Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Levi Pulkkinen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 Police Blog brings home to points that are really, really critical in debates about human trafficking, as opposed to “sex-trafficking.”

The first point is that non-sex-trafficking human trafficking is perfectly real.

The second, even more important point, is that while not all human trafficking is “sex trafficking,” i.e. not all trafficked people are trafficked into conscripted sex work, all trafficked people face the prospect of coerced sex. Some face the reality of it.

For instance…

A Pacific couple previously convicted on human smuggling charges was sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

Maria Bartola Santos-Gonzalez, 63, was sentenced to three years in prison Tuesday, while her husband, Juan Gonzalez Guerra, 55, was sentenced to one year and a day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement. Both pleaded guilty to in January.

Investigators with the Pacific Police Department and ICE launched the investigation in May 2009 after a 7-year-old girl told her school counselor that an older man had been molesting her, according to the ICE statement. The Pacific Police Department followed up on the claim and it led them to Gonzalez Guerra.

Read the quote in context here.

So. As often happens in these kinds of situations, the Gonzalez couple hired runners in Mexico to locate people who wanted to be smuggled into the U.S. so they could find work. So the people willingly entered into agreements to be brought here.

So. Their intention was to be in migration. Their agreement was to be smuggled in exchange for a fee to be paid after they arrived. Their reality was that when they arrived they were blackmailed, defrauded, threatened with violence, and were victims of violence at the hands of people they’d believed to be smugglers but who instead had instead trafficked them into forced, largely uncompensated labor.

And while they at it their children were tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, it sounds like, raped by their traffickers.

But I guess since they were only being sexually assaulted and raped by their captors instead of “prostituted” it’s not really very important. Because to their mind only sex-trafficking matters. (In fact some of them, mostly, no surprise neoconservatives and/or their very-conservative feminist allies, claim that concern about “human trafficking” is a deliberate dodge invented by the sex industry to distract resources away from them.)

Point being this case illustrates that yeah, really, there really, really is human trafficking, often of would-be ordinary migrants, and that people who say otherwise are liars. And yeah, some of the people trafficked into the U.S. — a little less than half according to credible, non-partisan estimates — are trafficked into sex work but the rest aren’t, and people who say otherwise are liars about that too. But finally, yeah, this case illustrates that the assholes who claim that only the sex-trafficking matters because ZOMG!!!TEH!!!WHITE!!!SLAVERY!!! are assholes who don’t get that regardless of age, gender, orientation, or forced profession once you’re coerced you don’t really have a lot of recourse if your trafficker wants to use your body as well as your paycheck.

Pulkinnen’s article adds

At the hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said, “[Ms. Santos-Gonzalez] took their money, put them in circumstances that were dire … children went to bed hungry … [she] took advantage of these people … in many ways it was a form of modern-day slavery… it is at the fundamental core that you cannot take people and grind people down… this is not the way to treat other people… you need to treat them with respect, you need to treat them with dignity.”

Just a little reminder that accusations of “accommodation” can go both ways. To obsess about the sex part of trafficking, instead of the trafficking part of trafficking, is to enable not only slavery, debt peonage, coercion and labor conscription but also sexual assault and rape.

For why this issue is so nettlesome to me see, also, for instance

• The Sex-Trafficking (Neo)Con
• Wiberforce Reauthorization Finally Passes

• Cool! Someone With a Clue Who Cares About U.S. Trafficking Policy

Y’know how it is with stereotypes? You hear someone’s a boomer-generation anti-prostitution crusader and a women’s-studies professor at a New England college and you just assume she’s part of a tradition of radical, 70’s-era feminism that was hardened by constant battle with a culture that wanted women, and men, right where they’d been for up to 6,000 years: subservience for women, domination by men, men providing goods and services in the domestic sphere, women providing obedience, clean socks, children, and sex whether they want it or not. You also tend to assume a couple of other things. That they’re going to be race, age, class, and orientation tolerant. That while they’re going to be impatient with and sometimes exasperatedly hostile to the clueless sense of entitlement expressed by “librul doods” they’re nevertheless generally supportive of progressive political policies. And you generally expect them to be somewhere between suspicious of and viscerally opposed to traditional, privileged, patriarchal institutions.

Superficially Professor Donna M. Hughes appears to fit that bill. But as I’ve said often enough on this blog, while stereotyping is probably unavoidable, falling unconsciously for stereotypes makes one an assholes. I fell for the stereotype. This makes me an asshole.

But I am not the only asshole in this story.

Having fallen for the stereotype I made what I believe, passionately, to be the right case to attempt to unify that brand of “old school” activism with more contemporary activism in hopes of reducing a destructive schism in gender activism that’s moving into its second century in America.

And having fallen for the stereotype I made an assumption that if Hughes was making common cause with regressive, patriarchal institutions it was in error… an error driven by a perhaps understandable but nevertheless unnecessary blind sense of urgency, anxiety, and powerlessness.

What I didn’t consider until I started digging even deeper than I had previously, was that rather than being a dupe of social conservatives, the religious-right, and neoconservative political activists she might herself actually be a right-wing neoconservative activist! Rather than being a “useful idiot” of neoconservative and religious-right activists who made the conscious decision to use trafficking as a partisan Republican “wedge issue” against progressives, Hughes might instead have been right up there on the front row cheering them on.

Y’know how she’s lately been calling Maymay a pedophile, a sexual predator, and a sex trafficker?

Turns out that put him in extremely rarified company.

Back in 2002 Hughes wrote a post in that renowned bastion of human rights, the neoconservative National Review Online denouncing participants of an anti-human-trafficking conference organized by political opponents of the Bush administration.

There are some wolves in sheep’s clothing among those who claim they are fighting the trafficking of women and children. In their disguise they speak loudly against trafficking as one of worst human-rights violations in the world — which it is — to conceal their goal of normalizing and legalizing prostitution and the transnational flow of women into sex industries.

...

The upcoming conference in Honolulu “The Human Rights Challenge of Globalization in Asia-Pacific-US: The Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,” scheduled for November 13-15, offers an example of this phenomenon. ...

If the listed keynote speakers, which includes Hillary Clinton, remain true to past form, they will passionately denounce the trafficking of women as a modern form of slavery, but steadfastly avoid mentioning prostitution as the demand that drives the trafficking.

...

These presenters and their colleagues couch their arguments in terms of human rights and women’s rights. But that is a smokescreen for their true agenda. They do not represent the interests of women and children. Normalizing prostitution and the transnational movement of women for prostitution does not advance women’s status or rights in the world. Instead, it turns women and children into sexual commodities that are raped, beaten, and exploited for the profit of a few.

She said it here, in the fucking National Review!

Yup. Maymay and Hillary Clinton, they all look the same from NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez’s office.

By the way, Kathryn, I should mention that National Review Online played an important role in shifting the focus of the trafficking and prostitution debates. In October 2002, NRO published my article entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” which exposed the agenda of some of the liberal feminist, leftist anti-trafficking activists. They were using the anti-trafficking debate to advance their efforts to legalize prostitution.

She said it here.

Yup. Us liberal feminist, leftist anti-traffickers just looove us some pimps, and brothels, and madams, and traffickers. Like Hillary Clinton and Maymay.

Anyway, without getting too personal about anyone else I’ll just reiterate that I’m not the only asshole referenced in this post.

—-

Nor, I ought to add, am I the only person to fall for stereotyped assumptions about what it means to be a women’s studies professor at a New England college. Without naming names I’ll just say that more than one person has pointed to Hughes as an emblem of what’s “wrong” with feminism. And, especially, what’s wrong with “radfem” radical feminists.

I’ll just point out that Hughes’s fellow neoconservative, fellow Iraq-war apologist, and fellow Bush/Cheney apparatchik Richard Perle used to repeatedly claim he was “a registered Democrat.” Well fine if he says so. And to the same extent it’s fine if Hughes chooses to think of herself as a “registered” feminist.

But while nearly everyone recognizes that pointing to Perle and saying “that’s proof that Democrats are all evil, nuke-hungry, human-rights-scorning war-mongers like Richard Perle,” it’s actually fairly common to see people like Hughes pointed at as “proof” that the only thing that matters to feminists are other narrow-minded, mean-spirited, privileged, upper and upper-middle-class white women like themselves.

That? That would be another mistake. That? That she might either deliberately or even inadvertently encourage that mistake in others would be a bigger transgression in my mind than all the slander, lible, and neoconservative sucking up in all of Eastern Standard Time.

I’m not the only asshole mentioned in this post.

—-

Update: And speaking of the accusations of lies and slander Hughes has launched at Maymay (and Hillary Clinton and the whole rest of the panoply of “liberal feminist, leftist” individuals who’s policies for addressing the problem are different from her right-wing and neoconservative cohort?) From George Bush and Dick Cheney all the way down to convicted felon Charles Colson, party strategist Michael Horowitz, and the cast and crew of National Review’s online operation the bread and butter of neoconservative rhetoric is, has been, and because its ingrained in their character probably always will be lies, innuendo, slander, and false accusation, not to mention disproportionate aggression and “preemptive” attacks. These are the people she aligns herself with, and NRO is the media organ she chooses to editorialize for. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

And one last thing: I’m not calling Hughes’ feminism into question any more than I’m calling Perle’s Democratic affiliation or, for that matter, Dick Cheney’s profession of tolerance of homosexuals or George Bush’s religious faith. The just don’t mean very much in the face of the compromises and subordination the political philosophy that unites them demands of its adherents.

When I first heard about this I felt sorry for Hughes for getting tangled up with the Salvation Army. I now feel sorry for the Salvation Army!

Jeffe Fecke of Alas, a blog is as weirded out by J.D. Hayworth’s haste to leap into man-horse sex as I was earlier today.

So here’s something I don’t get: why is it that whenever people start talking about same-sex relations, members of the right instantly leap to bestiality? We all remember former Sen. Rick “Man On Dog” Santorum, R-Penn. Then there was Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and his box turtle lovin’.

He said it here.

I can’t find a link at the moment but I’m pretty sure conservatives have also brought up the creepy prospect of NAMBLA members marrying juvenile boys variation as well. I can’t possibly, on the planet, be the only person to see it this way but…

The really, giant, big, distinguishing difference between grown men or women marrying each other, vs. Arizona Senate aspirants marrying their horses, is that the law already allows men and women to marry. Whereas, at least as far as I know, there are no provisions in law for horses to marry each other. Same with dogs. Same with box turtles. And for good reason. In civic if not celestial terms marriage is an establishment of fairly complex set of legal, contractual, tax, and property rights, including the establishment of legal inheritance and even powers of attorney. None of which, again to the best of my knowledge, are recognized in the case of animals.

Note: As for the NAMBLA scenario, Hayworth’s native Arizona already wisely prohibits marriage of children under the age of 18 without parental consent. Even with parental consent children can’t marry under age 16. Although, disturbingly, Arizona does permit children under age 16 to be married with the consent of the parents and approval of a superior court judge. (That last bit may be a nod to the state’s large child-marrying FLDS population.) To the extent a state wished to forestall the NAMBLA scenario they could simply update their child-marriage laws to 21st 20th Century standards. But I digress…

Point being that whereas legal marriage can (and should!) be easily extended to adults of the same sex with very trivial modifications of civic laws governing marriage adults who currently are allowed to marry each other, before people could marry animals it would first be necessary to establish all the other legal rights and responsibilities for animals that are now the domain only of humans.

Update: Although via Neatorama.com see also Injured Dog Checks Himself into Hospital. :-)

Sharon Johnson of WE.News says (bold and italics mine)

A bill under contention in Nebraska proposes joining 14 states and the District of Columbia in providing prenatal care for all pregnant, low-income women regardless of immigrant status under CHIP, the children’s health insurance program.

It is authored by Republican Sen. Kathy Campbell, a long-time advocate for women and children, who says the bill is “morally right because all children deserve to be born healthy.” Republican Gov. Dave Heineman opposes it, saying taxpayer-funded benefits should not reach people without legal citizenship.

Read the quote in context here.

Oddly, in 2006 the Nebraska Right to Life Political Action Committee aggressively endorsed Gov. Heineman’s reelection, saying abortion-rights opponents “got more action in 15 months from Heineman than we did out of [previous governor] Johanns in six years.”

And by “oddly,” in this case, I mean that the Nebraska Right to Life PAC steadfastedly supports the bill Heineman’s threatening to veto. In direct violation of blogger protocol (we’re supposed to just sit in our pajamas in our mom’s basements) I called them to ask. The woman who answered said NRTL believes strongly in prenatal care for everyone regardless of status.

Whatever else one might say about any organization opposed to reproductive rights one can say that at least on this issue NRTL has a consistent position. Whatever else one can say about Heineman, he clearly doesn’t.

And it’s not just about the choice issue that he’s being inconsistent by the way. He can’t claim this is about his nominal conservative principle of “States Rights.” The bill is a Nebraska initiative to restore a program that was cut from this year’s Medicare legislation. He can’t claim this is about his nominal conservative principle of “fiscal responsibility” either. By replacing Medicare funds with CHIP, which has more generous reimbursement rates, the bill would save Nebraska taxpayers almost $4 million a year.

Instead, like Congressman Bart Stupak, Heineman’s position is pure, gratuitous Teabagging.

Via Matthew Yglesias,