News of the Restless

Be it known that I say “alleged” only for legal reasons here. My mind is pretty made up as to what sort of person this woman is already:

I mean, a gold, rhinestone-encrusted MAGA clutch purse? That is one tacky-ass hoochie mama right there.

And of course, she allegedly sold the business to someone else before it became a brothel:

Yang says she had long since sold Orchids of Asia Day Spa, the massage parlor where authorities say they caught Kraft on camera paying for oral sex the morning of the Jan. 20 AFC Championship game — his second visit in 24 hours. (Kraft has denied breaking the law.) Yang, who goes by Cindy, was not charged in the multi-agency anti-human-trafficking operation last month that shut down 10 Asian day spas in Florida, none of which are registered to her or her family.

Allegedly.

(Cough.)

Anyhow, the fact that these misodge parlors (see what I did there?) likely engaged in trafficking to fill demand for their services should tell you a few things. First off, that there aren’t many women — in North America OR Asia — who voluntarily engage in prostitution, least of all because they just loooooove sex sooooooo muuuuuuuch. Bummer? Apparently not for the guys who go there. They don’t give a shit whether the women even like what they’re doing. They don’t even care if the women are adequately paid, housed, or fed. Or if they have freedom of movement (which implies freedom of choice).

“It was clear that multiple women were working and living inside the spas. They were cooking on the back steps of the business,” Snyder said. “They were sleeping in the massage parlor on the massage tables.”

They had no access to transportation and were moved from location to location, Snyder said.

Just let that marinate in your cerebrospinal fluids for a moment there…

…and now, consider how lucrative this operation was for their traffickers:

Snyder said this isn’t a case in which a woman is captured and kept against her will and locked up or kept at gunpoint.

“What you see instead are women that come here ostensibly to be maids or to work in restaurants, they bring their children,” Snyder said, noting they then end up in this situation.

Snyder said the men were the “monsters in this equation.”

Asked whether celebrities or prominent people could be involved, Snyder said, “There will be a newsmaker in this one.”

Sndyer said much of this starts in New York.

He said he anticipates additional women or managers will be arrested.

“We followed as much as $20 million moving in and out of China,” he said.

And that was just from one known ring. There are bound to be others.

BTW, did you catch the bit about a “newsmaker in this one”? Robert Fucking Kraft is certainly one, but another might just be his good friend, Donnie Fucking Drumpf…who, as we know from above, posed for selfies with the woman who claims to have nothing to do with this shady business. We know already that Donnie himself is hardly innocent when it comes to matters of prostitution; he is friends with Jeffrey Epstein, a well-known exploiter of under-age girls. It not only makes sense that he would be friends with a wealthy john who frequents skeevy massage parlors; it’s something we should frankly expect of him.

And if this woman with the blinged-out MAGA bag eventually turns out to be the actual madam of this particular operation, and has been using others to front for her, should we even bat an eye? No…because we already expect ugly things of Donnie and his associates.

Even uglier still (but entirely fittingly, given the milieu), this particular business relies heavily for its profits on racist stereotypes about Asian women:

“Economics are a huge contributor to how Asian women are victimized and also how they are deceived and coerced into exploitative situations,” said Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, author of Hidden in Plain Sight: America’s Slaves of the New Millennium and an expert witness in criminal and civil court cases related to human trafficking. “With that being said, Asian women are highly sought after because they are perceived by American men as being more submissive. In my interviews with commercial sex consumers, and through research into the forums where many of them post about these Asian massage parlors, they talk about their dislike of American women, who they perceive as more opinionated and more recalcitrant to their sexual and social demands.”

[…]

Trafficking experts say racial and sexual stereotypes of Asian women have origins in military sex tourism. Asian women sexually served US troops during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

This became the primary source of stereotypes framing Asian women as “fragile, docile, but sexually available,” said Katharine Moon, a political science professor and Wasserman Chair of Asian Studies at Wellesley College. “Those three wars shaped the sexual imagination of American men.”

After Japan surrendered during World War II, the country set up a brothel system for American GIs, which American authorities allowed to operate despite reports women were being forced into prostitution, a 2007 Associated Press review of historical documents found. During the Korean War, the US military frequently used South Korean prostitutes. Last year, a South Korean court ruled the government had illegally detained prostitutes who serviced American troops in the 1960s and ’70s and forced them to undergo treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

In a 2008 paper, White Sexual Imperialsm: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, Sunny Woan wrote that “white sexual imperialism, through rape and war, created the hyper-sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman. This stereotype in turn fostered the overprevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail-order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women.”

Be it also remembered that the “Orchids of Asia” saw little, if any, of the money they made for those who exploited this ugly “submissive” stereotype of them. And who shipped that money Bog knows where.

Having translated stories from the German press for this blog, about how traffickers operate there (out of perfectly legal brothels, even), I’m under no illusion that coerced “sex work” is any kind of exception. Globally, in fact, it’s the norm; few women would voluntarily sell sex for a living if they could make just as much money or more at something less physically and emotionally invasive, as men do (and take for granted that they can and will). The fact that there are so few straight men in prostitution (as anything other than pimps, traffickers and johns, anyhow) should tell you something about the gender disparities at work, too.

This is hardly a “victimless crime”, as it is so often ballyhooed to be. The women of these “spas” are being forced to work round-the-clock, which means they have to eat, sleep and live where they work, and the quality of life on the premises is poor. How many men would they have to service per day in order to rack up some 1500 each per year? I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been exposed to a shitload of STDs, with no access to medical treatment — and if, as in the German “wellness” brothels, they made their pimps more money per customer if they did it without condoms (which is illegal in Germany now, but still very commonplace).

The loud-and-proud “sex workers” who dominate the discourse around prostitution in the US are actually the 1%ers of sex capitalism. They are lucky and privileged, and they may well have no idea how much so they are. They are the ones who minimize and pooh-pooh all the trafficking that goes on under their very noses. In so doing, they actually aid and abet the traffickers by sweeping the ugly truth under the rug. If it hasn’t happened to them, so their reasoning goes, it ain’t happening much, if at all. It’s a pernicious lie, and an insidious one.

And if that kind of talk doesn’t remind you of the partisans of a certain political party, which talks a great game about “family values” while living a grimy nonstop Caligulan orgy, then you might just want to check your own privilege there, my friend.