The Big Business of Anti-Sex Trafficking

by Jacqueline S. Homan,
author of Without Apology

Combatting the scourge of human trafficking has become the sexy, trendy newest cause for privileged opportunists in need of their newest feel-good activism fix as they seek to profit by wrapping themselves in the cloak of social justice. Of course, those whom are the very core of this cause—the sex trafficking victims (or exited women) themselves—are without real, adequate and appropriate help in terms of income support, medical care, education, job training and job placement to regain control of their destiny to rebuild their lives and live with dignity while trying to do so.

Restoring trafficked women to “normalized” status in society is an important goal, but there is an enormous resistance to that on the part of society, including many “allies” that will not stop their privilege-clinging and power-overing to actually facilitate restoration. Sadly, even most such “allies” look down on adult prostituted women who started out as trafficked under-aged girls.

The very women and girls whom this movement is supposed to be about are exploited for their stories and then discarded and thrown under the bus by most “allies”, including many well-heeled academics who’ve been enriched with chair endowments and many other social prizes and rewards after prostituted/exited women’s stories of tremendous suffering have helped pave the career paths of those who enjoy all the status, prestige and prosperity in the name of “speaking for” downtrodden, marginalized women.

After decades of throwing the poorest, most marginalized women away with misogynistic laws and policies of “benign neglect” tantamount to social Darwinism, everybody suddenly wants to cash in on the big business of helping trafficked women and girls. How odd, considering that it was this very same male supremacist society that threw away poor marginalized women and girls into the prostitute caste in the first place—first by ripping away what meager, inadequate threadbare safety net that did exist for destitute women in the name of “personal responsibility”, and second by continuing to discriminate against women for good-paying blue-collar “men’s jobs” that don’t require an expensive college education, and third by reaffirming male entitlement to women’s bodies as disposable reproductive goods and sex goods.

The Obama administration has unveiled a plan inviting public participation for helping to fight human trafficking, and part of the plan is to open funding for battered women’s shelters whose funding was recently cut by the 2010 Congress. More troubling is that most of these domestic violence shelters refuse to take prostituted women who want to exit but who are also destitute and have nowhere to go. Funding for emergency shelters that turn away trafficked women and under-aged girls is funding that won’t be given to shelters run by anti-trafficking groups that help the trafficked.

Cash-strapped survivor-run and/or secular NGO’s that are geared towards providing real material help to survivors get little to none of the funding from the US Department of Health & Human Services through its Refugee Resettlement Office. Non-profit groups that get the lion’s share of the annual grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement are nearly all anti-abortion Christian organizations that are huge, deeply entrenched corporations with Catholic Charities and Polaris Project getting the most funds.

This is problematic because faith-based charities refuse to provide abortion care to trafficked women and leave them no choice except to be further physically and psychologically violated by their rapists-johns by forcing them to endure a full term of incapacitating pregnancy and a traumatic, grueling childbirth—thus, continuing the rape and torture. Forcing women to get/remain pregnant against their will when they don’t want to go through it has been the time-honored way that men have oppressed and continue to oppress women, using our vulnerability to pregnancy to keep us from having an equal opportunity to have the same good jobs that are automatically handed to men, denying us full citizenship and equal civil and human rights—which is what fuels the sex trade in the first place because it limits women’s opportunities and rights.

If it’s wrong for women and girls to be sexually exploited, how is it NOT also wrong for them to be reproductively exploited by their “rescuers” for the benefit of Christian adoption agencies and rich, white childless couples who are buying the “right” to further exploit those victims with forced factory-farm reproduction to provide them with babies—free grata?

How does this make them any different than the johns who bought the “right” to first use these girls’ bodies for forced sex to provide him with his precious orgasm?

There is something radically wrong with the system when the non-profit mega corporations (aka “faith-based” charities) that enjoy the backing of well-heeled patriarchal, misogynistic religious powerhouses get all the federal grant money from the US Department of Health & Human Services while cash-strapped secular and survivor-run non-profits started by impoverished exited women who are the real human trafficking experts can’t get funding to help destitute survivors and women who want to exit prostitution but can’t due to nearly insurmountable barriers.

A trafficked teen girl who has no choice becomes that 22 year old drug-addicted woman found in a dumpster with her throat cut from ear to ear because of being thrown away by a bootstrap-happy society that pushed her into the arms of traffickers in the name of “personal responsibility” while refusing to give her real equal opportunities and provide a social floor through which no one can fall.

The Exploitation Continues After Exiting

Now not all men are bad, and neither are all Christians. But the fact remains that the majority are comfortable with the status quo because it privileges them at women’s expense, or else there would NOT be a right-wing War on Women where it is women (especially POOR women) who punished with gratuitous cruelty for men’s sense of entitlement, greed, and debauchery. And there would not be a pandemic of sex trafficking fueled by male demand secured by female poverty and disenfranchisement due to discrimination backed by 6,000 years of institutionalized patriarchy.

People with privilege really don’t want to upset the status quo—it may mean having to relinquish some of their own privileges that come at the expense of the disprivileged. Even within the abolition movement, there is a LOT of privilege-clinging and power-overing.

Exploiting women as sex goods and as reproductive chattel are inseparable. It’s the same end game: objectification, reproductive enslavement, sexual terrorism and cruelty towards women to support male supremacy and male privilege to benefit men at women’s expense, suffering and misery.

Forced pregnancy/childbirth was the main linchpin that upheld the plantation slavery system in the antebellum South. African slave women were forced to breed. All for men’s sexual AND economic benefit at women’s expense and suffering. And even though not all men are porn-consuming, prostitute-abusing pigs, the fact remains that ALL men benefit from this sadistic, exploitative hierarchical system of unearned privileges in which women are kept economically, sexually, and socially oppressed in the ‘one-down’ position. And poor white women (“poor white trash”) have also been convenient throw-aways into the sex class so that men could have a free license to be sexually sadistic predators.

It’s no secret that most who are thrown away into the sex caste are those who either lack class privilege or race privilege or both. Poor men get offered helping hand up and job opportunities that are denied to women; poor women get told to take our clothes off—that being “only a whore” is the ONLY place in society for us, the only “option” if we don’t want to starve or be homeless. Or end up disabled or dead for lack of health care from jobless poverty due to discrimination. This is also how you get so many rescued trafficked women who, out of utter despair, reluctantly return to the traffickers and johns.

Traffickers tell their victims that there is no other place for them, that society won’t accept them and treat them nicely. Unfortunately, the lack of support, help, social acceptance, and a leg up for poor, marginalized exited women faced with no alternative except to return to prostitution gives this credence: Everybody (including many “allies” and “rescuers”) in society proves the traffickers right.

Almost all of the faith-based organizations that get the lion’s share of federal grant money only help a select few kids that make good photo opportunities for their charity’s fundraising PR. What kind of message does this send to trafficked teens and adult women who desperately want to exit prostitution that they were trafficked into before reaching that magical age of 18?

Meanwhile, poor adult women who either have already exited (or who want to exit but feel trapped because they’re physically and/or financially unable to exit) never get anything because there’s this idea that grown women cannot suffer and therefore don’t matter. Adult women are just discarded and written off as having made their “choice.” Almost all anti-trafficking groups focus only on children and ignore the women.

The Cost to Society of Ignoring Poor Prostituted Adult Women

Conservative estimates based on limited data collection place the percentage of sex trafficking victims with HIV at about 25%, but actual numbers may be much higher. According to the Office of the Secretariat of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, 63% of HIV-positive sufferers aged 15-24 are women.

A 2007 study published in JAMA showed that 38% of a study group of 287 sex trafficked Nepalese women and girls tested positive for HIV. The study also showed that the younger the trafficked girl, the higher the likelihood of being exposed to HIV since johns specifically request younger girls (under age 15) at brothels and johns often refuse to wear condoms and the prostituted women and girls realistically cannot compel them to.

Many other regions have much higher rates than that, such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside where 75% of prostituted women and girls are HIV-positive. Women and children who are trafficked for commercial sex experience a tenfold risk of contracting HIV compared to any other subgroup of the population. The average age of entry into the sex trade for females is 12-14 years of age. The US is one of the top three source and destination hubs for sex trafficking.

According to the US State Department, 80% of human trafficking victims are women and girls, and according to the Harvard School of Public Health study authored by Dr. Jay Silverman, the HIV infection rate exceeded 60% among girls forced into prostitution prior to age 15 from the 2007 sample of 287 Nepalese women and girls. The public health consequence, and ultimately, the devastation to society caused by male demand for commercial sex is astronomical.

“Addressing the widely accepted male demand for commercial sex is critical to ending this modern day form of female slavery,” Silverman said.

As sex trafficking survivor Lisa Bouvet, said: “Saying someone chose to become a prostitute is like saying someone chose to jump off the roof but no one mentioned that the building was on fire.”

Those who manage to exit the sex trade also face a substantial risk of being re-trafficked if they are from a country that lacks adequate social and economic support systems because of the contempt, scorn, derision, neglect and social rejection suffered by the prostituted. Many exited women and girls, out of sheer desperation, re-enter the sex trade when they’re left with nowhere else to go and no real social and economic support because of the criminalization and stigma that comes with being a prostituted woman. And when that happens, chances of being able to re-escape and survive are almost zero.

Many exited women are unable to afford proper medical care and due to total social exclusion and marginalization, they have almost zero employment opportunities and no hope of economically fending for themselves. Almost no one will hire exited women due to the social stigma alone, and finding some middle class Prince Charming to rescue her from utter destitution by marrying her and supporting her so she has a home, food, and medical care is definitely off the table.

As an aside, a study of johns showed that upwards of 60% are married men with families—they bought prostituted women so they could get away with doing to a woman what they would never be able to do to their own wives. If you torture and kill one of the “madonnas”, you will likely get prison; if you torture and kill one of the “whores”, you will likely get a free pass and a pat on the back.

Convicted Child Molesters Get More Social Acceptance and Better Economic Support For Re-entering Society Than Sex Trafficking Survivors

According to Dr. Brian Conway of the University of British Columbia, people who contract HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—can live very, very long and high quality lives without ever developing full blown AIDS as long as their CD4 (white blood cell) count remains well above 200 on medical therapy. But the vast majority of exited women struggle in abject poverty, and in countries like the US and the impoverished regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, destitute human trafficking survivors don’t have access to adequate medical treatment or any social income support to be able to live with dignity. Consequently, the sex trafficking survivors who contracted HIV from johns and traffickers are slapped with a cruel, torturous death sentence: slow, painful death from AIDS related complications.

Two major factors that negatively impact CD4 cell count are fatigue and stress. The stress from having to suffer in utter poverty and complete social exclusion due to stigma, compounded by the trauma levels of anyone who survived the amount of violence and torture as prostituted women have, only serves to intensify the agonizing progression of untreated HIV, which is hallmarked by ravaging and unrelenting opportunistic infections such as pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) which causes fatal treatment-resistant pneumonia for which medical intervention does not come cheap.

Untreated HIV is a certain death sentence, but it is a very slow and torturous one that surpasses the level of torture that would be permissible at Guantanamo. Treatment of HIV requires a series of antiretroviral drug therapies, of which there are several classes—each one inhibiting the mutation and multiplication of the HIV virus at different stages of cell invasion in the HIV virus’s life cycle. Often, several classes must be combined to effectively treat this devastating retrovirus which targets CD4 cells, injects healthy CD4 cells with its genetic code (RNA) which is then used by the reverse transcriptase enzyme to build HIV DNA.

The HIV DNA is injected into the CD4 cell’s DNA by the integrase enzyme, establishing HIV infection in the CD4 cell. When the HIV-infected CD4 cell reproduces, the HIV DNA is activated. This is how a retrovirus like HIV destroys the immune system and causes full blown AIDS—by attacking the body’s white blood cells. And this is why multi-faceted therapy drug schedules are needed to treat and subdue or limit the HIV virus’s activity within the body.

None of the current medical technologies for treating HIV can protect an HIV-positive person’s sexual partner from contracting HIV no matter how well the infected person responds to the antiretroviral therapy. So an HIV-positive john with access to good medical care and who is able to improve his healthy CD4 cell count and limit the devastation of HIV in his body, who then turns around and buys rape-on-demand sex from poor prostituted women (and likely refuses to wear a condom) then infects the trafficking victim who is unable to compel him to wear a condom—never mind dictate any other terms and conditions of the sex-for-money transaction. In fact, it is usually in attempting to refuse a particular sexual act that gets prostituted women murdered—if not by the john who wanted to hurt her as part of the “services” he paid for, then by the traffickers in whose eyes a “troublesome” woman’s life isn’t even worth eight cents.

Unlike the traffickers and the johns on sex tourism “vacations” at home and abroad who paid for the “right” to get “you-do-what-I-say” sex from prostituted women and children, poor trafficked and/or exited women that contracted HIV from these self-entitled sexually sadistic men that refused to wear condoms have little to no hope at all of living a long, high quality life if they cannot get proper care due to being from a country in which women do not enjoy equal rights with men, and a country that either does not have the medical technology of antiretroviral therapy available, or that does not provide good medical care to those unable to pay for it because of that country not having universal health care.

To be sentenced to death from full blown AIDS as a direct result of first being forcibly infected with it by cruel, sexually sadistic men that are carriers of HIV and secondly by lack of access to the same quality of medical care to adequately treat HIV that their class-privileged HIV-positive rapists enjoy, meets the definition of torture and crimes against humanity.

In the US, convicted serial killers sentenced to death row get more sympathy and avenues for legal redress and concern for their rights than an adult sex trafficking victim who struggled to exit “the life” against all odds. Regardless of where one stands on the death penalty issue, the fact is that the way the state is permitted to execute a convicted serial killer is restricted by Constitutional laws against cruel and unusual punishment and torture—which is why no one is executed by being drawn and quartered or burned alive at the stake like they were in medieval Europe.

It is also why the state cannot (in theory, anyway) execute someone with biological terrorism, and neither can an individual resort to that under Stand Your Ground Laws. Bioterrorism is precisely what traffickers and johns are doing by deliberately infecting prostituted women with a fatal, incurable STD. Women and children did not enter prostitution with HIV—traffickers and johns infected them with it.

It is a crime against humanity for any other identifiable group to be targeted for death by sexual torture, destitution and bioterrorism—except women. Do the math: 95% of the prostituted are women and girls, 94% of those living below poverty suffering without basic human needs are women and girls. Women comprise 52% of the population yet women have less than 2% of all good-paying blue-collar skilled trades jobs and science careers due to institutionalized sexism and discrimination. Men comprise 88% of the government leadership and lawmaking bodies, and men comprise 98% of the top 1% of the financial elite. Although 5% of the prostituted are boys and men, nearly 100% of the sex buyers are men. Money, privilege and power are gendered. And so is the institution of prostitution.

There are upwards of about 10 million trafficked women and girls trapped in prostitution in the US and only 200 shelter beds nationwide for women and girls who desperately want to exit but cannot. So the final question remains: will destitute exited women get helped with income support to live with a little bit of human dignity while they struggle to heal and rebuild their lives, or will this new anti-trafficking plan by the Obama administration merely serve as a boon for large charity executives? If this country is serious about the sex trafficking problem, then funds for destitute trafficking victims payable to the destitute exited women whether they exited 20 minutes ago or 20 years ago must come first before anyone else’s enrichment. What is needed is: income for destitute exiting/exited women to live with dignity as they try to get on their feet and rebuild their lives, medical care, dental care, therapy, advanced educations and/or vocational training and REAL job placement—guaranteed job slots for poor marginalized exited women.

Eyes Closed, No Peeking

By Tracy Lynne Stout Meisky

“Dedicated to the governor of Pennsylvania, who suggested that women upset at being forced to have an unnecessary internal ultrasound should ‘close their eyes’, and to the Georgia legislator who wants to outlaw abortion even for a woman carrying a dead fetus because ‘cows and pigs do it all the time’ , and to the gentleman in Wisconsin who wants to outlaw divorce and says that women who are abused by their husbands should just ‘remember the good times’, and… and…. and….

“Just close your eyes” he said.

Close your eyes and maybe it won’t hurt so much. Maybe you can make the shame go away if you don’t have to look at it, don’t have to meet the eyes of the doctor who is ready to violate you, who is no longer allowed to address your pain and need.

Close your eyes and deal with it because from this point on, health care for you is nothing more than a power play, the political blood sport of men, drenched in your own desperate blood.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of Jesus who wants you to know that you are a sinner- and a slut for having dreams beyond the ones given to you by your pastor, your employer, and your governor.

See, they are worried that you might get an abortion mistakenly thinking it’s a treatment for the flu or something, eager to brand you a wanton for having sex at all, a Jezebel for enjoying pleasure without consequence…the way that they get to.

Close your eyes and pretend that you are still a person with the right to make your own, most intimate decisions about your future.

Close your eyes and remember when planning your own family wasn’t considered dirty, when owning your body was still your birthright and the right to give birth also included the right not to.

Close your eyes and forget that you are supposed to be a mindless object of desire, to be salivated over and then dismissed, used by men to sell beer and shoes and laundry detergent, expected to exist only for their sexual pleasure, reviled for feeling it yourself, condemned for being what they so determinedly make you: a sexual being.

So come here, little girl, here’s a push-up bra, stilettos and a chastity belt. Learn now that sex is something for a man to do to a woman, not actually with her.

Understand that you must grow up to be either a slut, a dyke or a mother…and a mother, and a mother.

Close your eyes, girls, and enjoy your patent leather Mary Janes and princess dreams that don’t yet end in blood and probes and congressmen playing doctor behind the statehouse, insisting that the princess carry even death in her womb, all in the name of life.

Close your eyes and think of your grandmothers, and of their grandmothers owned by their fathers, traded to their husbands, needing permission to go to college.

Think of the days when the few lady-like jobs that existed were only for those un-natural old maids unable to join the ranks of the real women doing a woman’s real job of having babies.

Think of not even being allowed to learn or to help support yourself and your family, of depending on a man to feed and clothe you and your children, your own love and need to protect them a chain and an anchor that keeps you in the harbor of even a loveless, abusive marriage, your yards and yards of beautiful sail forever stowed belowdecks, because the open seas of life is no place for a woman.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of England; and of Iran and Afghanistan where women are chained for their own good, beaten for showing their faces, stoned for going to school, sewn shut between babies, robbed of the ability to feel passion, used for a man’s desire but allowed none of their own; receptacles, incubators, cooks and maids.

So close your eyes, and shut your mouths, and be thankful that you live in such an enlightened, modern land.”

Brava Tracy! I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Solidarity for the Few

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right

This movement struck me as being centered on young middle class white males, and they’re not welcoming or receptive of older people — including older people who have a lifetime’s worth of experience and battle scars from fighting the oppression created by unearned privilege. And according to Reena Walker, a seasoned older black woman and veteran activist, male privilege and how it is used by men in the 99% to beat women down and oppress us is ignored or rationalized by a busload of mansplaining. As a black woman who suffered a lifetime of poverty, sexism, racism and misogyny, Ms. Walker is hardly one of the 1% and yet the way she and other women are being treated at OWS sends the message that women (who make up 51% of the 99%) aren’t viewed as being human enough for harm against us to matter. Funny how freedom and economic justice is only for a few which usually does not include women. Some 99%ers are more equal than others.

It is no accident that women comprise over 70% of those living below poverty worldwide. The status quo of local and global capitalism depends on women’s unpaid/under-paid work. It could not survive without women’s unpaid work as primary caregivers, the childbearers, and the child-raisers. Capitalism is patriarchal to the core. The poorest of the world’s poor are women who also do upwards of two-thirds of the world’s work and own only 1% of the means of production and reproduction. Women hold up half the sky on our unpaid/under-paid backs.

Despite all of the claims by Occupy facilitators that rapes are not occurring at the Occupy Toronto camp at St. James Park, a few men from the Aboriginal community who are staying in the camp full time say otherwise. One of those men, identifying himself only as “Davine”, who is half Blackfoot and half Arab, said that the camp’s marshals have not been able to minimize or prevent sexual assaults on the women there and that “these [white] people are coming to us Natives for help.” What is really tragic in all this is that one of those Natives — Jayson Fleury — is a real opportunistic shmuck and sociopathic grifter who has ripped off poor and marginal women to support his lifestyle of partying across Canada 3-4 times a year. And he is one of a tiny handful of men who is willing to protect the women from rape. How sad is that?

What is supposed to be a movement about unity of the masses against the 1% is really looking more like the same ol’ same ol’: freedom and economic justice and a bigger slice of the pie for men; rape, invalidation, exploitation, abuse, oppression and discrimination against the poorest and most downtrodden victims of capitalism — poor women of ALL races. Somehow, I don’t find that very unifying, uplifting, or liberating as a poor and marginal woman.

And please don’t tell me that women’s human rights — including the right to a job with dignity, the right to an education, the right to food, housing, and healthcare, and the right to reproductive/sexual enfranchisement and bodily autonomy/self-determination, and most important of all, the right to NOT be raped and impregnated against our will at peril to our health, well-being, liberty, and lives — is less important that “the big picture” of those traditionally privileged members of the 99% getting their justice at poor and destitute women’s expense in the name of “social justice.” Sorry, but I’m not down with that.

As a woman from deep poverty who suffered more under capitalism than poor men due to institutionalized sexism, misogyny, and the social acceptance of patriarchy and its culture of rape, I have no interest in “taking one for the team” for the sake of the 99% movement (which is looking more like a Rapists’ Rights bowel movement) just so men can get a bigger slice of the economic pie while nothing changes for the better for women, especially poor and marginal women of all races.

Since colonization of North America, women in the US and Canada have been told to wait until after the men got all the more important issues resolved and then we women would eventually get our turn. But our turn never came — at least not for those of us in extreme poverty that never got to make it to even the lowest rung of the middle class. But then this Occupy movement has never been about us, has it?

A glaring example is the Occupy Vancouver list of demands included a call for the legalization of prostitution. Prostitution is rich white male-centered. It exists because capitalism is patriarchal and there’s a direct link between that and human trafficking and rape. Also at the crux of it is the larger societal view of women as non-persons, as cheap commodities that exist solely for male self-gratification.  These issues cannot be bifurcated.

Desperation, poverty, abuse, addiction, job and pay discrimination, lack of opportunities and a need to pay the rent and feed the kids, a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, and a misogynistic culture that devalues women and reduces us to disposable products to be bought and sold — all act in synergy to create a society where prostitution and sex trafficking exists and flourishes with men being the prime beneficiaries of it while women are further victimized.

What kind of social justice movement seeking to rectify the injustices of capitalism and the inclusion of women in the name of solidarity is this, anyway?

Why is the response to the rapes, the abuse, the exploitation, the trauma and the deaths that many poor and marginal women suffer as a result of being prostituted to simply treat this as “just another job”? What other job demands that the worker be raped, impregnated against their will, infected with an STD, violated, abused, and maybe even murdered? What kind of person supports that this sort of treatment should be legitimized? What kind of person seeking solidarity with women — especially poor and marginal women — would agree that women’s bodies should just be another disposable commodity available for purchase by men and that every woman should be OK with that?

Women need to be safe, but how safe are women when we’re not even viewed as full human beings? Yes, prostituted women deserve rights. But they also deserve to have real choices. Why would anyone think that johns will provide equitable treatment and respect for women? No man who thinks he has the right to trade in human flesh or take a woman against her will is a man who believes in real equality. A man who can do this is a man who doesn’t see women as being human enough for harm against us to matter. We should not have to accept and legalize exploitation and oppression from men in order to decriminalize the women being prostituted in the name of “unity.”

Legalized prostitution neatly sweeps under the wraps the insidious human rights catastrophe of the global human/sex trafficking industry. Women ensnared in that are literally forced into brutal sex slavery; bought and sold, beaten and raped over and over and over. Approximately 80% of those trafficked are women and girls. The average age of a trafficking victim is 14. The average life span once trafficked is 4 years. The victims usually die from HIV/AIDS related complications after being forced (often violently) to give unprotected sex to their male purchasers. Legalizing and sugar-coating the exploitation of women does not protect our human rights. It undermines them.

A genuine unity and people’s movement doesn’t consider women’s suffering irrelevant, or as a trivial “special interest”, or as titillating grist. Nor does it function as a microcosm of this capitalist economy with men competing for all the power, wealth, and status at the top while women serve as mere cheerleaders and poster children only to be trotted out for the convenience and benefit of male privilege.

Women deserve safety and decriminalized from doing what they have to do in order to survive, but women also deserve to have real options. As 51% of the population, women should be 51% represented in all mainstream jobs, instead of being herded into pink collar-ghettos, and the sub-poverty glass ceiling of Wal-Mart with the exploitative sex industry as the only other option available for poor women for whom college and grad school is as out of reach as a day trip to Sedna while male high school drop-outs and ex-felons get all the good-paying blue-collar union jobs in the skilled trades and all of the opportunities and hope for a better life that goes with that at the expense of women’s exclusion.

Women make up more than half of the 99%. Where is our liberation from male oppression and domination through rape, “honor killing”, FGM, hiring and pay discrimination, sexual and reproductive slavery, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence which are the all too common realities of women’s lives every day?  These are the realities that are disproportionally inflicted on poor and marginal women by men in the 99%. Yet these are all dismissed as “special interest issues” that are accepted as part of “the price of being born female”, which is why anti-oppression is needed.  And that is why a movement of unity for real social and economic change must be willing to accept constructive criticism and not get offended when male privilege is challenged.

What is uplifting, unifying, or liberating about Occupy camp facilitators designating untrained peers as “marshals” to serve as the “sexual assault response team” to deal with the rapes — not by offering rape kits that include emergency contraception and STD testing/treatment, and the arrest/removal of the rapist, but by counseling (read: pressuring) the women who’ve been raped against going to the police? (Not that the criminal justice system has ever been any panacea for women, especially rape victims — police, lawyers, and judges are products of the same patriarchal, misogynist, fetid capitalist sepulcher that has always oppressed and abused women through unearned male privilege at women’s expense. )

I have no interest in being ill-used and thrown under the bus for the sake of “solidarity” with fauxgressives just so that men can get justice while nothing changes for the better for poor women of all races.

If destitute and marginal women of all races are at these camps, it is because this shit is real for us. We have been the most oppressed, the most excluded, the most downtrodden, and the most harmed by the inherent injustices of capitalism which is inherently a gender war. Chronically poor and marginal women don’t have the safety nets that young working class and middle class white males have: the freedom from potentially life-threatening unwanted pregnancy, or the privilege of a job and/or families with resources to return to at the end of all this.

Jobless Women, the Economically Disappeared, Betrayed by Progressives and Petty Bourgeoisie Feminists Again

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism for Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

The middle class “feminists” who claim to be allies of their poorest and most downtrodden “sisters” haven’t a clue what a poor woman’s daily struggle in deep poverty is like.

Even the most generous, non-materialistic middle class “allies” of America’s poorest women refused to comprehend or accept the poor welfare mother’s preoccupation with their very urgent and pressing need for money.

Most of these so-called allies, who have never lived the savage realities of destitution and being among the ranks of America’s economically disappeared, viewed poor women’s concerns about money as an “entitlement mentality.”

Petty bourgeois feminists referred to poor single mothers as “con artists” who wanted to get money for “doing nothing”, accusing poor women of “only getting pregnant for the welfare check” — buying into the sexist, patriarchal capitalist idea that pregnancy and childbirth is “nothing” for women to go through even though pregnancy and childbirth complications still kill more women in the US than in many other countries, and that the unpaid work that women have always traditionally done is “nothing”; that home-making, care-taking or child-raising isn’t “work.”

What care-takers do IS work — just ask anyone who has ever had to choose between their McJob or their sick child, or forego a job search in order to take care of an aging parent or a terminally ill spouse (or domestic partner). And mothers need a hell of a lot more than a cheap box of chocolates and a ten cent Mothers’ Day card. Poor women need money.

Yet, because of being sold out or abandoned altogether by Eurocentric middle class feminists, America’s poorest of the poor — women on welfare (before Welfare Reform eliminated AFDC and reduced benefits) — found themselves in situations where those who didn’t have to live with the consequences of “pragmatism” and political “compromise” were the ones defining the situation.

There’s a huge difference between the slightly better off working class guy in temporary poverty who just needs a job and a chronically poor woman who has been out of the job market for many years, serving as a care-giver or as a sole parent. Care-givers and mothers really need, and deserve, an adequate income.

Yet, as the Reagan Revolution’s War on the Poor right along up to Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which was driven by most middle class “feminists”, each subsequent part of “welfare reform” grew more punitive as America’s poorest women were told by suburban-dwelling soccer mom feminists who claimed to be allies, that poor women on welfare had to be “pragmatic” because “compromise” via benefit reductions and 2-5 year time limits coupled with “work requirements” were necessary. But all of those pragmatic “compromises” were no compromise at all because America’s poorest women got nothing but subjected to economic terrorism with a proverbial gun pointed right at our heads. We gained nothing at all, and lost all the way around.

The final slap in the face was that there wasn’t even a guaranteed right to a living wage job as part of this “welfare reform.” No one knows exactly how many poor, hard-to-employ women remained jobless and were plunged into homelessness and utter destitution after being thrown off of welfare at the end of their 5 year lifetime benefit limit. Homeless people have been criminalized and driven underground, including children, who were also denied a basic public education for lack of an address.

Middle class “feminists” ignored that issue, after talking down to their poorer “sisters”, lecturing us on the need to be “pragmatic.” Well, with poor people’s life expectancy rates, preventable blindness and other disability rates, infant death rates, and maternal mortality rates that have now surpassed those in several other Third World countries; we see exactly what middle class pragmatism gets us.

This is what happens when middle class “allies” and activists lead and run social justice movements, presuming the right to “speak for” the poor. They think they’re the only ones qualified for the job to act as brokers and middle-men for the poor, and that their class status gives them that qualification. Others end up having to suffer the losses they personally won’t ever have to live with (or die from). And they expect poorer people to do all of the really hard, thankless and unpaid work while they get to speak at all the events, collect all the honorariums, get all the media attention and press coverage, and take all the credit for brokering the deal.

But they don’t want to do all of the unglamorous, energy-sapping and time consuming and grinding work of survey-taking and petition-signing, and doing what it takes to get 200 people to a rally. And that does take a lot of work. All those people don’t just show up simply because they saw someone’s name on a flyer!

While the bourgeois feminists’ movement was preoccupied with battling lifestyle-related issues, poor women have been fighting in the trenches for our rights to equal access to societal resources and benefits — including equal rights to the living wage jobs and equal pay. We didn’t care if we could burn our bras or publicly make out with a partner of the same sex. We care about being able to survive. We’re struggling for equal access to adequate employment, educations, and for the legitimization of income support as compensation and recognition for care-givers and mothers.

The class restrictions that kept white middle class women in the kitchen wasn’t our reality; poverty, racism, and sexism was. Although NOW made an official statement saying it was committed to protecting the now-extinct miserly and inadequate safety net of AFDC, including abortion and dental care covered by Medicaid for poor women, the majority of NOW ‘s petty bourgeoisie membership didn’t follow through. The rights of gays and lesbians to marry (albeit an important right) was far more important than poor women’s fundamental human right to life, to adequate food, utilities, shelter, a job and/or income support, and to birth control and abortion access and the right to medical and dental care — all of which are life and death matters for poor women.

In wandering into the morass of the trivial issues of bra-burning and trashing Playboy, petty bourgeoisie feminists completely betrayed the struggle for women’s most fundamental human rights and that has had a devastating impact on the lives of poor women without jobs or any means of income support.

Women suffering the real oppression of daily economic terrorism that poverty is, including the repercussions of forced pregnancy and forced childbirth-promoting laws that led to the criminalization of miscarriages and stillbirths, and the conscription of poor women into reproductive chattel slavery at peril to our health, wellbeing and lives — all of this has been ignored by middle and upper class feminists.

What they won’t ever admit is that they have benefited from the ongoing oppression and exploitation of their much poorer “sisters.” They never intended for poor women to benefit from all that equality they were seeking for themselves.

They’ve been silent for over 30 years since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 followed by the Rapists’ Rights Lobby’s “conscience clause” and “fetal personhood” laws that have cropped up over the last 20 years, and the decimation of the meager and inadequate safety net that welfare was prior to 1996 when Slick Willy eliminated welfare as we know it, plunging 14 million poor single mothers into instant destitution and homelessness under the guise of “tough love.”

There is no comparison between the “quiet desperation” of affluent women like the late Princess Diana of Wales who got tricked into miserable marriages with over-privileged inbred crowned heads or members of the financial aristocracy merely to serve as an incubator for the economic cannibal class’s parasitic progeny after buying into the Cinderella-Prince Charming myth and wanting all that royalty has to offer, versus the very real crushing and life-endangering exploitation and abuse suffered by poor women and girls from the underclass — like 15 year-old Rennie Gibbs, who began her life imprisonment sentence this 4^th of July (ironically, on the day American’s celebrate “Independence”) by a Mississippi court for the “crime” of delivering a premature stillborn, thanks to all of the “pro-life” laws and a Christian Right state in which there is no Planned Parenthood or any abortion clinic.

We still do not know anything about the male co-conceiver, such as whether he drank or did drugs which resulted in defective sperm which could have precipitated a miscarriage or stillbirth. We don’t even know if the sex (or the resultant pregnancy) was consensual.

But nobody cares about the plight of poor women, especially those of us who have been marginalized and excluded from the workforce for two or more generations — due in no small measure to the stigma of poverty and all the other barriers of classism that go with that which serve as obstacles to beat poor women down over and over and over, as vacuous middle class spoiled brats who are lucky enough to have good jobs tell us that no matter what we’ve tried to do to be “deserving” of a chance, we’re not doing anything right, not trying hard enough, not responsible, or just plain not good enough.

Dealing with issues of race and gender doesn’t meant you’ve dealt with classism and unearned privilege. There’s a world of difference between the working poor who struggle to get by from paycheck to paycheck who are one car breakdown away from losing everything and the very poor who’ve been trapped by generational poverty and all of the stigma and obstacles to getting a job (when there’s never been enough jobs for everyone anyway) that chronic poverty imposes.

The long-term poor who have been excluded and marginalized suffer the worst; neglected and abandoned on the outer fringes of society, struggling in destitution outside of the “primary labor market” of steady jobs. Those who are lucky enough to have enjoyed steady employment think that those of us with nothing in chronic poverty lack work ethic and discipline.

But it takes a hell of a lot more work ethic and discipline to survive even just one day in our lives, than it does to simply show up and perform some tasks assigned by some boss at an office.

Try scrounging money for food or a utility bill by salvaging scrap metal off the street in all kinds of weather, stripping wire until your hands are bleeding and calloused, and getting all cut up from handling scrap metal for 80 hrs/week just to get maybe only $100 (or whatever meager price the salvage yards feel like paying out based on prices that they set, depending on what the metals commodity brokers dictate). Then come and talk to me about “being responsible” and your “work ethic.”

Try having to live like that, hoping to get enough money to put towards a cheap prepaid cell phone just so you have a means of communication for things like being able to call the police or fire department in an emergency, or being able to keep trying to get a job while suffering from dental problems that you can’t get treated because you have no money and no job with dental benefits — never mind maybe eventually being able to repay that unaffordable student loan debt you incurred in hopes of being “worthy” of a chance for a job so you could climb out of poverty before getting “too old” for anyone to hire.

And of course, those of us in poverty who tried to do “all the right things” get nothing but slapped in the face by middle class snobs who always tell us how “irresponsible” we are if we have no income and have no way to document the fact that we have no income to the satisfaction of some snippy rude middle class bureaucrat at the student loan servicing center, and therefore we’re told we can’t qualify for any deferment or income-contingent repayment plan.

Middle class snobbishness and pragmatism blinds society’s more fortunate and luckily employed from that savage reality of poverty and classism. For those of us who have never had a moment’s comfort and security throughout our entire lives, pragmatism is merely a license for maintaining a status quo in which nothing ever gets better for us and there is no hope that anything will ever change.

Middle class (and often working class) pragmatism really amounts to “how can I get a better deal for ME” by using those of us at the very bottom as their poster child to further their own agenda while never sticking by the poor to help us get a better deal, too. Instead, we get jettisoned the minute they get a few token bones tossed their way. And what do chronically poor women get? Nothing. Or worse.

We get our food stamps and Medicaid cut, our LIHEAP funding cut while utilities skyrocket and things like heat in the winter or a hot shower are unattainable luxuries. Now we got our social security cut, and we lost our access to reliable birth control through Planned Parenthood as defunding Title X caused them to close their doors in several states already.

Chronically poor and jobless women like those of us from generational poverty were never included or accepted in the job market even during the “better times” — and we’re supposed to grateful to our middle class “benefactors” for their “wins” of pragmatism that always benefit everybody else except us? For us, these are life and death realities; not a tally of “wins” in the game of political football.

Until middle class feminists and the steadily employed working class “social justice activists” realize this and deal with their classism, they will continue to alienate the very poor and lose what little bit of trust we may have had in them in the first place. They have yet to do right by their poorest and most marginalized “sisters.” I won’t hold my breath in hopes that they ever will.

Because poor people never win in coalitions. Cross-class coalitions mean using the chronically jobless poor for the ends of middle class people. Those of us from generational poverty were never meant to be included. So what’s the point in voting when we’re always neglected or offered up as the convenient sacrificial lambs at first chance?

While women lucky enough to have a job, even if only a crappy one, can now get their birth control through Obamacare without co-pays, chronically poor women without jobs (or any chance of ever being able to get one) have lost everything with cuts in Medicaid and Planned Parenthood closings, leaving us with nothing — not even basic maternity and post-partum care to at least reduce the already higher chances of death and disability for us as a result of having no options other than carrying unwanted pregnancies to term. And for this, we’re supposed to be grateful to our middle class “saviors?” When we get a share of the pie for once and get access to real choices and options, then we’ll do the victory dance, too.

For Our Own Good, or Their Own Ego?

Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

It never ceases to amaze me how obtuse the beneficiaries of unearned privilege are about the plight of America’s poor, or to the depth of hatred aimed at the multitudes of their fellow citizens in poverty who have to use food stamps.

This is not solely the purview of conservatives who wear their contempt for poor women, children and the disabled on their sleeves; displaying their classism as proudly as if it were a Congressional Medal of Honor. It is rampant among middle class progressives as well — except they’re more duplicitous about it. They hide it within the matrix of pet liberal causes under false pretenses of promoting healthier eating habits among the poor.

They aim their malevolence at the poorest of the poor who rely on food stamps and unhealthy donated non-perishables from food pantries. Those foods are loaded with starch and carbohydrates, which causes Type II diabetes and obesity.

Rather than target “Big Ag” conglomerates who are heavily subsidized with “welfare handouts” twice — first by taxes, and second by taxpayers’ food purchases — middle class progressives and conservatives act in concert to push punitive policies to make the poor even more miserable. Punishing the poor is easier than promoting policies that would enable poor food stamp recipients to buy fresh produce from local farmers, whose prices are three times as high as the chemical and starch loaded foods from Big Ag conglomerates that you can buy at Wal-Mart’s.

Local farmers do not accept food stamps for their expensive “free range” chicken and eggs, and their organic produce that the poor can’t afford at prices which are three times as high as the less-healthy foods in the local Wal-Mart’s — not that the middle class ever cared about that.

But instead of addressing those issues, middle class liberals aim to punish the poor by further curtailing their already restricted food options, which are really a Hobson’s Choice. The time-honored middle class tradition of “let’s make the poor even more miserable” was openly embraced in Alternet’s recent article, “Should Food Stamps Be Used For Soda?” The gist of the article was that poor people on food stamps shouldn’t be allowed to buy any cheap snacks or beverages with the SNAP benefits. Poor people get nothing to enjoy as it is, but it’s OK to deprive them of even cheap beverages and snacks because “it’s for their own good.” Having any solace in the enjoyment of any small comforts is not.

Someone getting food stamps doesn’t get enough to be able to buy a month’s worth of groceries, even when stretching their food stamps by buying the 2-day old stale baked goods and 2-liter bottles of soda on sale at 3 for $5. The overwhelming response among Alternet’s largely middle/upper-middle class “progressive” posters was along the vein of “let the poor drink tap water if they can’t afford healthier and tastier beverages”, which is really nothing more than a polite form of Rush Limbaugh’s “let the poor learn how to dumpster dive if they’re hungry.” My all-time favorite is from South Carolina’s “pro-life” Lieutenant Governor, Andre Bauer, who proposed eliminating the school breakfast and lunch program for poor children in his state, saying that feeding the poor was like “feeding stray animals and encouraging them to breed.”

Those who hate the poor come in all political stripes, but are overwhelmingly from one socio-economic class: the middle and upper-middle classes who have unjustly benefited from a legacy of unearned privileges that are the hallmark of the capitalist paradigm, which was only successful because capitalism relies on a lot of slave labor and devalued work in society in order for it to be successful. Those whose work is the most devalued, who have provided the bulk of  “unimportant” work necessary for a capitalist society’s smooth functioning are women. The work women do is under-compensated precisely because it is women who do it. Everybody in society benefits from it, but takes it for granted while invalidating it. And giving moms a box of chocolates, flowers, and a card on one crummy day out of 365 designated as “Mothers’ Day” is an insultingly cheap kiss-off.

Yet, the taxes paid by poor women in this country — which poor women get the least benefit of — go towards disproportionately benefiting fascist militaristic police forces and military whose sole function is to protect capital and preserve this system of unearned privileges. And it is the middle and upper classes that benefit the most from this misogynistic command unit of the national security state which has always been used to brutally repress the poor here and abroad.

"Classism For Dimwits" by Jacqueline S. Homan

The middle class never had a problem with repression and capitalism’s other social ills until it hit them upside the snot-locker and forced them to reduce their own standard of living. They never had a problem with all the repression, inequality and unearned privileges that previously secured their own comfortable seat in the architecture of aggression of capitalism. As long as the rich were throwing them enough bones to mollify them, they didn’t even pretend to care about the well-being of the poor. And middle class liberals are just as selfish, sanctimonious, and self-centered as middle class neocons.

Middle class neocons got laws passed that restrict poor women’s access to affordable reliable contraception and abortion and middle class liberals’ response was tepid at best. Middle class neocons punish poor pregnant women, poor mothers, and poor children with draconian budget cuts to Pell grants, food stamps, LIHEAP, and Medicaid and pushed for the passage of “At-Will” employment laws which serve as a backdoor pass for employers to get away with job discrimination; disproportionately hurting poor women without any economic support in post-Welfare Reform America. Middle class liberals have no problem with that, contrary to what they tell the poor to our faces.

Middle class progressives quietly benefit from their right-wing counterparts’ agenda of pulling the ladder up and out of reach for the poor, including compulsory maternity to ensure poor women are kept poor and enslaved as childbirth chattel. Keeping poor women marginalized and excluded means fewer female PhD’s and well-paid skilled tradesmen — works out nicely for those who don’t want any real merit-based competition for the good jobs.

Poor women without reproductive choice and economic opportunity also make an even more economically desperate pool of prime candidates for exploitation as cheap “rent-a-womb” service — an inconvenient truth illustrated by the New York Times November 28^th 2008 article, “Her Body, My Baby” .

White heterosexual middle class couples whose chic, slim and trim latte-sipping “career women” are too posh to trash their bodies and suffer all the discomfort and risks inherent with pregnancy and endure hours of excruciating pain tearing up their own bodies from stem to stern giving birth, benefit from a large pool of poorer and more desperate women whose bodies, lives, and well-being can be sacrificed for a song as cheap under-compensated surrogate reproductive livestock.

Of course, those in the middle/upper classes benefiting from this arrangement deny that it’s all about the money even though they reap all the gain without suffering any of the pain. They convince themselves that they really did all the work of becoming a mother because it was their eggs that were used in the process, even though it wasn’t their bodies getting permanently ruined in the gestation and birth process, which is fraught with unexpected risks — perfectly healthy women with health insurance become permanently disabled or die from childbirth in the US.

Maybe that’s part of what’s behind the latest assault on food stamp recipients by the middle class who justify beating up on the poor by further depriving them of already sparse food choices with this latest push to prohibit food stamp usage for cheap snacks and beverages. Force a semi-healthy diet to ensure that economically desperate women are “fit” for exploitation as cheap childbirth chattel. Increasing the pool of semi-healthy candidates for “rent-a-womb” service drives down the already insultingly cheap going rates for the commodity of poor women’s bodies.

Another sinister purpose is also achieved by the faux concern for poor people’s health: healthier organs to be harvested that only benefit the middle class and the rich. In states like Arizona, the poor on Medicaid and Medicare have been removed from waiting lists for life-saving organ transplants. The poor got a death sentence by budget cuts. Where was the indignant outcry from the officious middle class about that if they’re so concerned about improving poor people’s health?

Maybe it’s time every working class/poor American revokes their organ donor status from their drivers’ licenses and non-driving state photo ID’s. If we’re not good enough to have a real fair fighting chance for anything in this country with a guaranteed right to an education and a living wage job and a guaranteed right to decent health care and access to healthy foods and decent homes, then we’re not good enough for the “haves” and “have-mores” to benefit from our body parts. Fuck ‘em.

The middle class, regardless of political stripe, has never been an ally for the poor. They do not seek equality outside of their own class. They do not want a partnership with poor people. They do not respect poor people. They seek paternalistic control to satisfy their own craven egos, and they often desire to exploit the less fortunate for their own political agenda. They don’t care about whether the poor get a chance in life or not. As far as they’re concerned, the poor are nothing but “useless eaters” that don’t deserve to live, much less have any happiness. The middle class is not ignorant and oblivious to the suffering and misery they inflict on the poor. They’re an oppressor class — just like the rich whom they emulate and aspire to become.