I want to tell you three stories of winning and losing, of selfishness and sacrifice, of this culture.
Story one. Last spring I gave a talk in a small farming community in northwestern Illinois. I drove there from my previous talk in Wisconsin, passing through prime agricultural territory, which is to say cleared and plowed and empty cornfield after cleared and plowed and empty cornfield. When I got to my destination, a delightful retired teacher took me to see the last remaining unplowed prairie in the county. It was more or less downtown, between a busy street and yet another field devoted to agriculture. As he led me across the slender tract, I couldn’t stop weeping at the sight of flowers who were once common and now barely hanging on, butterflies who were once common and now barely hanging on, a mother goose protecting her nest. My (human) host told me that even though this is the last six acres left—just six acres out of 360,000 in the county—the neighboring landowner refuses to stop applying insecticides and herbicides, which of course drift across the fenceline.
That evening, after he introduced me, I took the stage, sat down, and faced a roomful of members of this farming community. I thanked them for their hospitality, told them of my experiences of the previous twenty-four hours, then said, “I think the plow is the most destructive artifact humans have ever created. It destroys every living being on a piece of ground and converts that land to solely human use.”
The members of this farming community looked back at me. One gave a grim smile, then said, “Those plows paid for our houses.”
I nodded, smiled just as grimly, and responded, “That’s precisely the problem, isn’t it?”
Story two begins with me receiving an issue of my alumni magazine from the Colorado School of Mines, which featured an article titled “Hitting Paydirt.” The article tells stories of several “tremendously rewarding” discoveries. There’s a twenty-six-year-old CSM grad who discovered a “virgin deposit” of 2 million ounces of gold. Another grad discovered what became mines in environmentally ravaged Ireland; environmentally ravaged, war-torn, and rape-plagued Somalia; and environmentally ravaged, war-torn, rape-plagued, and slavery- and child-labor-infested Mauritania (the article, of course, only listed the countries, not their misfortunes, many of which are caused or exacerbated by resource extraction). But the story I want to focus on happened in Bolivia, where CSM grad Larry Buchanan, in the employ of a transnational mining corporation (with an address in the Cayman Islands for tax haven purposes, and having since that time gone through bankruptcy and changed its name, emerging as essentially the same company but without the debt), saw what seemed like a promising geological formation. He looked more closely, and found at the center of the deposit a village, complete with ancient stone church.
Buchanan describes it like this: “The silver deposit lay on the surface, mineralized ledges cropped out everywhere around and below a little indigenous village of rock, adobe and grass thatch, called San Cristobal. The cobblestone streets were paved with silver-bearing rock. The rock walls of the houses literally were laced with silver veins. You couldn’t take a step without touching silver. But somehow [sic] it had been overlooked [sic] by everyone [sic].”
He unintentionally answers his own question as to why these indigenous peoples had never put in an open pit mine: “The Quechua culture of southwestern Bolivia is one of multiple gods and spirits, one with a profound respect for the earth in general and curiously [sic], for rocks in particular. They believe rocks are their direct ancestors, living souls that speak, think, feel emotions, and have distinct personalities.”
Buchanan again: “We discovered nearly a half billion tonnes of those silver-plated ancestors of the Quechua. [Yes, he actually said that.] After a year of work, the engineers calculated it contained nearly a billion ounces of silver, enough ore to last seventeen years of intensive mining. The computer models proved it feasible: the profits would be more than enormous and the mine would become a money-machine. [Yes, he actually said that.] It was a company maker, a world-class discovery, a perfect setup.” The only thing in his way was “that poverty-stricken little village right on top of it. If we wanted to make a mine, San Cristobal had to go.”
But the village didn’t go down without a fight—between white people. Buchanan’s wife was against moving the village and forced Buchanan to sleep on the couch, only relenting when Buchanan agreed that they would move to the village for a while to bear witness to the destruction they were causing (or, to use his words, “the opportunities we were offering the people”). This strikes me as a classic example of the conservative/liberal one-two punch of oppression, with the conservative perceiving the oppression as good in itself, while the liberal bears witness to the oppression without doing much of anything to stop it. So Buchanan and his wife watched as people dug up bones from the village’s four-hundred-year-old cemetery to move to their new compound eleven kilometers away. Buchanan joined village elders as they crawled around the cemetery to beg forgiveness for disturbing the dead. He watched as bulldozers leveled the village in just four hours. It was all very difficult for him: “There were times I was literally brought to tears when I would contemplate what the people lost due to my discovery.”
What was once a living village where people resided with their ancestors in the walls, their gods all around them, is now a huge toxic hole in the ground. But it’s all good. Buchanan believes the people now live better lives in the compound; transnational corporations have made 70 billion dollars; and, best of all, Buchanan and his wife wrote a book about it all. “I came to learn life holds so much more of value than just a few billion dollars worth of silver,” he says. Having learned this valuable lesson, Buchanan moved on to other projects, and believes he has just recently discovered another billion-ounce deposit somewhere else.
Story three involves New Zealand tae kwon do athlete Logan Campbell, who funded his dream of reaching the Olympics through being a pimp. He made a lot of money providing women’s bodies for men to use. He even made a video to recruit women into working for him. The advertisement had lots of pretty pictures of women leaping for joy in fields, standing contemplatively on beaches, and sharing warm hugs with happy children. One female voice-over gushed, “When I was a little girl, I used to dream of a life of liberty.” Another asked, “Did you enjoy that? I sure did.” One said, “I’m living the dream.” And another said, “You deserve it.” The ad never did describe precisely what the “it” is that women deserve, but I think most of us would agree that most little girls don’t dream of economically coerced sexual relations with strangers not of their choosing, of years of post-traumatic stress disorder, of broken psyches and broken genitals and broken lives.
The point, really, is that Logan Campbell did get to live his dream. He went to the Olympics on the bodies of women, just like Buchanan’s “tremendously rewarding find” came at the expense of San Cristobal and its deities, and just as plows pay for houses at the expense of everyone else in the biological community. These are all dreams of fame, accomplishment, money, even what we consider necessities, like the way we feed ourselves and the way we financially accumulate. The problem is, all these dreams are someone else’s nightmare.
These stories are not merely what is wrong with this culture, they are the fundamental ethos of this culture: the fulfillment of personal, social, and cultural dreams at the expense of all others. No sane culture would in any way extol any of these stories. So long as these stories are seen as the fulfillment of dreams, where the subjugation of others is not seen as subjugating them but rather as helping them to “live the dream”; so long as this culture considers actions that lead to the destruction of ancient ways of life as “rewarding finds,” where your own murderous behavior is seen as “offering opportunities” for the victims; so long as we find it not only acceptable but right and just to convert the lives of others and the life-support system of the entire planet itself into fodder for us, there is little hope for life on this planet.
Originally published in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion
Featured image: Men’s rights activists, known for their strong defense of women’s autonomy and freedom, at a pro-prostitution rally.
By Jonah Mix / Gender Detective
As the discussion grows around prostitution law in Canada, New Zealand, Germany, and other nations, a common defense of the sex industry keeps coming up – the idea that laws against prostitution tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, making them paternalistic and anti-feminist. According to these supporters of the sex industry, prostitution is a choice a woman makes; legislating against it (even indirectly, through bans on the purchase of sex) is just another example of patriarchal control over women’s sexuality and a denial of their bodily autonomy. As one commenter put it on a recent blog post of mine, “There is nothing feminist about telling women what kind of sex they should or shouldn’t have. Nothing.”
This question about the interplay between free choice and regulation is a valuable one to have. Unfortunately, almost completely absent from the discussion is a second question: Does prostitution itself tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies? How do the demands on behavior made by the sex industry itself compare to the demands on behavior made by legal sanctions against that industry? Supporters of decriminalization are passionate about the impact sex buyer laws might have on women’s sexual freedom – but do they care much at all about the impact of what they’re fighting to decriminalize?
Before I go deeper, I want to make clear that I’m basing this look on the idea of prostitution as a service, which is by no means the only way people understand it. I myself don’t think we should see the sex that takes place in prostitution as a service. But since the people who talk about the sex industry in terms of free choice and bodily autonomy are most likely going to frame it that way, I’m not going to argue the point. Instead, I’m going to argue that the sex-as-service model is incompatible with the idea that we shouldn’t tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.
So, from the start: If sex is a service, then it’s a service purchased like any other: A customer makes a request and offers compensation in return. You ask a plumber to unclog your toilet, and you give him reason to unclog it by offering twenty bucks an hour. You ask a French teacher to help you learn the language, and the French teacher agrees because you’ve offered to pay an enrollment fee in her class. No matter what the service is, every transaction boils down to the simple logic of I want you to do this, and I’m going to provide you with enough of something else that you have reason to oblige.
Without one of those two parts, there’s no transaction anymore. Requesting a service without offering compensation is asking for a favor or making a demand, and compensation by itself is a gift if no request comes attached. Obviously, a client demanding free sex from a woman in prostitution would be rape, and a man giving her money without requesting sex is no longer a client. So for prostitution to be prostitution, we have to have these two features: A man’s request and a man’s compensation.
This notion of a “request” is important. In almost any transaction, the person initiating the purchase of the service is the one who frames the exchange. When you go to hire that plumber, he doesn’t turn around and say, “You know, I see your toilet is clogged, but I’d rather fix this leaky faucet.” Your French teacher doesn’t get to decide the day’s lesson will be on the Baltic languages whether her class likes it or not. Professionals in the service industry might provide advice to customers or guide them from a position of authority, but they’ll never provide a service that doesn’t at least meet some need or desire on the part of the customer. If they did, the customer wouldn’t pay (why would he?) and the transaction would be over.
This doesn’t mean that the service provider’s desires are irrelevant – only that they don’t, by themselves, determine the transaction. For example, I’ve spent years working as an appraiser of rare and antique books, something I absolutely adore. I don’t think I ever appraised a book I didn’t want to appraise, and I went out of my way many times to grow appraisal jobs and guide them towards the best samples I could find. Between poring over old classics and digging up obscure treasures, it was a job I very nearly would have done for free. But it was still the customer’s desire, not mine, that determined what, how, and when I performed my labor. Or, to put it another way, while I said that I may never have appraised a book I didn’t want to appraise, I know for damn sure I never appraised a book the customer didn’t want appraised. How could I? If they didn’t want it, they wouldn’t have been my customer!
Of course, prostitution isn’t comparable to bookselling, even for the people who say it’s a job like any other. But the larger point stands: We’ve all worked a job we didn’t desire, and we all have desires for jobs that don’t and possibly can’t exist. But no one has worked a job their employer didn’t desire be done. In any service industry, it’s the person fronting the bill – he or she who requests the service – that determines what the service will be.
A lot of this seems like boring theoretical busy work, and it very well might be. But the implications for prostitution are enormous. Because prostitution is a service, and because men are overwhelmingly the ones requesting that service, it’s reasonable to assume based on the previous paragraphs that men are the ones who define what prostitution is and how it plays out in the global marketplace. Considering that prostitution involves a physical act, that means that prostitution is an industry in which men tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies.
Just like a plumber is never going to leave your toilet overflowing while he redesigns your bathtub, and your French teacher is never going to start lecturing in Estonian, a woman in prostitution is never going to perform a sex act that doesn’t align with the desire of a male client. That’s not the same as saying she’ll never have any desire of her own for that sex act (although it’s worth asking if a meaningful proportion do). It just means that her desire isn’t the reason that sex act is being performed. Because I’m stuck at my parents’ house this weekend and their Internet is too slow for most of my video games, I decided to take the time and make a chart showing the intersection of male and female desire in the sex industry:
If a sex act is desired by both the male client and the woman in prostitution, then of course it’s likely to happen. And by the same token, there’s very little chance of two people performing a sex act if both find it unappealing. After that, though, the pattern diverges. If a woman in prostitution actually enjoys a sex act, but her male client doesn’t, his refusal to pay outweighs her desire. But sex acts desired by men and not by women are performed in prostitution all the time, whether through the grudging acceptance of the woman or through unambiguous sexual coercion. Even with a generous estimate, it’s likely that hundreds of women endure unwanted sex acts in prostitution for every man who does the same – or, to put it another way, male desire is literally hundreds of time more influential than female desire when it comes to what sex acts occur in prostitution.
This asymmetry exists everywhere in prostitution, not just in the actual sex. A quick search online for brothels and escort agencies comes back with a range of mannerisms, clothing, and presentation choices that could charitably be described as, well… narrow. Beyond a few specialty schoolgirl outfits, nurse ensembles, and one punk-themed “sex dungeon,” the vast majority of women on display are thin, white, wearing heavy makeup, and displayed in some form of lingerie. (The women who aren’t white are specifically marketed as submissive Asians, “fiery” Latinas, and even more explicit racial epithets for Afrikan women.) Exactly as you’d expect, the vast majority of aesthetic choices made in prostitution align with what men generally find arousing.
Of course, it’s theoretically possible that every single woman in these brothel and escort advertisements has an authentic desire to dress like a schoolgirl or in lingerie (although, again, it’s absurd to actually think that). Regardless, that’s not a reasonable explanation for why those styles are so commonly seen. Many women have an authentic desire to wear jeans and t-shirts. Others wear overalls, sweaters with pictures of woodland creatures, ballroom gowns, or knit scarves. But those are rarely, if ever, seen in prostitution – and, if they are, they would only be seen by men who specified that they had those precise interests. Just like in any other industry, women in prostitution have financial incentive to privilege male interest over any personal desires they may or may not have.
Reading blogs and articles by women in prostitution – including those who explicitly support the industry – you can see this male control extending even further into things like speech patterns, mannerisms, the way a woman laughs, the way she walks, and even their basic identity. I just read a post from a woman who was busy trying to find a more “sensual” name after a few clients told her they didn’t like her real one. Another said she asks men beforehand whether or not they want her to smile, because both “too much” and “too little” smiling can be a turn-off depending on their preferences. Read that again: A woman has to alter how much shesmiles,while being penetrated, based on what a man requests. And this is the industry that liberals defend in the name of bodily autonomy?
Prostitution, as a practice, just is men telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. It’s men telling women how to use their bodies, how to move their bodies, how to dress their bodies. What men tell women do with their bodies is the primal guide for how prostitution functions; if we stopped, prostitution couldn’t function. Like all markets, supply responds to demand and the customer is always right. The problem is that the customer wants a fuckable object, not a human being.
Real freedom – not just for women, but for any human being – is incompatible with an industry where rent and food money depends on fulfilling the demands of a stranger. And while all workers suffer under capitalism, we at least tend to see factory work as an expression of control, not liberation. A coal miner isn’t free just because no one tells him he can’t mine coal. The minimum wage shelf-stockers at Walmart don’t have real bodily autonomy just because no one said they can’t take instructions from their boss. It’s a mystery to me, then, why suddenly the legalization of prostitution is seen as a win for women’s freedom, when the result is just a larger set of demands put on their bodies.
Now, I understand the twinge of indignation when some people hear talk about abolishing prostitution. And I understand why “Let women do whatever they want to with their bodies” is an appealing slogan. But if you really aspire to that goal, let me ask: Does that include the woman putting on a miniskirt because she knows she’ll make more than if she wears the jeans she finds more comfortable? Does that include the woman wincing through painful, unpleasant, or just plain boring sex because the alternative is homelessness? Does that include the woman alternating between faking and holding back smiles while a stranger penetrates her? Don’t those women deserve the right to do what they want to with their bodies, and not what the men they depend on for survival want to see done? You may not like that the law sets limits on what a woman can choose to do, but remember: It’s not the law that told her to change her very name for the sake of a man’s erection.
The unmonitored use of mercury, such as in illegal alluvial gold mining, often takes place on tribal peoples’ lands. Discriminatory attitudes towards tribal peoples mean that little action is taken to control it.
In Peru, 80% of a Nahua community have tested positive for high levels of mercury poisoning. 63% of those affected are children. Symptoms include anemia and renal failure, and one child has already died displaying symptoms consistent with mercury poisoning.
The Peruvian government has known about the mercury contamination since 2014 but has done little to identify the source. It is possible that other tribal peoples in the area have been affected, including uncontacted peoples.
Indigenous spokesman Reinaldo Rocha Yekuana said: “We are worried about the results of this research. This pollution affects plants, animals, and future generations.”
The Brazilian authorities have known about the mercury contamination since at least the 1980s, yet have failed to put a permanent stop to the illegal gold mining. Little has also been done to treat the affected Indians.
In Venezuela, several tribes including the Yekuana, Yanomami, Piaroa, Hoti and Pemon are also being devastated. 92% of Yekuana women in one region have levels of contamination far exceeding accepted limits.
Survival’s Director, Stephen Corry said: “These governments are sitting on a ticking time bomb. Every week that they fail to act, more and more indigenous peoples are being harmed. When mercury poisoning is identified, the source must be halted immediately and those affected must be treated. The effects will be catastrophic if indigenous peoples’ lands aren’t protected.”
It gives us great pleasure to share some incredibly positive news with you. Two days after the heartbreaking media tour of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek capture facility, where one hundred and fifty wild buffalo were “processed” and shipped to slaughter or otherwise condemned, the bulk of the trap was empty and Yellowstone was hungry to capture more bison. Haunted by what we had witnessed there, our hearts sank as large groups of buffalo approached the trap. As expected, Yellowstone park wranglers — those who work at the trap — attempted to capture these buffalo families. First they went after a group of seventy-two buffalo, then another group of thirty. But in a beautiful twist of fate, the buffalo sensed the danger and were determined to save themselves from slaughter. Watch this video to see what happens.
BFC patrols are busy day and night, in every kind of weather, helping buffalo and motorists stay safe on the highway as spring migration brings the buffalo to their traditional calving grounds. Photo by Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign.
As of this writing, there have been no other captures at Stephens Creek. Fifty-seven orphaned calves and yearlings remain captive, with Yellowstone telling us they don’t know how long they will be held or what their fate will be. There are currently no other buffalo near the trap, though the Park Service intends to keep it open through the end of March. Thankfully, the majority of buffalo have left the Gardiner Basin.
West of Yellowstone, in the Hebgen Basin, spring migration is beginning. BFC patrols have been extremely busy from early in the morning through late at night, warning traffic of buffalo along the highways. They are attempting to migrate to their favored, traditional calving grounds on Horse Butte, but there is still a lot of snow to negotiate. We’ve had some very warm days and extremely cold nights, so the snow is like concrete and difficult for the buffalo to navigate or forage through. Their best chances for food are along the south-facing slopes and the river and creek beds, where grass is slowly starting to become exposed. It’s a very difficult time for the buffalo and all wildlife, having survived one of the harshest winters in the lower-48 states and having all their fat stores used up and with the Earth providing very little nutrition as of yet. But buffalo are strong survivors and they will come, bringing the next generation. Wild buffalo should be safe on Horse Butte, thanks to Governor Steve Bullock’s decision to grant some year-round habitat. But, we will not know for sure until the decision is accepted or not at the next Interagency Bison Management Plan meeting on April 6, in West Yellowstone and until we see how the Department of Livestock interprets the decision.
Food choices in the early spring are slim, but this pregnant mama makes due. Photo by Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign.
The buffalo and BFC need you right now. Many of the volunteers who have been with us all winter will be leaving soon due to spring commitments. We are losing a fair number of people just as our busy season begins. If you have the time and desire, please consider volunteering with us. BFC provides room, board, gear, and training to our volunteers — all you need to do is get here. Please check out our volunteer page to learn more. We hope to see you on the front lines in the land of the last wild buffalo!
Last week’s report and photos about what we, and the buffalo, experienced during the two-day media tour of Yellowstone’s bison trap could barely scratch the surface of the horrible things we witnessed. This brief video footage will bring you much closer.
On March 8th and 9th, Yellowstone National Park organized a media tour of their Stephens Creek bison trap, where 150 wild buffalo were being held captive for slaughter and potentially quarantine. All of what you see taking place here is paid for with your federal tax dollars. Some of the footage was shot by BFC’s Mike Mease and some was captured by the Park Service’s GoPro cameras. One hundred fifty of America’s last wild buffalo were run through the gauntlet of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek capture facility; 93 buffalo were shipped to slaughter by the InterTribal Buffalo Council and the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, both of which are signatories to the Interagency Bison Management Plan. Another 57 buffalo — all orphaned calves and yearlings — are still being held in the trap.
Every person working at the trap is employed by Yellowstone National Park. The Montana Department of Livestock has Yellowstone trained so well, that the Department isn’t even present except when escorting buffalo to the slaughterhouses. These acts by Yellowstone National Park are horrific and criminal. There should not even be such a facility inside the world’s first national park, much less anywhere else. There is no justification for the Park Service to commit these atrocities. Yellowstone justifies its actions under the banner of the Interagency Bison Management Plan, which it could pull out of anytime. They may face a lawsuit by livestock interests if they did so, but, so what? So much new information has come to light, so much change has come to the landscape, and such a groundswell of public support has emerged for wild, migratory buffalo, that a lawsuit might be hugely beneficial. The callous behavior of Yellowstone Park Rangers and biologists who are harming the buffalo reveals the gross disconnect that these people have from the sacred beings whom they are charged with protecting, and how wantonly they are willing to betray, not only their mission, but the sacred buffalo that the whole world expects them to protect.
This video will break your heart. After watching, you will want to do something. Here are a few suggestions:Share this video with everyone you know, send it your local and regional media, and share it with the White House and your members of Congress. Tell them all to visit Buffalo Field Campaign and learn more.
Many thanks to the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the rest of our stellar legal team who made this media tour possible by representing BFC’s media coordinator Stephany Seay and journalist Christopher Ketcham in a lawsuit to gain full access to the trap. Showing the world even this brief glimpse of what Yellowstone is doing to the beloved buffalo — in service of Montana cattle ranchers — will bring us that much closer to putting an end to this madness, and bringing this trap down.
