How different is it to be forced to prostitution to survive by economic necessity than by a beating?

The cunning realist blog discovered that all sorts of folks share tips on the Internet and form community, even johns who view women like this:

Heading over there myself in a week or two and am 50 / 50 on local action. Have been defense contracting for years (Egypt / Jordan / Yugo / Germany / Italy / Hungary) … never had an issue finding good quality locals for dirt cheap.

More of this crap here. I’d thought lit theory in college used up any interest I had in naming things misogynist, racist, colonialist etc, but what else do you call this? Most succinctly: dehumanizing.

The commenters on his blog, like this one named Matt Connolly, say things like:

So what’s new? I was in the service in Japan in the early ’60s and it was the thing to do to have a young Japanese woman as a mistress for the 13 month tour and then to return home to the wife in America. It has been forty years plus since then and we seemed to have endured. We also did the same in Vietnam.

What’s new Matt? More media. The Internet. And that means more transparency. And that means more people seeing the reality of the crap we do. Specifically in this case: that men do to women, that moneyed are doing to poor, that America is doing to Iraq, that sexual shooting galleries do to hope of meaningful connection and genuine intimacy.

Tip of the toque to Andrew Sullivan.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under politics, sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.