Mumbo Jumbo

Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness.  -  Sophocles

If you haven’t heard about the “teenage exorcists” yet, take a look at this short interview from Vice in which the girls helpfully explain that you can “catch” demons by having sex with prostitutes because “Satan can’t just go into anybody that he wants to.  He has to have a legal right.”  Apparently, they think harlots are licensed agents of the Devil, which A) would probably surprise Jesus, and B) seems to mean they’ve got us confused with witches, and witches with Satanists.  But since they also seem to confuse demons with STIs and mental illness with mythical metaphysical monsters, this is not really very surprising.

Now, most people in the general public and nearly all of my readers may chuckle over the earnestness with which these sheltered young women declaim their outlandish beliefs, but it wasn’t so long ago that the same news agencies who seem inclined to mock them now were reporting stories of gigantic Satanic conspiracies with a straight face.  Furthermore, those same agencies, and probably many of the same reporters, accept and repeat the ridiculous stories of the “trafficking” hysteria with the same level of credulity these girls display in discussing demons; as I’ve pointed out before, the “trafficking” narratives are practically identical to those of the Satanic Panic, except that the shadowy all-powerful organizations abducting hundreds of thousands of nubile virgins from their families are now called “pimps” instead of “cultists” and are supposed to be motivated by evil greed rather than evil religious fervor.  There is the same focus on lurid BDSM sex, the same impossibly-high numbers of victims and sex acts per night, the same claims of vast criminal organizations, the same inability to catch any of the supposed perpetrators and the same total lack of physical evidence.  In Sweden, Satanic cults, “sex trafficking”, “repressed memories” and “patriarchy” are part of one seamless narrative, and in the rest of Europe “trafficking” cults are said to control their victims with black magic.

So really, it was inevitable that the black magic connection would reach the United States as well; “trafficking” rhetoric has grown increasingly wild and bizarre for over a year now, and the age of the supposed victims has been slowly creeping down toward the range of those in the daycare sex abuse branch of the larger Satanic hysteria.  I haven’t seen a whole story devoted to it yet (though that’s just a matter of time), but hints are starting to appear in typical “sex trafficking” stories.  For a long time now “pimps” have been credited with preternatural powers of persuasion, but this is the first time I’ve seen it cross over into the quasi-supernatural:

…Sheila Simpkins McClain’s life was fractured by violence.  At around age 14, McClain left home and became involved in prostitution…Now, years later, McClain has dedicated much of her life to working with women who are coming out of situations similar to hers.  She’s the assistant resident manager for Magdalene in Nashville, Tenn., and an intervention specialist with End Slavery Tennessee…Pimps, McClain says, can almost hypnotize young women…McClain helps to break that spell…

Yes, McClain does use the qualifier “almost”, but the reporter also uses the word “spell” in the next line despite the fact that hypnosis is neither magical, nor can it induce a person to do anything she is strongly opposed to doing.  The general public, however, believes otherwise, and it is clear that the idea McClain is trying to project is one of paranormal power.  There is no way to tell whether she believes this herself or whether it’s just a useful lie; she also claims that the internet has increased the ability of pimps to control whores, when even a large fraction of cops and other political prohibitionists recognize it’s the exact opposite (which is why they’re so desperate to persecute online ad sites that make it much harder for them to catch a large number of hookers by raiding a single brothel or stroll).

That story appeared on NPR, which abandoned its façade of journalistic skepticism a long time ago; this one from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune doesn’t even make the pretense of it.  Author Christine Stark (a staunch disciple of Dworkin who has referred to animal testing as a “system of prostitution”) uses “trafficking” as a direct synonym for “prostitution”, utterly denies that sex workers exercise any agency whatsoever, and vomits out a number of bogus “statistics” such as the astonishingly-ridiculous claim that 98% of sex workers are homeless.  But while these are typical rhetorical devices in these anti-whore, anti-male screeds, even Melissa Farley might hesitate to make the revolting claim with which Stark concludes her deranged attack:

…Duluth harbor is notorious among Native people as a site for the trafficking of Native women from northern reservations…to be sold on the ships and in Duluth and Superior.  Native women, teen girls and boys, and even babies have been sold for sex on the ships…

As I’ve pointed out before, the common lie that the “average prostitute enters the trade at 13” automatically implies that a huge number of underage hookers are literal babies.  But because most of the people who repeat this idiocy are far too stupid to understand that, I don’t think most of them actually believe that large enough numbers of men want to rape infants to support a commercially-viable enterprise; Christine Stark does, though, and is willing to say so in print.  How the disappearance of all these babies is covered up (even in a marginalized population) she cannot say, but it’s not difficult to see the resemblance between Stark’s sex-trafficked infants and those the Satanists were supposed to have produced in droves by impregnating young girls, then wiping their memories and returning them to their homes.  And if one can believe that the magical hypnotic powers of “therapists” can “recover” memories, it certainly isn’t that much of a stretch to believe in the magical hypnotic power of “pimps” to erase them.  Or the magical power of demons to possess someone via sex.  Or the magical power of teenage girls to drive said demons out.