Tag Archives: Sex Work

Exploring What Now?

This is kind of … odd.

At a recent conference on sex trafficking in Orlando, Florida, members of a panel warned attendees about the dangers of space exploration, saying it would be a gold mine for future sex traffickers.

“Space is going to be like a frontier town,” said Nicholas Kristoff, who chaired the panel on Sex Trafficking: the Long Term View. “There will be no law enforcement in space, which means that girls, some as young as 11, could be easily trafficked to colonies on Mars or in the asteroid belt where they would have to service up to 50 men a day in zero gravity.”

Asked for comment by e-mail, Julie Bindel expressed support for a ban on space exploration, noting that science fiction films have frequently depicted prostitution in space. She derided series like Firefly for presenting an unrealistic and unrepresentative model of future sex work. She noted that the film Total Recall featured numerous prostitutes including one with three breasts. “No little girl grows up wanting to be a triple-breasted Martian prostitute.” She further attributed the recent push for space exploration, particularly the Mars One TV show, as being due to efforts by the “pimp lobby” to create a completely new market for sex outside of the bounds of law enforcement.

After the panel, the organizers pointed to a recent study by Dominique Roe Sepowitz and the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research which claimed that ads for interplanetary prostitution have increased 200% in the last year alone and presented evidence that shuttle launches are associated with major increases in sex trafficking. “We have good evidence that women and girls were trafficked into Cape Kennedy during the Apollo program as well,” she said. “Everywhere there is a rocket launch, there is sex trafficking.”

Such opposition is not new. In her seminal book Intercourse, feminist icon Andrea Dworkin noted that rockets have a phallic shape. “The push for more space exploration is clearly an effort to thrust these phallic rockets into the universe’s unconsenting vagina.” She advocated for an “enthusiastic consent” standard from other planets before further human exploration.

I don’t even know what to say about this. We haven’t even gotten a man to the moon in 40 years and we have people worried about the future of sex in space. Takes all types, I guess.

Update: This post was part of Maggie’s April Fool.

Midweek Linkorama

  • Chili grenades? Chili grenades.
  • Stripper week continues on the blog with this story about Iceland banning the practice. This is being proclaimed as a great victory for feminism, but I don’t see that taking away women’s freedom — even if it’s the freedom to “degrade” themselves – and probably forcing them into illegal activity, is progress.
  • A fun story about the First Seder in the White House. I wonder how the Demented Right will square this with their vision of Obama as an Israel-hating Muslim.
  • Radley Balko has a point. Why doesn’t the public have a fraction of the outrage over real killings and bloodshed committed in the name of the War on Drug as they do about a brick thrown through a politician’s window?
  • Barack Obama and the Democrats kept abstinence-only education funding in the healthcare bill. Because what this country really needs to bring our healthcare bills down is a bunch of pregnant teenagers. And I thought I was snarked out on that subject.
  • You know the thing I hate about being a libertarian? Being right all the time. For the last decade, we warned that states were spending beyond their limits and creating a fiscal time bomb. We were right. Again.
  • More on the Godwinizing of the Tea Party.
  • Some legal humor from one of my favorite judges.
  • Politically Incorrect Linkorama

  • Is diversity training a sham? It wouldn’t surprise me at all. But I’d never admit it in print.
  • OK, I’ll admit it. I read this article because someone linked it up as an article about strippers. But, if you can get by the author’s decolletage, it’s a very fascinating article about how Massachusetts law is making life more difficult for strippers in the name of helping them. (It also confirms that my acquaintance who stripped her way through college and into law school was not unique. And no, she was a friend of a friend. I didn’t meet her in a professional context.)
  • I’m cooking up a post, not sure for which site, that would infuriate my old feminist philosophy professor. It may be a while, but I’ll link up this story, about the myth that sex slaves are pulled in for sporting events. What’s amazing is how many members of the religious right and feminist left will respond to this story with dismay — i.e., they’ll be disappointed that there is not a severe sex slave problem that they need to agitate about.
  • Was our War on Fat misguided? I find this especially interesting given an article I read last week about scientists mis-using statistics. We’ve seen this pattern from the Food Grabbers. Ten years ago, we all had to substitute trans fats into our diet. Now we have to get rid of them. Ten years from now they’ll be back. Personally, I think our evolved bodies are too kludgey for strict dietary rules.
  • Speaking of bad science, this sounds like hand writing analysis for the 21st century.
  • OK, enough political incorrectness. Back to plain old BS.

  • Ireland is cutting bureaucrat pay to balance their budget. There is no chance such a thing could happen in this country.
  • The massive epidemic of bad public defenders seems a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. A competent defenders would keep innocent people out of prison and keep appeals from dragging out, saving money in the long run.
  • Hugo Chavez takes Sean Penn’s advice and arrests the owner of the last free television station in Venezuela.
  • I can’t stand Ann Coulter. But I find the Canadian restrictions on free speech even more offensive.