March 09, 2012
Knights in Shining Armour: Men who Rescue Sex Workers and Slaves
Laura Agustín over at Naked Anthropologist:
Men at the higher end of the evolutionary scale: That is how one man has described men who want to save sex slaves, seeking to differentiate themselves from less civilised, bad men – the ones that buy sex. In this idea, being a Good Man is achieved not by concern for world peace, equal opportunity, racism, the end of poverty or war but rather by concern for sex slaves.
Recently I published a sober academic review of a book that is not academic at all, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Afterwards, I republished the review in Counterpunch, with a snappy introduction for the occasion...
The publisher of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn, has forwarded me a letter from the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation objecting to the piece, calling me a journalist, which I am not, and obviously not checking to see who I am before writing the letter. He also doesn’t seem to have read past that introductory paragraph to the review of the book, where he might have found real issues to think about.
In Laura Agustin’s cynical worldview, men who hold the opinion that prostituting women is wrong and endeavor to do something about it are, in fact, misguided crusaders in the tradition of Don Quixote lost in chivalric fantasy on a mortal quest to feed their own egos by saving damsels in distress. In her article, Not Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, Sex Trafficking, Agustin specifically targets two men amongst what she portrays as a growing parade of attention-seeking phony heroes (cue the paparazzi) – Nicholas Kristof and Siddharth Kara.
Unsettling as it is for Agustin to accept the presence of men at the higher end of the evolutionary scale, Kristof and Kara are helping to shed light on a culture of gender exploitation that has survived only because of spin and lies. Where the rest of us see two men of intelligence and compassion, Agustin sees ulterior motive. In my experience, ones own ill intent makes one suspicious of ill intent in others. What is Agustin’s motive in attacking those working hard to end the exploitation of women? More spin and lies I suspect.
Robert J. Benz
Founder & Executive Vice President
Frederick Douglass Family FoundationA culture of gender exploitation has only survived because of spin and lies? What? No interest in poverty or cultures of gender inequality from this crusader! Cynicism is in the eye of the beholder, of course. Note that Benz clearly places his kind of man on the high end of evolution, in that overtly colonialistic move in which white men save brown women from brown men...
(Here is a debate on trafficking with Laura Agustin and Siddharth Kara, among others, over at the BBC. Also here is an intervew with Siddharth Kara over at Columbia University Press.)
Posted by Robin Varghese at 04:24 PM | Permalink
Comments
My God. I'm listening to this debate right now and frankly, Ms. Agustin gives academic cunt hair-splitting a bad name (and I'm being deliberately crude here). She's honed a niche and, by god, she's sticking to it. I am not impressed.
Posted by: David Jensen | Mar 10, 2012 12:45:52 AM
Fortunately, David Jensen, most rational people don't equate vulgarity with valid criticism. Having watched the whole debate, which is about an extremely complex issue that admits no easy solutions (the hypocritical pleas of Hollywood stars notwithstanding), I thought Laura Agustin's contribution, specifically her view that a heterogeneous problem should not be reduced to the worst-case scenario, was important, and Ronald Noble, Interpol's General Secretary, pretty much agreed with all the distinctions she was trying to draw. So how about advancing an actual argument for why you're not impressed instead of simply insulting Laura Agustin's gender?
Posted by: Alasdair Cameron | Mar 10, 2012 5:31:58 AM
"Academic cunt hair-splitting." This, you do not say, David Jensen, without severe reproach. It's a desperately ugly comment, and when you've had more time to reflect, I think you'll write to ask that it be removed. Whatever you make of Laura Agustin, you cannot distance yourself from those words fast enough.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 10, 2012 9:36:21 PM
David Jensen,
Could you please cite an example when "academic cunt hair-splitting" has been given a good name? Or, to be crude as well, explain what the hell it is?
Posted by: TriciaWow | Mar 11, 2012 12:54:26 AM
FWIW:
"AFP, Thailand investigate claims of fake rescue of children from sex slavery" - http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/524834-afp-thailand-investigate-claims-of-fake-rescue-of-children-from-sex-slavery
And,
"BANGKOK: -- Being a sex worker these days isn't what it used to be, at least for those whose rights are backed up by the Empower Foundation. Much has improved - no more pimps or mamasans, and fewer punches thrown their way. Being "rescued", though, causes them all sorts of problems." - http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/538603-thailands-sex-workers-dont-want-to-be-rescued
It's just that I live in Thailand. And I am sooooo tired of Christian missionaries here to save the brown people from themselves (and make good Christians of them).
Posted by: Ashley | Mar 11, 2012 6:20:25 AM
At first blush, it's difficult to criticize advocates for victims of slavery, violence, forced sex work, and so many other evils. After all, getting the message out there and making people aware of such horrors are extremely important. If they are a bit short on documentation and the rigor of proper research, they can be forgiven for doing their work in the service of the Lord, or for the rest of humanity.
While the increasing dawn light is still noticeably rosy, it's tempting to caution the academics that they ought to cool it. Knights in shining armor function on a different, though worthy, plane, and should not be held to an intellectual or publication standard that doesn't apply. Savior knights split skulls, not hairs, and we should not expect them to do otherwise.
In the full light of day we come back to an incontrovertible fact. You cannot begin to solve a significant problem before it is properly described. Once you have clearly described and understood the problem, you are miles ahead in finding or developing a solution. To do this requires rigor in method: definitions, research, data, analysis, critical review, field experience, and professional supervision.
In the debate on trafficking (link above) only two people understood this, Laura Agustin and Ronald Noble, Secretary General, Interpol. For example, Agustin makes a distinction between voluntary participation in human smuggling [I want to leave my country and go to another country.] and human trafficking. Except for Noble, the reaction of the other panel members seems to be, "Whatever." This is an extremely important distinction because anti-immigration politics can tend to conflate, inappropriately, crossing borders to seek a better life, with the horrors of sex slavery and forced labor.
Tilters of windmills, and knights in shining armor are not all bad. In fact, we need more of them. They do have to be reminded, though, not to go it alone. They need the help of others to illuminate the real problems, and keep them focused and on task.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 11, 2012 12:49:39 PM
It's been a slow weekend here on the blog. I'm still waiting for David Jensen to ask that his remark be removed from the record. For it to remain here means that it's okay for academic women to be insulted with obscene language -- and insulted AS women -- for doing what academic men do. That is, considering a situation with the utmost accuracy, delivering a nuanced reading. Disagreeing with that reading, or just sounding off to say you find it tedious, can be accomplished without calling a learned woman a "cunt." And, it had better be.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 11, 2012 1:39:30 PM
On the contrary, Elatia, I think the remark should be allowed to stand. May "academic cunt hair-splitting" rise to the top of the links and be forever chained to David Jensen's name when anyone in future is curious to know the man behind anything else he happens to say. May he beg to have the comment removed, and may the esteemed editors refuse.
Posted by: Zara | Mar 11, 2012 4:23:55 PM
Zara, you have a point. I Googled David Jensen, and some nouns cognonymous with the one we find regrettable here are already attached to his name, on different kinds of Internet forums. We don't know that's his real name, however. Maybe there's another David Jensen. If so, he's making it difficult for this one to get a fair hearing.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 11, 2012 5:03:35 PM
David Jensen, your vulgarity is not appreciated here at 3QD.
Anonymous may hack your computer and stifle your crude comments for now and evermore.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 11, 2012 5:34:39 PM
This is a serious problem here in Massachusetts:
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/25642550/detail.html
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 11, 2012 5:44:23 PM
At the very least, David Jensen is in someone else's living room and he should be courteous, to say the least. The opening of his comment was not just discourteous or bad mannered. It was an outrageous insult. He doesn't need more cognonymous hits on 3QD.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 11, 2012 6:19:10 PM
Context, comedians and c-words
Posted by: prasad | Mar 11, 2012 6:23:41 PM
This isn't comedy. It's a serious article about trafficking, slavery, forced labor . . .
BTW, the BBC debate was excellent.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 11, 2012 6:50:09 PM
No doubt, but the word-debate was quite farcical by my lights. Whatever the hell Mr. Jensen was doing with his deliberately provocative word-choice, it offered, by construction, no insight into his views about women, or anything else. He revealed no more than his awareness (quite accurate) that in this crowd he'd provoke a reaction. If this were a religious place he might have blasphemed. We know this quite well; we understand quite intuitively that taboo words may be deployed not *just* to convey the sentiment they invoke but precisely to annoy those who would enforce the taboo, for universally comprehensible pleasure of annoying the pious. And yet we willingly get taken in by the trollery, pretending that we don't understand what's going on, and do this over and over again, with different actors and words every week. There's more than an element of the puppet and the string in that response.
Except when we don't want to do the thing; when someone (like Maher) uses the bad words, but who we don't want to yell at, and in whom we are less willing than usual to suspect ill-will toward the group we're being solicitous of. Then we stop the charade, and invoke context at last. For one blessed moment we stop with the word policing, and think about what the transgressor was actually getting at with his performance.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 11, 2012 7:14:24 PM
I don't think Maher was funny, either. It's a very ugly word.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 11, 2012 7:25:48 PM
(continued) It's not a moment that can last; mere word taboos (unlike context dependent proscriptions of ideas, like the idea supposedly defended here, that women conduct academic inquiry in a peculiarly hair-splitting, vaginal way) cannot be long maintained against those who test the boundaries for the joy of pushing against them and their enforcers, if you give any indication of grokking that you know what they're up to. What's hard for me to understand is why the offensive-word-game, rather than the offensive-idea-game, is worth playing.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 11, 2012 7:28:38 PM
The C-word man was not playing an idea game. He made an ad feminam attack and left it at that without explaining why he was not impressed.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 11, 2012 7:46:40 PM
Prasad, you make some interesting and intelligent points about side issues. Of course "David Jensen" knows he's being rude -- he says as much. I didn't fall for it, knee-jerk style. It's the first time I've see anyone use that word here, AND it coincides with a big backlash against women in our culture. I believe that to make the kind of distinction you do between thought and language is a debating society turn, a bit unworthy of someone as supremely smart as you are.
Bill Maher's trade is outrage with a strong mysogynistic current, but then he didn't sign in here and use obscenities to put down academic women. You will notice I have not suggested "David Jensen" be censored or policed -- only that he think over his usage and consider petitioning an editor to remove the comment. Whether 3QD is a place where learned women can be called disgusting obscenities, and where the way they carry out their academic endeavors may be characterized with gender-specific obscenities, is not for me to say. I am free to reproach the commenter, however, and to make a request of him.
I have used that freedom, as have several others here. I don't hugely care if "David Jensen" is secretly gruntled by all the attention -- my guiding principle cannot be making sure to give no pleasure to foul-mouthed sexists who like to offend. If only enough women, and men, were guided by the notion that disgusting language would die out with zero reinforcement, we would be living in a world entirely ruled by frat-boys and their whiffy utterances that the rest of us were just too cool to deal with. In fact, we are getting -- back -- to that world faster than we think.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 11, 2012 10:34:42 PM
David Jensen's vulgar language and the distressing point of view his language reveals, has contaminated the free flowing discourse at 3QD, where cavalier demeaning comments have no place.
Posted by: R. Zinn | Mar 12, 2012 2:41:55 AM
I am extremely uncomfortable with this kind of language. As an academic, I have been named this and worse, accused of taking work away from men, etc. This is unacceptable.
Simply stating that you are being crude on purpose does not make it therefore acceptable. David Jensen chose the words for their full value and was not naive on that point. It also detracts from the focus of the thesis putting emphasis on the violent manner of dismissing the author, because she is a woman with whom he disagrees.
Pissed off.
Posted by: Karen | Mar 12, 2012 10:26:23 AM
What Karen, R. Zinn, Elatia Harris, Louise Gordon, Alasdair Cameron, TriciaWow, and some of what Zara said.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 12, 2012 11:53:44 AM
Maybe what follows is that 3QD needs comment moderation, like digg or slashdot, if trolling can't be ignored. Because if Mr. Jensen can hit-and-run to completely derail discussion on any forum at the drop of a word, well, he's basically in charge, isn't he? Maybe it's just I'm not a parent yet, but I'm pretty sure that's not how you deal with a five-year-old.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 12, 2012 12:49:29 PM
Elatia,
Sure, I don't think I'm saying anything about "censoring" or "freedom." Also, I wasn't saying language is distinct from thought, only that to understand what someone's saying you have to look not just at what words they type but at what you think they're "up to." I don't think that's a debating trick at all. What Mr. Jensen was doing was to make people jump up and down, and since no-one holds a stick to his head, taking him seriously (or worse pretending to take him seriously, like he isn't trolling) doesn't help anything much. In the game this thread played, I'm pretty sure he won and everyone else wasted a lot of time. I'm not arguing against combating misogyny, but against
a. feeding trollery
b. taking people at face value despite indication they're not being earnest, or even interested in the truth value of what they say
Posted by: prasad | Mar 12, 2012 1:01:21 PM
Prasad, I think you're giving David Jensen too much credit. I think he was just being lazy and stupid, and pleased with himself over what he thought was a well-turned phrase. We've learned to ignore the routine trolls here well enough.
Posted by: Zara | Mar 12, 2012 1:29:34 PM
Oh, for fuck's sake. It's perfectly OK to respond to a sexist epithet with a "Hey, that's not cool, fuckwit."
Try substituting a racist epithet here. I think there would, rightly, be objections and no one would be hand-slapping the objectors. No one would let a racist epithet stand, uncommented upon.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 12, 2012 1:58:21 PM
I would like to add Vicki Baker to my Honors list, above.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 12, 2012 2:48:02 PM
Prasad, it's awful to be in an argument with you, when I admire you and your intelligence. But I am a veteran of these wars -- the semantic ones, the ones about whether boyz club language is merely contemptibly regressive while utterly harmless, the ones about whether learned women are as vulnerable as those without education to sexist slurs, and so on. Experience leads me not to take this David Jensen dude for a troll. He is hoping for a pass to the boyz club by providing its members with a chuckle at the expense of learned women. He is hoping the atmosphere around here is hospitable to that, because it's actually all he has to offer. Trolls are nowhere nearly so socially desperate.
I agree with Zara here. He doesn't "win" because he got attention, because that wasn't his aim. His aim was, I believe, to find acceptance with other sexists by being "witty." That it's grotesque and pathetic does not make him a troll, still less a troll who has won the day. In so far as his language, without reproach, has given encouragement to men don't like women in places that were once a male preserve, we may expect more of the same. In so far as he wants to be taken seriously by other men like himself, who are yet plentiful -- well, a few men aren't sitting still for it.
I would appreciate it if you denied him the easy entree he seeks, the camaraderie with men who hate women, the comparisons with successful entertainers who also hate women, and the trivialization that is, actually, his license to continue. If he were a troll after all, then we would ignore him like we do other trolls. But that's not what he is. He's an asshole seeking a beach head. He has used the worst word you can use to insult women, a word with no equivalent when it comes to the derogation of men. Who knows if the editors are reading? And how did it become more important to you to ignore faux-trolls than to stand up for the rights of women not to be abused?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 12, 2012 6:09:38 PM
Not at all, I quite enjoy constructive argument with wise interlocutors, and the more forthright the better.
"And how did it become more important to you to ignore faux-trolls than to stand up for the rights of women not to be abused?"
That's a bit of a won't-you-stop-beating-your-wife question from my perspective, since I don't think Mr Jensen was interested in anything more profound than hijacking the conversation! I'm not buying that he came here expecting secret or not-so-secret sympathy. No doubt Mr. Jensen could shed light, but one doesn't expect that.
As to why ignoring trolls (nothing 'faux' about it) might be worthwhile, this thread is evidence enough for me me - compare the number of comments that have *anything* to do with the post to that ego-stoking [the word I wanted to type is readily deduced from context] Mr. Jensen. Naturally I don't exempt my own comments, since whilst i deplore the engagement I have not managed to end it. Anyway, I'm not persuaded his importance justifies this engagement.
Contra Vicki I think the trolling would be *more* obvious if he Kramered on us, not less. Then one would just call him a brisk name in return, in precisely the manner she suggests, ignore from there on, and cut off the oxygen supply. There wouldn't be a prolonged discussion, reproaching him, asking him for an apology, appealing to his conscience and such ad nauseam.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 12, 2012 7:05:48 PM
I'm not sure what "Kramered on us" means. What I am sure of is that you are metaphorically slapping the hands of people who are objecting to sexist epithets. If you want to move the conversation along, I would suggest something along the lines of "You're absolutely right, whatshisname is a misogynist fuckwit, let's ignore him and discuss the article."
If you want to re-focus the discussion, don't, for example, assert that his misogynist slur offers "no insight into his views about women." That is just bullshit.
Misogynist fuckwits happen. Comments by random fuckwits are not a reason for Abbas to rescue distressed damsels with the banhammer. But at this point, you with your "no insight into his views on women blah blah blah", are a millino times more depressing and enraging than the random fuckwit in question.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 12, 2012 7:47:50 PM
Vicki, I'm not interested in "depressing and enraging" you per se, but a. Jeez. Everyone else on this thread is on your side. It can't be that hard to suffer my view. You're even on Norman's several honor lists. b. seeing that I believe my argument, and that you've accused me of peddling bullshit, I'll make my last response to you. I *didn't* say slurs don't offer insight into character in general (whilst it is possible to be awful without slurs or non-awful with, presumably it's a lot easier to be awful with than without.) My claim is that the particular kind of awfulness we've best reason to infer from this particular slur in context is a generalized desire to troll, not any particular cognitive belief about women or their place in society. That was the point of my blasphemy comparison way back on my first comment.
If you think I'm a "million times worse" than our first in some sense, shrug. We soldier on.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 12, 2012 8:41:23 PM
"Comments by random fuckwits are not a reason for Abbas to rescue distressed damsels with the banhammer."
I imagine this refers to my one mention of comment moderation, as at digg or slashdot. Well, benevolent overlords are not how either of those sites handles moderation either.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 12, 2012 8:54:02 PM
For anyone still tuned in -- I skimmed the article but did not read it, which is not to say I found it tedious or took exception to it, only that there's so much here only a real introvert could stay on top of it all. Whether I have read a particular article or not, I find that it is often only a pretext for interactions with others here; many threads morph into being about anything but the article. I spoke up not to defend Ms. Agustin from an extremely crude diss, but to defend the social space we all share from degradation by language that is harmful and hateful.
It is my personal view, backed up by mainstream research, that language of this type doesn't go away if we only act as if it were not there. Rather, it flourishes. Like other forms of abuse, this kind of language is insidious and infectious. It could easily become blog culture for men to weigh in like that: nuthin' to say but obscenities against women, and a place where boyz are tacitly understood to be boyz to say it. I would hate for that to happen here.
So far, people who make remarks that are racist do not get written off as trolls here. It's not a comfy atmosphere for that, thank heaven. But obscenity wedded to prejudice and verbal violence against women spreads outward rather than remaining the isolated work of one singularly feckless intellect, and it compromises the rights of others, too. I respect people who hold differing points of view from mine -- many of them are just plain smarter than I am. But I can remember when college girls would have been expected to titter at the remark in question, quite as if it were funny, because, if you have no rights -- well, isn't it a little priggish to be sticking up for them? Things are different now -- may they remain so. But Thomas Jefferson's words gather meaning with every new assault on women that our era yields up: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 12, 2012 10:35:22 PM
"...histrionic hipster faggot...".
Almost a month ago, a reader who identified himself as "ModernGuy" took a shot at one of our own writers at 3QD. I addressed my outrage to "NeanderthalGuy," and here is part of my comment:
"However, I ask if you would explain your use of the pejorative, 'faggot,' in your comment. You disagree with his delivery and some of his views, but so what. I do not understand how hurling such an invective, and label of opprobrium and humiliation bolsters your criticism of him.
"3QD does tolerate a bit of "up yours," "yo' Mama," and "damn fool." If 3QD will not object to an abusive and derogatory epithet, then I will."
And, in fact, no one else did. I was the only one who objected.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 13, 2012 2:11:17 AM
I missed that one, Norman -- I would have objected to it, as well.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 13, 2012 10:03:48 AM
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