Revolution #279, September 2, 2012
Pornography, Sex Slavery and the Military:
This is the Imperialist System…
This is What They Want You to Vote For
In today’s world, millions of young women and children are kidnapped, or sold by their starving families, or lured with the promises of employment and then sold across borders into a sex-slave trade on a scale never seen before in history. This is happening in a world dominated by the capitalist-imperialist system where everything and everyone is transformed into a commodity.
The extreme sexual violence of the global sex trade is embedded in the culture of reactionary armies, including the U.S. military, which treats women as prizes of war, and as objects to torture in the brothels around military bases throughout the world.
Fundamentally, an army is a concentration of the society it fights for. The army of U.S. imperialism uses the objectification of women and pornography as a cohering force and reward, from the barracks to the brothels to the battlefields.
In the U.S. military: women are raped and sexually assaulted by male soldiers at nearly twice the rate as in civilian society; nearly 1 in 3 women soldiers will be raped and assaulted in the short span of 2-6 years while serving. Women soldiers are more in danger of being raped by a fellow soldier than of being killed by enemy fire. Because of the element of betrayal, rape and sexual assault contributes more strongly to developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than combat-related stress. The long-term consequences for these women are severe PTSD and lifelong problems with depression, alcohol abuse, and chronic illness. Journalist Helen Benedict, who has studied women serving in Iraq, said the woman-hating in military culture is so pervasive, from boot camp through active duty, that she could only describe it as “sexual persecution.”
The response of the U.S. military command structure has been to downplay and cover up this epidemic wherever possible, or to give lip service to promises of reforms, while continuing to do little or nothing. Women who report military sexual assault can expect to be ignored, threatened and retaliated against, including by being diagnosed with a “psychiatric disorder” and discharged. As a result, the great majority of women who are raped or sexually assaulted do not report it.
At the same time, in the military, sex is increasingly equated with violence. The most grotesque scenes of sexualized torture from the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are reproduced at porn sites, as are battlefield scenes of Iraqi women’s bodies with their clothes torn off; there are even depictions of U.S. soldiers gang-raping Afghani women during military assaults. This is all part of degrading those they conquer.
With more than 200,000 troops stationed in 130 countries—not counting the 90,000 troops in Afghanistan or the hundreds of thousands of private contractors working for the military—sex slavery flourishes around U.S. bases worldwide. In 2009 former prostitutes in South Korea accused their government and the U.S. military of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s to 1980s, complete with a testing and treatment system to ensure the prostitutes used by American troops were disease-free. “Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women said. Another said, “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”
Kathryn Bolkovac, hired in 1999 for an international “peacekeeping mission” in post-war Bosnia (one of several national groupings that fought for their independence following the break-up of the country of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s), blew the whistle on a sex slavery ring that included extreme sexual violence and torture of trafficked young women, and the selling of female children as young as 12, hidden and protected by the U.S. State Department, the UN, and a private military contractor—DynCorp.
For being the whistleblower on these crimes against women, Bolkovac was threatened, fired, and sent home. Despite a lawsuit, no one was held accountable; and DynCorp was awarded a $250 million contract to train the Iraqi police force.
So the horror grinds on. Neither Obama nor Romney, Democrats nor Republicans, have seriously questioned, let alone challenged, the ugly patriarchal, male supremacist social relations rampant in this society and concentrated in its military.
Only a few months back, Secret Service agents and U.S. soldiers “bought” at least 20 prostitutes while in Cartagena, Colombia, in advance of an Obama visit. Obama went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and called those involved “knuckleheads,” as though a frat party had gotten out of hand.
This system needs, thrives on, and is cohered around the most violent forms of patriarchy and male domination; and neither the Democratic nor the Republican party can, or will, call that into question.
This is the Imperialist System…
This is What They Want You to Vote For
Liberals have an Oedipal complex: It's not that they want to sleep with their mothers—it's that they willfully blind themselves. Bob Avakian |
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