One of the simplest ways we can prevent child sex trafficking is held in the power of our tongue. Every day, we can be listening deeper to the words we use and the misconceptions we perpetuate that we’ve brought with us from our own homes and backgrounds. We have the ability to shift our words to align with where we want our culture to go instead of remaining stuck in a cycle of inadvertently valuing boys over girls. We have all played a part in this.
Before you start throwing your lettuce at me, let me clarify. I am not saying you are a woman-hater. I am saying our world has subtly normalized the idea of “men over women” for centuries, and I am merely suggesting that each of us has the responsibility to do a check-in. Sometimes, even small words cause a rudder to get off course.
Recently, Jim Gaffigan posted a tweet for National Hot Dog Day. He’s often a pretty funny guy, but once I began taking stock of the words my husband and I allowed in our house, I realized funny is subjective. Now that I know better, I am uncomfortable with so much (or any) of Gaffigan’s humor being at the expense of women in the sex industry. The meme he tweeted read, “Hot dogs are like strippers. No one wants to know the backstory.” His caption was, “Ignorance is bliss.”
Alan Dershowitz, accused of having sex with minors, is currently using this “ignorance is bliss” strategy to distance himself from any illegalities that may or may not have happened on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. An island that has been named repeatedly as a place where Epstein was trafficking girls 14-16 of age for him and his business friends. It seems this “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy is common.
In fact, many people (men and women) who have been caught trafficking children plead the same case. “I didn’t know she was a minor.” And maybe that’s true. Maybe none of them knew. And maybe these children were threatened not to tell their age.
Why threaten them? The johns know enough to know these aren’t women they are sleeping with. The girls certainly know their own age. But the laws are written so the charge for raping a child is one thing. If you didn’t know she was a child, it’s a much lesser charge altogether. In Nevada, a man can sexually assault a child, and if he claims he doesn’t know she’s a child, he gets a year probation. That’s because Nevada has this crime categorized as a class E felony. That’s a year probation for your first offense, and 1-4 years for subsequent charges. I guess ignorance is bliss.
But, how about them hotdogs? I do love a good hotdog over a baseball game. And, I fully agree with the sentiment that whatever these hotdogs are made of is something I probably don’t want to fully know about. I’d likely never eat them again. But, if I am reading this right, Gaffigan is comparing a woman to a hot dog. A mishmash of meat we don’t want to know closely because it’s secretly disgusting if we know more.
