I was going to start my first post for Gene Expression with the more clinical-sounding Prostitution and Genes but I thought that might not get people’s attention.
I invite the other contributors and commenters of Gene Expression to consider the issue of sex enslavement in terms of human biodiversity. Jim Henley and Lynxx Pherrett are having a civilized and enlightening disagreement about the issue. Jim, as honorable a non-interventionist as I can think of (Lew Rockwell being the opposite), thinks that foreign “peacekeeping forces” cause, or at least greatly facilitate, the evil practice. But Lynxx points out In general, importation is driven more by ethnic issues than economic ones: it’s bad form to enslave locals, no matter what the economic range of the clientele. So Henley’s assertion that “Local militias were not importing women from other countries to enslave” before the arrival of NATO is probably bunk. There where probably plenty of Bosnian girls shipped to the brothels of Belgrade before the intervention.
I think that you can probably find a midpoint where the two apparently opposite views intersect. Foreign peacekeepers (read: horny foreign men either too young to have formed families, or separated from families) in effect create the same situation as importing foreign women into a developed country. You have the combustible intersection of young, nubile, vulnerable females without the traditional protections of family* with sexually hungry males. Bad combination for all concerned, especially the girls. A female body in this situation is reduced to a commodity to be trafficked. It’s easier for a man to think of a foreign girl this way. In fact, for a man to think of “one of his own” in such a commodified fashion would be unthinkable.
Question: is reducing sex to an impersonal transactional act a means of facilitating gene flow from isolated communities? After all, Lynxx keeps referring to these gender-neutral laws about “Trafficking in Persons” but most of the persons being trafficked are fertile young women, not boys. Clean up your minds: my reference to boys has nothing to do with sex. If we are talking about slavery here, and if the developed world is so insatiable for cheap labor, then why not traffic even more in young men, who are capable of doing all the developed world’s dirty work as slaves, rather than just cheap labor? Because what we are talking about here is sex, not just slavery. Treating the problem as simply a slavery issue won’t work unless we concentrate on the sex part.
Lynxx’s post is very long and exhaustive, separating out countries by origin, transit and destination. It does not separate out the slavery by type–because the human rights organizations and non-governmental organizations that treat the issue do not separate out slavery by type. I would suggest that they do and they would get a firmer grasp on the issue. “Israel is a destination country for trafficked women”; “Japan is a destination country for women trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation and for men trafficked for labor purposes”; “Pakistan is a country of origin for young boys who are kidnapped or bought and sent to work as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.” I suggest that these are quite different problems, with different sources in human biology.
As an aside, most of the white girls so trafficked are from Eastern Europe or the Balkans. This was traditionally the mine-field where slavers stocked the harems of the Ottoman elite. I wonder if some enterprising Ph.D. student could trace a historical continuity between the family-based prostitution rings of today with the slave-trading networks of yore.
*Remember the part of the Godfather where the Corleone family takes care of a “domestic abuse” of a Corleone daughter? They don’t read feminist tracts to the abusing husband. They beat the crap out of him. Now that’s family. When people talk about family values, they don’t realize that family values (which appeal to instincts relating to blood and individual survival) function above and beyond the reach of the law, which appeal to ideas of universal ethics and morality, and which may–indeed must–supersede one family’s interests.
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