of our struggle. To be an anti-capitalist, to be a member of the
authentic left who stands with all of the oppressed, is to embrace radical
feminism-not the mock feminism of neoliberalism but the true feminism of
Andrea Dworkin. It is to recognize that no assault against capitalism is
possible, or morally permissible, unless it is accompanied by an assault
against male violence and the exploitation of women and girls.
"Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore," Dworkin
wrote. "Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female
piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the
corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell cunt; racism is
not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or
Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure;
poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women
who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the
powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not
wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel
when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The new pornography is
left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has
gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too."
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