Chapter 7 - People Are Not Products
FbF Book Club: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Perry, 2022)
Previous Entry - Violence Is Not Love
Around six or seven years ago, I decided to take a trip by car from Split, Croatia all the way to Barcelona, Spain. This was during the month of June, so the weather was guaranteed to be quite pleasant along the Mediterranean and its hinterland.
I had driven down from Milan all the way to Split many times previously, so I raced through this leg of the journey in the opposite direction, choosing to stay overnight in Milan as it was roughly the halfway point of the trip. I had not booked a room in advance, so I found myself looking around for a hotel not too far off of the highway. I found myself in an industrial area to the southeast of the city, and I noticed something very, very odd in the distance: there were people standing on the side of the road, each one alone, but seemingly equidistant from the next.
“Wait a sec”, I thought to myself. “These must be those prostitutes that I’ve heard of before.”
As I turned down the road to investigate, I saw cars approaching slowly and methodically from the opposite direction. As I got closer, I saw that these people were indeed female prostitutes, and they were all Black. Completing one circumnavigation, I noted that they were all wearing very tight miniskirts, and they all had a small campfire in front of them to keep them warm (it was already well past midnight).
“Italian guys are the biggest dogs”, I laughed to myself as I sped off towards the nearby Holiday Inn.
There are an estimated 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes in Italy alone, making up anywhere between 60% and 70% of the overall supply in that country. Strictly controlled by the Nigerian Mafia, they are lured to Italy (and elsewhere, including South Africa) with the promise of well-paying service jobs as waitresses or maids before being forced into prostitution. Most of them come from Edo State in Nigeria’s south, a poor part of the country lacking the oil wealth of the East and the agricultural abundance of other states. Italy has imported a class of foreign prostitutes to sate the market demand for cheap and easy sex.
Commonly described as “the world’s oldest profession”, prostitution has stood the test of time to be a permanent feature of human civilization. It is this “profession”, that is the subject of the seventh chapter of Louise Perry’s book.
She opens this chapter by introducing us to a woman known as Josephine Butler who campaigned against the procurement of prostitutes in India by the British military for their soldiers (one of her many, many campaigns). I did not know this detail of British history, but it falls firmly within what we know about warfare and prostitution:
For British Army officials in the 1880s, for instance, the necessary link between prostitution and the colonial project was simply common sense. The vast numbers of British men stationed in India needed to be provided with prostitutes, and the authorities would rather not have an epidemic of venereal disease on their hands. Thus there was a procurement system put in place. A circular memorandum from the quartermaster general, dated 1886, decreed that ‘it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women [and] to take care that they are sufficiently attractive.’
To acquire these women – described in this same memorandum as ‘convenient arrangements’ – British officials would typically show up in Indian villages and flourish a government order for prostitutes. ‘The poor people are afraid to refuse or resist; their daughters are delivered up,’ reported one medical officer. These young women – many of them below the age of consent in Britain at the time – were bought for 3 rupees apiece and then kept effectively imprisoned in the army brothels.
Warfare and prostitution go hand-in-hand. It’s a tale as old as time.
The madams took their clothes away on arrival, leaving them with only a translucent gown that would be conspicuously scanty if they ever ventured out on the streets, making escape difficult. The girls were also controlled through economic coercion, since they were required to pay a daily fee for their lodging, and this fee was made deliberately higher than the tiny sums they were paid by punters, meaning that a prostitute accumulated debt the longer she ‘worked’, tying her to the brothel forever.
The economic coercion of a well-known strip club owner (he owned over a dozen at one point) in Canada. This man (belonging to my ethnic group) hit upon the idea of sending scouts to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to find new talent for his first club. He imported strippers from some of these countries (most were from Romania or the Czech Republic). Upon arrival, he would take their passports and tell them that they would get them back once they earned him a set amount of money, something between $20,000 and $50,000 if my memory serves me correctly.