David Mitchell

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, has quickly catapulted into my top five favorite authors, of any genre.  He rocks.  Anyway, in one of his novels, Number9Dream, one of Mitchell's characters writes a poignant history of her enslavement that I want to share with you.  The novel is set in Japan, but it might as well be set in any so-called civilized country.  I'm going to italicize the part that I think is most important, because I have to remind people of the phenomenon of blissful, hopeful ignorance all the time.  Because we think we have made the world such a better place than fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago, we ignore the realities that our own attitudes and ignorance create, and so we then vehemently reject the truth that there are 27 million slaves in the world today.  I hear so many voices ringing in my head arguing with me, "There can't possibly be that many!  I would know about it.  And in the United States?  No.  At least, no more than a few thousand."  What?  Are you serious?  That's more than ignorance; that's a harmful arrogance.

Without further ado, I will quote Kazue Yamaya's account with no further commentary.

"The doorbell rang.  I answered it, and three men barged in the door and snapped the chain my husband had trained me to use.  They demanded to know where my husband was hiding.  I demanded to know who they were.  One slapped me hard enough to dislodge a tooth.  "Your husband's case officers," he snarled, "and we [not my italics] ask the questions."  He and another searched the house while the third watched me to try to reassure my screaming son.  He threatened to maim my son if I didn't tell him where my husband was.  I called my husband at work and discovered he had phoned in sick that morning.  I called my husband's cell phone and discovered the number had been disconnected.  I called his pager--dead... My son watched with big scared eyes.  The two other thugs returned with a box of my husband's personal effects and all of my jewelry.  Then the bad news really began.  I learned that my husband had run up debts of over fifty million yen with a yakuza-backed credit organization.  Our life insurance policy had been doctored to name this organization as sole beneficiary in the event of his suicide.  The house and contents were their property if my husband defaulted on repayments.  "And that," said the most violent of the three, "includes you."  My son was taken into the next room.  I was told I was now responsible for my husband's debts.  I was then beaten and raped.  Photographs were taken "to guarantee my obedience."  I had to endure this torment in silence, for the sake of my son.  If I failed to obey their orders, the photographs would be sent to every name in my address book.

A month later I was living in a single windowless room in a buraku [not my italics] area of Osaka.  I was indentured to a brothel, and I was not allowed to leave the building or have any contact with the outside world, beyond sex with my customers.  You may doubt that sexual enslavement is practiced in twenty-first-century Japan.  Your ignorance is enviable, but your disbelief is precisely why such enslavement can prosper unchecked.  It happens; it happened to me.  I myself would have doubted "respectable" women could be forced into the sex industry, but the owners are masters of control.  I was dispossessed of every item from my old life that could have reminded me of who I was--except my son.  I was allowed to keep my son--this prevented me from escaping by suicide.  My customers not only knew about my imprisonment, they derived pleasure from it, and would have been implicated in the crime had it become public.  The final wall between me and the real world was perhaps the strongest: a phenomenon psychologists label "hostage syndrome"--the conviction that my fate was deserved and that no "crime" was being perpetrated.  After all, I was a prostitute.  What right did I have to bring shame to my old friends or even to my mother by appealing for help?  Better that they carry on believing I had disappeared overseas with my bankrupt husband.  Six other women, three with babies younger than my son, shared my floor.  The man who raped me was our pimp--it was him we had to beg for food, medicine, even diapers for our children.  He also supplied narcotics, in careful quantities.  He administered them personally to ensure we couldn't overdose... In time our old lives became detached from what we had become."

The account continues, but this is enough to capture, despite its being fiction, the reality of the cruelty that sex slavery is.  And, of course, this story could have easily been about some other form of slavery.  It's all equally unexpected and horrible.

Unknowingly Supporting Trafficking

One of my major arguments in this blog and in my book is that we all unknowingly support human trafficking in some way.  The uniqueness of my argument is that I say it is not only the things that we do that support human trafficking, but the way that we think and talk, too; our very attitudes contribute to slavery, whether we like it or not. 

There are more tangible ways that we contribute to slavery, too, of course.  I don't focus on the tangible so much as I should, though that's partly because I truly believe that if we can change our very beings to be aware and compassionate of the humanness of others then tangible acts would become unnecessary.  In helping think about the tangible, my fiancee pointed out this article to me: Unknowingly Supporting Trafficking.  

If you have been concerned about slavery for awhile now, you may have thought about how buying clothes, chocolate (or coffee and other goods) that's not fair trade, and fruit can contribute to trafficking.  You've probably also given thought to the massage parlor industry, especially considering that this blog and my book have talked a good deal about some of those.  Still, it's worth the reminder that slaves are working in various industries that produce what we consume.  The article is a quick read so I hope you'll read it.  I don't have anything in particular to add to it except that I hope you will think long and hard about how you consume products: just because consuming products does not bring us face-to-face with another human being does not mean that we can stop being aware and compassionate of the humanness of others.

Belle Knox

If you have not heard of Belle Knox, then you can Google her and learn a whole lot very quickly.  Be careful when you do so, though, because she is what most people term a "porn star."  In my book, I did my best to refer to those working in pornography as "pornographic actors," trying to return some of their human dignity back to them.  Pornographic actors are human beings just like you and me, and yet the problem with pornography is that we are able to degrade what we view through a medium--usually a computer or TV screen--to less than human; and once we do that, it's not a far jump to degrading people that we actually encounter in life to less than human.  This is why I talk about pornography in my book and on this blog: the relationship between pornography and slavery is not a thin one.  We like to think that it is so that we can go on viewing pornography whenever we have the urge, or at least accepting its presence in our society; and all the while not confront the reality that we are also contributing to the attitudes that create and sustain slavery.

Belle Knox is an interesting figure.  By now you may have paused to look her up and read some about her, so my telling you who she is might be unnecessary.  But anyway.  She is a young student at Duke University, using pornography to pay her way through school.  If you spent a lot of time looking up Belle Knox, you might have realized that there's a lot of speculative writing about her that's not based in fact.  Worse, there's a lot of negatively biased writing about her, suggesting and implying that she is a scourge.  Worse, she has become a target for hate.  Pornographic actors are victims, through and through; just as slaves are victims.

Look, does anyone really think that Belle Knox is the first or only college student paying her way through school with sex?  And why is she not the only one?  Because pornography pays!  And why does pornography pay?  Because we are a society of hypocrites!  We put up a front to the world saying that we are a good person, trustworthy and an upholder of the universal moral code, and then in private we like to degrade and demonize others in a misguided attempt to feel power, love, and self-worth.  Pornography is a major business because of our hypocrisy. 

And we do not like to admit that we are not the good people that we portray, we do not like to admit that we are insecure, we do not like to admit that we do not love ourselves, we do not like to admit that we struggle to find worth, community, and an outlet for our desire for power, so we blame all of our inner struggles on others: the pornographic actors themselves.  That way, we can degrade them all we want while we take advantage of them through a medium, then turn off the screen and walk away as if nothing happened.  What happens, though, if we ever meet a pornographic actor?  Well, then the crap hits the fan, because then we have to acknowledge that there is a part of ourselves that we do not love, and that is likewise unable to love--the part of ourselves that would rather blame others for our faults--the part of ourselves that would rather laugh at, insult, and attack Belle Knox and her family for her existence, than to ever look inward at our own darkness.  Our negative reaction toward her and her family is indicative of just how desperate we should be to change who we are. 

The reaction to Belle Knox's career choice is not surprising to me in the least, but it is extremely disappointing.  Though Knox is not the first or only female or pornographic actor to be blamed for the sadness, badness, and madness of others, the fact that we still have so much room for improvement in ourselves frustrates me, and should frustrate you.  I applaud Knox's bent toward social justice, but I pray that her motive will go beyond the rights of sex workers and instead focus on changing the hearts and minds of citizens everywhere so that one day there will be no need, no demand for pornographic actors or sex slaves: where there is no demand, there will be no supply.