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24. DON'T WORRY - THESE SLAVES ARE ONLY WOMEN (March 2003)
Forget all the nonsense about the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery lives. I don't mean the blatant slave markets of the Sudan or Mauritania in Africa. (Which of course the left never protests in the streets.) I mean an even vaster enslavement worldwide, that of those least consequential of human beings, those human throwaways, the Venuses in Mars' world - women. It's estimated that half a million women a year are being shipped - not traveling, being shipped - out of the former Soviet Union and the more wretched parts of Eastern Europe - primarily by brutal criminal gangs - to Western Europe and beyond. Some of these women, however stupidly, travel willingly to their fates, driven by poverty. Others are tricked. The trade is duplicated all over the world - in Thailand, India - indeed, even in the United States. 2 million girls a year aged 5 to 15 are forced into the sex market. They are screwed, get AIDS, are psychologically annihilated - then thrown away. By definition, none can be volunteers. Now this vast worldwide slave trade is in fact common knowledge all over the world. My object is not to bring this story to anyone's attention. Anyone who is attentive knows about it. It is to ask a question: Why is it allowed? This is the 21st Century, the Third Millennium. Wasn't slavery supposed to disappear with the Black Death and the sailing ships? Well, there is your answer. The Black Death kills men too. And sailing ships can't make a buck for a man anymore. If they could, New York Harbor would still be clogged with white sails. This is somewhat about Capitalism, yes, but somewhat about something larger in human affairs - a fundamental divide that - and this is the ghastly truth - confirms the craziest, most extreme and man-hating feminist in every prejudice she has.
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