He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. – Friedrich Nietzsche
Don Quixote imagined himself a knight errant and set off on a quest to save damsels, defeat villains and right all wrongs. But since there were neither monsters to slay nor damsels in distress, his madness conjured them out of mundane people and things and he frequently interfered in other people’s business. Fortunately, everyone else (including his “squire”, Sancho Panza) saw reality as it was, so Quixote’s ability to actually hurt others was minimal. We have of late been invaded by a veritable army of Quixotes, but unlike their mostly-harmless fictional progenitor these modern knights erroneous have managed to convince much of the world that hotels and brothels are prisons, husbands and businessmen international gangsters and whores pure, victimized damsels to be rescued from a Fate Worse Than Death.
The most famous of these quixotic crusaders is of course Nicholas Kristof, who imagines himself the savior of both whores and passive, childlike brown people everywhere. He’s well-known for riding in on a nag he imagines to be a charger and “rescuing” girls from brothels with the “help” of local police…who often subject them to abuse the second Kristof rides off to proclaim his latest triumph in the New York Times, just as the servant boy Don Quixote “rescued” was beaten by his master as soon as his “savior” was out of sight. Dr. Laura Agustín has written a number of articles exposing Kristof; one of the best and most comprehensive of these is “The Soft Side of Imperialism”, published on January 25th. A month later the same newsletter, Counterpunch, carried another of her essays; this one’s on an academic charlatan named Siddharth Kara, who like Kristof is revered by trafficking fetishists:
It is good luck for Good Men that sex slavery has been identified as a terrible new phenomenon requiring extraordinary actions. In the chivalric tradition, to rescue a damsel in distress ranked high as a way knights errant could prove themselves, along with slaying dragons and giants. Nowadays, Nicholas Kristof is only one of a growing number of men seeking attention and praise through the rescue of a new kind of distressed damsel – poorer women called sex slaves. In this noble quest, women who prefer to sell sex to their other limited options are not consulted but must be saved…
Siddharth Kara, another man seeking saintliness, uses lite economics – another trendy way to get noticed these days. His Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery…is not a scholarly work. Neither based on methodological research nor reflecting knowledge of literature that could give context to the author’s experience, the book reads like the diary of a poverty tourist or the bildungsroman of an unsophisticated man of moral sentiments demonstrating his pain at unfathomable injustices. This places Kara in the tradition of colonial writers who believed that they were called to testify to the suffering of those not lucky enough to be born into comfortable Western society. Scholarship is virtually absent from his list of references, whether on migration, trafficking, slavery, feminism, sexualities, criminology, gender, informal-sector labor, or the sex industry and prostitution…Sex Trafficking is touted by anti-slavery and End Demand campaigners as presenting hard data, incisive analysis and up-to-date economics, but it reads more like an account of knight-errantry…
…Kara reads like a bull in a china shop, bumbling into brothels, stressing and sometimes endangering young women, pressing them to provide him with conversation, annoying goons, and throwing money around. The absence of academic supervision to control his preconceptions, critique his lack of methodology, or check his spin makes one wonder what Columbia University Press thought they were doing publishing it…For a man setting out to report on sex as business he is priggish. Bothered by old men who ogle young girls, he admits “I felt ashamed to be male”…Exalted sensibility and anachronistic rhetoric further link Kara to nineteenth-century moral crusaders like Josephine Butler, famous for saying if she were a prostitute she would be crying all day. Kara knows little about present-day migration and mobility. Meeting a Lithuanian woman in Italy and a Nigerian woman in Bangkok cause him to suspect they were trafficked, as though obtaining travel documents and tickets were too difficult for women to manage alone. Not finding slaves in the United States, he concludes there must be less demand and therefore less slavery, but also that the United States is “too far away” (from what?), as though contemporary air travel had not rendered distance almost irrelevant…
…Kara is not interested in migration…[or] “trafficking”…preferring slave trading for the movement of people and slavery for the jobs they get. He claims that slavery is back on a large scale, but his is a cartoon version of master and slave, free of any social complexity and the ambiguities of human interaction…Finally forced to recognize that slavery could sometimes represent “a better life” (p. 199), he is nonetheless blind to the possibility that people in bad situations may be able to exploit them and is obviously ignorant of slavery studies far evolved from abolitionist reductionism. Slave narratives, slave archaeology, ethnobiology, and historical research all have illuminated social systems in which slaves were not wholly passive nor owners unidimensionally crushing…He claims that “sex slaves” are the best earners for masters because they are sold “literally thousands of times before they are replaced” (p. 24), confusing an owner’s sale of a slave with a slave’s sale of sexual services to customers. Would he do this if another service were involved, like hairdressing? If a salon owner buys a slave to be a hairdresser who then sees many customers and produces money for her owner, would Kara say the hairdresser is sold thousands of times? Or would he see that her labor is sold, albeit unjustly…
Agustín goes into considerable detail about this man’s awesome degree of ignorance, and after reading her article one is forced to wonder if the trafficking fanatics bother to read anything before praising it, or if they automatically pronounce a work “important” and “well-researched” if it generally supports their beliefs. Kara proclaims that there is little sex slavery in the US, which is certainly true but directly contradicts “trafficking” dogma. Maybe the fetishists didn’t get that far in the book, or at least assume those they’re preaching to won’t.
Two days later on her own blog Agustín presented her view of recent grandstanding by Ashton Kutcher, another Galahad wannabe whose sexual habits, alas, disqualify him for the role. Like Kristof he tags along on police raids, but unlike Kristof he doesn’t want to get out of easy driving distance of the nearest Starbuck’s:
Ashton Kutcher is branching out from child sex trafficking and child sex slavery to child pornography, undoubtedly on the advice of publicists who want him associated with all things scarily sexy about children. This…contributes to the blurring of distinctions amongst people who sell sex, no matter what age they are. Distinctions are necessary if one would like as many different people as possible to enjoy autonomy and rights, and one would think most people would like that, but alas they don’t when exchanging money for sex is concerned…
Being part of police raids is clearly the In Thing for Rescuers. Nicholas Kristof went giddy over the AK-47s he saw at Somaly Mam’s raid, and Mira Sorvino [is] playing a New York cop-turned-Border-Patrol-agent in a TV mini-series called Human Trafficking…So I am hardly surprised that Ashton asked to tag along on a police raid of pedophile homes in California (if that is really what they were, which is not proven). But something creepy is getting normalised here: Celebrities now routinely side with police in order to show their seriousness about trafficking, and, in a circular move, get their knowledge about trafficking from the police. Ashton won’t have known anything about the people whose homes were invaded except what the cops told him (he wasn’t allowed inside). But he doesn’t have to know more, because this is a publicity stunt…What happened to Hollywood’s historic liberal slant that caused actors and writers to stand up against big government? Gone with the wind of trafficking.
I was originally planning to present the Kutcher story in “That Was the Week That Was #9”, but Agustín’s analysis was so much more interesting than the rather-dry story I decided to present it as part of this parade of arse-backward “heroes” committed to destroying women’s lives for their own personal glory.
One Year Ago Today
“Ching Shih” was an early 19th century whore whose charms and intelligence allowed her to become the most successful pirate in history.
These men give “chivalry” a bad name. A “chivalrous” man is willing to RISK something, like say – his life, in the defense of the defenseless.
A “chivalrous” man – doesn’t point to himself and say … “Look At ME! Look At ME!” while he does good deeds. A “chivalrous” man is quite to content to allow the honor of doing the good deed – to be the payment for the deed itself. Okay, well let me modify that a bit – maybe good sex, given in willing admiration by the damsel is also fair payment! 😛
I don’t think there is anything wrong with chivalry. I’m not really a student of the medieval code itself – so perhaps there’s a downside in that literal code. However, I do think that free men need some sort of code to live their lives by. A code, not enforced on them, but willingly followed by them because they believe it right.
Otherwise, I do believe the male species degrades into animal.
You’ll definitely appreciate my upcoming column of April 11th. 🙂
Chivalry, as most people imagine it today, was largely an invention of the bards and the Church. The new fangled concept of “romance” was spreading, and it suited knights to promote themselves as dashing heroes in order to get what men always want.
However dragons never existed, and the greatest threat to the “virtue” of medieval European women were the knights themselves. The majority of knights were second and third sons, with no land or title, and hence were basically mercenary soldiers. This is not to say they were evil, but soldiers do what they have to do. Women, other than the daughters of the greatest nobility, had few rights, so it was not hard to be chivalrous in the romantic sense.
Rape and theft by the victors of battle was considered normal, so chivalry did not apply to the losers. Nor did it apply to peasants, so non-noble women were fair game for the knights. The only real protection those peasants had was the indignation of their lord over damage to his “property”.
A personal code of conduct is undeniably a good thing. But being kind and polite, resisting oppression and protecting the weak doesn’t require some archaic set of rules. Perhaps the most important thing of all is to honestly try to discover what other people want out of their lives, and to respect those desires, even when they don’t meet with your own preconceptions. Most people really don’t want (or need) to be “saved”, although a helping hand is always welcome.
You might want to read this too.
http://rt.com/usa/news/sex-strike-liberal-lunch-417/
I advise any visitors brought here as a result of Kristof’s tweet to read extensively in the archives before making any comment.
Thanks as ever for your brilliance, probity and passion, Maggie.
Ah, is that where all that traffic came from? Kristof tweeted about me?
Since you are pretty computer savy, I’m sure you’ve seen it. But, yeah, he linked directly to this article. http://twitter.com/#!/NickKristof/status/181418494846451715
Funny that he included your pic of Don Quixote with the chain gang. But actually, if you read that scene very carefully, and since I know that you know about the history of prostitution in early Modern Europe, you might see that our knight errant was probably way more progressive than our knight erroneous. 😉
After I saw N/A’s comment I went to Twitter, searched it out and even re-tweeted it! I also found a very cool comment about me on his blog that I’m going to add to “Criticisms, Witticisms and Praise” in a few minutes. 🙂
Haha! Just read that comment. Great tweet!
The comment you linked on the Kristof blog drew the attention of our old friend, “Stella Marr.”
How surprising.–
Yes, I noticed that. She has this bizarre obsession (which nobody else quite comprehends) that my having owned an escort service somehow means I was never a whore. In other words, she accepts one of my statements as “proof” that another is a lie, despite the fact that they aren’t contradictory. The mind of a fanatic is a strange and scary place.
One of my roommates at university was such a fanatic (She compared having breast cancer to porn addiction because both are “diseases”. Yeah. Really.) so I can take a stab at interpreting this.
You see, since prostitution, to said fanatics, is irrevocably abusive and coercive, every one who is a prostitute is a victim and helpless. To own a business of prostitution means to be in control, the exploiter, etc. A helpless victim of prostitution who has been so freed would never become the exploiter by owning a business of prostitution. You are either one or the other.
Former roommate said this about porn, not believing that anyone who owns a porn company or directs porn could have ever really been a performer….despite obvious ample, recorded evidence to the contrary. She was a joy to live with for 20 days.
I can only imagine. But, I presume the reason she doesn’t conclude that the “madam” part was a lie and the “whore” part true rather than vice-versa is that I’m not pathetic and broken and talking about how horrible prostitution is. What a loon.
Dear n/a, I’m glad to see you again as I accept your offer to get me a copy of the “Manhunter” DVD. As far as staying anonymous when buying something off someone’s Amazon.com wish list, here’s part of the info I got from Amazon on e-mail:
We will never reveal the identity of someone who purchases an item from a wish list. When an item is purchased from a wish list it will be sent to the wish list recipient without the name of the purchaser.
Your identity will not be revealed unless you choose to reveal yourself by
including a message to the wish list recipient. Even if the wish list owner
contacts us requesting the name of the person who purchased the item we are still not able to reveal your identity.
I only show my wish list to people I want to see it so please let me know which of these you prefer: I e-mail the link to Maggie OR you or I put the link on this blog only. Also, I’m glad to buy you a gift as a “thank you” for “Manhunter” that’s the same cost. You’re welcome to e-mail me at any time if you like and Maggie can give you my e-mail address. Thank you again for this offer and for your kind words about how/why I’ve helped men out sexually (and still do, to be honest). It’s nice to not be ASS-umed about in unfair, negative ways and not put in a safe little category box.
Laura,
Fantastic. 🙂
Please put the link right here on the blog and Manhunter (“what disadvantages, Will?”) will be on its way as early as 9 PM EDT tonight.
Have to rush now — will post again later. Again, I’m delighted that you accept this little gift, Laura.
It’s a pleasure.–
It’s *my* pleasure. And hello Maggie — very pleased to know you’ve got new readers.
They are *gawking* right about now. 😉
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/ref=wish_list
Dear n/a, please know the offer to get you a gift of the same value doesn’t expire and the offer to you to e-mail me doesn’t expire either. A used copy is fine as long as it plays well. Thank you again! Take care.
Hi Laura,
That link takes me to *my* wishlist page! Would you be able to put up your link — say, just for today — right here on the blog?
I’ve never done this before, so please excuse me if I’m missing something obvious!
I tried searching “laura24lb” but no luck…
I just clicked on it, and it opened up my wish list. I guess it will open up the list of whoever clicks on it. Oh well, it’s about time I adjusted my list anyway.
I learned how to send the right link…lol. I’ll master all of it soon! Thanks again to Maggie for helping n/a and I exchange my wish list information.
My pleasure! 🙂
Kristof states he has no issue with those who sell sex voluntarily in today’s op ed. His quarrel is the women who have no choice.
The problem, Ron, is that he A) makes those women out to be a vastly larger percentage of the prostitute population than they are, and B) advocates for criminalization policies which only hurt coerced women rather than helping them. Take a look at my “Handy Figures” column (link in right column) for the numbers, and if you’d like to read the opinion of a genuinely trafficked woman on the whole thing take a look at my interview with activist Jill Brenneman.
Love the play on words Maggie. Knights erroneous to point up that errant can mean mistaken too!
Thank you! I’m always pleased when readers catch my wordplays; sometimes I think I make them too obscure!
I caught it too! Great Nietzsche quote, btw!
Yes those 12-year-olds should be free to choose to sell their bodies to freaks and perverts. How DARE Kristof interfere!
Bill, I’m pretty sure Kristof, as in his column today, believes they are all pimped. If you want to ride the Kristof bandwagon, at least get his “facts” straight.
Bill, the notion that there are droves of very young prostitutes is pure propaganda; as I demonstrated in this calculation, only about 3.5% of all prostitutes are under 18, and over half of those are 17. The “12-year-old prostitute” of trafficking propaganda is so rare as to be a prodigy, and the claim that the “average” prostitute starts at 13 is pure nonsense (as demonstrated here).
Furthermore, the vast majority (84%) of underage prostitutes are runaways who have never even met a pimp, as demonstrated by a recent Department of Justice study, and 75% of underage prostitutes work ONLY on the street rather than online.
Finally, Kristof’s support of criminalization does nothing to help the true victims; in fact, all it does is to give those who exploit them another weapon with which to frighten and control them. If you truly want to help “trafficked children”, you should support decriminalization of prostitution so that clients who are offered underage girls, or adult prostitutes who encounter them, are free to go to the police without fear of persecution. Make as much moralistic noise as you want, but if you support criminalization YOU are one of the reasons those rare 12-year-old prostitutes are unable to escape their plight.
Bill, I was probably being too subtle, since I am guessing you are new here. So I’ll be more explicit.
The most detailed study of underage prostitutes in NYC–and our knight erroneous was talking about NYC in his column today–discovered that only 10% of them had pimps. I.e., no pimps, no “international sex trafficking ring” was responsible for the predicament of 90% of them.
So who was responsible? Most likely, their fucked-up, broken, abusive American home life. Just like child abuse mostly takes place in the home or with people the child knew. The Traci Lords narrative, to my mind, is still the best way of understanding what is going on here, not some super-hidden, international network of perverts.
That NYC study is here, btw: http://www.laweekly.com/2011-11-03/news/lost-boys/
There seems to be an alarming willingness to believe that a large number of men would jump at the chance to have sex with a 12 yr old girl. Does anyone honestly think this of their male friends and relatives? Perverts of this kind undoubtedly exist, but I would guess that they are just as rare as serial rapists.
Taking Tracy Lords as an example might be misleading. Most Asian girls of 12 and younger, look like little boys, and are much smaller than the average 12-13 yr old American girl. The would-be paedophile brothel client would almost have to be a homosexual to be aroused by the typical Cambodian 12 yr old.
VW: Your first point is right on. I meant to include it in a comment I posted on Laura Agustín’s site about the basic logistical problems with the notion that huge amounts of 12-year-olds are being hooked up via traffickers with pedophiles in the US.
Since Backpage, or any other prostitution advertisments, do not ever advertise that the girl is underage, how do pedophiles know that they will actually hook up with a 12-year-old? And, even if they use code words in the ads, no adult wanting another adult would be familiar with such codes (I’m not familiar with them, if they even exist), and would surely freak out at seeing a 12-year-old at his door. That’s surely not a good business model, springing a 12-year-old on someone who wants an adult.
As for Traci Lords, I was only talking about the fact that back in her day, as well as today, there are a lot of teen runaways in certain parts of our country. As runaways, they may face problems of homelessness, drug abuse, self-prostitution, or pimped-prostitution.
But, until recently, we all understood this problem in terms of her narrative: Broken, abusive home; She runs away from home; She lies about her age with the help of a “boyfriend”; And she enters into porn based on this lie. So, maybe it wasn’t clear in what I wrote, but I was trying to say that I see little reason to use words like “trafficking” or “slavery” or “international networks or rings” to be able to understand her story and the story of many others like her in this country.
I’m not sure what you thought I was trying to say as Traci being an example, but hopefully it’s clearer now.
Well, this morning it’s storming, I haven’t had enough sleep, and my arthritis hurts. Still, I have to go in to work., pretty much against my will. Does Kristoff feel sorry for me? Or would he only feel that if I were still doing sex work?
Hey, if I’d had my way I’d have a huge trust fund, and never have to work. But that’s not life for me, or most people.
One of the largest sources of teenage prostitutes in the US today are LGBT kids. They’re often tossed out of their homes by their parents, and turned away or abused in shelters. So they have few choices. If Kristoff was serious, he’d be raising money to build shelters for them.
And despite what you may think, there are few non-judgemental places a homeless teen can go, places that won’t get you locked up in the system.
Been there, done that. I’m sure it hasn’t changed all that much.
Look, it’s very simple. When I was young, working in a strip club, and then later porn and prostitution just paid way more than any other job I could get. If Kristoff is serious, maybe he should be agitating for an increase in minimum wage.
Well said, Comixchik. Concerning LGBT kids, yeah, all regular readers of this blog know that (and if you don’t, see the LAWeekly link about NYC I posted above.)
It’s actually too bad that there weren’t more of Kristof’s minions coming over here to debate us. But I guess it is not surprising, since knight erroneous himself is just so damn erroneous and clueless (and fucking racist), such that I guess his minions realized his cluelessness upon coming here. Kinda funny.
In case it wasn’t clear, I know you know about LGBT kids! The “you” referred to Kirstof’s followers.
I think one of the most disturbing details about the Somaly Mam raid is the presence of AK-47s and Kristof’s giddiness over their presence. That really highlights his mentality. Does he understand how those guns work? How any gun works? That the very people who he wants to rescue could have been maimed or killed by the very guns he was probably getting a boner over?
Well, you know, omelettes and eggs and all that. 🙁
I can’t fault Kristof for getting a boner over AK-47’s … it’s happened to me too. 😛
Heh, yeah.
I get wet over certain firearms as well and this summer I’ll get the chance to shoot one of those babies. But it’s just so inappropriate in this case. Now, if Kristof was part of a raid going up against a warehouse full of well-armed traffickers, carry on. But I think we all know he wouldn’t be at THAT scene.
Regarding Stella Marr – she knows exactly what she is doing. Last month, a neofeminist wrote on her blog in a post called “Trafficking versus Prostitution” that neofems should stop hiding behind the term anti-trafficking, and use anti-prostitution instead.
Stella jumped in with this comment: (emphasis mine)
“I’ve made a conscious decision to start using prostitution and trafficking interchangably — though I usually use the word s ‘domestic sex trafficking” when speaking of myself. Sex trafficking according to the UN definition means using someone for the purposes of sexual exploitation.
We’re in the position now where people understand that trafficking is terrible — but they’ve been sold the lie that most prostitution is not like trafficking. In fact it’s just the same as what people think of as trafficking with a few slight variations such as locale or native language.
What I’m conciously trying to do when I writ about it is link trafficking and prostitution in people’s minds. In a way, the word trafficking can be our Trojan horse — now that the public understands it’s a bad thing, they will be able to understand prostitution is sexual violence in a way they wouldn’t have before.
I agree with you about the conflation of labor trafficking and sex trafficking. And I don’t think it helps to say women who are labor trafficked are also sex trafficked, unless they are being forced to work in brothels on the weekends and in factories during the week, or something like that.
Rambling here. You are fantastic. So much love to you xoxo”
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Her goal is obviously deceptive, and by using the term Trojan horse, her deliberate trickery is apparent.
Nearly all neofeminist prohibitionists are like that. They’re Machiavellian in the strictest sense; in other words they believe that end justifies the means, and they’re willing to lie, hurt real women and do whatever else they have to do to get their way.
I think it should be pointed out that another harm of folks like Kristof is that those who really are doing good can be lumped in with such knights erroneous (and yeah, it’s good word play).