More Disturbing Things

Courtesy of PBS' Frontline. The illegal trade in women for sex slavery. If you don't know about this, go do some research. It's one of the most disturbing and saddening things in the world today. I hate it that women around the world are so degraded and completely de-valued that people they know can sell them to violent strangers as though they were a piece of furniture, knowing full-well the abuse and neglect they'll suffer at the hands of yet more strangers for profit and perverse sexual enjoyment of criminal strangers.

I was so upset by it that I (unfairly) proceeded to start an argument with Husband. His penchant (although not an active one) for strip clubs irritates me. I've come to the conclusion that he'll probably never understand the very clear link I see between the so-called "acceptable" levels of objectification of women in the U.S (and Australia and other western nations) and the appalling crimes against women and girls in poorer parts of the world (but also in the West). I think also that part of it stems from his lack of sisters or female family his own age. Without having been personally impacted growing up by the inevitable unwanted attention and/or sexual abuse that, I'm sorry, EVERY woman encounters growing up or in school or at college or at the grocery store or at the bloody nursing home, it seems hard for him (and many, many other men) to understand that the ramifications are not just individual, but rather global. He doesn't seem to get that the larger picture of the shiny, sparkly jewel that is American Culture reflects very differently when it's immitated by poor, uneducated wannabe "Pimps" in Eastern Europe when they shamelessly kidnap and sell for $1000 the unsuspecting pregnant wife who is trying to buy goods for her Mother's market stall. And somehow the judiciary in those countries don't get it either, because when they rarely try the traffickers for the crimes they committed, they don't sentence them.

And, as usual it's the women and their children who suffer the lifelong physical and mental ramifications of being locked in tiny apartments and being forced to "service" 8-20 often violent men every day, forcing the women to have abortions (the results of their "clients" efforts, or the pregnancies they unwittingly carried into the nightmare) and subjecting them to infection with God only knows what disease. To add insult to grievous injury, when the authorities bust the illegal brothals the women are labled "prostitutes", denied any victim status and deported back to whence they came. The "pimps" who organize the set-ups are rarely caught, and even more rarely tried.

This is one of the reasons why I think pornography and strip-clubs are a bad idea. Their influence sadly echoes much louder than the willing, and well compensated (in the best of all such circumstances) dancers, or the owners, or the patrons ever thought.

Husband and I made up, of course. He's learning that little gets me as riled as the abuse of women. Next time he'll probably just nod and say "Yep, I agree". He probably won't "get it" just as he didn't this time. But maybe, if we ever have a daughter, or perhaps if I just explain it differently... something will click. I hope so.