#1). Chong Kim
Chong Kim is an American born Korean who was kidnapped and forced into human trafficking from 1995 to 1997. Kim was 18 at the time but her captors were under the impression that she was 13. She worked her way up to "madame" status in order to escape. Which Kim did manage to do and now is a very outspoken activist against the dark underbelly of American human trafficking and the role America plays in the global sex slavery trade. These are little girls giving birth to babies that in turn, also become sex slaves for the same evil system that helped spawn them. Free cattle, if you will.
It's absolutely horrifying.
I learned about Chong Kim after seeing an ad on Alternet.org for the movie Eden that was made about Kim's truly victorious tale of overcoming dangerous odds and not just escaping (where the movie ends) but to see in reality a woman that has overcome obstacles, transcending victimhood, and even the status the word survivor lends, achieving instead the ability to thrive.
Kim begs in an auto clip from a podcast to please reconsider the female before you in the strip club, in the pornography, at the bachelor's party, on the corner of 34th and Main, and ask yourself if you really think she wanted to be there?
I had to overcome a lot of trepidation in seeing Eden, fearing it would just be more torture porn on display, not unlike the awful film Compliance that's also--very unfortunately--based on a true story. But nobody should dignify Compliance by watching it, maybe by eradication, sure, but no one should watch it. But you will want to watch Eden. Even if it is a difficult watch.
Cleveland, OH was where Ariel Castro had three local young teenagers held captive for ten years. He fathered at least one child by one of them. It upsets my very core when I think about how a human being can get reduced to serve no other function other than a sexual one and that this can just as easily be a global trafficking issue as it can be one isolated pervert down the street because obviously, that pervert is not in actuality so very isolated. We all need to start being more responsible to our communities. One of the simplest ways to combat sexual predators is to be aware that they're there. There's a wonderful smartphone app called Offenders, that's free, it uses GPS and registered sex offender databases to alert you of the sex offenders that live in your immediate radius. We also need to be more alert and not be afraid to ask why or intervene if something's suspicious or doesn't feel right on a gut level. Make domestic disputes your business, don't ignore it. We also need to be more active in our local communities, whatever niche you can fill and serve in, that will help empower women and children. Women and children aren't sex slave toys, they're human beings and we shouldn't have to combat sexual predators, which sometimes are not always so obvious for us to identify.
Instances like this just discourage loftier notions of motherhood.
It took Kim 6 years after her experience to start stepping forward and speaking out, why she did, is summarized in an article interview with Kim where she says she was at an university and the panel had said that there was no way this sort of thing could happen in America. Chong Kim had to set the "experts" straight; can't really get more inspiring than that.
#2). Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is a filmmaker, actress, spokesperson, and advocate. She wrote, directed, and produced the amazing and angering documentary film Miss Representation, that debuted at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and also made its national broadcast premier on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. Newsom is the Founder and CEO of MissRepresentation.org, a call-to-action campaign to empower women and girls to challenge limiting labels in order to realize their full potential and self actualize.
If you haven't seen it yet, you really need to host a movie night and make Miss Representation your next to-watch documentary. With how badly women are under represented in the making of media that portrays them as seductress sexpots, it's really a film that every female, no matter the age, should see.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is an articulate and passionate woman serving an entire gender of a species by engaging them to become inspired to tell their own stories, in their own way, while enlightening them to the mechanics that help keep those stories silent.
#3). Shelley Lubben
Shelley Lubben is an American author, singer, motivational speaker, and former pornographic actress. Lubben is the founder of The Pink Cross Foundation. Even though it is a Christian non-profit it doesn't negate for me what Lubben is trying to do with Pink Cross, she's been involved in the anti-pornography movement since 2004. I think the real scope of human pain can be found once freely browsing her site and absorbing the numerous amounts of people who have worked in the porn industry and are adversely effected by porn outside of that industry. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a gathering of the nation's divorce lawyers, attendees revealed that 58% of their divorces were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online. And there's a bunch of other Porn Statistics on her website as well.
There's plenty of informative videos, like Ex Porn Star Subjected to Poop, Violence, and STDs in Porn, in it, Lubben schools us on the industry term of "handler" - when a porn star is so fucked up on various drugs they cannot function properly and actually need another person to handle their body for them, they call that person their "handler" and reminds us that this is happening in California and that this is contemporary slavery.
Because, and I wanted to get into this more in an upcoming blog, we live in a culture where a notion of shooting what has become known as "CreepShots" is legal and even encouraged among those that look at said CreepShots to assist in making them happen (secretly taken photographs, non-consensual sexualized imagery in public) and like one Tumblr user stated:
Chong Kim is an American born Korean who was kidnapped and forced into human trafficking from 1995 to 1997. Kim was 18 at the time but her captors were under the impression that she was 13. She worked her way up to "madame" status in order to escape. Which Kim did manage to do and now is a very outspoken activist against the dark underbelly of American human trafficking and the role America plays in the global sex slavery trade. These are little girls giving birth to babies that in turn, also become sex slaves for the same evil system that helped spawn them. Free cattle, if you will.
It's absolutely horrifying.
I learned about Chong Kim after seeing an ad on Alternet.org for the movie Eden that was made about Kim's truly victorious tale of overcoming dangerous odds and not just escaping (where the movie ends) but to see in reality a woman that has overcome obstacles, transcending victimhood, and even the status the word survivor lends, achieving instead the ability to thrive.
Kim begs in an auto clip from a podcast to please reconsider the female before you in the strip club, in the pornography, at the bachelor's party, on the corner of 34th and Main, and ask yourself if you really think she wanted to be there?
I had to overcome a lot of trepidation in seeing Eden, fearing it would just be more torture porn on display, not unlike the awful film Compliance that's also--very unfortunately--based on a true story. But nobody should dignify Compliance by watching it, maybe by eradication, sure, but no one should watch it. But you will want to watch Eden. Even if it is a difficult watch.
Cleveland, OH was where Ariel Castro had three local young teenagers held captive for ten years. He fathered at least one child by one of them. It upsets my very core when I think about how a human being can get reduced to serve no other function other than a sexual one and that this can just as easily be a global trafficking issue as it can be one isolated pervert down the street because obviously, that pervert is not in actuality so very isolated. We all need to start being more responsible to our communities. One of the simplest ways to combat sexual predators is to be aware that they're there. There's a wonderful smartphone app called Offenders, that's free, it uses GPS and registered sex offender databases to alert you of the sex offenders that live in your immediate radius. We also need to be more alert and not be afraid to ask why or intervene if something's suspicious or doesn't feel right on a gut level. Make domestic disputes your business, don't ignore it. We also need to be more active in our local communities, whatever niche you can fill and serve in, that will help empower women and children. Women and children aren't sex slave toys, they're human beings and we shouldn't have to combat sexual predators, which sometimes are not always so obvious for us to identify.
Instances like this just discourage loftier notions of motherhood.
It took Kim 6 years after her experience to start stepping forward and speaking out, why she did, is summarized in an article interview with Kim where she says she was at an university and the panel had said that there was no way this sort of thing could happen in America. Chong Kim had to set the "experts" straight; can't really get more inspiring than that.
#2). Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is a filmmaker, actress, spokesperson, and advocate. She wrote, directed, and produced the amazing and angering documentary film Miss Representation, that debuted at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and also made its national broadcast premier on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. Newsom is the Founder and CEO of MissRepresentation.org, a call-to-action campaign to empower women and girls to challenge limiting labels in order to realize their full potential and self actualize.
If you haven't seen it yet, you really need to host a movie night and make Miss Representation your next to-watch documentary. With how badly women are under represented in the making of media that portrays them as seductress sexpots, it's really a film that every female, no matter the age, should see.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom is an articulate and passionate woman serving an entire gender of a species by engaging them to become inspired to tell their own stories, in their own way, while enlightening them to the mechanics that help keep those stories silent.
#3). Shelley Lubben
Shelley Lubben is an American author, singer, motivational speaker, and former pornographic actress. Lubben is the founder of The Pink Cross Foundation. Even though it is a Christian non-profit it doesn't negate for me what Lubben is trying to do with Pink Cross, she's been involved in the anti-pornography movement since 2004. I think the real scope of human pain can be found once freely browsing her site and absorbing the numerous amounts of people who have worked in the porn industry and are adversely effected by porn outside of that industry. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a gathering of the nation's divorce lawyers, attendees revealed that 58% of their divorces were the result of a spouse looking at excessive amounts of pornography online. And there's a bunch of other Porn Statistics on her website as well.
There's plenty of informative videos, like Ex Porn Star Subjected to Poop, Violence, and STDs in Porn, in it, Lubben schools us on the industry term of "handler" - when a porn star is so fucked up on various drugs they cannot function properly and actually need another person to handle their body for them, they call that person their "handler" and reminds us that this is happening in California and that this is contemporary slavery.
Because, and I wanted to get into this more in an upcoming blog, we live in a culture where a notion of shooting what has become known as "CreepShots" is legal and even encouraged among those that look at said CreepShots to assist in making them happen (secretly taken photographs, non-consensual sexualized imagery in public) and like one Tumblr user stated:
"It’s not about sex. [These men] have porn, they have as much fucking porn as they could possibly ask for: They have billboards and ads and primetime TV shows and Hollywood movies, free videos, magazines. They have porn channels, porn movies with sexy images of women … CreepShots specifically says this isn’t enough. They don’t want pics of girls knowingly posing; they want to violate … They get off on your violation. They want more proof that women exist for them and them alone."
When is it going to be enough?
Apparently Yoga Pants have become a CreepShot fetish, if I had known that prior to buying three pairs of Yoga Pants (and yes, they're comfortable, that's why I wear them) I wouldn't have bought them, I don't want to windup a CreepShot for some 13 yr old Redditor to flap to, let alone be the one taking and posting my picture.
When is it going to be enough pictures and pin-ups and He-men and Men of Steel and dominatrices?
Women don't exist for sexual gratification of males. Shelley Lubben, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and Chong Kim have all proven that by being inspirational women.
Comments
Post a Comment