The Third Way: An End of Trafficking and Prostitution,A Beginning of Mutual Sexuality

Since I am here to talk about a life-or-death change that is thought to be impossible—ending sex trafficking, prostitution and the demand for unequal sex that creates a market for both—let’s talk about other deep changes that have happened in my own lifetime.

For instance, when I was auditing classes at the University of Delhi, there were many students who had never before been in classrooms with members of the so-called ‘opposite sex’. Tension and self-consciousness were palpable and painful. Some young women sat in the back and said not a word. A professor told me that it was unnatural and impossible to teach amid sexual tension, that co-education might work in other cultures but not here.

Now, I think it’s possible in both our countries for women and men to study and argue and learn together, to actually be friends, whether or not there is any sexual or romantic vibe between them. That is a huge step towards recognizing each other’s full humanity.

When I was living here at the end of the 1950s, there were still instances of sati that were viewed as chosen or even romantic. Despite brave protests against enforced sati, and laws against it passed during the British Raj, some still considered it as an inevitable and honourable part of culture—even of human nature. After all, a woman’s identity came entirely from the man she married and there was no other way she could make an honourable living or be other than a burden. Then in the 1980s, under pressure from a brave feminist movement, India passed its own laws against sati and remaining instances became rare and deplored. Feminists also began to take on the police, the courts and the more concealed crime of dowry murders.

When I was a student here, both of our countries viewed some wife-beating as inevitable, even deserved, since wives were supposed to obey their husbands, and men might be justified in physically disciplining their wives. In pre-feminist America, the police might be called to intervene but domestic violence was the one crime in which they defined success as getting the criminal and the victim back together again. Indeed, the terms ‘domestic violence’ and ‘battered woman’ had not been coined yet, there was no visible women’s movement and no shelters to escape to. The most common questions were: What did you do to anger him? Or: Why don’t you just leave?

Now, there is still a long way to go—an American woman is more likely to be injured or killed by a man she knows than by a stranger, but at least there are laws against domestic violence, shelters are tax-funded, police can bring charges—even if the woman is too terrified to testify—and escaping ‘masculine’ control is understood to be the time a woman is most likely to be murdered; thus it must be carefully planned.

When I was a student here, both of our countries kept quiet about rape and sexual assault, or blamed it on the woman, or assumed it had some relationship to sex. Now, a critical mass in both our countries understands that rape is the fault of the aggressor, not the victim, and that it’s about violence, not sex. ‘Masculinity’ requires superiority to females, and since that is a lie, it can only be maintained by violence or the threat of violence. Rapes are often carried out by groups of men or boys who are proving their ‘masculinity’ to each other. Rapists often use objects to penetrate and tear apart female bodies—no erection or ejaculation involved—and they may also rape the very old or very young, even infants. Nor does the number of raped women necessarily reflect the number of men who rape. In the US, one study showed that the average rapist had raped 14 times.

Finally, we are beginning to understand that a male-dominant culture tries to addict the males to dominance in order to perpetuate itself and to persuade men to risk their lives in wars that have nothing to do with their own self-interest, which is why female bodies are in special danger in war zones. But at least we now know about the mass rapes and evisceration with objects in Bosnia and Rwanda and the Congo. If the evidence of sexualized violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust had not been suppressed at the Nuremberg Trials some 70 years ago, we might have been better prepared for sexual violence in war zones now (Hedgepeth & Saidel, 2011).

It was a huge step forward when Judge Navanethem Pillay, a South African judge of Indian descent, became the first woman of colour in the judiciary in her own country and then the first on the Rwanda Tribunal and the International Criminal Court. She was the main force behind legally defining rape as a war crime. ‘Rape has always been regarded as one of the spoils of war,’ as she said. ‘Now it is a war crime, no longer a trophy.’

It was an even bigger step forward when, in both our countries, we began to reform rape laws that required a third-party eyewitness—so mistrusted were women—and to contest laws based on the idea that only virgins or married women of the right race or caste could be raped. Our respective women’s movements agitated for laws against sexual assault that put the victimizer on trial, not the victim, and we ourselves took to the streets to protest sexualized violence.

In 2012, I watched with admiration as outrage reached a peak in massive and continuing demonstrations against the brutal gang rape, evisceration and murder of a paramedical student on a bus in New Delhi. This angry fire lit the dry tinder of sexualized violence in general and forced government action. Soon, I was reading the final report of the Verma Commission. It recommended new punishments for gang rapes, acid attacks, stalking and trafficking, and new support for gender equality and equal political participation. It even recommended against the teaching of patriarchy and male supremacy in schools. When Gopal Subramaniam, one of its three commission members, visited New York in 2013, he explained that now sexualized violence was out in the open and the victimizers were shamed, not the victims. Indeed, people fighting against this extreme form of inequality were looked upon as heroes. This was a sea change.

Like all such examples of changing consciousness that I have seen in my lifetime, I can imagine that prostitution or ‘survival sex’, plus sex trafficking by force or fraud, could gradually diminish and die out. Even now, wherever there is more equality between males and females, there is less trafficking and prostitution. Wherever there is less equality, there is more of both. Just as the colonial era sent men without women into countries where they created or increased prostitution, male-superior cultures are now creating a son surplus and a daughter deficit. This also is increasing the buying, selling and kidnapping of women.

Prostitution is not the oldest profession. It’s the oldest oppression.

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One barrier to fighting both prostitution and sex trafficking is the false notion that there has always been this kind of inequality. In a patriarchy, some women are sexually restricted to child-bearing and keeping the ruling class or caste ‘pure’, while others are sexually exploited for sex only or for producing more workers. But when European colonists arrived among the 500 or so tribes of North America, they wrote home about their shock that ‘these savages’ did not rape, not even their female prisoners. Columbus himself wrote home his complaints when conquered Native women fought against becoming sexual slaves to his crew.

It’s true that patriarchy has existed for 500 to 5,000 years, depending on the part of the world, but at most that’s 5 per cent of human history. From Kerala to Kenya, there still are remnants of matrilineal cultures in which women controlled agriculture, understood the means to decide when and whether to have children and lived in a balance of authority with men. In my country, Cherokee and other original languages do not even have gendered pronouns, nor did many other languages with ancient roots, for instance, Persian, Bengali, Finnish, Yoruba, Basque and many more. They may have absorbed concepts of gender after colonists arrived, as Tagalog absorbed Spanish. But they were still a long way from, say, French that attributes gender to everything, from pens and forks to tables and chairs.

In truth, gender roles are elaborate cultural inventions of subject/object, active/passive, that rose up over centuries to allow male control of reproduction by controlling women’s bodies and freedom.

Even in our modern imaginations, gender and prostitution seem to be inevitable parts of human nature. Also, prostitution can only be dealt within two ways: legal or criminal. Once again, duality conceals the full circle of possibilities, but it was the only choice I had ever heard.

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When I began to travel as a feminist organizer, as I had learned in India, legalization seemed more humane. Otherwise, prostituted women only had a choice between a pimp who protected them from arrest or got them out on bail—then took their earnings and forced them to work—and a literal prison cell. Given a choice between the two prisons, eliminating one seemed like a good idea.

I did run into a few enlightened authorities who invented choices in between. For instance, an African American woman judge in night court refused to book a prostitute unless her customer was arrested too. It was amazing how fast her charges melted away. But mostly, prostituted women agreed that legalization might be better, although some feared their pimps too much to care; others did not see much difference since they had to have sex with their arresting officer and a few said days in prison felt like a rest.

Then I got an emergency call from Johnnie Tillmon of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The daughter of a black sharecropping family, she had become a fierce organizer, arguing to increase the level of welfare payments, especially for single mothers. She was raising small children and, as she pointed out, it would cost the state infinitely more if she stopped doing it at home; yet payments were so slight that the end of each month she brought Kool-Aid and potatoes. For Ms. magazine, she also wrote a lethal analysis of the welfare system as a gigantic jealous husband who looked under your bed for other men’s shoes, controlled your life with endless paperwork and doled out an inadequate allowance.

On the phone, she explained that Nevada, the only state in which prostitution was legal, had come up with a double whammy. Since prostitution was being described by a powerful combination of academics, pimps and some prostituted women themselves as ‘sex work’, a job like any other, women were being told that either they try it or lose their welfare payments, unemployment cheque or other benefits meant for the jobless. The state was saving money and creating a tourist attraction at the same time.

It took two days of protest marches on the strip outside Las Vegas hotels by the full membership of the NWRO, outrageous speeches about ‘body invasion’ by my speaking partner Flo Kennedy, celebrities who attracted national press and general disruption of the carefree atmosphere cultivated for tourists.

It also took a surrealistic few hours marching outside the Mustang Ranch, the first legal brothel of Nevada, looking at the occasional woman who peered out at us curiously while women peered out at us from the window of a house trailer that was an individual brothel. In the end, media attention forced the state to withdraw its threat.

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Women’s movements around the world have been fighting the criminal and global sex-trafficking industry for as long as I can remember. In Germany, I heard that the same pressure had been put on the women recipients of unemployment and other government programmes. There, prostitution was called ‘hospitality work’. There must not have been many takers in that prosperous country. When the 2006 World Cup in soccer was held there, about 40,000 women and children were trafficked in, mostly from the surrounding and poorer countries of the former Soviet Union, all to the service athletes and fans gathered from around the world.

In 2008, I went back to Nevada and its county of legalized prostitution with an experienced activist who thought she could gain entry into one of the new brothels. No such luck. Because it is legal, illegally trafficked women from other countries had probably been taken there to be ‘broken in’, and the owner, a man with a gun in his belt, was cautious. He was also said to be the single biggest contributor to the campaigns of judges in the state of Nevada, and he refused us even a drink at an empty bar.

Since this brothel, too, consisted of many house trailers lined up behind a high storm fence, we went to its farthest side where there was a restaurant and saloon run by a woman who had been living there for years. She told us that she saw the owner buying cartons of ramen noodles at a shopping centre, so she knew that’s what he fed ‘his girls’. She, too, bought soup and threw individual cartons over the fence. ‘I know those girls don’t get enough to eat,’ she said, ‘and this way, he won’t know.’

So much for better conditions that are supposed to come with being legal.

Enforcement of some laws against trafficking of children has been successful. Even those who still believe that legalization creates better conditions probably do not want this life for children. But since the average age of entry into prostitution is between 12 and 13 in the US—and between nine and 12 in India—how successful can they be? Even if they were, how could one look at an 18-year-old? It would mean saying, ‘I’m sorry, I could have offered you a help and a way out yesterday, but today you are on your own.’

And what is happening globally is that females are being pulled into the sex trade ever younger, partly because of the idea that they are less likely to have AIDS or most surrealistic of all that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. Also son preference in, say, China has resulted in skewed sex ratio and that has resulted in using deception and force to bring girls and women from, say, North Korea.

Indeed, this importation of women takes place form south to north within India.

And there are still the two opposite forces of criminalization and legalization. The first is supported by patriarchal religious power that condemns as sinful all sexual expressions that cannot end in conception, and does not take place within patriarchal marriage. The second is the equally patriarchal but secular idea that freedom and democracy and even human rights are defined as the maximum sexual availability of females to males under male terms. For instance, there are groups that talk about ‘the human right to be a sex worker’, but not the human right not to be a sex worker. This view does not have religion behind it, but it does have the huge sums of money of the sex industry plus the increasing power of pornography that normalizes the sexual domination of women. Porne means female slaves, while eros means love and it implies mutual pleasure and free choice. Pornography is as different from erotica as rape is different from sex.

Most women’s movements have fought for the Third Way: for making a living outside prostitution, for safe places to live in or at least meet outside brothels, for schools for children so girls need not be prostituted and boys need not become pimps, healthcare, safety from corrupt police, and just as important, respect, listening and friendship. Yet because women’s movements have generally fought prostitution and sex trafficking, they are sometimes condemned as anti-sex by secular groups. Because they emphasize pleasure, not just reproduction, they are often condemned by the patriarchal religious world.

But this Third Way of listening and offering alternatives—of educating buyers about the cruelty and reality of the world they are supporting—is lessening demand and saving lives from Chicago to Sweden. Even some of the countries once most devoted to legalizing prostitution are discovering that it just does not work.

None of this is easy. It is a huge global industry and interfering with its profits can be dangerous. Many prostituted women, children and men, too, have their own Stockholm Syndrome to overcome. A woman may have been sexually abused as a child and come to believe she has no other value or she may belong to a group that has been prostituted for generations. But it is a tribute to the human spirit, both among the activists and prostituted people, that in my country, groups are seeing women transform from objects to self-willed human beings.

And we are finding out that many myths are wrong: indoor prostitution is no less traumatizing than outdoor and buzzers in rooms prevent injury by sadistic customers. The overall rate of life expectancy for prostituted women is comparable to men in combat. Indeed, body invasion is even more traumatizing than external beatings. Our skin is our defence and our body is our domain, our sense of self.

It also has not been possible to independently document any diminishing of AIDS or child prostitution, despite payment to brothel owners to distribute condoms and despite declarations of so-called unions that claim to bar children. When I have been to Sonagachi, for instance, I have looked inside open doorways and seen the children. But then, unlike Bill gates, I did not announce that I was coming.

And I also have seen signs all in Bengali, except for two large English words: SEX WORKERS. Though I have often been ashamed of the foreign policy of my country, I have never been ashamed of my own women’s movement until I saw those words so clearly imported from the US. Having one’s body invaded by strangers is not just any job. The term ‘sex workers’ can be and has been used to deny unemployment and welfare and other benefits to those who refuse such ‘work’. I hope this term was once invented by women in search for at least verbal dignity but now it has become the property of sex-traffickers and brothel profiteers seeking unlimited demand. As I watch women being lined up in the street like cattle next to that ‘sex workers’ sign and see children sitting inside a doorway under those words, I realize that I, for one, can never say them again, except to apologize.

While it may or may not be legal for an individual adult woman or man to sell her or his sexual services, it should not be legal to sell the bodies of others. Thus pimps, brothel-keepers and certainly traffickers should be pursued with the full force of law. In Scandinavian countries, it is not illegal to sell sex but it is illegal and subject to a fine to buy it. France has also passed a law to fine customers. This is not irrational; it is simply a recognition of unequal power and thus unequal responsibility. And arrest does not mean jail for men who have committed no other crime; it means a fine and learning the human cost of this industry that sells the right to dominate other humans. For the first time, attention is shifting from the powerless and no longer criminalized supplier to the powerful demand.

We have reached a crucial place in history. We know that prostitution is not inevitable, that it is a function of unequal power. Yet, in my country, there are girls and women, especially women of colour and Native American women, who are tattooed with a pimp’s distinguishing mark so other pimps will be warned away; sometimes even a tattoo that is itself a price code. This is hard and inhuman to see.

Remember that the key is listening and change happens from the bottom up. For instance, I went to Zambia for a conference on sex trafficking. Afterwards, I visited friends who live on the Zambezi River and I ended up sitting on a tarpaulin in the middle of a hot and dusty field, in a circle with 20 or so village women. They were shy, our languages were diverse, and I thought: This is one time when the magic of women in a circle is not going to work.

Then one woman began to say the unsayable, that her husband was beating her and she did not know what to do. The others supported her and began to tell the truth too.

Gradually, I learned that what sent the women to Lusaka to be sex trafficked was the need for money to buy food and pay their children’s school fees. Crops had been cut by two-thirds because the World Bank had built a dam in the Zambezi River to produce electricity, promised irrigation systems but never delivered. The women were carrying water in buckets to grow maize, yet once it grew, the elephants ate it.

I asked what they needed and they said they wanted an electric fence to keep the elephants out. Then they could grow enough maize for themselves and also to sell.

So I went home and raised a few thousand dollars for a fence. It was not much.

When I went back the next year, the women had pulled up acres of weeds by hand, carried buckets of water from the river and raised a bumper crop of maize, enough for their own family food security for a year and also to pay school fees.

They sang songs to the maize. We danced to the maize.

If you had asked me how to stop women from those villages going to Lusaka and being sex-trafficked, I never would have said, ‘An electrified fence.’ But that was just what it was.

We have to listen to each other. We can go both back and forward to a time when sexuality was about mutual pleasure and procreation if you chose. It will again be our human bond. Sex will be its own reward.