Women in a Globalizing World by Angela Miles

Author:Angela Miles [Miles, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781926708195
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 14580057
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

RICHARD POULIN

Globalization and the Sex Trade

Trafficking and the Commodification of Women and Children

CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION TODAY involves an unprecedented “commodification” of human beings. In recent decades the rapidly growing sex trade has been massively “industrialized” worldwide (Barry; Jeffreys 2009). This process of industrialization, in both its legal and its illegal forms, generates profits amounting to billions of dollars. 1 It has created a market of sexual exchanges in which millions of women and children have been converted into sexual commodities. This sex market has been generated through the massive deployment of prostitution (one of the effects of the presence of military forces engaged in wars and/or territorial occupation (Strudevant and Stolzfus) in particular in the emerging economies, the unprecedented expansion of the tourist industry (Truong), the growth and normalization of pornography (Poulin 2000), and the internationalization of arranged marriages (Hughes).

The sex industry, previously considered marginal, has come to occupy a strategic and central position in the development of international capitalism. For this reason it is increasingly taking on the guise of an ordinary sector of the economy. This particular aspect of globalization involves an entire range of issues crucial to understanding the world we live in. These include such processes as economic exploitation, sexual oppression, capital accumulation, international migration, unequal development and such related conditions as racism and poverty.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION OF THE SEX TRADE

The industrialization of the sex trade has involved the mass production of sexual goods and services structured around a regional and international division of labour. These “goods” are human beings who sell sexual services. The international market in these “goods” simultaneously encompasses local and regional levels, making its economic imperatives impossible to avoid.2 Prostitution and related sexual industries—bars, dancing clubs, massage parlours, pornography producers etc.—depend on a massive subterranean economy controlled by pimps connected to organized crime. At the same time businesses, such as international hotel chains, airline companies, and the tourist industry, benefit greatly from the sex industry.

This industry is now an important economic power. It constitutes five percent of the GDP of the Netherlands (Dusch), 4.5 percent of South Korea (Conseil économique et social), three percent of Japan (Kirby), maybe six percent of China (Bentor) and, in 1998, prostitution represented 2 to 14 percent of all the economic activity of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand (Lim). According to a study conducted by Ryan Bishop and Lilian Robinson, the tourist industry brings four billion dollars a year to Thailand. It is not without reason, then, that in 1987 the Thai government promoted sexual tourism through advertising “The one fruit of Thailand more delicious than durian [a local fruit], its young women” (Hechler).

The industrialization of the sex trade and its globalization are fundamental factors that make contemporary prostitution qualitatively different from the prostitution of yesterday. “Consumers” in the economic North now have access to “exotic” and young, very young, bodies worldwide, notably in Brazil, Cuba, Russia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and, given the trafficking of children, in their own countries. The sex industry is diversified, sophisticated, and specialized: it can meet all types of demands.

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