I saw the movie Call + Response. Thank you, Shannon for turning me on to it. Please go to www.callandresponse.com to find out about show times in your area.
It is about modern day slavery – the fact of its existence, the vastness of it. It's not simply little girls getting kidnapped from their villages to be sold to brothels. There are child soldiers, there are men and women-whole villages-who are enslaved for labor purposes. And the cartels which run the drugs and the guns, they run the people trafficking too. For all we know, the clothes we buy are made via slave labor; an essential metal for our cell phone, mined by slave child labor.
The movie is a sort of benefit concert, with commentary to inform and encourage. It is a calling to attention and action, a provider of ways to respond.
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What kind of person desires to have sex with a 3-year old? Or a 7-year old? I'm not talking about cultures I don't understand or know enough about, I'm not talking about the brothels of India or Southeast Asia, or even Europe. I'm talking about the Americans who do this, going to a massage parlor, seeing that the child can't be more than 12, looking like the gymnasts of old. Traveling abroad specifically for the opportunity to 'get a little girl' (or a little boy), to have a child perform fellatio on them. What kind of person is stimulated by watching 5-year old orphans spread their legs on camera?
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High-heels for infants who aren't even close to walking are available for purchase. Could someone explain to me how this is not another way to promote a child as a sexual object? Because one there is a widely acknowledged sexual component to the wearing of heels, particularly high heels. Yes, there are power heels for the office. But that underlying power our sexuality.
Men having sex with teenage girls is so common place, so fabled, so aspired to. Why? That school girl craze of a several years ago, with the short prep school plaid skirt and the knee high socks. Why did fully mature women have to mimic teenage girls in order to be seen as attractive? And why is a woman's attractiveness solely sexual? (Or seemingly portrayed as such in common media?)
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There are women who speak and fight and speak and fight for such causes. There are programs to teach and reinforce positive self-image in girls, so that they don't succumb to the prevalent American myth? that the only value she has is by being both sexually well versed and suitably chaste, that her womanhood is described by how good she 'does it' and how she's not a slut. (Did no one bother to mention that how good one is most likely depends on practice, but the more one practices, the more looked down upon one becomes?)
What I would like to see are more male voices talking to men and boys. I hear things here and there, but teaching girls to keep their legs shut means nothing if the boys are dropping their pants and pushing thier thighs back open. (And not necessarily by brute force, gentle persuasion and muddled emotions can be a deathknell.)
I'm not sure that boys would listen to women. I am confident that they would not listen to me. My psychodrama seems so peculiar to my gender. And I do not understand.
I do not understand why promiscuity seems to be so prized by the men of our modern society. (Before one launches into an evolutionary argument about having the most offspring a la a lion, do not forget that the more offspring one has, the more mouths must be fed. I do not have the impression, from the little I've read, that ancient man, in his multi-partner ways, neglected his offspring. One would think that the need to feed so many mouths would be a dis-incentive for planting so much seed.) I am not trying to advocate monogamy. I am trying to understand what would drive a man to visit brothels in the first place. Hit it and quit it leaves many a woman feeling soulless; does it not do the same for men?
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