Pimping The Conventions
Every now and again I get an urge to take the ‘democratic’ political process seriously. I get that it is a lot of work to organize political conventions:
- Rent a convention center and a whole lot of hotel rooms–check.
- Elect (defined loosely) delegate–check.
- Traffic in lots of extra sex workers–check.
J.C. OConnell has a good piece about the latter over at RH Reality Check:
“The amount of awareness that there is among activist communities is high. I think not a lot of (other) people have been listening,” said Amanda Moon, a graduate student in international human rights at the University of Denver. “I think this DNC is trying to achieve a lot of things that have never been done before like the green movement, which is a great movement. But a lot of energy is being focused toward that, and a lot of other issues aren’t being heard.”
The exact number of sex workers trafficked into the city for the DNCC would be impossible to calculate.
But many metro area strip bars have already tripled their staff in preparation for the convention, said Stephanie Sharp, who has done outreach work with Denver prostitutes and works for the STD division of the Colorado Department of Public Health.
Denver, with its intersection of major highways and the Denver International Airport, is a convenient location to move sex workers through - and switching prostitutes’ cities prevents them from making any ties to the community that could help them escape the business, advocates said. Women in Denver typically enter prostitution at the age of 11 or 12, slightly younger than the national average, Sharp said.
To make matters worse, Denver is “almost completely pimp controlled” with pimps controlling almost all of the women who work as prostitutes through psychological manipulation and violence, Sharp said.
Of the 500 Denver prostitutes that Sharp has interviewed, she said only a handful worked for themselves.
Moon and Sharp gave their talk, Human Trafficking and Consumerism, Friday as part of the University of Denver’s Sexual Assault Awareness Week.
Human trafficking is a $44 billion a year industry, according to event organizers.
And let’s be clear here. The humans being trafficked are mostly women and virtually exclusively to serve the ‘needs’ of men. Best little misogynist democracy that money can buy, and have no doubts, the Repugs will no doubt be doing the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized, Atrocities, U.S. Politics, Misogyny
Human trafficking is about the sexual enslavement of women for the sexual exploitation of men - but we must never say these words. No, no, no instead we have that gender neutral term ‘human trafficking.’ I wonder how many men are trafficked for the purposes of women buying their bodies? Any guesses? I note too that women in prostitution are routinely moved from city to city to prevent them from forging any ties within the community. Oh yes, we can’t have prostituted women thinking they might just possibly be human and want to escape this misogynst male driven trade.