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Diary of a sex slave
October 12, 2006
This week the San Francisco Chronicle finished its exhaustive
four-part series
on sex trafficking. (Actually if you count all the audio slide
shows, podcasts and follow-up articles it's more like a 12-part
series, but who's counting?) The articles center around You Mi
Kim, a naive South Korean college student with a serious
shopping habit who ended up getting duped into sex slavery to
help her pay off her $40,000 in credit card debts. After
answering an ad to work as a hostess in an American men's club
("Very gentle. No touching," the ad reportedly read),
she was flown to Tijuana, Mexico, smuggled across the border and
forced to spend five months having sex with dozens of men in Los
Angeles' Koreatown and Ingleside neighborhoods. Later she
extended her stay in hell working in a massage parlor in San
Francisco's Tenderloin District for four more months, where she
met a really nice john who fell in love with her and whisked her
away from her former life. What a story -- a modern fairy tale
of evil step-madams, coed Cinderellas and a prince in shining
latex.
The series, which includes three massive "diary
entries" with more details about discarded condoms and
coerced sex acts than probably any mainstream media story in the
history of humankind (just a hyperbolic guess), also attempts to
give a sense of how large the problem of sex trafficking has
become. Although reporter Meredith May admits that exact numbers
are hard to come by, the stats she gathers will give anyone with
an ounce of humanity the willies. According to State Department
estimates, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced
labor and sex worldwide each year, and 80 percent of those
people are women and girls. Where do they end up? Mostly in
"civilized" countries like the U.S., Australia and
Japan. In the U.S., asserts May, the most popular destinations
are New York, Las Vegas, Texas and California.
May is careful not to overstate the issue, but she does
suggest San Francisco's famously sex-positive culture is in part
to blame for sex traffickers setting up shop inside the Golden
Gates. Paraphrasing the opinion of Donna Hughes, a
"national expert on sex trafficking at the University of
Rhode Island," May writes that "San Francisco's
liberal attitude toward sex, the city's history of arresting
prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population
have made it one of the top American cities for international
sex traffickers to do business undetected."
So after several consecutive days of "Diary of a Sex
Slave" plastered in gazillion-point print across the
daily's cover (no doubt a happy fact for beleaguered circulation
czars), it's hardly surprising that yesterday Mayor Gavin Newsom
announced a plan to crack down on massage parlors known for
prostitution and specifically sex trafficking.
But what is a liberal city to do?
From "Lusty Lady," the unionized strip-club co-op,
to the 2005 Sex
Worker Festival and Girlfest,
the city has always wanted to have it both ways: embracing every
conceivable sexual proclivity and at the same time embodying
ideals of gender equality and human rights. Two years ago the
city moved away from stigmatizing the massage parlors by
removing them out of police oversight and into regulation by the
Department of Environmental Health.
Like the Netherlands being accused of confusing multicultural
tolerance with allowing intolerant Muslim groups to flourish,
the idea that San Francisco's sexual tolerance has been
exploited by sex traffickers presents a bit of a pickle. No
doubt there will be a temptation to minimize the issue, or at
least quibble over what the issue is. Already city supervisor
Jake McGoldrick has been quoted as wondering if it might not be
the right time to embrace the legalization of prostitution. A
concerted effort to quash sex traffickers will also set off
alarm bells with self-empowered sex workers and their
surprisingly influential advocates. An editorial
by sex-worker advocate Carol
Leigh in the Chronicle written in the wake of several raids
on massage parlors, aimed at busting sex trafficking last year,
sounded the alarm. "Before we buy into the 'sex slave'
melodrama," Leigh wrote, "we should consider the
complexities of sex work, migration and trafficking. Framing the
range of abuses in the sex industry as a moralistic concern
about 'sex slaves' obscures the real violations (and advantages)
of this industry."
Leigh's emphasis on complexity sounds good -- but advantages?
If this debate were about forced ditch digging, the issues would
be pretty clear. But adding sex into the mix still seems to make
us muddle-headed. Like the gazillion-point type screaming from
the headlines, sometimes it's hard to keep things in perspective
and, well, call a slave a slave.
-- Carol Lloyd
Original link: http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/index.html
Comments on the original SF Gate story can be found here:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/foreigndesk/detail?blogid=16&entry_id=9691#comments
Letters:
Trafficking 11/04/06
There's a difference between the trafficking of workers and
prostitution. I finally read the series and the fact she was
tricked into illegally crossing a border and having sex with
customers when she thought she would do neither was fraud and a
form of bondage. She also had to pay off the 10,000 debt by
working as a prostitute before going home. If it involves fraud,
force, debt bondage, etc. it is modern day slavery.
-- Donna Darko
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/view/
From a Legal Pro in Nevada 10/31/06
My response is less to the article and more to the various
things I've been reading here. I'm an legal prostitute in
Nevada, working at a brothel, and while working as a pro is
definitely hard work, I don't see it as slavery (in my case).
Before coming to Nevada, I had never worked in the sex industry
- I came to NV to be legal because prostitution is a
legitimate form of work to me. It was my choice and I made it
(and I'll have to deal with all of the repercussions that come
of it.)
But, there is a marked difference between working as an LPIN
and being a sex slave. I'm not forced to do anything I
don't want to do - I was very careful in picking the place where
I would work, ensuring that I had the same freedoms other people
have in more "normal" jobs.
I'm a fan of legalization, but careful legalization. There
are things in Nevada laws right now that give more advantages to
the houses instead of the working girls. The playing field
should be even, and safety should be a concern. I tend to feel
that if prostitution were legalized, perhaps there would be less
opportunity for victimization. Not that sex slavery wouldn't
happen, just that women looking to enter the sex industry would
have a safe place to go (like I did.)
Too many people just throw around those words without
thinking about it. There's a lot of issues (moral and societal)
involved in the sex industry and it's high time we started
acting mature about it rather than having knee-jerk reactions
either way (pro or con).
-- SR
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/view/
Care to prove this? 10/15/06
Most prostitutes, even if they aren't in debt peonage, are
enslaved to drugs or otherwise living in difficult
circumstances. Hardly any of them fit the "happy
hooker" image presented by the "sex positive"
movement, and nearly all would get out if they could.
I guess we all are supposed to assume without question that
this is the gospel truth-- after all it is inconcievable that
our prim middle-class values are not universal.
Unfortunately this statement is completely presumptous, based
upon nothing. If you are going to spout these popular chestnuts,
please at least try to back it up with something based upon
actual fact and experience.
The fact is nobody who has ever researched prostitution has
ever been able to simplify it in this way. Women and men go into
sex work for many, many reasons, they are *not* all drug
addicts, and a surprising percentage are not living in
especially difficult circumtances (it all depends on where they
are living and working of course-- LA is different from
Calcutta). "Poor downtrodden drug addicted hooker" is
just as much a stereotype as "happy hooker".
Putting aside the stereotypes, you would be surprised at how
many working girls are in this work specifically because it
allows them to make a great deal of money very quickly without
job training, education, or experience-- and also affords them
an extraordinary level of independence and flexibility. Its one
of the few lines of work where women are much more powerful than
men and make most of the money. I know of several exotic dancers
who have gone on to become porn actresses and escorts, running
their own production companies, producing their own films, and
choosing their own patrons very carefully. More often than not,
they are supporting families, not drug habits, owning homes, and
paying all the same bills we all have to pay.
For many of these women, the alternative would be a dead end
pink collar job, and they know it. Who are you to second guess
them?
Carol Leigh is right-- there is plenty to be concerned about
in the sex trade, but there are also very real tangible
benefits. This is the reason it exists.
-- Anon
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/view/index2.html
"sex positive" vs. prostitution 10/12/06
I haven't read the Chronicle's series, but I think it's
absurd to suggest that sex positivity leads to prostitution (if
Salon's interpretation is correct). First of all, people who
demonize sex often turn out to have the biggest peccadilloes, if
not illegal tendencies, hidden in their closets. Second, sex
positivity, at least to me, indicates an element of consent,
that whatever the kink, all parties have agreed to it. The thing
about prostitution is that there's a form of coercion involved,
whether it's economic coercion or the threat of violence, etc.
I'm just not sure I can get behind the argument that sex work is
ever empowering because who would do it if they felt they had
another viable option? The writer Ariel Levy (I hope I'm getting
her name right) was on Colbert the other day, promoting her book
"Female Chauvinist Pigs." She made the point that
stripping and porn are about fake expressions of sexual
pleasure, and they do nothing to really help women enjoy and
feel good about sex in real life because we're imitating
imitations. I had never heard this issue put quite that way, and
I thought she made a good point.
-- Janice78
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/view/index3.html
California 10/12/06
Anon
Some people outside the USA view California as an entity unto
itself--almost like a sub-country of the US.
-- Shadow
Hear, hear 10/12/06
Good to see some rational voices on here pointing out that
it's precisely BECAUSE of the illegality of prostitution that
things like this are allowed to continue. If there were legally
run parlors that had to register with the city, be subject to
health checks, and provide STD testing and proof of such, what
john in their right mind would choose to visit one of the dingy
underground ones with the risk of getting arrested? The demand
for the underground ones would drastically decline, if not
disappear. Not to mention that prostitutes would now be
registered workers with all the legal protections due to such.
Of course, this is not to say that this would solve the problem
of worldwide sex trafficking - more likely that the victims
would simply be trafficked to a different country, where legal
supply does not meet demand. But at least it would help the
problem here, that is, if that unholiest of alliances between
right-wing conservatives and Andrea Dworkin-esque feminists can
be overcome.
-- Alex
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/10/12/sex_slave/view/index4.html
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