Bad Sex Sucks

Last night on the way home from class, I spied this lone bumper sticker on the pizza delivery car in front of me: Bad Sex Sucks. How ironic that I had just spent over an hour talking about sex trafficking as part of my women’s studies class at UNC. Talk about bad sex!

Here are some sex trafficking stats compiled from the United Nations that you should know about:

• Between 600,000 and 800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year


• The estimated total market value of illicit human trafficking is $32 billion


• Approximately 80% of those trafficked are women and girls; up to 50% are minors


• The majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation


• The U.S. is the second highest destination in the world for trafficked women (yet we don’t categorize our status as an offender in the global Trafficking In Persons report card because we give the grades)


• More women come from Russia than any other country, yet women are trafficked into the U.S. from Asia, Central and South America and Eastern Europe


• Trafficked women are sold for about $2,500


• They serve as many a 20 clients per day at the price of about $200 per client
  

Traffickers lure women into this modern-day form of slavery through force, fraud or coercion. They beat, starve, rape and gang rape the women they traffic. In Victor Malarek’s book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade (which we read for class), one trafficker states, “You can buy a woman for $10,000 and you can make your money back in a week if she is pretty and young. Then everything else is profit.”

Poverty is one of the many factors that make individuals vulnerable to trafficking. In addition to being drawn in by a promise of a good job in another country, women are sold into slavery by friends and family, kidnapped or are victims of a false marriage proposal.

Many experts agree – the sex trafficking industry is founded on the buying, selling and marketing of the bodies of women and children solely for the sexual pleasure of men. At the same time, men are the purveyors in the industry. Talk about the ultimate slap – women don’t even control the market for their own bodies!

Why? Why is the demand for trafficked women for sex so huge? Why is it that men’s sexual needs are so great that the rights of vulnerable women are violated? Why isn’t there an equally robust global market for male sex slaves?

If you think you know the answer to these questions, I need you to weigh in. We didn’t get very far in our class discussion. We talked about how through Western culture, men are taught that domination of women is the norm. For example, rape is often portrayed as a romantic notion, and power and violence against women are eroticized in our popular culture. In other words, we teach men to dominate women through sex.

I cannot figure out why we put up with this crap. Can you?

For more information about sex trafficking, visit the Polaris Project at:
http://www.polarisproject.org/?gclid=CMqY19eRkZcCFQpjnAod418C_Q