[image is from here]
Take it, conquer it, enslave it, overwhelm it. Trick it, manipulate it, seduce it, drug it. Buy it, sell it, consume it, lend it around. Then get another one and enjoy beginning again. If she resists, break her down. Use violence or the threat of violence in the right way and she will beg, cringe, cry; she will help you hurt her so that you will hurt her less--this is the arithmetic of female oppression.
-- Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, page 28.P.I.M.P., or PIMP: a possessive, invasive, misogynist profiteer
W.I.M.P., or WIMP: a woman-invading misogynist procurer
C.R.A.P., or CRAP: corporate, racist, atrocious patriarchy
P.R.I.C.K., or PRICK: patriarchal, racist, ignorant, condescending, know-it-all
PIMPing is among the most lucrative political occupations a man can enact in a society that views women as sexxx-things or just as things for men to have patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist versions of "sex" with/at/on/in. When I say "occupations" I am using the term in two ways: as an indicator of what he does for work to earn money, and as a signal or alarm for what he does politically to her to earn status as a man. His work or occupation is renting out women. His political work is to occupy women. From dictionary.com, for "occupy", the verb:
| 1. | to take or fill up (space, time, etc.): I occupied my evenings reading novels. |
| 2. | to engage or employ the mind, energy, or attention of: Occupy the children with a game while I prepare dinner. |
| 3. | to be a resident or tenant of; dwell in: We occupied the same house for 20 years. |
| 4. | to take possession and control of (a place), as by military invasion. |
| 5. | to hold (a position, office, etc.). |
The PIMP (the possessive, invasive, misogynist profiteer) takes, holds, employs, possesses, controls, resides in and occupies women personally, psychically, politically, and physically through acts of invasion of her body and being. She may or may not acquiesce. She may or may not resist. She may or may not, under unusual circumstances known mostly in the West, "choose" to be exploited in some or all of those ways.
The politics of choice is never examined enough. In a liberal country, terms like choice and consent become meaningless so often that one wonders why we base laws and customs on them.
In the U.S., and in many other places around the world, people are not free to choose to not live in a patriarchal society, nor are we free to choose to live outside a white supremacist system, nor are we free to choose to not live in a capitalist state. Oppressors, structurally located and socially positioned through law and custom, have privileges and entitlements that those they oppress do not. These are material, meaningful protections. They can and do often mean the difference between living with or without care and consideration that is institutionally mandated and compulsory at both ends. The oppressed must, on some level, take care of and be considerate of the oppressor. The oppressor is, often, under no compulsory or mandatory, legal or customary obligation to do likewise. The oppressor gets to choose how much care or consideration he will dispense. The oppressed do not get to choose. If they aren't caring and considerate enough, they will be ridiculed, punished, or destroyed.
These privileges and entitlements can and often do mean the difference between living and dying. But neither groups is free, if by free we mean capable of living without CRAP. CRAP is toxic to all, but is more than toxic to the oppressed. To the oppressed living in CRAP means sustaining various levels of systemic and systematic abuse and neglect. Care and consideration from the oppressors is often not negotiable. Whereas the oppressor negotiates the terms of care and consideration he receives, with and without the consent of the oppressed. It is up to him how humane he will be, but however humane he is, he is still an oppressor, structurally and systemically. These structures and systems are only flexible enough to bend without breaking; they are aggressively resistant to any radical change. It is the collective work of the oppressor and the oppressed that keep these structures and systems in place. But it is only the oppressors who are in control. This is to say, these structures and systems could not be maintained without the labor and lives of the oppressed, but the oppressed cannot determine the direction or destruction of these structures and systems without the assistance and cooperation of the oppressor.
What we have here is relative freedom. We can measure our level of freedom by the degrees to which we are able to make class-liberating choices. Some of us (adults, men, whites, the wealthy) have more relative freedom than others (children, women, non-whites, the poor, respectively). Class-liberating choice-making exists only for the oppressors among us. Men can choose to be freer, for example, by loosening the straight-jackets they put on in order to be men. Women's straight-jackets, by comparison, tend to get tighter the looser the men's get. This may seem counter-intuitive, but as men get more freedom, they seek to further control and direct it. And they direct it to one another individually, disproportionately. Systemically and systematically, they direct it to their class only.
In this social and political framework, those most exploited and enslaved sexually are from the populations of people who have the least freedoms, the least opportunities to make liberating choices for themselves as a class.
It should come as no surprise then, that poor girls of color are extremely abused in systems of prostitution, trafficking, and sexual slavery. It should also come as no surprise that wealthier white heterosexual men from the Global North and West tend to travel to the Global South and East to purchase, rent, possess, occupy, and enslave girls. They do this often and a lot; often and a lot is too often and too much. The only humane level of this happening is not ever, and never at all.
There is a term for what these Western white men do. It is a term that is designed never to convey the inhumanity and horror of what these men do. The callous and cold term is "sex tourism". But it is not "sex tourism": it is, rather, the knowledgeable, willful, and horrific predation, possession, occupation, and destruction of human life using "sex" as an oppressive weapon against those who are told they must take care of and be considerate to their oppressors. Nothing could define atrocity more accurately than that.
What all girls are told by PIMPs is that PIMPs look out for girls. Women are told similar things. But the PIMP only looks out for himself. He is not even capable of looking out for her because his job, economically and politically, is to sell her out WIMPS who want to abuse her for their own pleasure and for the PIMPs profit. The individual acts of the PIMPs and the WIMPs function as a class action over and against those classes of human beings they occupy and oppress.
The WIMP and the PIMP get pleasure and profit from procuring and possessing women, girls, and boys.
"Sex tourism" rather disturbingly invisibilises an atrocity committed through class-strengthening white heterosexual male (WHM) supremacist activity, offering WHM protection from the stigma and negative consequences of their actions over and against others.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy weave together a value system that most profoundly injures the humanity and invisibilises the human status of poor women and girls of color.
Within white and non-white societies and cultures, the most oppressed are also the most stigmatised and stereotyped. If you ask white and Black straight married men what Black women who are not their mothers, wives, or daughters exist to do, the woman may want to shoot them when they honestly express their answer. Mick Jagger expressed this answer very effectively in his song "Brown Sugar". The lyrics, written by Mick "the PRICK" Jagger, and by Keith Richards are as follows:
"Brown Sugar"
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)
Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright
Hear him with the women just around midnight
Brown sugar how come you taste so good?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should
Drums beating, cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonderin' where it's gonna stop
House boy knows that he's doing alright
You shoulda heard him just around midnight
Brown sugar how come you taste so good, now?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should, now
Ah, get along, brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, got me feelin' now, brown sugar just like a black girl should
I bet your mama was a tent show queen
Had all the boyfriends at sweet sixteen
I'm no schoolboy but I know what I like
You shoulda heard me just around midnight
Brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, brown sugar just like a young girl should, yeah
I said yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
How come you...how come you taste so good?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
Just like a...just like a black girl should
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
To possess and inhabit a woman is to make terribly dehumanising and oppressive assumptions about what women are on Earth for. They are on Earth to be and to do as they please, not to be done to. To live for themselves, not for men. To enjoy life, not to endure it only. To thrive, not just to survive. To experience the richness of living then naturally dying, not the poverty of living while fearing rape, possession, and death from men and their institutions of misogynistic abuse and atrocity.
To possess and inhabit a woman in any patriarchal system, but particularly in a system of prostitution or sexual trafficking or sexual slavery is to turn women into something worse than a thing. As has been noted in a variety of ways, men take better care of the cars they use repeatedly than they do the women they use repeatedly. Men love their favorite music, with on-going verbalised appreciation and respect, more than they love the women in their lives.
When men commit atrocity, we tend to deny it, and when the evidence is laid out before us, we call it a matter of nature or god's [sadistic] will, not a PIMP and WIMP (man-made) misogynistic disaster. But we men are responsible more than any other factor. Check the stats. Do the math.
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