Here’s another article so deeply stupid that a single paragraph just couldn’t represent its truly moronic whole. So without further ado, let’s play “Count the Idiocies”:
…Once all the neon lights come on, Annandale – a small city in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia – transforms into a Koreatown, with restaurants and karaoke bars…one such bar has blacked out windows and a facade decorated with fairy lights. Beyond its doors, an unwelcoming middle-aged Korean woman stands behind the dimly lit bar and a large screen shows Korean video-clips. An Asian man on a stool stares at newcomers1…A young Korean woman wearing an off-the-shoulder top sits alone in one of the karaoke booths. Too bored to look up2, she plays on her phone as a huge screen blasts a K-pop classic…The surroundings may appear a little grim, but a good time in a bar like this will set back the average punter far more than in many of the trendiest bars in Washington3. That’s because many of these bars provide…hostesses known as doumis, who[se job is] to entertain clients by singing and drinking with them, and in the seediest establishments, having sex with them4…Karaoke bars like this have opened up a new front in America’s war on human trafficking and the illegal sex market5. Massage parlours in the US – where prostitution is illegal everywhere except Nevada6 – have long been notorious as fronts for the sex trade and for exploiting women mostly from China and Korea7. But as…new government policies are introduced, the enslavement strategies used by traffickers…are getting more sophisticated8…History shows that human traffickers are quick to adapt to, and take advantage of, changing societal norms9. One of the latest trends traffickers have managed to bend to their advantage is an increasing fashion for South Korean women to undergo plastic surgery as a way of enhancing their career prospects10…Limited access to legitimate financial services leaves many women no option but to seek informal loans, making them vulnerable to traffickers11…Once a woman is lured into prostituting herself, traffickers also use plastic surgery as a way of perpetuating the debt bondage12…Few women can break the vicious circle as they go from loan to loan, trying without success to stitch their lives together13…Complex networks – from drivers to pimps and brokers who lend money at extortionately high interest rates in both countries – are built around the victims of sex trafficking14…Not only is plastic surgery used to trap women in these networks, but an array of beauty salons in the US…profit from it…[prohibitionist weirdo] Connie Chung Joe [said]…“First they go to the nail salon, then the hair salon, then they get their make-up done. These girls have to pay for it”15…Polaris…found that out of more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking16 between December 2007 and December 2016…massage parlours accounted for 2,949 cases, putting them second only to escort services as a source of the problem17…[prohibitionists] and [pigs] say that trafficked women tend not to regard themselves as victims18, and that this is particularly the case with Asian women19…Constance Rossiter, YMCA’s programme director for Trafficked Persons Assistance…says the networks that bring Chinese women into the US are complex20…Rossiter says…“it’s a shame-based culture”21…[a Washington bureaucrat named Steven Wagner] says…“the fact they have to work…to pay off a sum of money that had been agreed, they find that acceptable”22…cultural backgrounds combined with stigma…often lead women arrested at massage businesses to insist to police they are prostituting themselves “of their own free will”23…
1) I’ll bet she’s only “unwelcoming” to busybody American women who positively reek of racism. And the dude on the stool was probably staring at Raquel’s camera and wondering how bad the othering in her story is going to be (answer: pretty damned awful).
2) That’s not boredom; she’s just ignoring nosey parkers like Raquel who obviously have no intention of paying her.
3) You get what you pay for: fun K-girls rather than prudish beltway hipsters like Raquel.
4) You know you’re about to see a torrent of prohibitionist vomit as soon as the word “seedy” appears.
5) I did warn you. “Illegal sex” is about the least-bootlicking phrase in this mess, so proceed accordingly.
6) As regular readers know, it ain’t really legal in Nevada either, but discovering that would’ve required actual research rather than simple regurgitation.
7) “Fronts” is a fairly subtle dysphemism, unlike “exploited” to mean “employed”.
8) “Sophisticated” is the excuse pigs use to rape women who work in massage parlors.
9) That would be a good trick, considering the concept was invented less than a generation ago.
10) See, unlike men, women are much too stupid to make conscious decisions about enhancing our incomes. So any time it seems like a woman (especially a nonwhite woman) is making such a rational decision, it’s really “sex traffickers” luring her into it.
11) Yes, non-bank loans now constitute “trafficking”. But student loans that you have to pay for decades & can go to jail for defaulting on aren’t at all exploitative, no sirree!
12) “Lured into prostituting herself”? Surely Raquel didn’t mean to imply that women have so much agency; doesn’t she get we’re all “prostituted” by others? And obviously anyone incapable of deciding to have sex is surely unable to decide to have plastic surgery. Women are incapable of making any decisions about our bodies without evil men coercing us, except for abortion of course.
13) Funny how these imaginary “trafficking victims” sound a lot more like people outside the demimonde, struggling to pay debts with fixed paychecks from which the government extracts huge fractions, than like all the real-life sex workers who find it much easier to pay debts than they did when they had straight jobs.
14) Prohibitionists love the “giant international cartel” fantasy of coercion; in reality, coerced sex work is usually not much different from any other kind of coercive relationship.
15) This is quite possibly the most mind-bogglingly stupid and blatantly racist part of this whole heap of filth. I can’t think of any industry other than show business in which the employer pays for beauty treatments. So if a white woman gets her nails done, it means the nail techs are “trafficked”, but if an Asian woman gets her nails done, it means she’s trafficked? What? How does this even make sense to prohibitionists?
16) There haven’t been 32,000 cases of “trafficking” since the term was invented. This is the number of calls to Polaris’ hotline, almost none of which actually correspond to anything in the real world.
17) Could it be any clearer that the term “human trafficking” is being used here as a dysphemism for “sex work”?
18) Gee, I wonder why that might be?
19) Why won’t those damned Asian women accept the slurs their benevolent white saviors label them with? Don’t they know their kind is too stupid to understand their own lives, and they should accept the wise guidance of white cops and religious fanatics who want to “save” them via unemployment and deportation?
20) And “sophisticated” too, I’m sure.
21) Unlike enlightened US culture, in which nobody is ever shamed.
22) Whereas in the US, not paying one’s debts is completely acceptable, which is why we have credit ratings and debtor’s prisons.
23) Because that couldn’t possibly be true. No, it must be this Occam’s razor-defying psychobabble I just made up.
Anyhow, you get the idea. If you’re bored today, see if you can find any I missed due to having to fight down nausea for two hours while I edited and analyzed this demeaning racist filth.