And let slip the dogs of war!
Augustus Caesar.
Anti-marriage bias
Europe and the USA have the largest number of prostitutes – an estimated 35-45 lakhs prostitutes out of an estimated 200-250 lakhs prostitutes in the world live and work in the EU+USA. This may be related to a deep-seated antipathy in the West towards marriage – misogamy.
In ancient Rome, to overcome ‘this anti-marriage attitude, Augustus Caesar introduced, uxorium – a tax on celibacy and childlessness. He passed laws Julia et Papia Poppaea, that reduced rights and inheritances of the unmarried and allowed girls to be married at the age of 12.
Even before the Bible and Eve, the West (and Desert Bloc) targetted marriage, wives and women for blame.
Lucretius, a famed Roman author, preferred marriage as a lesser evil to ‘cure’ passion and …
St.Jerome, in 393 AD, wrote Against Jovinian, an important Vatican tract against marriage, that influenced the Church and Europe for the next 1500 years. Roman synod under Pope Siricius, promptly declared Jovinian as a heretic. Emperor Honorius had Jovinan whipped and banished from Rome – exiled to a small island of Boas, off Dalmatia. St.Augustine thought that “thanks to pagan fecundity there are already enough souls to fill heaven, Augustine counseled all men to refrain from the obsolete Old Testament command to increase and multiply”
The first Christian Emperor, Constantine, at Vatican’s behest, encouraged celibacy by “repealing the Augustan marital legislation that imposed penalties on the unmarried … he even extended the power of making wills to minors who wished to become celibate.”
After his conversion to Christianity.
Misogamy – from medieval to modern
It took the combined weight of French authors like Voltaire, Diderot and Helvetius to make marriage acceptable in France. Added to this, were the arguments by Montesquieu, that Catholic France suffered due to celibacy, in comparison to Protestant Britain. France in 1920, re-introduced an anti-celibacy surtax to stem decline in French population. And Italy followed soon after in 1926.
Misogamy is so deeply ingrained that one writer extends this “symptom of an almost unconscious persistence of misogamy in France” even to translations of literary works. In Europe’s best “long-standing traditions of misogyny and misogamy.”
Does this trend persist?
Early Bruce Springsteen.
In modern era
Bruce Sprinsteen’s The River, was an interesting record – released before Born in the USA. The title song, The River, was about the disappointments of marrying early, with a union job, and then finding himself at a dead-end.
This song represents marriage as a black-box that is supposed to deliver – but rarely does. Entitlement thinking – Medicare, Welfare checks, Unemployment benefits, etc. How the State gets all this for me is the State’s problem! Too bad, if the State has to annihilate the Native Americans, the Australian aborigines, or the Africans!
Like Neil Young sings about the producer who wants a writer who is alone and hungry! The ‘economy’ needs people who have “drifted far from home … hungry … alone” – (from Neil Young’s album containing, Crime in the City).
Roald Dahl’s classic-into-a-movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is another revealing tale. Most reviews confirm that the movie is ‘faithful’ to the book – not that it matters, or is actually possible. I have on good authority on the matter of “plot and structure, the new film sticks very close to the book.” Another reviewer says,
Like Dahl’s book, the film stresses the importance of family over personal ambition, love over selfish desire. The plot, too, remains largely as Dahl left it: five golden tickets hidden in chocolate bars.
Pro-family at first glance, it is a deeply sick tale. Of how a rich man, Willy Wonka, finally gets happiness, family, reunion with his father and someone to take care of his factory and wealth. The secret of his wealth – don’t have a family. What do the poor guys, like Charlie Bucket (rhymes with Leaking Bucket) get? A hovel, unemployment, barely enough to eat, discrimination, austerity. You got to be stupid to be be poor or to believe in a family. Good guys finish last.
Well said, Mr.Dahl.
The story is constructed well. To the smart guys, the message is clear. Stay away from family, parents, responsibilities. You can be like Willy Wonka. You get the wealth, you will anyway get everything else also. To the poor and ‘stupid’, like Charlie Bucket, the message is seemingly “A Family is Great Thing, Isn’t It!”
Though 60% of the Western adult population is married, at least 30% are on thin ice!
Well done, Mr.Dahl!
Let us do the numbers!
Do numbers bear out this narrative of the West.
Measuring simple marital status of the broad population may give a crude confirmation of this social bias. At any point, 35%-45% of the adult population in the US and UK, for whom data is available, are unmarried. That is 1000% more than India’s unmarried population. How will it affect women and children when projections show that “the population of unmarried women will soon surpass the number of married women”.
Strangely, there are no cross-country, comparative reports on marriage and prostitution. The modern West, which seeks to measure every aspect of life (they call it econometrics) especially if it involves the Third World, has done no such study on prostitution and marriage.
Global overview – on-off ‘tolerance’ for prostitution
Ex-President of the USA, George Bush estimated that “800,000 to 900,000 people are bought, sold or forced across borders” for prostitution. A study across the world, further estimated that “the number of prostitutes in the world was around 40 million.” This seems to be very high estimate – when analysed on the basis of major countries. A more likely number seems to be 200-250 lakhs prostitutes across the world. EU (25 lakhs -30 lakhs), USA (14 lakhs-20 lakhs).
In the USA, of these, a report estimates some “300 thousand to 600 thousand of 2 million prostitutes in the USA are children and teenagers under 18. Most of them are under the category of street prostitutes.”Some older reports from the 1980′s give a much lower figure of 1 million prostitutes in USA.
These reports estimate Indian prostitute population at 2.3 million – a little more than the estimated US population of prostitutes. An overview of human trafficking summarizes
The ILO estimates in a 2005 report that trafficking generates 32 billion US dollars in turnover annually. The International Labour Organisation’s 2005 Global Report on forced labour estimates that each year 2.45 million persons are trafficked for forced labour worldwide.
A significant part of these trafficked people are female-teenagers and women for purposes of prostitution. A Europol (European Police organization) report traces traffic patterns.
In the 1970s, trafficked women came mainly from South East Asia. In the 1980s, the second and third ‘waves’ of women came from Africa and Latin America. The latest traffic, the ‘fourth wave’, are females from Central and Eastern Europe. The escalation of this crime within the EU can be linked to the enormous profits that can be made by the traffickers, pimps and bar and club owners who supply and cater for the demand in purchased sex that exists in Europe.
Trafficking in human beings is considered to be the fastest growing criminal business in the world, generating massive profits for international criminal organisations. 120,000 women and children are trafficked through the Balkans alone. The US TIP Report 2001 reported on evidence that had surfaced implicating the French embassy in Sofia in selling an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 visas to Bulgarian prostitutes. (Extracts from Europol Report TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN FOR SEXUAL EXPLOITATION IN THE EU: THE INVOLVEMENT OF WESTERN BALKANS ORGANISED CRIME 2006 Public version).
The Europol report emphasizes the role of ‘immigrant’ and illegal aliens as ‘prostitutes’ from countries facing political unrest, civil conflict and war. Yet, another report points out how “the influx of peace-keepers and other international personnel may lead to increased trafficking of women and girls for prostitution”.
Prostitution. Prevalent and pervasive.
The heart of the market
In these movement patterns, a significant destination is Europe, which possibly has the highest prostitutes-to-populations ratio – alongwith the USA. A news report estimates, that “every day about 1.5 million Spaniards and foreigners pay for sex”. In the middle of an acute problem,
Spain has been dubbed the “brothel of Europe,” with up to 500,000 women working as prostitutes. Every day, 1.5 million men buy sex in Spain, said Maribel Montano of the governing Socialist Party (PSOE). The trade, which is plied in places ranging from parks and flats to roadside brothels, turns over an estimated 40 billion euros (54 billion dollars) annually, almost the equivalent of Spain’s education budget.
A BBC reports estimates “prostitutes in Germany … number around 400,000″ – a figure that Der Spiegel supports. When compared to other countries, “Italy’s 80,000 prostitutes are more visible than anywhere else in Europe” – close to another recent estimate and up from a 1997 estimate by New York Times of 25,000. Coming to Britain, a newspaper reports, “Prostitution in the UK is worth more than £770m a year, and the Government could raise tax revenues of £250m if it were legalised”.
Though lesser than Spain and Germany, some “80,000 people visit prostitutes in Belgium each day, according to an official government estimate”. The same report indicates that “two-thirds of Belgium’s prostitutes were brought in illegally by pimps from eastern European countries such as Russia.” It then underestimates how “Belgium’s estimated 10,000 prostitutes” handle 80,000 customers a day – which seems improbable.
France within Europe is seemingly, an exception. With just about “15,000 male and female prostitutes in France, with 7,000 in Paris alone” France has one of the lowest prostitutes-to-population ratio. This figure is contradicted by estimates from a recent book by a French student-part-time prostitute who claims that “nearly 40,000 students turn to prostitution simply to make ends meet” in France. Der Spiegel (Germany) ran a similar story sometime back tracing how this form of recruitment or voluntary economic activity starts.
For smaller countries, loose estimates of “more than 8,000 prostitutes may be active in Finland” float around. For Switzerland, there are reports that “around 14,000 prostitutes worked in Switzerland in 2005, the majority of whom were immigrants.” In Greece, an estimated “10,000 prostitutes work the streets of Athens, a city whose districts house 500 brothels and attract more than a million people a year for sex”.
For procurers and women in Eastern Europe,
Turkey has become a magnet is that the more lucrative markets of Western Europe are protected by increasingly strict visa requirements that take weeks to work through, with only uncertain results. A young woman from Moldova can be in Istanbul in a day by paying just $10 for a month long visa at the border.
Commercial Sex – bigger than movies and music
BBC reports that “in Britain, it is estimated that some £770m ($1.2bn) is spent on prostitution every year, more than on cinemas or many other forms of entertainment.” In Switzerland, prostitution “generates an annual turnover of SFr3.2 billion ($2.65 billion).”
In some parts of EU, prostitution is recognized as another profession with a State taxation policy in place. For instance, “5%-10% of the estimated 20,000 prostitutes in the Netherlands pay taxes.” Belgium is considering “estimated 50 million euros a year. It represents an attractive option for a country currently struggling to balance its budget deficit”. At “€14 billion-a-year prostitution industry”, Germany is the biggest market by value, for prostitution.
Anti-sex, Anti-marriage and anti-women. (Cartoonist - Nick Anderson, Publication - Houston’s Chronicle).
In the German city of Cologne “a ‘sex tax’ brought in revenues of €828,000 in 2006, a municipality spokesperson told the news agency ddp – a significant increase over 2005, when revenues were €790,000. Although prostitution is legal in Germany, Cologne is the only city that has a specific sex tax. Each prostitute is required to pay €150 each month into the city’s coffers. However, those who only work part-time can opt to pay €6 per day worked instead.”
Cross country data is hard to come by.
What does prostitution mean
Prostitution, as these figures show, takes care of a number of things. Unemployment for one. Every prostitute, creates jobs for at least one more person (more pimps and brothels, more medical services, increased security, cosmetics, business, etc.). For another, the revenue receipts that Governments seem to be getting.
A general European view was that “all women were thought to use sex for personal gain, the prostitute was understood, in the words of Ruth Karras, as ‘simply the market-oriented version of a more general phenomenon”. There is one reality that feminists believe, which needs to be isolated and accepted, is that “not all women engaged in transactional sex work fall within the victim category.”
I wonder, is prostitution is a subliminal response to the emotional and social wasteland of a society which works hard to limit societal growth and families from happening. If men rape, do women prostitute? Is prostitution, a form of gender-revenge by women against men? For limiting the role of women in society?
The number of prostitutes in Europe and the USA, the covert encouragement of pornography are part of Western pattern of showing themselves as champions of ‘freedom’ and ‘individual’ choice. This narrative hides a systemic bias against marriage and cynical on-off ‘tolerance’ towards prostitution.
Maybe even a political motive!
A societal bias towards prostitution
A recent ‘sting’ report about prostitution gave an interesting insight into sex services offered.
Within minutes, smiling Carla walked in to the room in pink lingerie and introduced herself as “Bea”. She then recited a price list, “£30 for hand relief, £40 for oral sex with a condom followed by sex and £70 for oral sex without a condom followed by full sex with a condom”. (via Tory MP Mike Weatherley’s wife working as a prostitute – mirror.co.uk).
What happens to people if they don’t get ‘hand-relief’!
If 67% of European youth is single, needs hand relief, one can only imagine how that pent up frustration can be released through war, rape, enslavement, butchery, crime, etc.
As Shakespeare put it, “Cry ‘Havoc’! And let slip the dogs of war.”
Though 60% of the Western adult population is married, at least 30% are on thin ice!
Exciting new series. From 1 Mar, 2010.
Artha and Kama form the major pillars of western society… with very little dharma and absolutely no moksha…. As long as they enough artha to satisfy their kama its all good… As Artha drains (as it has already started since 2007) from the west…the unhindered kama will raise god knows what kinds of hell…. The true test of Indian society came in the 17-18 hundreds when massive drop in GDP took place and the biggest transfer of wealth happened from India to Britain… In-spite of the vanishing artha …. Indian society remained resilient… family structures did not breakdown….Crime did not rise… addictions of any kind did not take hold…. etc etc … I am an NRI living in the west.. Everyday I see the wealth disappearing from here…I know in 5-10 years time me and many like me will head for home…Hopefully this time we can make a stand….Im sure many immigrants like me would be demonised for taking away the jobs etc…. IN the mean time we can convert our wealth into gold and transfer it to india…. You are spot on in this analysis…
The interesting part is how Western ‘intellectuals’ promote this agenda. For instance Malthus, who was long influential in 19th century Britain, suggested ‘preventative checks, abortion, birth control, prostitution, postponement of marriage and celibacy.’ for ‘population control.’