It’s another experimental Half-Nekkid Thursday video presentation. I posted a recipe for tomato sauce that I mentioned making last week. In the recipe I forgot to mention that if you let the sauce simmer all day in a crock pot you can smooth it out with a hand blender. And I realized it reminded me a bit of how I like to be touched, at least at first, with that gentle, slow sensual stirring motion.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

So was anyone listening to some of the actual coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s theology yesterday? The ones where they were actually playing whole long sections of his sermons instead of little galvanic loops? The ones where African American journalists were interviewing African American pastors from Rev. Wright’s tradition about what he says and what he means and what he’s standing for?

The ones, especially, where his principle of being unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian weren’t parsed as incomprehensibly alien “gotcha” syllables but addressed as obvious and important: contrary to the cultural colonialism of Euro/Anglo missionaries, the pipe organs, or neck ties in 110-degree (f) heat, or, well, the missionary position they imposed on their sometimes reluctant, sometimes enthusiastic, but always second-class-to-them congregants wasn’t Christianity. Even though the other part was.

And when you think about it those colonial congregants, like Rev. Wright, had every right to begin every sentence with “I’m not a Christian but…” But they didn’t because they felt what they felt and were unapologetically Christian. And in the face of that Christianity they didn’t much appreciate other people trying to shame them for taking a pass on communion with elevated pinkies and garden-parties themed about “uplifting” “those people.”

And when you look around and see people who turn that around and say things like “Well, I go to tea parties, and I do the missionary position, and I listen to pipe organs, and read “My Pet Goat“ to red ‘n yellow ‘n black ‘n white children at Emma E. Booker Elementary School so that makes me a Christian.” And then they act surprised, hurt, and angry when someone like Rev. Wright challenges them.

But Rev. Wright does not say “I’m not a Christian but…”

He says “I am a Christian and!“

With the occasional “God Damn you” thrown in, especially when it’s clear that to the extent there is a God you just might be damned.

But we are not all Christian, nor are we are all of Rev. Wright’s denomination, nor his gender, nor his race, nor his heritage, nor his class, nor his family, nor orientation, nor age, nor abledness, nor his service record as a soldier or his personal service to a President, nor his cis-genderedness, nor his natal language nor citizenship nor income nor education nor reproductive status nor health nor health-insuredness, and even if we are some of those things we are not all, and even if we somehow are all those things we’re not those same things in equal measure. But for all that we can hear him, and respect him, and learn from him. And if we disagree we can disagree with him and still hear him, and still respect him, and still learn from him. And when his words cut us rightly, and when they cut us wrongly, and we disagree with him we still can hear him, and respect him, and listen to him.

Because he is not a Christian but… all the rest, he’s a Christian and all the rest.

Reverend Wright is not an IQ test to be boiled down to one number, nor am I nor are you nor is anyone we know. We are all each of what we are and.

—-

Sometimes it seems to me that among broadly progressive people there’s a feeling we are IQ tests, that we can be boiled down to our number. Sometimes it feels — and I mean really feels, not rhetorically feels — that progressives, perhaps lacking experience with the faith of Rev. Wright and of other denominations, find it harder to forgive… in themselves or others… our… I dunno… trespasses, transgressions… sins of omission or commission. And perhaps because we — not unlike Rev. Wright’s tradition — have rejected imposition of the colonizing inessentials we forget that messages beginning with, effectively, “God damn you for…” are not words arising out of disrespect, nor shortsightedness, nor dismissal.

Yeah, some of us have become so brittle that we lash out at Rev. Wright for pointing out not only our feet of clay but our coating of mud and our filling of shit, that we retreat when our baby steps aren’t big enough, that we oppo-research his whacko-HIV-conspiracy butt in hopes of off-centering him to see how he likes it… And yeah, some of us have become so brittle that we’d prefer the painful destruction of did-not/did-too slinging, then piling, then avalanching of mud… And yeah, some of us might prefer that to the no-less painful but mutual support of turning each other our cheeks so the other may find and wipe away mud that we ourselves will never see on our own.

Because none of us is so perfect that we have no mud on us, no are any of us so sanguine that a little skin won’t come away with the mud. And if we speak of honoring diversity we do so not because someone, one mortal somewhere, or some one group somewhere might have it all down pat… has the “best” IQ. We do it instead because each of us, and each group among us can teach us a little arrogance, and each can teach us a lot of humility, and because left unchallenged yesterday’s inspiration is always today’s ego trip. And since there’s no one or one, on this world anyway, with the one truth and the only way to “salvation,” on this world, anyway… the only way out is to to hear, to respect, and learn. And, finally, not just learning from the insights of others or from insights of our own, but — if we would become wise — learning from ours and other’s mistakes.

Anyway, did anyone hear that coverage yesterday? I was driving between destinations yesterday and heard it on a secondary public channel that specializes in NPR rebroadcasts, and news feeds from Dutch and Australian national equivalents of the BBC and that, in my area at least, fades in and out like old shortwave. But I listened to it, and thought about all the times I’ve pulled up stakes, withdrawn, left myself behind saying “I’m not a liberal but…” or “I’m not an environmentalist but…” or “I’m not a person of faith but…” or, especially, “I’m not a feminist but…” And I thought about all the other people in the world who aren’t a this but, or a that but. And I thought about all the Salvadorans who died because people were too pure to vote, or at least vote for Jimmy Carter, and so they withdrew, and so Reagan became President. And I thought about all the people who’ve died and still will die, and all who’ve been oppressed and will remain oppressed, and all the medications that have been withheld, and all the court decisions what will be upheld because people were too pure to vote, or at least vote for Al Gore, and so they withdrew, and so My Pet Goat became President. And I thought about what my Dad, who loved Martin Luther King, said when King went to Memphis to help organize the garbage workers, that he was taking larger steps and casting a wider net. And I remember my Dad, who loved Dr. King, saying afterwards that they could tolerate him as long as he stuck only to injustices of race, but they couldn’t let him live when he began to address injustices of not just race but poverty and class. And I think about how easily we’ve splintered ourselves since… over again, and over again… without him.

And while I can look past all our agreements and consonances to places I don’t agree with Rev. Wright, and see as well where he doesn’t agree with me, I can still hear him, and respect him, and learn from him, as when he says not “I’m not a Christian but“ and says instead “I am a Christian and.“

There are so many places in experience and discourse where “and…” fits perfectly where once “not/but…” pinched and chafed.

Jessica of Jezebel keeps it all in perspective…

Here we are, worried about the sexualization of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, when 31 out of 53 girls from the ages of 14-17 from the Yearning For Zion ranch are pregnant or already have children. Although the polygamist Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints have been claiming that they do not marry off 13 and 14 year old girls to older men, the number of very young yet pregnant girls seems to refute these claims. What’s more, there are 53 girls ages 14-17 who were taken from the ranch, while only 17 boys in that age group were living with the sect. (The gender divisions in children under 14 were about 50/50.) This gives credence to the tales of “lost boys“ of the FDLS: adolescent males who were exiled from the sect to keep the gender imbalance favorable for polygamous unions.

Read the quote in context here.

So the other night the photos that were blasted wall to wall on the big-screen tvs were all about Hannah Montana in entirely inappropriate circumstances. Not sure what Annie Leibovitz was thinking. On the other hand I can kind of gues what the news blasters were thinking for wall-to-walling photos and videos of Cyrus in those inappropriate circumstances.

But here’s the deal. I think people like Leibovitz, and Vanity Fair, and wall-to-wall cable is comfortable sexualizing 15-year-olds precisely because they’d be horrified by 15-year-olds having sex. Sexualized virgins… have-it-both-ways virgin/whores… are the only salt and savor one is permitted in the “no-sex” class paradigm where the best way possible to insure women’s legitimate sexual arousal is never detectable is by making everyone look aroused (lipstick-red lips, eye-shadow blue eyelids, high-heel-presented boobs and ass, etc.) even when, and maybe especially when they’re not.

On the other hand, when the same media discovers girls who’ve actually had to be sexual instead of being merely sexualized, and especially when they can’t find a way (a la Britney Spears) to blame them for it, they just fuse and sputter. Thus the complete failure to confront what the fuck was going on at that little child-rape-and-forced-labor factory in Texas.

And, based on inside scoops I’ve gotten from friends in the white-American southwest, it ain’t boy children doing the forced labor either, it’s girls — just like it was sets of exhausted-looking too-young girls pushing shopping carts ahead of wary, hard-eyed older women too young to be their mothers and too different-looking to be their sisters, and too close in age to be their babysitters that I saw in the grocery store in that nice “we don’t have internet in our hotels, I guess we’re just quiet folks around here” Small American Town near the four corners we stopped in a few years ago.

And I just want to know, really, where are those boys? I know one man, in his 60s now, who in classic recent-refugee fashion became a cab driver after being “excommunicated” from a polygamist “splinter group” at a very young age. But yeah, if children under 14 are half boys half girls, and for those over there were 53 girls and only 17 boys then what the fuck happened to the other 36 boys? Where are they?

Why aren’t their mothers crying for them on TV the way they have been for their lost girls? By law and by right a minor is a minor till 11:59PM of the day before they turn 18, and so those missing boys need — and I suspect really need — to be in shelters as well.

And can I just close with an obvious answer to the question “whut about teh menz, why urn’t ther any menz?” What if there weren’t that many men to begin with because it was an FLDS-designed beacon-on-a-hill wet-dream poligamist compound? How many hand-picked-by-Warren-Jeffs “spiritual husbands” would be needed to “tend to” 170 women and girls over age 14 anyway? Seventeen might not be too many, especially since (said one of my sources years ago) older “sister-wives” are frequently given responsibility for day-to-day operations anyway. And, um, yeah, given that “spiritually married” or not it’s illegal in Texas to have sex with children under age 17, and given how many of the children taken into custody have themselves been pregnant or had children, then you’re probably not going to see a lot of those guys coming forward to appear on Larry King Live either, because shortly thereafter they’d appear in orange jump suits.

—-

And if I may just editorialize for a moment, this just seems like such a good time for BFP, and BlackAmazon, and Jill, and maybe Hugo, and all the other good bloggers who think they’re so pure-of-heart they can’t learn from their or anyone else’s mistakes to do Take-Two CEO Ben Feder** a favor, to do Justice Arthur Cooperman a favor, to do the slave traffickers in Sudan, and all the other MRAs in the world including Warren Jeffs a favor and go dark on their own. Yeah, yeah, you’re all sensitive and shit. Me too. Now put away the violins and get back to work.

[** Take-Two produces Grand Theft Auto™ —fl]

Lynn Gassis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has been standing up for the “no-sex” class theory recently. She has a killer post that I think does a wonderful job of explaining how even if it was true that women across the board really have lower libidos than men it still wouldn’t be enough to justify the near-timeless assertion that women put up with sex only so they can get pregnant and, preferably, then sue for child support! (Note: Lynn’s responding to a proposal by Jacqueline Passey that development of a male pill would decrease quality of sex because while men desire sex women desire — with equal intensity — children and that they’ll manipulate and like to get pregnant like men lie and manipulate to get sex…! Which, as Lynn notes, is “the ‘no-sex’ class on steroids.”)

Now, how many low sex drive people are actually abstaining from sex? Let’s first look at the phenomenon of the sexless marriage.

A sexless marriage is a marriage in which little or no sex occurs between the two partners. The US National Health and Social Life Survey in 1994 (Laumann et al. 1994) found that 2 percent of the married respondents reported no sexual intimacy in the past year. The definition of a nonsexual marriage is often broadened to include those where sexual intimacy occurs less than ten times per year, in which case 20 percent of the couples in the NHSLS would be in the category.

The proportion of married couples having sex less than ten times a year actually looks reasonably in line with the sexual dysfunction statistics given earlier (considering that most of the men and women reporting some sort of sexual dysfunction are probably still having sex, but that, say, many of the 5-15% of women who have serious ongoing low sexual desire may not be, along with some corresponding set of men).

Now, how about single women? The Guttmacher Institute reports that

One-third of American women aged 20–44 are single, and nine in 10 of these women are sexually experienced, according to “Sexual Behavior of Single Adult American Women,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg et al., published in the March 2008 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Hey! It looks as if the percentage of single women who are not sexually experienced is right in line with the proportion of women who report being chronically uninterested in sex! It’s almost as if women, like men, had sex out of actual sexual desire! Whodda thunk it?

Read the quote in context here.

Whodda thunk it indeed?

Photo on Flickr by… hey, me! Used under a Creative Commons license.

So last week I mentioned a tomato sauce I often make and people asked for the recipe. Here you go.

Seriously, while I never make sauce exactly the same way I like to take a little tip from Indian cooking and cook the spices right into the olive oil before I toss in chopped onions and garlic into a big skillet. If I’m cooking with meat I’ll toss in either ground beef or Italian sausage and let it brown a bit. When I’m not using meat and I’m planning to cook everything down, I’ll use chopped up eggplant which substitutes nicely.

Once the onions and garlic are in I’ll usually them that go till they just starts to get translucent before throwing in all the other chopped veggies. Veggies vary but I always a red or green bell pepper, almost always some carrot, celery if my kids and partner will let me get away with it, and then either the regular white or brown mushrooms. Every now and then I remember to soak dry porchini mushrooms but I almost never plan to put it in pasta sauce.

Lately once the veggies are all piled in and cooked just a bit I’ve started doing this trick I heard from some Italians where you “sweat” the vegetables, covered, on low for up to half an hour. That works as a nice alternative to deglazing the pan with wine… though I usually do that anyway.

I’m not a big wine snob… or drinker (about once a year I give away all the bottles well-intentioned people bring over.) I keep a couple bottles of high-quality vermouth — one sweet and one dry usually — plus some really expensive port and (a staple for Asian cooking) Chinese rice wine. For pasta sauce, unless I’m using something really beefy as the (optional) meat I’ll deglaze with the dry vermouth with has a nice, fruity sweetness that to my ignorant palate nicely complements tomatoes.

Then into the pan I toss however many cans of mixed (almost always that great organic brand) tomato stuff — diced, whole, crushed — to mostly fill the skillet. Then I’ll usually top off with herbs, black pepper, and salt, a little tomato paste, sometimes a little anchovy paste, and a pinch of sugar.

Then depending on what’s what I’ll either cook it just above a simmer for 15-20 minutes, or else I’ll move it into a big pot and simmer it on low till it gets this really thick, glossy, almost syrupy quality that’s really cool.

After that I usually boil pasta, grate parmesean, throw together a salad (I use olive, flaxseed, or sometimes a nut oil plus unseasoned rice vinegar as the dressing base with salt and pepper always, but then a little brown mustard or mayo or maybe a little crumbly bleu cheese to help emulsify it and fresh or dried herbs.) Whack up slices of crusty bread and yell for someone to set the table. Cleanup the big stuff while they’re doing that, then serve up, say whatever feels appropriate to you, and dig in.

Update: SugarMag observed that I’d neglected, um, times and measurements. Which, as she said, is fine if you’ve already made it hundreds of time (in the last five years I’d guess 250 for me?) but not so hot if you’ve never done it before. So while I still think it’s hard to go too wrong as long as there are tomatos in it and nothing burns I’ll add some starter details.

For an 11 inch wide, 2.5 inch deep skillet: – One medium onion, chopped – One green pepper, chopped – A medium carrot and a medium stalk of celery, chopped – Half pound of ground beef or italian sausage (bulk is cheaper but sliced up links are fine too.) – If not ground beef then a medium-small eggplant peeled or unpeels and cut into cubes. – As much garlic as you and yours enjoy – One to two tablespoons of your choice or combo of dried oregano, basil, marjoram, or “italian seasoning” herb blend. – A quarter teaspoon of black pepper or to taste – A teaspoon of salt or to taste – Maybe a teaspoon of sugar – Maybe a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar or a teaspoon of (stronger, more acidic) wine vinegar – As little as a tablespoon of olive oil and as much as a quarter cup (it’s healthy, flavorful, and filling, so if you’re worried it’s beter to skimp on the meat instead.) – Up to a quarter cup of wine, water, or some kind of broth for deglazing. – The equivalent of three 14.5 oz (411g) cans of tomato “stuff,” (stewed, diced, crushed, sauce, whole, etc.) – A tablespoon or more (to desired consistency) tomato paste – A teaspoon or less of anchovy paste – A quarter teaspoon red chile flakes or to taste.

1) Sear ground meat on high heat till it gets a little brown around the edges and a little browning starts sticking to the pan too (disregard the sticking part if you use teflon.) It’s ok if the inside of the crumbles isn’t quite done because it’ll finish cooking in the sauce. Transfer meat to a bowl. Pour off any accumulated fat. Don’t clean up the browned stuff on the bottom of the pan.

2) Add olive oil to pan over medium high or high heat, let warm till fragrant, then sprinkle seasonings over the oil without stirring, wait another few moments and throw in garlic and onion. Turn down the heat if necessary to prevent scorching, and stir occasionally, one to three minutes, till the onions are translucent.

3) Turn the heat back up and start tossing or stirring in all the other veggies. Once the heat’s stabilized again turn down heat enough to prevent scorching and let it carmelize a bit. Maybe five to fifteen minutes. Note: depending on moisture in the veggies you may wind up with too much juice for it to brown properly. Life in the big city, it’ll still be good.

4) If you’ve got good browning, turn the heat back up to high, throw in your quarter cup of liquid and stir, making sure you get all the carmelized juices and scrape-y bits loose and into the liquid. If you don’t have good browning, again, life in the big city — add the wine anyway if you like, or, I guess, drink it if you’re ok with that. If you do then let it simmer for three to five minutes (till the steam stops smelling like there’s raw alcohol in it.)

5) Add the tomato stuff and stir. Add tomato paste, anchovy paste, and anything else still out on the counter. :-) Stir to mix.

6) Simmer very low, stirring occasionally, for up to 20 minutes or

6a) Transfer to a large pot or (my choice) crock pot and let cook for the rest of the day.

What Ema of The Well-Timed Period said about the difference between 20 year old men and 20 year old women — in general, yes, but under the current administration in particular.

Actually, technically, the difference being that young women with the same political connections, or political sympathies as the young man in question (the 20-year-old guy who got the nod from U.S. officials to supply $300,000,000 worth of shitty bullets and other munitions to the Afghanistan police and army) are permitted to make their own medical/reproductive decisions. Because “they’re different.” They “have their whole lives in front of them.” Because they “weren’t being irresponsible.”

This evening I went to a fundraiser for Cedar River Clinics. It’s one of only a handful of independent women’s clinics left in the United States that provides full services including pregnancy termination. The fundraiser was not for the benefit of the women who get those “free passes,” the ones who, as in the days before Roe simply “needed abdominal surgery, poor thing” with full complicity of discreet medical professionals. Instead it was to help those whom anti-abortion laws are designed to hurt most: those living in poverty, not speaking the dominant language, teenagers, the undocumented, the intimidated, the already ill, the overtaxed with other children, the domestically abused, those who don’t live in the meager 15% of counties where abortion services are available and must therefore travel, and those who don’t have money for a simple, early termination and must therefore race their bodies and the calendar to raise money for a riskier, far more expensive, later termination before it’s too late even for that.

If you’ve got a little extra (where “a little” is as little as ten dollars) you can donate here. And, if you’re up for something a little different, the inevitable anti-choice protesters are being put to good use with the clinic’s creative Pledge a Picketer program.

While I was cleaning the kitchen this afternoon and waiting for lunch to heat up (grilled pepper jack cheese and tomato on sprouted grain) it occurred to me what, exactly, has bugged me about the institution of spanking children. And I nearly lost my appetite.

Back in the 1920s, 1930’s, and into the 1950’s my grandfather wrote pediatric advice books as well as columns in various parenting magazines. Although a lot of what he said sounds a little, um, quaint to us today he was fiercely progressive. He was a passionate supporter of the La Leche League, endorsed eating healthy whole foods for health, he was opposed to routine male circumcision, and (the point) he really bucked the trend by rejecting spanking and other forms of corporal punishment for children. He never spanked any of his children, and while I remember my mom or dad spanking me once or twice when I was very young it must not have worked because they’d stopped before was what would have been pre-school aged. And, continuing the theme, my partner nor I have ever spanked my children.

And, sorry, but having read maybe one too many adult posts, or articles, or having heard maybe one too many personal testimonials extolling spanking as sexual foreplay I’m… just not comfortable with the idea of spanking as corporal punishment for children. Sorry, I’m just not.

And I don’t want to hear that “it doesn’t really hurt them that much.” Uh, uh, if it doesn’t hurt but it affects them through some other mechanism what’s that mechanism? Conflicted feelings of erotic sensation imposed by custodial/authority figures maybe? Sheeah, that’s going to make me more accepting.

I mean, for crying out loud, I’m pretty sure if these people were, I dunno, pinching their children’s nipples or some other non-genital behavior associated with adult BDSM the offender would, appropriately, find him or herself first in jail and then on a sex offender registry. So why, exactly, do we stand idly by while unsupervised parents eroticize their children’s asses? (And what, exactly, is the motivation behind emphasizing “bare bottom” spanking anyway? I mean WTF?)

Sorry. Time out works great. Sitting on the stairs works great. Losing computer time works great. Loss of play-date privileges works great. Long-boring-grownups-talking-about-consequences works too. You want to spank somebody, though, save it for a consenting adult. Where it’s appropriate. M’kay?

Because spanking kids? Eww! It’s not just wrong, it’s sick and wrong. And it’s not just sick and wrong, the more I think about it the more it’s just (the wrong kind of) perverted.

This is a follow-up on an earlier post about androcentrism in BDSM. Smack My Nuts, a submissive man commenting on “On Being Straight” on Bitchy Jones of Bitchy Jones’s Diary said something seriously interesting about yet another “it’s about the men” / “getting penetrated equals submission” quirk that shows up, evidently a lot, in dominant woman / submissive man fantasies.

I feel like this is all connected to the idea that dildo-anal sex is automatically dominating sex because the person penetrating is the dominating one and the one getting penetrated is the submissive one. I’ve never really bought into that idea because it would suggest that women are somehow inherently submissive since they don’t come with their own penises and that in order to become dominant, they have to go buy an artificial penis. And I just can’t accept that idea.

To me, orgasm denial sex, sex in which the woman is allowed to come, but the guy isn’t, would be far more sexy and dominating. If there’s going to be a strap on involved, I’d much rather see a guy with a raging hard-on forced to fuck the girl with the strap-on, leaving his own needs completely unsatisfied while she gets off as much as she wants. Although I think that even that isn’t as sexy as the couple having intercourse together until she gets off, but the guy is then left with a hard cock bobbing in the air. That’s sexy as all get out.

Read his comment here.

His fantasy is still, well, rather obviously his fantasy but he’s clearly distinguishing that just because he’d gets his kicks from orgasm denial doesn’t mean his dom would automatically want the same thing.

I’m really liking Bitchy Jones. And by extension many of her commenters.

Photo by Flickr user EVERYDAYLIFEMODERN. Used under a Creative Commons license.

The other day on the radio, Benjamin Skinner, promoting his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, said that in the U.S. half of all human trafficking is for purposes of sex. He said worldwide the figure is way lower, only about one in ten. The rest, the other nine out of ten are trafficked for use as agricultural, industrial, and domestic laborers.

Some people evidently feel that the sex industry coined the term “human trafficking” as a euphemism what they do. Without taking anything away from the severe problem of sex slavery in America**I’m sure the people who broker the cheap clothes we wear, the cheap food we eat, and the cheap commodities we buy couldn’t be more pleased to hear that.***

Fun litmus test alert. Y’know the story out of Colorado politics where an right-wing former member of the House of Representatives who’s running for Congress again got in hot water over a junket to the Mariana Islands last time he was in office.

The Mariana Islands, by the way, are a U.S. territory so even though they have none of the same legal or labor protections, products manufactured there can be stamped “Made in America” and imported without tariffs. And because it’s not really covered by U.S. law it’s an absolute haven for egregious labor, immigration, and human rights breaches.

[Their] guest worker program is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution, sex trafficking, beatings, female workers kept in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire and other fun stuff.

Source: TalkingPointsMemo

It’s weird. Anti-abortion types look at the situation in the Mariana’s and (rightly) decry when trafficked factory laborers are forced to have abortions, but they waive off the trafficked labor. Anti-prostitution types (rightly) decry sex trafficking but waive off the forced labor. Certain labor groups (rightly) decry the trafficked labor but don’t much mention sex trafficking.

In an LA Times op ed Skinner says the Bush administration (believe it or not) got off to a good start on human trafficking of all sorts

In its first term, the Bush administration spoke out strongly against human trafficking, laying out the most aggressive anti-slavery agenda since Reconstruction. But politics hamstrung its implementation. Pressed by a coalition of academic feminists and evangelical conservatives, American officials focused mainly on eliminating prostitution, despite overwhelming evidence that, worldwide, more than 90% of modern-day slaves are not held in commercial sexual slavery.

Before his reelection, President Bush spoke frequently about slavery, including two rousing speeches he gave before the U.N. General Assembly. But in each case, the president only detailed his concern for those in the commercial sex industry, never mentioning debt bondage (in which a person is forced into slavery in order to pay off an initial debt) or labor trafficking. Over the last two years, the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons has dedicated four times as much of its budget to fighting sex slavery as it did to combating other forms of slavery.

Source: LA Times

The article neglects to mention the other group beside “academic feminists and evangelical conservatives”: sweat-shop owning clients of now-jailed “evangelical conservative” superstar Jack Abramoff. Gee! Wonder why Bush 180’d his position between his first and second election campaigns? [Update: Abramoff used his “Traditional Values Coalition” as a money laundering front for Congressional bribes jaunts “fact finding missions.” —fl]

Slavery, being slavery, is slavery whether it’s household slavery as practiced in Ethiopia (and, I dread to think, possibly among refugees here in the U.S.****), or as practiced by “a Christian woman” in Florida, or as sexual slavery in Italy, or Dominican sugar plantation slavery, or restaurant slavery in Los Angeles, or as Christmas-light factory slavery in China, or genitally-mutilated sex and labor slavery in Sudan, or child carpet-weaving slavery in Kathmandu.

Just sayin’

[** This morning I’ve been looking for local NGOs I can volunteer with, because sexual slavery sucks.

• I repeat, this morning I’ve been looking for local NGOs I can volunteer with because all slavery sucks.

• An elderly woman who worked in a now-defunct Ethiopian take-out place always enigmatically referred to her employer as “my owner,” which I at least used to take as unfamiliarity with English. That she might have meant exactly that now just creeps me out! —fl]

Just a quick clarification based on an entirely sensible post from Infra at Skin::filter(). The point of my theory of the “no-sex” class as dominant paradigm is to clarify for men that we feel obliged to manage or regulate women’s sexuality. (It’s an extension, not a refutation of the classical feminist theory of women as the sex class.”)

Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street
From my window I’m staring while my coffee grows cold
Look over there! Where?
There’s a lady that I used to know
She’s married now or engaged or something
so I am told

All lyrics from Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Source selected from random Google.

The theory binds outright denial — as when classicists (and many contemporaries) insist that women want sex only in order to have children**, or as when doctors around the world spent up to half their time treating women for “hysteria” by masturbating them… and hating it! It also binds the variant wherein women are believed to want sex with anyone else but you. (The latter concern, I think, accounts for an unnerving amount of racism, e.g. fantasies/fears of African American men in American mainstream porn who are invariably depicted as irresistible-to-women “big buck studs.” See also the whole “protect the white women” crap the Ku Klux Klan dished out despite the fact that virtually all miscegenation took place because the human property of slave-owners and their sons had no, zero, none right to say no.)

(Chorus)
Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
‘cause if my eyes don’t deceive me,
There’s something going wrong around here

Either way men (it mostly is men) are left believing, again, that women’s sexuality must be managed and/or “channeled,” either to “awaken” their sexuality or to steer it (and keep it steered) their way. And either way the traditional results are a continuum of “leverage” ranging from a “proper” proposal to the woman or (even more traditional!) her father (deemed “appropriate”), to impressing with displays of derring do or accomplishment or wealth, to seduction, to transaction (possibly dinner & roses with “polite” expectation or straight-up cash for sex), to drugging or drunk-ing, to offers of promotion at work or school for sex, to offers of demotion at work or school if sex is not forthcoming, to simple disregard for “no,” to threats, to outright violent criminal sexual assault. And again to the extent men are motivated by a belief that without such intervention the prospective partner would never be interested — either interested at all, or interested “in you.”

Tonight’s the night when I go to all the parties down my street.
I wash my hair and I kid myself I look real smooth
Look over there! (where? )
Here comes jeanie with her new boyfriend
They say that looks don’t count for much
If so, there goes your proof

To the extent one believes that the above paragraph exhausts the possibilities, or that some are “better” than others (instead of merely more uncouth, uncivil, or violent), one is still caught up in the paradigm.

I might add that to the extent men believe they have to manage women in order to “get” sex, men are failing to recognize the possibility of their own unembellished desirability.

(Repeat and fade)
Something going wrong around here
Something going wrong around – here

Anyway, the point being that being indoctrinated to believe this is the way it has to be… in fact, just believing that’s the way most women feel about themselves or about men, ought to be reason enough for men to start looking for the exits on the social system that wants us to believe Joe Jackson’s song is the only way it is, or could be.

[** Examine that sometime while looking at “pro-life” assumptions, by the way! —fl]