Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Following up on a post from last January, a press release by Thom Mrozek of the DOJ Central District of California Office reports that…

LOS ANGELES – Five defendants, all members or associates of an extended family, face potential life prison sentences after being found guilty today of international sex trafficking for participating in a scheme that lured young Central American women and girls into the Los Angeles area and forced them into prostitution, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King for the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien for the Central District of California.

The defendants, four Guatemalan nationals and one Mexican national, were convicted of conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion; and importation of aliens for purposes of prostitution. The jury in the case was unable to reach unanimous verdicts on additional charges.

During a six-week trial, the government presented evidence that the defendants targeted young, uneducated, impoverished undocumented women and girls from Guatemala, and conspired to lure and smuggle them into the United States, where they were put to work as prostitutes. All but one of the victims were enticed with bogus promises of legitimate jobs. But after arranging for the victims to be smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border, the defendants used a combination of threats – deception, rape, physical violence and witchcraft – to compel the victims to perform acts of prostitution.

Read the rest of the press release here.

In my original post I mentioned one of the victims who pretty clearly believed she was being voluntarily smuggled into the U.S. to do domestic labor despite the defendants claims that all their victims had agreed to be smuggled for sex work. Mrozek’s press release suggests only one victim had arrived with the intention of doing sex work.

But as I also mentioned in the original post it doesn’t really matter what their intention was: the victims agreed only to be smuggled — transported across the border for a fee. The perpetrators instead trafficked them, withholding their incomes, forcing them to work without compensation, and keeping them physically and psychologically captive —including with threats to… wait for it… turn them over to immigration service for imprisonment and deportation.

Trafficking would still occur without restrictive immigration and border-migration policy. And sex trafficking might still occur if sex work was legal and socially destigmatized. But the motivation to trust one’s luck to someone who might only smuggle you but… might not would nearly evaporate. And so would the opportunities for traffickers to hook their victims in.

This post is about an effective way to deal with people who post sexually “incriminating” information about others against their will: outing the posters so that their future employers, partners, and customers find out when they Google them.

On Saturday at Sex 2.0 Maria Diaz gave a presentation on “revenge porn” “Revenge porn” is the umbrella term for the act of distributing information about a person’s sexual nature against the victim’s wishes, but it’s most closely associated with posting nude photos taken before a relationship ends as a way of getting back at an ex.

One of the big concerns for victims is that even if they get redress from perpetrators… or even if the perpetrator genuinely regrets their decision, once information goes into circulation it can’t be recalled.

One potential bright spot is that as more, and more, and more people “grow up online” and as more and more people’s photos end up in distribution (either involuntarily or voluntarily) we can expect to reach a certain saturation level such that the existence of such photos won’t be scandalous at all. (In 1984 the discovery of years-old nude photos of Vanessa L. Williams obliged her surrender her position as Miss America. Some years later the disclosure of far more sexual photos of rabid right-wing radio host “Doctor” Laura Schlessinger raised eyebrows but caused no lasting damage. Just recently the discovery of photos of controversial figure Carrie Prejean have caused scarcely a ripple. (Compared, at least, to her genuinely scandalous, but unconcealed homophobia.)

Odds are that it won’t be that long before such photos won’t derail a Supreme Court nomination.

That will be then, however. This is now. And now, for whatever reason, not only do people feel embarrassed and threatened when a former partner posts photos, they also face potential discrimination from future partners, colleges, and employers during routine background searches.

So what to do?

Well, Google and background checks cut both ways. If Google can turn up “incriminating” photos indicating that, like the entire rest of the population, one has a pee-pee and an inclination to do things that feel nice with them, well? Google can also turn up information on the assholes who think it’s fun, funny, or “revenge” to post them.

And you know what? Whereas a “saturation” effect may protect victims in the future it’s extremely unlikely that future employers, partners, journalists, or biographers will ever be pleased when they turn up evidence that a candidate has posted such photos.

“Youthful indiscretion” is almost by definition a transitory phenomenon that, again almost by definition, has no bearing on one’s likely future performance. “Being an asshole,” on the other hand, can be a little more… indicative. (For instance it’s very likely that no matter what he does in the years between, 30 years from now Jason Fortuny’s odds of a supreme-court nomination will be approximately what they are now: zero.)

So to the extent you can’t recall photos posted on the internet I’d like to suggest making it just as difficult to recall the information identifying the individuals who posted those photos.

Yes, I’m aware that many victims would prefer the incident be forgotten as quickly as possible rather than dredged up again in the future. That’s obviously fine. But not every victim will feel that way. And, really, it only takes a few to create a laudable “chilling effect” on other would-be perpetrators.

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors prefaces a quotation from the LA Times with “It would be nice if human rights violations like this got more media attention.”

Here’s part of Bartow’s excerpt from the LA Times article

When Sandra agreed to make the perilous trek from her native Guatemala to the United States in 2006, she said, she was lured by the prospect of a job as a housekeeper that would enable her to send money to her impoverished family back home.

Her father had a hernia that prevented him from working, and money was so tight that she and her 12 siblings sometimes didn’t have shoes or enough to eat, the young woman testified Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.

But not long after Sandra was delivered to L.A. by human-smuggling “coyotes” she learned that the job awaiting her had nothing to do with cleaning houses.

Instead, she said, she was told that she would have to “lay with men.”

Read the rest of the LA Times article here.

Since I’m sanguine about intentional sex work but bitterly opposed to both slavery and unwanted sex I’m inclined to agree that stories like this should get more attention.

And so I went to Google News to see how often the story had been picked up. At the moment Google News has what really boils down to 28 links to basically different snippets of the same Associated Press story in English and Spanish. So score one for Bartow! On the other hand regular old-fashioned Google turns up 86 links… still mostly links to the same old thing though. Blogger.com’s blog search turned up some links to the original indictments back in August, 2007 — for instance from a now-abandoned blog called Human Trafficking News. (It’s evidently taken this long to bring the case to trial.)

One disservice I think Bartow may have made is failing to quote two further snippets from that LAT article. First, it’s easy to conflate the point that most customers of sex workers are men with an assumption that all traffickers are men.

Among the defendants in the case are sisters Mirna and Gladys Valenzuela, both illegal immigrants from Guatemala who, according to prosecutors, hatched the plan to begin luring young women from their home country to the United States, where they would force them into prostitution. Also charged are two of the sisters’ nieces and Mirna’s live-in boyfriend, Gabriel Mendez.

Second, had Bartow quoted a bit more of the article her readers might have learned that, in addition to being a violent, coercive, manipulative jerk the woman who was allegedly running the trafficked sex-slavery ring is also a fucking racist and a prude.

At one point, she said, the defendant she was living with, Mirna Valenzuela, threatened to sell her to a pimp if she caused any problems. She said Valenzuela told her the pimp would force her to have sex with men of different races and to submit to oral and anal sex.

“I kept telling her not to sell me,” the young woman said.

Finally, a point I’d like to make, one I’m pretty sure Bartow wouldn’t touch with a 10-page legal brief: the defendants are allegedly justifying their actions with the claim that the women they were trafficking had knowingly come to the States to be prostitutes. As if this was an excuse for… (italics mine)

The women typically charged $80 for 15 minutes of sex and some saw as many as 30 clients a day, prosecutors alleged in court papers. The women were forced to turn over all the proceeds to the defendants, they said.

No… see… agreeing to be smuggled to the States to perform agricultural labor doesn’t entitle one’s smuggler to sell your agricultural labor and keep your earnings. Same with sex work. The work you intend to perform has no relevance to whether you wind up enslaved, m’kay?

It would be nice if that got a little more coverage.

#%!#$!!@$@~

Photo “Women at work, Battle of Britain memorial” by Flickr user davepatten. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution reviews, or at least views, someone named F. Roger Devlin’s” Sexual Utopia in Power (pdf, sorry), originally published by William Regnery II’s paleoconservative Occidental Quarterly — text in italics are Cowen’s quotes of the original article. (Italics are Cowen’s)

Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because—to say it once more—women choose.

Or:

The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?

This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously).  The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle.  So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak.  The birth rate falls, for one thing.  The piece also claims that the modern “abolition” of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.  Some of you will hate the piece.  I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.  If you’re tempted, read it.
Read the quote in context here.

Devlin’s very disapproving article claims that sexual utopia for women is choosing the best possible man with the result that if they can’t hook up with James Bond (his example) or maybe Donald Trump then no other men will have sex unless a) she chooses, no doubt resentfully, to “settle” for less or b) he resorts to date rape. Oh yeah, and all that con-sarned emancipation just makes things worse, including requiring more date rape, because men are deprived of all those more traditional, genteel economic forms of extortion.

The semi-predictable comments are peppered with people asking what exactly Cowen might consider evil. I’m not sure of that but I think the guy’s evil in Hannah Arendt’s sense that actions taken from banal assumptions can lead to horrific results. One banality he adheres to is mistaking for “instinct” or “genetics” women’s perfectly rational partnership decisions in the face of traditionally and often legally-mandated economic distortions… or that men’s equally rational (though more odious) decisions made from the traditionally up-hill side of those market distortions should be mistaken for unconscious and uncontrollable biological mandates.

It seems to me that the real “sexual revolution” derives from three points beginning back maybe 250 years: a) medical advances, especially the discovery of hygiene, leading to lower death rates among women and children with the result that b) women have more time in terms of diminished child care and more predictably long life span to take advantage of education leading to c) increased social productivity and overall higher standards of living. The resulting virtuous cycle leads to all sorts of other innovations such as markets for brute-strength-mitigating automation, demand for unnecessary-pregnancy-reducing medical advances like contraception instead of once extremely risky after-the-fact abortion**, and then finally the simple, innovative question that started becoming unavoidable in the late 1950s or 1960s: why should a man and a woman working side by side producing the same output be paid differently?

In economic terms the answer to that last question is “there’s no good reason at all.” Devlin answers that women have to be paid less than men, preferably far less, because otherwise men won’t have the kind of leverage we need to get laid. Except for James Bond and, I guess, Donald Trump.

I’m not an economist but I’m guessing an economist like Tyler Cowen would say anyone who thinks we should return the entire social organization of the economy to the productivity levels of the 1950s just so Devlin can get laid is evil.

Also, wow does Devlin have a low opinion of men or what? Virtually none of us will never be interesting to potential partners without some form of bribery, fraud, extortion, or force? Really? Sh’yeah and people say feminists are the problem!

Point: surprising how even highly libidinous women are interested in men who are so busy trying to bribe, extort, defraud, or force them to do something they’d… enjoy doing with someone who wasn’t being an asshole. Maybe the trick, therefore, isn’t to make it easier to be assholes, it’s to stop being assholes.

Point: You don’t have to read very far into Devlin’s paper before he pretty clearly articulates the conditions that impose the “no-sex” class designation on women. What’s less clear is why he so thoroughly approves of this in the face of all the misery he fairly accurately describes for both women and men.

[** This doesn’t mean abortion is bad, wrong, old fashioned, or anything else. Just that before contraception there wasn’t much alternative. —fl]