I have a real issue with the sexualisation of public life.
I´m a nightshifter, and even on my free days I´m often awake during the night, often watching German satellite TV.
During the night the private stations finance their program with phone-sex advertisments. Normally I use the remote real fast because those ads really sicken me: Women present themselves as objects for one purpose and one purpose only, letting go of the last remnant of self-respect.
What should I care? It´s a way of making a living isn´t it.
Quite likely, that those women in the ads really make a good living. But millions and millions of others just make a very good living for some others, mostly men, and not just on the phone or on an ad. Many are literally forced into prostitution by men who had tricked them with promises of normal jobs, others were forced by poverty and desperation.
Speaking of that, I can tell you a personal story, as usual.
Some years back still in Germany while my kids were still small, I had been living for a couple of months in a shelter for the homeless. How I got there is another story.
However I was desperately trying to get out and find a decent place to live. I went to many interviews for a place to rent, nobody wanted to rent me anything, there were enough others applying for these apartments, who looked less risky.
But then there was this one woman. She said, she was going to move in with her boyfriend and wanted to sublet her apartment for a year at least.
However, she would need the permission of the building company and since her place was only one livingroom, one bedroom, she wouldn´t get it for a family with 3 children.
But then she looked at me and said, "it´s hard to live with children in a shelter isn´t it". I said yes, and she felt sorry for me. She had a little boy of her own.
So she sublet to me without permission, but we should be careful so the manager wouldn´t find out or she would loose her contract.
And so we moved in. And even when she after only 4 months told me she needed her apartment back, since things weren´t working out with her boyfriend, she still told me, not to worry, she would wait until we had found something new. (I panicked anyway, but that is still another story.)
She had been a bit vague on her job, but since we took over her phone, we soon found out from the strange calls we received, that she must have been connected to the redlight business.
I had several temporary jobs at the time, in one they cheated me of all wages for 3 weeks work, in another I worked 4 weeks and only got 3 weeks paid.
And that´s when I actually played with the thought of not saying: "wrong number", at the next strange call. Well, I was never seriously considering it just playing with the thought, I was not at the end of my tethers yet.
But I surely can identify with women who are, women who were slightly more desperate than I was and slightly less religious, women from countries were the economy has broken down, women who have hungry children to feed.
And one of those, for whatever reason she went into the business, showed compassion to me, when nobody else would.
No, I do not hate those women, not even the ones on TV, that go so much on my nerves.
But I hate a system where women and even children are sold, bought, used, humiliated and hurt badly, a system that makes women and children into discardable objects.
And I do not just blame the system on the pimps and their organisations, the providers of the business, I also blame it on the market.
If you take together prostitution and pornography, then it is one of the biggest markets in the world.
There has allways been a prostitution business, but in the last decades it has grown out of any proportians. Some free-sex advocates had argued, that with no more taboos on sexuality, there would no longer be a need for this kind of business.
I guess they were wrong.
The less taboos, the more demand and the more extreme. Normal prostitution is no longer enough. Now it must be violent sex.
Normal pornography is not enough, now it must be child porno or snuff movies.
It looks like adults, just as children, need certain rules and restrictions, even when some of them break them once in a while, for kicks.
But when the rules fall and no borders are any more visible, the people who need the adrenalin kick of breaking rules start getting so far over in their search for kicks, that they start seriously hurting others.
And with sexuality it seems, as if, just like with drugs, some people get addicted to their sexual kicks, they need more and more either life or in images. And it gives them less and less of kicks, so they need higher dosages, extremer ones.
This is the market for exploitation of women and children.
And how did we get so far?
I blame it on Freud. His ridiculous and never verified theories about sexuality being after food and water the most important need in life, and that restrictions on sexuality will make a person emotionally disturbed, these theories have opened the way to the falling away of rules and restrictions, which normally would keep a lid on the extremes of sexual behavior.
Sexualized images are now all around us, selling every product imaginable, and giving men the feeling that women are really only good for one thing and one thing only.
Date rape has not become less seldom, but even more frequent, than before the sexual revolution. For now many men just can´t take no for an answer any more. They quite honestly think the woman is just playing around and no doesn´t really mean no.
Besides rape, there is sexual pressure on teenage girls even as young as 11 years old.
They are told, that sex is allways cool and who doesn´t take part is totally out.
The newest "inn thing" seems to be, that as entrance fee for a cool party, girls have to perform oral sex on the organizing boys.
If this is the peak of women´s liberation, I definitely don´t want it, for the young girls I know!
We in the west are a society out of control in many ways, and sex in my opinion is definitely one of them.
