Comments Elsewhere

Kameron: Great post. I had to hold back the vomit when I read “I bought her” too. I know Big Daddy Kristof is trying to impress us with the strangeness of the situation, but would “I bought her freedom” or “I paid a ransom” be too much to ask?

With every column Nicholas Kristof publishes, I hate his smug, patronizing, patriarchal ass even more.

Jim & Omar: in addition to agreeing with everything that Kameron has said about Kristof’s article (or rather, series of articles—it isn’t just that the guy wrote one article, but that it is the latest of six or seven now about his one-man crusade for the emancipation of Cambodian child prostitutes), I also wanted to add that Kristof’s adventures in Cambodia aren’t just a Victorian revival in the sense of colonialism; they’re also a revival of Victorian moralism towards “fallen women.” Katha Pollitt got it exactly right:

“To tell you the truth, I thought those columns were a little weird—there’s such a long tradition of privileged men rescuing individual prostitutes as a kind of whirlwind adventure. You would never know from the five columns he wrote about young Srey Neth and Srey Mom, that anyone in Cambodia thought selling your daughter to a brothel was anything but wonderful. I wish he had given us the voices of some Cambodian activists—for starters, the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center and the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO)—both of which are skeptical about brothel raids and rescues, which often dump traumatized girls on local NGOs that lack the resources to care for them.

“…

“You can see the narrative in the process of creation: Third World women are victims; American men are saviors. Right-wing Christians care about Third World women; feminists only care about themselves. Meanwhile, Equality Now fights the good fight on “spit and a nickel,” as Bien-Aimé says, and gets ignored.”

This is connected with Omar’s comments. Yes, Kristof is allegedly trying to prick our consciences into moving for a larger solution to the problem of sexual slavery. Good for him, but the problem is that in the midst of endlessly telling and retelling the tale how he became the Great Emancipator of lovely Srey Neth and Srey Mom, he forgot to say much of anything about how this might be done. You’ll have trouble finding any discussion in his articles of the existing Cambodian groups, or international feminist NGOs, that have been doing the hard work on the ground of combatting sex slavery and the trafficking of women; the only groups he seems to be aware of at all are domestic anti-trafficking pressure groups on the Christian Right. You’ll also have trouble finding any discussion whatsoever in his endless ruminitions on sex slavery of the privileged men—for example, men from China, Japan, the United States, Australia, and Europe—whose “sex tourism” drive much of the demand for child prostitution in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. How can we change the material conditions that women and girls face so that more women have options other than prostitution or starvation? How can we change men in our own culture and elsewhere so that the demand for child sexual slavery is eradicated? What can we do to aid organizations that have already begun to do this work in piecemeal fashion? These are all hard questions, but they are essential questions for any serious progress to be made. And they are questions that Big Daddy Kristof completely avoids. This is an important issue that deserves to be taken seriously, and Kristof is using his highly visible position in the Op-Ed page of the Times to inform us of the virtue and the money that he’s got to spread around.

In other words, he’s a useless wanker. To hell with that, and to hell with him.