Toxic Sex Culture
Sex is supposed to be a good thing. As loving adults, we can enjoy a wide variety of sexual experiences with one or many partners throughout our lives. Unfortunately, toxic ideas are all around us. When I see how it hurts our young ones, it makes me crazy.
The average age a prostitute starts hooking is 14 years old. If that’s the average, then for every girl who starts at 16, there’s a girl starting at 12. Grown men are having sex with these little girls. Some of them are responsible for coercing them into it in the first place. All of them are responsible for keeping them there. It’s an epidemic of child sexual abuse that no one seems to care about. After all, these girls are breaking the law, right?
Describing the trauma of prostitution, and its consequences, one fourteen year old stated: "You feel like a piece of hamburger meat – all chopped up and barely holding together" (D. Kelly Weisberg, 1985, Children of the Night, Lexington Books, Toronto).
Don’t even try to tell me that prostitution is a choice when little girls are brought into the life, drug-addicted, violated, abused, and made dependent on men who are willing to exploit them until they are all used up. In The Journal of Trauma Practice, 89% of prostitutes reported that they were desperate to escape (2003).
Teen porn, and the focus on teens as the most sexually desirable, is a problem on many levels. It’s not healthy or right. When teenagers have sex, they’re supposed to be having sex with other teenagers. The only money exchanging hands should be at the corner 7-11 store to buy a box of condoms.
"It takes a village to create a prostitute."
Melissa Farley
posted by Theresa @ 8/31/2005 08:10:00 AM
13 Comments:
how very sad ...
.... and very true.
You nailed it with "Teen porn, and the focus on teens as the most sexually desirable, is a problem on many levels."
Great post my Hot-T!
The obsession with teens in general baffles me. I remember the sex I had in my teenage years. It sucked. Give me an "experienced" woman (as long as she has great pears) over a teenager any day.
Sexy and sensible: You will make us all better people.
I like your point about the only sex they should be having is with other teens, and the only money being exchanged is at the 7-11 for condoms. WELL SAID.
let's hope they use condoms!
The Salvation Army did one of the most comprehensive surveys among commerical sex workers about 5-7 years ago now and they found that close to 99% of the women on the street had been sexually abused before age 12 and that, of those that were abused, app 90% were first abused by a family member. I've become more and more convinced that the vast majority of societal problems are really rooted in the sexual abuse of children (sexually abused by people adults who were most likely abused themselves).
Abuse...plain & simple...is wrong.
I can not comprehend this being an actual choice that anyone would make.
The teen porn emphasis has another impact as well, and that's how the emphasis further creates this damaging culture of youth, a culture which demands we don't honor the natural aging of our bodies when we run out for plastic surgery or Botox injections.
Sure, we'd like to be young forever, and being with a teen might make men (and women, as they aren't completely inculpable) feel young, but I've come to learn that the much more satisfying partners are those with experience, which generally means older. Maybe the whole MILF thing will overshadow the teen thing one day.
Yeah. I don't have much first hand experience, except seeing the unhealthy focus in porn venues. It's all creepy.
I would say these men who try to do this should be "circumsized" ... Where they would not be able to think abt anything like that ..
That is so upsetting when you hear abt the same ...
./thanks
ilaiy
Not to throw a damper on this, especially since I feel very passionately about both child sexual abuse and prostitution (especially street prostitution) but are those figures credible?
There's certainly vast amounts of child and teen predation, but a number of other studies suggest that 14 is probably a bit young for an *average* age to begin turning tricks. I'm prepared to believe this is true in certain demographics but not all.
The two main problems are that a) service agencies, and popular culture, tend to focus on subsistance/street prostitutes but these may represent as few as 15-20% of all prostitutes if you include escorts and private-list prostitutes.
I first became interested in prostitution (and I'm interested only in the public-policy sense and by no means in a personal or economic sense) when the Green River serial killer was murdering street prostitutes on an almost weekly basis in the Northwest in the 1980s. In my part of the country in the last 20 years or so between 300 and 500 are believed to have been serially killed by a relative handfull of murderers and that's just fucking too many human lives lost to stay in the dark about who they are and how they got there.
Prostitution is an abhorrent act to a lot of people, and consequently the men and women who engage in it tend to be massively stereotyped and categorized into fairly unrealistic templates. I know the Salvation Army and other groups have good intentions but I just don't think it's productive to pull a "Jerry's Kids" number on them and treat prostitutes, as a class, as vegetative stumps in thrall to this substance, that manipulator, the other social background. More to the point, the stereotypes alienate a number of women (escorts for instance) who sell their bodies but don't recognize themselves in the classic stereotypes and therefore don't participate in efforts to redress the overwhelming tendency for subsistance prostitutes to be raped, robbed, roughed up, murdered, and dumped along riversides and in pig farms.
Finally, indulging in such stereotypes permits us to tut-tut knowingly and say "well, it only goes to show." A lot of these people need real help and they're not going to get it until we can identify with them more personally as fairly ordinary people who are generally able to make intelligent choices when choices are made available to them.
Finally, propagating these stereotypes makes it easier, rather than harder, for their customers to discount their humanity, and from dehumanization it's only another step to (non-transactionally) victimize them.
Yeeks! I'm sorry if I sounded cranky about this. Transactional sex is a total rats nest of conflicting issues that just aren't going to begin to be untangled until the whole process is clearly illuminated. I passionately want to see it untangled. There's just too much carnage not to.
figleaf
Ahh wrong word ""circumsized" ... you should have there "private parts" removed .. So they could see it every day and seewhat they did was wrong ... There should be no excuse to this ..
This is what I feel personally ..
./thanks
ilaiy
it is so true and sad...me myself i like the older woman image...even though now i am older than the older woman of my fantasies....35 to whatever age...these women will tell you what they want whether it is to buzz off or come on honey....
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