What’s Current: Chris Hedges calls Amnesty’s prostitution vote ‘a profound setback’

Six johns who murdered six women in 2014 (Top, L to R: Mathew Cherrington, Mateusz Kosecki, Michael Wenham. Bottom L to R: Robert Fraser, Steven Mathieson, Nicholae Patraucean)
Six johns who murdered six women in 2014 (Top, L to R: Mathew Cherrington, Mateusz Kosecki, Michael Wenham. Bottom L to R: Robert Fraser, Steven Mathieson, Nicholae Patraucean)

Chris Hedges with the help of Lee Lakeman, Alice Lee, and Rachel Moran, brilliantly conveys the sickness of our neoliberal culture, in which a renowned and respected humanitarian organization advocates for modern slave masters to openly ply their trade.

We live in a global culture where the wretched of the earth are chattel and where sexual slavery—which is what most prostituted women and girls around the globe endure—is sanctified by market forces. These women and girls are among our most vulnerable. After being crushed by poverty, racism and sexism, they are unable to find other ways to make a sustainable income. They are treated little better than livestock transported to markets for consumption. That a so-called human rights organization parrots vile justifications is emblematic of the depth of our moral degeneration and the triumph of misogyny.

Prostitution is not safe for women. The vast majority of violence against prostituted women is committed by the buyers of sex. Karen Ingala Smith shows us a tale of six johns.

“If we care about liberating women, then we need a united sisterhood in the feminist movement.” A toxic mix of faux “intersectionality” and identity politics has taken over online feminism, used to tear down and silence women in the name of social justice.

While we sit there behind our screens deciding who is a TERF or a SWERF, there are women with caring responsibilities who don’t have the time to engage. Due to the way our society is structured, having a baby can lead to innumerable structural inequalities for women. What about what feminism can do for them?

Sometimes we cannot even clearly distinguish when men are being violent towards us. It’s “50 Shades of Grey area.”

“Let’s Expose the Gender Pay Gap.” Britain recently introduced a plan requiring companies with 250 employees or more to publicly report their own gender pay gap. It joins a handful of other countries, including Austria and Belgium that have introduced similar rules. Let’s make the companies in the U.S. be required to publicly publish their gender pay gap.

Meghan Murphy

Founder & Editor

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist from Vancouver, BC. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including The Spectator, UnHerd, Quillette, the CBC, New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and is now exiled in Mexico with her very photogenic dog.