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[”The latest research by the underground women’s rights organisation the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reveals that as many as 25,000 Afghan women worked as prostitutes in 2001 - 5,000 of those were in Kabul alone - with stark predictions that the number will rise as women and girls resort to selling themselves to escape poverty.”

South China Morning Post, April 9, 2006]

by Dr. Suki Falconberg

10/13/07

In the October 3 Cyrano’s Journal/Thomas Paine’s Corner, I wrote a letter to Ken Burns, creator of the PBS series The War, criticizing him for omitting the many women forced into prostitution by WWII (and by all wars, for that matter). I’d like to respond, with some additional thoughts, to some of the readers who responded to me…

First, I’d like to thank Robert Farrell, Kenneth, B. Lenner, Bolo, and MeganM for their compassionate and intelligent responses and contributions. I’d also like to ask the ex-military man, Kenneth, more about what he has seen. He writes: “I have been throughout the world; the amount of prostitution that is in lock-step with the U.S. military is mind-boggling.” Please let me know, Kenneth, if you know anything about the situation in Korea (which I mention in the article below) and if ‘the pact’ (also mentioned below) still holds.

One reader asks for verification that almost 100% of the GI’s in Japan after WWII took advantage of the sex slaves in the comfort stations set up for them. This fact comes from John Dower’s Embracing Defeat. Dower is an emeritus historian at MIT. Another verification is the 200,000 Amerasian children abandoned by GI’s. Pearl Buck reports this number when she visited Japan in the decades after the war. 200,000. To rape that many children into these prostituted bodies indicates a high amount of usage. That is enough rape-thrust power to send a space shuttle to the outer planets. Since girls who slept with GI’s were outcasts (despite the vulnerability and destitution that led to their sexual exploitation) and so were their children, lying down with the soldiers was hardly a voluntary act on their part. ‘Rape’ is what was done to their bodies—despite the girls being labeled prostitutes to justify the act as innocuous—rape produced those 200,000 unwanted children. Hence, my conclusion that almost every GI in Japan was a rapist. Which brings us to a really big question: Why have those vets who are still alive not been tried and punished for this crime?

As a sad side-note, Pearl Buck also visited Korea and she writes: “There I saw the same child as I did in Japan–outside the gates of our military bases. She was dirty and frightened. These are the children of our sons and brothers. We have to do something for them.” She might have added—“of our husbands and boyfriends” as well.

Another verification is a newspaper account from the time in which U.S. army chaplains complain about the long lines of soldiers outside the brothels. The same account says that the GI’s were trucked in by the busload.

According to this article, once inside the brothel, the GI picked his girl. Demand was so continuous that the girls had no time to eat or sleep. Some were raped 60 times a day. I would like to ask the vets still alive how they could do this? Did you not see it as rape? It is time you took responsibility for this big ‘dirty secret’ of war. I can’t understand why Burns made no mention of the GI’s as mass rapists. Puzzling.

As for the “almost 100%” speculation, I think I can bring a personal note to the issue. Using prostituted bodies is simply what military men, in any era, do: I talked to many, many American sailors during the 1970’s and 1980’s and they all told me the same thing–when the ship docks in a foreign port, almost all the men go off and get drunk and find a whore to screw. Very, very few hold back. It is apparently still the same now, as, for example, when the U.S. Fleet pulls into Thailand, a major ‘sex-binge’ spot.

I am aware, of course, that all militaries behave this way. I am aware of what happened to the Korean Comfort Women and that the Japanese soldier, not just in Nanking, but all over Asia, was one of the most efficient raping machines in the history of war. If there is a Purple Heart for Rape, he would win it.

I am aware that other allied forces raped during WWII. Apparently, the Australians behaved with even more savagery than did the Americans in Japan. According to historian Yuki Tanaka, the girls cried all night as the Australians raped them all night. (Answer for me, men of the world, how a man can get turned on enough to get hard if the girl is terrified and crying? Was every Australian soldier in Japan turned on by this hard, terrible act of rape? Will the Australian vets still alive answer me?)

Moroccan allied soldiers raped widely all over Italy, sometimes subjecting entire villages to this terrible brutality. (The 1960’s movie Two Women shows something of this, particularly in the gang rape of a mother and daughter by 30-40 Moroccans.) But I am an American woman and these GI’s are my men. I want to see them behave with compassion and kindness.

Another reader asks if I sent the letter to Ken Burns. Yes, I sent it to PBS. But, from what I saw of his series, Burns is so indoctrinated with the lies of war that I think it unlikely he could see war from the prostitute’s perspective. This is what I try to do. She has definitely been left out of the history of war. That such a huge piece of war history could have simply gone missing is tragic. The reasons for ignoring her are obvious: the news and all of history are recounted from the point of view of the conqueror rapist, not from the point of view of the body in the brothel. As the prostitute takes her daily rape quota, she is not articulate enough to say anything—she is too busy trying to survive. And too ashamed to speak due to social censure. No one ever asks her what she thinks of all this war making and how her body got caught up in the sexual crossfire. If journalists (those who could tell her story) visit brothels, it is to sexually relieve themselves, not to stand as recorders of the injustice done to the brothel’s inmates.

Our staggeringly large number of war films always tell the tale from the point of view of the soldier. Just one example from the Vietnam era: we never know what the field whore in Full Metal Jacket thinks as the men take turns on her. Significantly, she is wearing sunglasses so we cannot see her eyes. We know her only from the crude jokes the men make about her. This famous, lauded movie is supposed to uncover the horror of war? But Kubrick certainly made no effort to unmask the ‘true horror’—that what happened to her body was far worse than anything that these soldiers endured. I would have taken the camera into the room where they gang raped her, and removed the sunglasses, and showed the dead misery in her eyes.

In all war movies, the prostitute is a dirty joke, a throwaway being with no humanity or importance—the focus is always on the soldier and his temporary ‘lapse’ as he buys a prostituted body in order to release his sexual tension inside her. His need to relieve himself due to the tensions of war and her necessary presence as a toilet, sewer, semen-dump, is simply a staple of this genre.

Even Casualties of War follows this pattern. Supposedly, the men gang rape the village girl because their leave is cancelled and they can’t get laid in the nearest town at the nearest brothel. No notice does the filmmaker take of the fact that the prisoner in the nearest brothel undergoes on a daily basis what the village girl is only subjected to once.

Journalists all see the soldier’s story as primary; the raped whore is incidental to his existence—just a convenience. A female journalist for U.S News and World Report speculated that American soldiers in Iraq are behaving savagely and killing civilians because they do not have brothels where they can drink and let off steam. Actually, there is evidence that Iraqi women have been brothelized for them. And relieving himself inside an already thoroughly raped whore’s body does not make a soldier less savage. If anything, the license he takes upon this enslaved women will make him more careless and savage toward non-whore women—including the ‘clean’ ones back home. And I really wonder where this woman journalist from U.S. News mislaid her vagina? Can her imagination not extend to how she would feel if she were a body in a brothel, a woman on her back invaded by thousands of drunken men she doesn’t know?

Yet another reader says that a gentle approach is called for. I think the time for a gentle approach is long gone. In fact, it evaporated when the first male raped and prostituted the first female. Historians will have to date for me the advent of war, since my primary expertise is in literature–but I do know that the first war epic in the West, Homer’s The Iliad (850 B.C.), is purportedly based on historical events that took place around 1500 B.C. and that Gilgamesh, the first literary work of the Western world, dates from 2000 B.C. and is based on a Sumerian civilization from around 2700 B.C. The Sumerians created the first military empire, and Gilgamesh makes reference to sending sons off to war and to raped daughters. Twenty-seven centuries of raped daughters. Twenty-seven centuries of prostituted, sexually-enslaved women.

Enough is enough already.

Historians say that the first slaves were female: captive women taken during war and used for sex. And that both slavery and prostitution originated from men making war. Historians say that the practice of trading sex for money or food arose from conquered women trying to placate the enemy and to find a way to survive. Nothing has changed since pre-Homer or pre-Gilgamesh. Despite the emergence of numerous women’s rights groups and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and Refugees International and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, plus dozens of others that document the conditions of prostituted women, girls, and children both in the civilian world and in conflict areas and around the bases of occupying military forces—and despite extensive coverage of the depredations of UN Peacekeeping forces and NATO forces who freely exploit sexually vulnerable women, girls, and children everywhere they are stationed—nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing has changed. Far more women, girls, and children are prostituted now, at this moment, than have, collectively, been exploited in the history of our species.

How will ‘gentleness’ protect women from being prostituted? It is our very ‘gentleness’ and softness that makes us vulnerable. Men can rape us because they are stronger—and rougher. Do you think ‘gentle’ girls would be in brothels if they were not weaker than the pimps who put them there for profit and weaker than the men who force themselves into the girls for pleasure? What girl would chose intercourse with men she doesn’t know? What girl would chose to let one group of men rape her all day so that another group can take the money that she brings in? What girl would chose to work under the conditions that many prostitutes face: forced anal sex, for one, since that ‘decent’ girl back home won’t do it and some one has to satisfy the male urge for this. After all, his sexuality is paramount, is it not? What girl would want to be treated like a dirty joke and a semen-release dump—as if her sexual needs were simply non-existent? And I can testify from my own experience that most military men are drunk when they buy a body. This means they are usually rough as well—sometimes just through drunken carelessness. It is not a great deal of fun to be banged into by a man who is not just smelly with groin sweat but reeking with beer breath and doesn’t much care if he hurts the girl or not. Not to mention the soreness, tearing, bleeding, damage to the bladder and many other physical problems that are simply part of being used by large numbers of men in one day, or one night. I don’t think that non-prostituted women, like some of the ones who responded to my article, really know what prostitution entails for the woman. What for the man is fun and games is for her a great deal of pain.

No, I don’t think that the brutality visited on our bodies for so many weary centuries of ‘prostitution rape’ can be solved by a campaign of gentleness.

Another reader criticizes me for being graphic about sexual suffering. I don’t make any apologies since this tactic is long overdue and apparently effective for some readers: I receive many e-mails thanking me for finally breaking silence and describing the harsh truth. It is time for someone to tell how deep the physical pain is. (I wish someone had listened to the Korean Comfort Women when they graphically described the horror of being raped 50 times a day, but apparently no one did—so I have to tell my story—in hopes someone will listen. It is not nearly as graphic as theirs—since I was not raped 50 times a day [I would not be alive to write if I had been]–but it will have to do.)

Concerning women and prostitution in Iraq, it is definitely hard to ferret out what is happening since journalists do not write about this aspect of the war and soldiers observe ‘the pact’—that tacit understanding that ‘what happens here, stays here’ in terms of sexual behavior. (Yes, the famous Las Vegas advertising slogan comes from the military and dates at least as far back as WWI and the silence about collective visits of our soldiers to French brothels. I have this information from an uncle who is a WWII vet who, in turn, knew WWI vets.)

Information comes in snippets here and there, most of it from numerous women’s rights groups scattered across the internet. All of them report the presence of sex trafficking in Iraq and that girls have ‘gone missing.’ All of them report that, of the 2 million refugees in Iraq, and the 2 million in neighboring countries, some women are turning to prostitution to survive. A New York Times article mentioned “whorehouses in Basra,” but did not go inside the brothels to examine the lives and fates of the inmates—not surprising since this newspaper, like all others, is written from the point of view of the soldier and the conqueror rapist. I would ask the British soldiers in Basra if they are frequenting these whorehouses? If so, what condition are the women and girls in? Can you—British soldiers–help them? I would ask you to please rescue them instead of using them.

A Dec. 2006 Newsweek article by journalist Christian Caryl reports that booze, whores, porn, and drugs are now rampant in Iraq due to the American occupation. Caryl says that there are now brothels in Baghdad where young Iraqi men can rent a woman for fifteen minutes. It only costs $1.50. Apparently, according to this article, before our invasion of Iraq, only gypsy women were enslaved for prostitution. Most significantly, he reports American MP’s are making sure that the women are released if arrested. Why would the MP’s do this? Is it to make sure that the women are available for our soldiers?

Sadly, this journalist sees the ‘right’ to buy a body as part of ‘Iraqi freedom.’ Now Iraqi men can exploit enslaved women just the way Western men do! Carly is identical to Burns in this respect: they both see the story from the perspective of the rapist—as do all other Western journalists, film-makers, etc. Since the whores’ stories are never told, are the women simply brothel rape fodder and are the ‘rape rights’ of the male “all important”? When the NY Times matter-of-factly mentions ‘whorehouses in Basra,’ as if they were a given and a norm—no effort to ask the whores what they think of their lives—that ‘revered’ paper is on the side of the conqueror rapist.

Are the Iraqi military and the Iraqi police force visiting these brothels, as do militaries and police forces in almost all other countries with trafficked/sold women (a few instances: Cambodia, Thailand, India, Turkey—there are many others)?

I would be incredibly happy if no American soldier in Iraq were using a prostituted body. I would very happy to learn that no Filipina women have been trafficked in to provide sexual services. I would be even happier if our men were rescuing Iraqi girls from brothels, comforting them, and setting up recovery programs for them.

I would like to know more about the Iraqi women and girls who are currently in the Baghdad brothels. How did they get there? Are they surviving, in any way, being raped every fifteen minutes by a different man? What will happen to them if they can escape their rape prisons? Is not ‘honor killing’ the way Iraqi men deal with ‘wayward’ women? If a ‘decent’ girl is tainted if she is raped only once—apparently the hymen is all that makes a girl valuable in Iraqi culture—then how much more ‘unacceptable’ must be a girl who was forced to whore and was raped thousands of times? How much greater must be her ‘dishonor’? So great as to be immeasurable in a culture that judge’s a girl’s value solely by her virginity?

Are there any programs in Iraq to help the prostitute? Has any of the massive amount of aid money going to Iraq been designated to help her? Has Condi Rice visited any of the Baghdad brothels—to help the girls? Rice too is a woman. You would think she would care about the rape of other women.

I am just asking. These are important questions. They have not been asked before. They have not been foregrounded, front row center, on the first page of the New York Times.

Perhaps this newspaper, and all the others in the world, and all the magazines like Time and Newsweek missed their chance at a pivotal moment in history. This was the early 1990’s. This was when the Korean Comfort Women finally told their stories. I had high hopes that this would be the continental divide in women’s history. I had high hopes that every newspaper and magazine in the whole world, in all languages, would devote pages and pages and pages to this story, perhaps even entire issues. I expected the world to be consumed by the true horror of war that had finally been uncovered. For the first time ever, we had testimonies, dozens of them, about what war really was.

Every girl told the same tale: a virgin when conscripted; her body broken though hours of rape; her spirit destroyed through months or even years of use by 30-50 soldiers a day. Her whole life and girlhood and womanhood taken from her. Then fifty years of tormented silence, until finally a few incredibly courageous survivors spoke–in the early 1990’s.

But it is 2007 and nothing has changed. The systematic sexual enslavement of women is more prevalent than ever. ‘Comfort women’ are still a staple, a norm for all militaries. Another group of ‘comfort women,’ in fact, now occupies a sad niche in modern-day Korea. Around U.S. bases there, roughly 10,000 girls trafficked in from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Philippines service our soldiers. I don’t know how many Korean women are similarly enslaved.

These trafficked girls receive about 2 million visits a year from the men so ‘usage’ is ‘typically’ high. The few girls who do escape and are able to speak (after so much rape trauma) all tell the same story: what ‘trafficking’ involves is beating, starvation, ongoing gang rape, and other terror tactics to break the girls and keep them docile and performing. The few who escape report the humiliation of being forced to dance naked for the soldiers and how they are beaten if they cry when the men take them in the back rooms for sex.

Apparently the militaries of the world have learned nothing from the stories of the Korean Comfort Women. You would think that these horrifying testimonies would change the history of women forever—and change the attitudes of militaries of ‘free nations’ like ours—Americans, to whom slavery is now horrendous—you would think that the whole fabric of history would turn itself upside down and all soldiers of all ‘free’ nations would say—“yes, we now know, how the prostitute suffers. We won’t rape her anymore.”

But nothing has changed. In 2007, the traffic in ‘comfort women’ is thriving and drunken GI’s are partying on their bodies.

I thought, when the Korean women told their stories, that all ‘free’ women in America would rise up in enlightened outrage and say, “no, no more, now that we know the truth about the comfort women of war, now that we know the pain of all those forced into prostitution, you will not prostitute one more woman for our military or for any military anywhere.” But if I ask the average American woman, she doesn’t even know who the Korean Comfort Women were, let alone the Occupations ones served up to her father, or grandfather, in Tokyo or Paris or Berlin–and she has no knowledge of the ones now servicing our soldiers around our bases all over the world. She knows a lot more about the love life of Jennifer Anniston and whether Lindsay Lohan is once more re-entering her posh rehab spa than she does about the rape-fate of millions of women around the globe.

Is this rape-fate happening in Iraq? Since this kind of activity is always covered up, how can we find out what is really happening? Will American women soldiers tell us? They themselves are being raped. Our women soldiers in Iraq report being afraid to go to the latrines at night because of the possibility of being sexually attacked.

I have some corroborating evidence that might tell us what is happening from a book called Afghan Women, just out, by Elaheh Rostami-Povey, herself a woman from that country. The sexual misery of women in that country might give us a glimpse into a similar situation in Iraq. At least half a dozen times in this book, Rostami-Povey mentions that Afghan women, both in Kabul, and all around the country, are begging in the streets and selling themselves for sex to survive.

She gives the impression that this is widespread and commonplace. That country has 50,000 occupying allied forces, 25,000 of whom are Americans soldiers. Are these 50,000 men buying sexual services from these destitute women? If not, it will be the first time in the history of war that military men have not bought women forced into starvation prostitution. In every war, young men, trained to be hard and hyper masculine—war elevates male brutality to an intense level—have needed some place to put their penises. That place is the body of the cheap whore created by that very war: the destitute, vulnerable girl with no choice but to ‘lay or starve,’ as one Vietnam vet I talked to put it.

Is this also the situation in Iraq—women forced into starvation prostitution? Why should it be any different from in Afghanistan—where we now have an eyewitness account from an Afghan woman, Rostami-Povey, as to the pathetic circumstances of these women. With 4 million Iraqi refugees, the situation automatically creates starvation prostitution. It is so all over the world. In Liberia, young girls, some mere children, will sleep with the Peacekeeping forces just to have a bed for the night, so desperate are they.

Is Iraq the big exception to all war-time and refugee inevitabilities—no prostituted women, even though they are plentiful in every other conflict area in the world? And if women are being prostituted, are the allied forces using them? They seem to be doing so every place else. Why would Iraq be the exception?

I have a solution. It is a simple one. It is based on the remark of another vet. He said: “Instead of making useless wars, like the ones in Iraq, we should set our soldiers to doing something helpful—like knocking down all the doors of all the brothels in the world. And taking those girls out of there!”

It is so simple. Instead of raping prostituted bodies—in Korea, in Iraq, in Afghanistan—let’s have our men rescue these poor girls. Let them put all the money they would have spent buying the girls to a much better end: take them out of the brothels and set up sanctuaries and refuges and long-term care facilities (to heal their physical and psychological wounds) and schools for these trafficked/prostituted girls so as to give their minds a different world from the rape they have known.

Just think. What if….What if, in Tokyo, 1945, the U.S. Military had set up ‘comfort stations’ for all the destitute, sexually vulnerable girls in Japan. Places where, instead of being raped all day, the girls were fed and soothed and given warm blankets and peace.

My last response is to the woman in the military who served in a combat zone and says the only prostitutes she saw were female military contractors who set up shop to take advantage of a ‘captive market.’ These women, she says, were fired and sent home.

Now, it is interesting that this apparently voluntary form of prostitution is frowned upon. What would be wrong with a woman, in an entrepreneurial spirit, exchanging sex for money? I don’t think I would object to this if it were, indeed, completely voluntary. She would have to have complete choice as to customers and she would have to be treated well, and with respect—because she is providing a valuable service. The monetary reward would have to be substantial—since she is selling an inestimably precious part of her body. And no worthless, sleaze, pimp middlemen, taking the profits. And, of course, complete freedom to refuse anal sex or other services distasteful or damaging to her.

I could continue to lay out a Prostitute Bill of Rights, but I think you get the general idea.

Is this sort of voluntary form of prostitution possible? Would not the ‘entrepreneur prostitute’ be preferable to the ‘starvation/war-zone’ prostitute? If so, why not let these entrepreneurs set up sex shop in Iraq, or other combat areas?

Is prostitution always sexual slavery, given that, historically, the institution has depended on the strong (male, in power) taking advantage of the weak (vulnerable, hungry female)? Does setting up a space we call ‘brothel,’ where a woman is subjected to sex with multiple men, for their pleasure—certainly not hers!–imply that she is sexually subservient to the male, the dominant one, and his needs? If poverty is involved, there can be no question of ‘choice.’ Can there be ‘choice’ if the entrepreneurial woman offers sex without coercion, or is she simply colluding in her own degradation by acquiescing to the idea that the male, by his gender birthright, is entitled to buy a body just for his sexual gratification. Is she still degrading herself (and all other women) if she markets her own body and is well treated by her customers and makes lots of money?

I’d certainly find this form of entrepreneurial prostitution more palatable than the pathetic starvation prostitution of war.

On a crueler, satiric note, prostitution would certainly be a way of turning the Iraqi economy around: conscript all those war-impoverished females to sexually service those 150,000 or so horny young American men over there. Look what we did for Thailand. A third of their economy now depends on the sale of young girls—an industry jumpstarted by the massive presence of our soldiers during the Vietnam era. Prostitution would, of course, exist there without our war, so long ago, but considering that the famous sex-and-pussy shows were first set up by ex-U.S. servicemen and that the huge numbers of prostitutes we created during that era were, after the war ended in 1975, channeled into sex tourism (can’t let all those prostituted bodies go to waste!)—well, just consider the possibilities for Iraq and Afghanistan. Baghdad and Kabul—Whore Capitals of the Middle East, like their sister city Bangkok, Brothel Capital of the World. Japanese and German tourists and the militaries of the world would have a whole new whore-destination to visit.

To return to being serious, I hope that not one girl or woman in Iraq is being prostituted to our military. I hope that not one American soldier there is forcing sex on a desperate, starving girl. If this I so, it will be a first in the history of war.

Dr. Suki Falconberg, © 2007

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