During my time in grad school, I had the opportunity to cross enroll for a course at Harvard Law School. Though the most obvious reason for my taking the course was to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming Elle Woods, it also had the fringe benefit of bringing presenters from all over the country, who worked in various professions relating to child welfare and advocacy. One class meeting in particular continues to stir my conscience and haunt my heart. The presentation was on human trafficking. The panel included various attorneys, a woman who had started an organization providing support and refuge to victims of human trafficking, and two young girls (about 16) who had been enslaved by this obscene crime for most their adolescent lives. We listened to gutting and glistening stories of survival and analyzed the legal, social, emotional, and financial factors we believed perpetuated the crime. When the presentation concluded the class was invited to ask questions. The most obvious yet perplexing question was asked "What can we do to stop human trafficking?"
I was floored and heartbroken by the response.
"
Discourage your colleagues from hiring prostitutes."
The panel went on to explain that the very thing keeping human trafficking alive and well in the United States were the high powered, suited, clientele that had likely once sat in an Ivy clad classroom similar to the one we were currently sitting in. Of all the advice or rationale that could be given, this was the single thing they unanimously believed would do the most to prevent human trafficking. It was to be verbal about our disdain for our male colleagues who alluded to any type of purchased promiscuity, and to make our feelings known about human trafficking frequently and publicly.
"Sex sells." These two words in sequence have become the most debilitating and dehumanizing sentence our world has ever seen. Making a human being a commodity is a subtle and subversive part of our purchasing power on a day to day basis. This power comes early. I remember as a young girl always including a cleavage line in my illustrations of women. I first learned this aesthetic from drawing Princess Jasmine over and over again as the Disney movie Aladdin was particularly popular at the time. As I reflected on this I realized I had never seen a Disney Princess without cleavage, have you ever seen a Disney Princess without cleavage? Did you know the Disney Princess franchise ranks as one of the highest grossing industries in the United States? The princess cleavage costumes available at the Disney store create revenue competitive with US automotive and tobacco industries!
While it is particularly scary how we socialize young women, I have become even more frightened by how we socialize young men. We teach them emotional expression makes them lesser, weaker, and easily dominated. Consequently this allows them to see other men and especially women who emote as lesser, weaker, and easily dominated. This sets them on a trajectory to begin to see women as malleable objects. Making a human being an object rationalizes violence against them.
As terrifying and problematic as our buying into the Disney franchise and socializing boys out of feeling is, I believe our cultures' purchasing power is most devastatingly spent on one thing...pornography. Countless studies have revealed the tragic impact of what many now commonly accept and are desensitized to. Grocery stores checkouts are peppered with "soft" versions of it and most media has become so sexually saturated and dysfunctional that almost all of it is "pornified" in one way or another. Living in an NC-17 world has proved to have crippling effects on women in regards to body image, eating disorders, political efficacy and safety. Additionally it has normalized in the male psyche an idea of women as objects, falsely justifying violence and misuse of them.
If we are to join in the pursuit of bringing back our girls and ending human trafficking for good, I believe we must start with evaluating our personal and collective purchasing power. We have to be willing to speak up about the ideas and industries we refuse to buy into. For me this has come with the sad recognition that I must give up my US Weekly addiction and can no longer keep up with the Kardashians. It is recognizing the need to speak boldly and clearly against pornography and any thing that demeans or diminishes human life.
No comments:
Post a Comment