CoL #?: Sex Traffick in Jackdom

Jasmine made dinner last Sunday. Yummmy. I was loaning her my copy of Are Women Human? in trade for her loan of Lucie Brock-Broido's first book, and we got, natch, onto the subject of sex trafficking and debt bondage, etc., over the souffle and pate and Cotes de Rhone and fennel salad and port and grenache (envy me, go on). She, it turns out, has been keeping up, and hipped me to TEN and its Made By Survivors program. That in turn got me off of my moral ass and prompted me to share, and the to list a handful of trafficking resources. So, scan down at right. --- Click &c. ---
The NYTMagazine article, "The Girls Next Door," is harrowing and reveals the pervasiveness of this trouble in the US, most of other links are to the UN and other anti-trafficking .orgs meant to give a quick overview. MacKinnon's book chronicles the use of rape as a tool of genocide, and the index of said is a STUNNINGLY COMPREHENSIVE collection on the laws, especially international, that address women's rights and cases related to femicide and sex slavery. TEN and Made By Survivors there are a sign of one helpful response to the problem.

We cannot, let me say it again, we cannot live in a Culture of Life when our very sexuality, the very possibility of life and its highest mysteries, is treated as a simple market commodity. This destroys women and children of both sexes, in body and soul. They are, in fact, expendable sex toys in this market. This destroys men by convincing them that their 'need' can and will be met at any cost. It destroys both by convincing us that we are not, any of us, fully human. I said my bit on MacKinnon for Common Knowledge, and that review will be out this year. Suffice it to say: these are not practices brought to us by monsters from outer space. These practices are extensions of drives and beliefs and attitudes very much present in our culture, our culture of death. They stem, at bottom, from a fundamental lack of regard for being human, and include all of our practices in commodification and othering, our economic and power structures, our whole scene, right back to that notion that men are human and women are something else. Same trouble with the sexual predation of children we keep not addressing effectively. A real culture of life cannot and will not flourish when we are all debased in this way.

I'll extend the list "what you can do" as I discover more.

Note Bene. MacKinnon's name is a flashpoint, so: I am, I would like to repeat, Not anti-sex or anti-pleasure. There's much of it to be made by us sexual-spiritual/spiritual-sexual creatures. But, as Irigaray theorizes so MacKinnon shows in the world. It's possible to have loving, liberating, soulful, playful, sweaty sex and pleasure. It's just that we live in a moment in which that must still be negotiated one couple (or set) at a time because we have not yet created a socio-cultural life world in which such play is normal, expected, supported. We still live in the world MacKinnon describes. Also, there are MANY feminist women and men addressing this catastrophe of the world soul. The collection Femicide is another goody. It's just that I've read MacK recently, and I'm all tangled up in Stein and my own "utopic" visions for now. So, be cool.