In college, I spent a year working as a youth counselor at a center for at-risk teens. When I’d tell people what I did, I generally encountered positive reactions. People commonly commended me on the importance of the work that I was doing. Of course, most of them assumed that I was working with teen drug addicts or general troublemakers. When I’d clarify that I worked with teenage sex offenders, the air disappeared, and usually so did the conversation. In fact, you may have noticed your own chest tightening even as you read the phrase, “teenage sex offender.”
Since that time, I’ve noticed again and again that most people in our country are not only uncomfortable talking about anything sexual but that they are also much more comfortable discussing violence. Of course, not only do most sexual crimes involve violence, but our refusal to talk about some of the sexual issues facing America actually perpetuates violence. In so many ways, our silence — our American sexual squeamishness — is getting people killed.
One of the first examples that comes to mind when you bring up the disproportionate reaction Americans have between sex and violence is Janet Jackson’s famous Super Bowl Halftime wardrobe malfunction. The public outcry over an accidentally exposed breast was louder and more prevalent over the course of a week than anything I’ve heard in my lifetime about, say, the massive multi-billion-dollar human sex trade industry in America. Let me be clear: Janet Jackson’s exposed breast was not a sexual issue America needed to address. That is not why people threw a fit. People threw a fit because they were forced to face something of a sexual nature. I mean, what are they supposed to say to little Jimmy after he saw that? Never mind our casual reaction to concussion-riddled players being carried off the field.
I’ve noticed the same concept with most people’s attitudes toward the pornography industry. Generally, people aren’t upset on behalf of the porn actors and actresses who often deal with literally brutal working conditions (seriously, read Gail Dines’ “Porn Land” ) than they are on behalf of their poor husband, son, or neighbor who had the unimaginable misfortune of being exposed to such smut. See, to get to the real sexual issues facing America requires us to get our hands dirty, so to speak, and we are much more comfortable dealing with surface issues. And we’re usually only touching those issues in order to push the topic further away from us.
Where this relationship between sex and violence becomes immensely more important is when it moves from theory to incidents not only affecting individuals but whole groups of people.
The rape culture we find ourselves living in is built upon our sexual squeamishness. Talking about the victims of sexual violence makes us uncomfortable, so we turn the victim into the transgressor. It seems much more comfortable for us to discuss how a woman should have been more modest to avoid what happened to her (a bullshit argument) than we are actually talking about what happened to her. So high schools throw a fit every time a teenage girl wears something that exposes her shoulders or knees, and yet I’ve heard people dismissed as angry feminists (note: “feminist” shouldn’t be an insult) for talking about the fact that a woman’s chance of being raped in college is one in four or that every 107 seconds another American is sexually assaulted, or that 98 percent of rapists will never spend a day in jail or prison. I’d dare guess the average American is less familiar with these types of statistic than they are with Ronda Rousey’s MMA record.
See, if we dehumanize the victims of sexual crimes, it lessens the offense, and in turn our delicate sensibilities are less offended. This is why most Americans assume, first that the sex slave trade is only something that happens to Liam Neeson’s daughter in a country far, far away and second that if it does happen here it must be a low-income issue, one brought in by Donald Trump’s dirty rapist foreigners.
The reality is that, while it shouldn’t matter if the victims are U.S. citizens or not, 83 percent of them are born right here in America. And most of their pimps aren’t strangers dressed in gold chains and big purple hats — it’s their own relatives. As one victim of the sex slave trade explained,
“If you’re expecting my ‘sold into child slavery’ story to begin with guys in ski masks bursting into my bedroom and snatching me up in the night, the actual story is worse, in a way. One night, my stepdad just pulled me out of bed and said, ‘Come here, uncle needs to see you.’ There were zero uncles downstairs. But there were several creepy, creepy men who passed me around from lap to lap and paid him for the privilege.”
She explained further:
“When I was that age, it didn’t go beyond ‘sit on uncle’s lap.’ I’d do as I was told and they’d call me a good girl and that was that — I obviously had no idea what was going on. Then I got a few years older, and they started sending me off on ‘private sessions.’ Yes, that means exactly what you think it means. Let’s not kid ourselves.”
The pool of clients her family pimped her out to wasn’t isolated to lower-income men. Lower-income men cannot fuel a multi-billion dollar industry all by themselves. In fact, one of the big cash payouts for these American pimps is selling the girls into arranged marriages. The girl in this example was nearly purchased for $50,000, but her parents figured they could hold out for more. The issue isn’t a little problem, either. Between 2008 and 2014, over 4,000 children were freed from U.S. sex trafficking. But, just as was the case when this girl found a way to go to the police, it’s easier for us to turn away and “pretend not to see.”
Dehumanizing people doesn’t only happen to someone after he or she become a victim of sexual violence; in many cases, it is what perpetuates the violence. Thankfully, we as a nation have come a long way in the past decade in relation to how we treat and see gay and lesbian individuals. People like my brother have, thank god, become human to a much greater portion of the population. This trend is reflected in our national hate crime statistics. Now, I’m not saying hate crimes against gay and lesbian individuals aren’t still a huge problem in America. They are. However, I do want to draw attention to the fact that as gay and lesbian people become more human to us, we become less comfortable with them facing potential violence.
Sadly, this idea is only emphasized when you look at the current hate crime trends in relation to transgender individuals. According to The Advocate, while overall violence against LGBTQ people is down, violence against transgender people is up 13 percent. For far too many Americans, transgender people aren’t people. They are jokes. They are a very popular subcategory of porn. They are flashy headlines too soon forgotten.
Now, I understand that America is a big old boat and that it takes a while to get us turned in the right direction. Yes, eventually we may work our way out of our sexual shell and become comfortable addressing these issues; however, for transgender people, for the one out of six women who are the victims of attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, for the tens of thousands of children trapped in the American sex slave trade, those changes are coming far too late.
Good read. The culture in America is slowly getting better in many ways, but I still constantly find myself surprised at the devaluing of segments of people who don’t fit an individual’s ideal template for what a “good” person is. Many religions have done a wonderful job in making people ashamed of their sexuality. It is absolutely not a woman or girl’s fault a man becomes aroused at the girls appearance. A man lacking self control cannot put the blame for his actions on others because they stimulated him against his will. A person feeling physically attracted to the same sex is frequently taught to be so ashamed of their feelings that they may go as far a suicide to escape their predicament. Everyone needs to learn to respect individual agency and freedom and recognize that personal moral codes may not apply to others. Everyone ought to have the exact same rights and respect regardless of age, race, gender, sexuality, etc. Tolerating the differences of others is the true price of freedom, not sending people to die on a battlefield.
Well said, Ryan.