Virginia- WELCOME to a night at the movies, with such wide- ranging selections as “Hard Core Sluts,” “I Screwed My Friend’s Wild Mom,” and “Bi Oral: All Oral,” plus the fetching “Teeny Thais.” Welcome, in other words, to millions of rooms in thousands of chain and franchised hotels, including several in Greater Fredericksburg. Welcome, in other words, to 21st-century slavery.
Pornographic pay-per-view movies watched in a hotel room and women and girls dragooned into whoredom before a camera are as connected as the links in a shackle. Although it is hard to prove that woman X in porn film Y is a victim of sexual trafficking, the roaring commercial demand for smut exemplified by hotel porn–by one estimate, a $500 million-per-year business–has stimulated a supply of unwilling human flesh so vast that some call this the second age of slavery.
The International Labor Organization puts the number of people held in bondage–including sexual bondage–at 12.3 million. Of the 800,000 people annually trafficked across national borders, reports the State Department, most are females forced to earn money for their masters on their backs.
Forced prostitution and the technology-triggered explosion of pornography–the $5 million to $10 million in U.S. retail sales generated by hard-core porn in 1970 is now matched by the annual profits of a single Internet site and represents just 1 percent of yearly hotel-TV sales–are parts of a sex industry that can’t be “disaggregate[d],” says Ambassador Mark Lagon, director of the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “Pimps need new women and girls as the sex market flourishes.”
AGAIN AND AGAIN
What is viewed on a hotel-room “adult” channel–actual prostitution–would in most U.S. jurisdictions be illegal if produced in that room. But the prostitution and, often, de facto rape of XXX “actresses” occur somewhere, and the fungibility of human skin in the digital age potentially makes pornography’s destinations infinite. A 2003 study by clinical psychologist Melissa Farley involving 854 prostitutes in nine countries on five continents reported that 49 percent of the “tricks” had pornography made of them. Many prostitutes, homeless and financially desperate, suffer childhood sexual abuse; those who survive the trade with their psyches minimally intact are haunted by the knowledge that, somewhere, a visual record of their exploitation survives on film or disc. Porn isn’t harmless, certainly not to its most degraded victims. “Why are some people saying prostitution is okay?” one former trick asked activist Julie Bindel. “Do they want to be a spittoon for men’s semen like I was?”
Cursory watchers of hotel porn are familiar with that, and many other, images. But if second-hand prostitution is a fetid revenue source for many of America’s big-name hotels, it is especially inappropriate in Fredericksburg inns.
Teenage girls in the city are having babies at three times the state average rate–a social problem that has roused Mayor Tom Tomzak, a physician, to rail against the sexual abuse of girls by men. But that message is, shall we say, unreinforced by “Barely Legal/Corrupted No. 7” and “Pure and Innocent: First Timers”–titles offered by LodgeNet, the top porn seller to U.S. hotels. An increasingly pornographied culture–hotels that serve as video-brothels are, alas, giving many guests all the corrupting comforts of home–may blithely dismiss these perversions, but parents may wonder how their young daughters are viewed by men who’ve spent the evening in a Marriott or a Holiday Inn mentally wallowing in such fare.
Some parents, tragically, need not speculate about the nexus between porn and victimized girls. Although the link between smut and sex crimes can be reasonably debated, there is no small evidence on the affirmative side. More than three-fourths of serial killers, notes family advocate Michael McManus, citing an FBI study, use “hard-core and soft-core porn to fuel their anticipatory fantasy.”
EROTICIZING CHILDREN
This precisely profiles Richard Marc Evonitz, the murderer of three Spotsylvania County girls (16, 15, and 12), whose porn was so precious to him that, even with the police hot on his trail, he dashed to his apartment to grab it. Would local hoteliers who purvey to their guests borderline child porn–which, writes human-trafficking author David Guinn, “implicitly endorses child abuse [and] enculturates the viewer to eroticize children”–care to explain to those girls’ parents how “Barely Legal,” et al. do no harm?
An iron law of economics is that an increased public desire for a commodity increases its output. When demand explodes for the sexual defilement of females on a TV or computer screen, and too few women and girls voluntarily market their bodies, the suppliers turn to other means of production. Thus, the UN ranks human trafficking behind only illegal drugs and weapons as a profit-maker for global criminals, and includes porn as a form of trafficking when its victims are “recruited” by threats, force, or deception–all M.O.s of today’s slave merchants.
This year, notes Ambassador Lagon, is the 200th anniversary of America’s outlawing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade–a time to wise up about slavery’s modern guises. Alas, no such perspicuity was evident when the civic-minded of Fredericksburg passionately critiqued the exterior construction of the downtown Courtyard by Marriott hotel, but gave no thought to the grotesque deconstruction of human dignity that occurs within most Marriotts.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for civil society to join a “modern, growing abolitionist movement” against human trafficking. That starts with curtailing demand for the goods the traffickers hawk. A stone block at the corner of William and Charles streets marks the spot where helpless human beings once were auctioned in Fredericksburg. Tourists ask, “Why did they allow this?”
Future tourists may add: “Twice?”