This essay first appeared in Cliterati on February 8th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
As I’ve pointed out many times, moral panics do not slowly decline until they vanish; rather, they continue to grow until they begin to rot from within like an overripe fruit, then they burst and spread their noxious juices everywhere. Seen from some angles, though, the panic may seem as robust as ever right up until the end. One of the areas in which this is so is the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), the anemic American counterpart to the BBC; because both networks (and the US equivalent to BBC radio, National Public Radio [NPR]) depend on government sufferance for their funds, it is completely unsurprising that they have pandered shamelessly to the “sex trafficking” narrative both the UK and US governments have used to excuse xenophobia, asset seizure and an expansion of the police state. Still, it’s fascinating that at a time when the paradigm’s critics are becoming ever-bolder and getting increasing attention from the media, that PBS feels comfortable getting behind yet another self-aggrandizing project of the pathologically-smarmy Nick Kristof, especially one which shamelessly doubles down on the absurd claims which have become the hallmark of “sex trafficking” hysteria.
The nonsense starts right from the lede of this adulatory Guardian advert for the show, with the ludicrous claim that “each year 100,000 American girls and women are coerced into prostitution.” Setting aside for a moment that there are only about 450,000 sex workers at a time in the US, let’s just judge the claim exactly as presented. “Sex trafficking” fetishists are also very fond of pretending that the average “sex trafficking victim” only lives for 7 years once she starts seeing clients, so that would mean there were about 700,000 “sex trafficking victims” in the US at any given time (we’re also told that the average “victim” is 13 and dies at 34, but let’s not think too hard right now about how one can subtract 13 from 34 and arrive at 7). Claims for the number of clients per day range from a high-but-reasonable 5 to a literally-impossible 110, but for the sake of argument let’s go with the not-atypical claim of 20-48, which is to say 34 (related to the spurious death age by magical numerology, perhaps). This would mean that on any given day, 700,000 x 34 or 23,800,000 American men – roughly a fifth of the entire adult male population – was paying for sex with such a “victim”. Unless we believe that every one of these monsters can afford to pay for sex several times a week, the inescapable conclusion is that every single adult American man, including Nick Kristof, is paying for sex with a “sex trafficking victim” every single week of his life. Yet other ignoramuses tell us that only about 10% of men have ever paid for sex; are you beginning to understand why I find the pronouncements of prohibitionists so ridiculous?
The rest of the article is no less absurd. There’s the usual bootlicking presentation of every asinine proclamation of cops as though it came straight from the Delphic oracle, the typical demonization of clients (which as we have seen above, include every single American man including the cops and Nick Kristof), the denial of the agency of every single sex worker, the mythmaking about “pimps” who in real life barely even exist, the libeling of escort services as “sex trafficking”, and the reiteration of the same dubious statistics as every other “sex trafficking” scare story. There is also the grotesque lionization of the vile Tom Dart, a monster who tries to make it look as though he’s targeting “demand” by charging male and transwoman sex workers as clients, and of course the lurid presentation of underage-streetwalker porn for the wanking pleasure of the oh-so-moral audience who salivate at the thought of young girls being dominated by stereotyped “pimps” and raped by cops. In short, it’s an ugly, repetitious pile of filth standing in obscene disregard of the increasingly-publicized truth about “sex trafficking” hysteria, but you can bet Kristof and his “rescue” cronies will continue to milk it for all the cash and publicity they can get, right up until the point it erupts like a turgid pustule.
” let’s not think too hard right now about how one can subtract 13 from 34 and arrive at 7”
That’s calculus territory for these people.
You refer to PBS and NPR as “anemic counterparts” to the BBC because the former are reliant on government funding. Do you mean to say that the BBC is superior, then? I just took a quick look and see that the BBC is funded by TV license fees (taxes, in other words). Isn’t that government funding, just in slightly more roundabout way? Unless the funding is set up to be wholly independent of the whims of Parliament, what’s to stop them from withholding the funds unless they play to the right tune?
Even though it is a publicly funded entity, there is a strong tradition of independence at the BBC. If you know British society (I’m British) you would know that no Gov would dare to threaten to withhold BBC funding for political reasons. It would be a major scandal. The BBC has often produced programming that directly criticizes the ruling party.
Then that’s even worse, because they have no excuse for buying into such a moronic myth.
NPR and PBS are “anemic” compared to the BBC because there is a much more populous and powerful gub’mint be EVIL! constituency in the US compared to the UK, so that in fact we’re lucky that NPR and PBS are as robust as they are. There’s always a politician getting cheap applause by promising to shut them down.
I’m always disappointed to see non-conservative media falling for this type of glurge, but MS-NBC has lapped it up for a long time and NPR has done other stories which support sex trafficking hysteria. I ascribe it to the influence of gender feminists, who are accepted by those on the left but no longer should be, given that they have proven themselves to be just another variety of prude.
The only surprise here for me was your charge of xenophobia, which I find more than a little ironic, at least as applied to Britain. After all, Britain’s recent child-rape scandal was allowed to go on as long as it did primarily because no news medium there was allowed to mention that the perps were Pakistani men.
While I hope this moral panic does indeed rot from within, I think it’s going to need some help doing so. I’m very interested in helping.
“There is also the grotesque lionization of the vile Tom Dart,Tom Dart on fire a monster who tries to make it look as though he’s targeting “demand” by charging male and transwoman sex workers as clients …”
I’m a trans (legally male) sex worker and interestingly, the same thing happened to me when I was arrested for escorting in Pittsburgh, the actual charge on my paperwork was “solicitation of prostitution”. So it seems that efforts to pump up the numbers to appear to be targeting demand may be happening in lots of places…
“the inescapable conclusion is that every single adult American man, including Nick Kristof, is paying for sex with a “sex trafficking victim” every single week of his life. ”
Thing is: people that hate men and male sexuality have no trouble believing this.
Another number that might be interesting to look at is the money.
23,800,000 clients a day, at (say) a hundred bucks a client, is 2.4 billion bucks a day, 0.85 trillion bucks a year. The US GDP is about 17T, so men having sex with human-trafficked sex slaves is about 5% of the US economy.
The question becomes: is this really something we want to dick with? Ending human trafficking could very well have serious unforeseen negative effects on the economy.