Pornography/prostitution/trafficking are connected to other violence against women
It is not possible to separate prostitution from trafficking, or prostitution from other kinds of violence against women. Incest usually precedes prostitution, pornography teaches men how to treat women, and johns try out on prostituted women what they later subject their wives to. Since johns like "something new," they buy trafficked women. This article by Bob Herbert connects the misogyny in US popular culture with the murders of schoolgirls in Pennsylvania.
Why Aren't We Shocked?
By Bob Herbert
New York Times, October 16, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/opinion/16herbert.html?hp
"Who needs a brain when you have these?"
- -message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women
In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural
Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the
killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys,
and then deliberately attacked only the girls.
Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl
was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado
attack.
In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little
was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a
gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis
of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only
the white kids. Or only the Jews.
There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have
first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to
eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been
calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been
seen for what it really was: a hate crime.
None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have
become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with
misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be
expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women
and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather
forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was
that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country,
not that it happened to girls.
The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is
so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its
ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues
have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby
women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance
telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a
billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, "When was the
last time you got screwed?"
An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman's face with
the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a
porn video.
We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on
women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the
most sensational stories, large segments of the population are
titillated by that violence. Weíve been watching the sexualized
image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years.
JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And weíre still watching the
video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.
What have we learned since then? That thereís big money to be made
from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In
a misogynistic culture, itís never too early to drill into the
minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and
their ability to please men sexually.
A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or
so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and
girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
Weíre all implicated in this carnage because the relentless
violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the
wider societyís casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls,
to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels ó objects ó and
never, ever as the equals of men.
"Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible," said Taina
Bien-AimÈ, executive director of the womenís advocacy group
Equality Now.
That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of
pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream
America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the
old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7
billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being
beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names
like "Ravished Bride" and "Rough Sex -- Where Whores Get Owned."
Then, of course, there's gangsta rap, and the video games where
the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of
pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was ìItís
Hard Out Here for a Pimpî), and on and on.
You're deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It's
all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its
farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish
schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.