Sasza Lohrey  

Hello and welcome Welcome to the BBXX podcast. Let’s get intimate. I’m your host Sasha Laurie. And we’re here to challenge the way our culture has conditioned us to talk and think about sexuality, intimacy, and healthy relationships. In this last interview of the series of four interviews, we dive into human trafficking but with a specific focus on sex trafficking. And while conducting research, one of the most surprising things was understanding the players involved in not only the industry itself, but in the attempt to abolish what is now referred to as modern slavery, and specifically within the sex trafficking industry. while conducting research, the only books I could find were all written by religious organizations. And I found it incredibly helpful to know how many people are are involved in currently trying to end this. But I couldn’t help but wonder why it seemed as though religious organizations were the only people involved in such a global human issue. This is not a religious issue. This is not a women’s issue. This is a global human issue. And awareness needs to be brought to the mainstream so that we can all contribute to making a difference. I think part of the issue with getting people behind this topic is that it’s so big and it feels so overwhelming and dark, that people don’t know where to start. And it becomes easier to look the other way or to feel helpless. But our hope for this series is to do the opposite, is to help us realize how the system works, how we’re a part of it, and Therefore, how we can help make a difference. And our goal with this series is that you can leave it with a greater level of awareness, but also feeling hopeful that we can work together to change it. This interview will be slightly different, as I will interject every once in a while to add a bit more information, some additional details to some of the stories or the people mentioned, or statistics about the industry to provide better context. The reason for this is because it’s simply such a big topic. And again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. As you might realize it’s impossible to fit everything we want into the interview itself, but I just felt as though I wanted to give you all as much information as possible while still Allowing for a digestible interview. Benjamin no lo is an American filmmaker and the CEO and founder of Exodus cry, a nonprofit committed to abolishing sex trafficking, and breaking the cycle of commercial sexual exploitation. Before we get started to provide a bit of a lens through which to understand the industry and the rest of this interview, I wanted to share a few shocking facts about human trafficking and as well about sex trafficking. There are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history. In the last five years, 89 million people have experienced some form of slavery one in 200 people slave today. Human Trafficking wasn’t illegal in the United States until 2000, when the trafficking victims Protection Act was passed, which officially made it a federal crime. The United States along with Mexico and the Philippines, was ranked one of the world’s worst places for human trafficking in 2018. In the US, there are no official numbers of human trafficking victims, but estimates place it in the multiple hundreds of thousands. The most human trafficking cases in the US have been reported in California, Texas, and Florida. Children are more vulnerable than adults. they’re easier to control cheaper and less likely to demand working conditions. More than 300,000 young people in the US are considered at risk of sexual exploitation.

Native American women are also particularly at risk. In 2016, a reported 506 Native American women disappeared or were killed in American cities. In Phoenix, another of the top trafficking jurisdictions in the US, it was estimated that 40% of sex trafficking victims in the year 2015 were Native American. In the United States, women in prostitution have a mortality rate that is 40 times higher than the national average. The way a police commander described it is that the, quote, only way not to find this problem in any community is to simply not look for it. These statistics aren’t easy to digest, but Maya Hope is that it will draw your attention at how huge this issue is and how important it is that we do something about it, but also to the fact that this is not a foreign issue. This is something happening in every state in the United States, and most likely in every country in the entire world. They say that prostitution is, quote, the oldest profession in history. But what people are now realizing is that it is perhaps the oldest form of slavery. In this interview, and throughout this series, there are many parallels with the expression used by Neale Malin Muth in our interview about rape culture. This is not exclusively the product of a few bent and twisted minds, but a result of a cultural belief system. It is one that we are a part of, but one that we have the power to change.

Interview

Thank you so much for joining us. Again, Benji, we spent our first interview talking a bit about culture, cultural influences, the ways that our relationships, our perception and our actions are shaped by our own interpretations of our culture, and the way that people are acting around us. It kind of started hinting at a culture of complacency and how that creates opportunity for certain negative belief systems or behaviors to kind of integrate themselves into our society and culture as More normative. And that interview really focused on liberated in the work you did with that documentary. But that is only a small amount of the work you’ve done, which is actually much more broad with Exodus cry and the documentary nefarious, but also kind of some other documentary work you’ve done in the past and also that you guys have coming out later this year. So I’d love to have you just give a quick background as to your work and the ways that you see the different facets of it related to one another. 

Benjamin Nolot

Yeah, sure. That’s a great place to start. So my attention was first drawn to all of this through here remember if we discuss this in our first podcast, but me my awakening to the issue of I’ll say it this way, how x can be used to damage or destroy another person’s life happened for me when I watched the movie accused at 11 years old of the gang rape of Cheryl row. But it became something for me that was like a haunting feeling that was more ambiguous. And it wasn’t until I learned about human trafficking, that I was awakened in a more concrete way reality of suffering in our world, specifically related to those who are being sexually exploited or commercially sexually exploited. And so that is what catalyzed me on a journey to learn more about this understand the dynamics of what was happening in our world related to commercial sexual exploitation, and then how to craft that into a story that could educate other people who documentary genre. And so the decision to kind of go on that journey has resulted in the creation of nefarious our first film is a documentary on global sex trafficking and a follow up on to that question. liberated the new sexual revolution into young adult hookup culture, and the stories and culture that shape our conceptions of gender and sexuality. And now we have six more films that are slated for release here in the next year or so, all dealing with various aspects of the commercial sex industry, everything to pornography consumption, its effect on consumers, who high class escorting and the undercurrent of trafficking, who male sex buyers and getting into their character BIOS and understanding their journey to Expo say on various aspects of the porn industry in the way in which monography is being created. So for me, this has become like a life calling to address this issue of mercial sexual exploitation. And at some level, every single one of our lives is affected by this, whether it’s just a casual pornography consumption all the way Across the gamut to someone that we know that has either been trafficked or sexually abused in some way, or maybe somebody out there listening has been sexually abused in some way. And so I feel like we are living in a corporately sexually traumatized planet. And that’s not a common way to describe the landscape of our culture today, because sex really is mostly given visibility through a lens of erotic nature, and what is seductive and desirable about it. But there’s very little discussion, critical discussion about the way in which sex become a vehicle, the enslavement, harm, and destruction of other human lives. And so, as I think about this issue of human sexuality, I look at it through the lens of three primary categories and object sexuality, relational sexuality, or malevolent sexuality. I think it’s important to understand human sexuality in these categories. So that we can distinguish between really what we’re talking about. For me if I offer a critique of pornography, like I am known to do, like if I say, for example, pornography invokes women’s suffering to feed the male ego, if I make a critique like that, or fill in the blank and 100 different critiques, then responses like, Oh, you must be anti porn, which is used in a very strategic, tactical and pejorative way to categorize me as somebody who’s to be discredited and not worth listening to, because he’s anti porn, then that deductive reasoning, then leads to your anti porn, you must also be anti sex, you must also be approved. So what it does is it shuts down conversation, it shuts down the ability to think critically about these things. Because the reality is, is that in actuality, It’s my reverence for human sexuality and my value for human sexuality, fuels and drives my critique of pornography, and of many manifestations of sexuality in our culture today and the way that it’s treated. And so an equivalent comparison would be to critique McDonald’s and then somebody says, You’re anti food. absurd. The person who’s critiquing McDonald’s is doing so because they’ve developed and cultivated a robust palette that can appreciate better food. And so like, why would I waste my time with this? I do think it’s important to make these distinctions at the outset in terms of the categories of sexuality again, object relational, malevolent sexuality, and how those intersect with commercial sex industry.

Sasza Lohrey  

Would you mind defining those categories of sexual for people who might not be familiar with the different definitions?

Benjamin Nolot  

yeah, sure. So, just to kind of keep it like really simple and I can go more in depth if you like and two objects sexuality is a non mutual sexuality. It’s based on one person’s pleasure at the expense of the other is taking as opposed to giving or sharing and an object sexuality is shame and guilt based based on like usury and thinking about your partner as a egotistical mirror, and a sponge and a receptacle and body parts and object for gratification is just like is charge oriented, or relational sexuality is eyston mutuality and a relational sexuality is playful, it’s tender, it’s enhancing of love and connection ship and relationship and intimacy and spirituality and emphasizes vulnerability and NSF As well as passion and pleasure and aggressive energy, but it’s being safely expressed with consideration for the partner. And it’s oriented towards the whole person. And not just body parts. relational sexuality can be exploratory in the vein of humanizing your partner, and giving and receiving and being respectful and it’s heart opening, and it’s sensation with affection. And a relational sexuality is an expression of sexuality in the absence of shame and guilt. A malevolent sexuality is a sin a desire to violate or degrade another person is hate and sexuality used. And it’s a kind of primitive envy an assault on the innocence of another person, plundering the other person, tormenting The other person releasing one’s true utter helplessness, despair and vulnerability by making the other experienced these feelings at the hands of the dominant individual. And so I’ll give you an example of that. I interviewed a porn producer of a very hardcore genre of pornography. And I asked him to explain to me what he wanted to see happen on a set. And he went on to explain it, he reached this point, his interview where he said, so he’s describing the young female, and he specifically targets people who have never done porn, who are very young and very unsuspecting. And the reason he does that is because he wants to overwhelm them in the context of a sexual scene, your aggression and domination and violence. And then Hatcher them being overwhelmed on camera because he’s eating this heady wine of malevolent sexuality, this specific demographic of people who are looking for that, who have this like sadistic energy, Aedes on innocence. So he’s describing what’s happening in the scene he goes, and so she’s on the set, she’s shivering. She’s shaking, and her mind is so blown out what’s happened. And then he goes, and then I just lay it on harder, and I lay it on harder, and I lay it on harder, until they snap until they’re on a heap on the floor, in a puddle of tears with me pissing on them. That was how he scribed what he wanted to see happen in a scene. And it’s the utter degradation of humanity and is important to say to make those distinctions that not all sex is good sex, that vehicle sex is being used across the planet, the subjugation dehumanization and destruction of human lives inside of the commercial sex industry in a very systematic way. So I think us warrants our attention. Think about what can we do to help bring an end to this?

Sasza Lohrey

Going back to kind of the initial question of how you see them related, understanding how our actions, behaviors dollars, play into this very complicated, very intertwined system. It’s only through that that we can then understand Okay, well, if this is how I might be unknowingly supporting this or playing a part in it. That also means that I am capable of creating change within it because many problems come from a demand for them, you know, a supply and demand system and with less demand and with less discussion or with less light being shone upon negative examples. We can use our power our voice, our dollars to try and change this system and stop perhaps seeing it as such a big overwhelming topic that no one necessarily really wants to learn about on a Wednesday at 5pm on their way home from a really hard day at work, but begin seeing it less is just this overwhelmingly large topic that we can’t do anything about, and really understanding our agency and the power of our voice, our dollars and educating ourselves in order to create change within this complicated system. But again, it comes and it starts with knowing what is happening and under Understanding how these different parts are tied together. You kind of talked a bit about that. But maybe if you could even emphasize a bit more how on kind of cultural level, I think there’s kind of a back and forth between all of these a two way street, whether it’s from sex culture, to the porn industry to human trafficking, they’re all these different ways they’re tied together and kind of a back and forth two way street of influence between them, that I’m not totally sure how much people are aware of I mean, even I, myself, am probably still not fully aware but have become so much more aware in really diving deep into this research.

Benjamin Nolot 

Yeah, absolutely. I think connecting those dots is such a important part of this conversation, where people to see that we’re not just talking about this sub sect of people who are being exploited in third world Countries know somewhere away from our view. We are talking about overlapping realities, intersecting realities that touch all of our lives in a broad spectrum of ways. The massive global commercial sex industry would not exist in its current form warm apart, a deep cultural complicity in supporting a hover narrative that allows the commercial sex industry to expand and to thrive and to be what it is today. So to really dig into the intersecting and overlapping realities of how the sex industry is part of our world and how it touches our own lives, and it will just fare from the perspective of my own personal experience, and how I came into this so I heard the story of a 13 year old girl who was out in front of her house living in Arizona. Mom was inside cooking dinner. With the other kids 15 year old gets a phone call from a friend that she’s Driving through the neighborhood. She goes out. And as she does, a man jumps out of the vehicle and pulls her in a blindfold her and begin to ease in her prostitution, which involves in her situation, a lot of gang rape activity and stuff like that to break her down. Her traffickers were advertising or online, and men would show up to the apartment to have sex with her and then she’d be put back in the dog kennel whenever they were done. This happened for 40 days until police received the tip and raided the place and she was rescued. This girl’s name was Debbie.

Sasza Lohrey  

The FBI estimates that well over 100,000 children and young women alone are being trafficked in America today. ranging in age from nine to 19. With the average age being 11 Debbie stories A chilling example, one of many that provides irrefutable evidence. One evening Debbie got a casual call from a friend, Bianca, who asked to stop by her house, wearing a pair of SpongeBob pajamas. Debbie went outside to meet Bianca, who drove up in a Cadillac with two older men. I went in and started to give her a hug, Debbie says, and that’s when she pushed me in the car. As they sped away from her house, where her mother was unaware of what had just happened. One of the men told Bianca to tie Debbie up, and he threatened to shoot Bianca if she didn’t comply. They drove her around the streets of Phoenix for hours, exhausting and confusing her. This is often a test technique used to make victims believe they’re in another city to completely disorient them, and lead them to believe that they’re even farther removed and farther from being able to escape than they would think otherwise. The story has countless disturbing details. But essentially, Debbie was held captive mentally, emotionally and physically tortured, held at gunpoint, gang raped and forced to live in a small dog crate for several days on end. This sort of thing happens in main cities in the United States. But there are also certainly many other cases in which kids are seduced into thinking that they’ll have economic opportunities that they’re on their way to becoming a model. They’re being recruited to be in To show that they’ve found a boyfriend, who loves and adores them, only to find later that they are in a situation in which they have no control in which they have been undeniably deceived, in which the perpetrator has no plans other than to exploit them, to enslave them through a system of manipulation, exploitation and abuse.

Benjamin Nolot  

So I confronted this situation, and like you like anyone listening to this was absolutely horrified. So I began to pull on the thread a little bit. And the more that I pulled on the thread, the more I saw, not only at a scope of this hype of exploitation was so much bigger and broader than I could have imagined. But it also runs our more deeply into the culture. And so, for me that encountering sob story, created an empathetic hook, that drove me on a quest to really understand how something like that happens. And in the process of reverse engineering, this one person’s exploitation, again to see all these other overlapping issues. But for me, like that story, traumatize me, it disturbed me it disturbed my sleep. And you get to a point where you can only do it with the Broken Heart of another person suffering so long before you start thinking, How do I put an end to this? When you realize that it’s not just one person, that there’s 180 2 million people trapped in prostitution around the world Have a story who all have a name, who all have experiences. So the drive for me compassion in that broken heart was channeled into a drive a really, more deeply understand how somebody could get into that situation. So we went out and we filmed our first film, nefarious merchant of souls, we began to follow that journey. And trafficking doesn’t look the same everywhere. It has many faces. There are also commonalities that unite them all. And what we began to see is that, and I’ll use think Amsterdam as a great example of this, that there was this intersection between our cultural understanding of sex and gender, to role of pornography, to the role of the cover narrative episode. industry, the role of trafficking, who plays a prostitution? All of these things were intersecting in this one red light district for me. So no, I’ll just tease that out of it. So, there’s a group of, we were out of, I don’t know, three, four o’clock in the morning. And in for us, like we’re, they’re investigating where they’re making a documentary. And we want to see how life unfolds. You know, through the night in a red light district, like Amsterdam, three or four o’clock in the morning, you see groups of British stag parties 30 to 40 men in a drunken stupor, the sending on these women and panic alarms going off at all hours of the night. And the women are in Windows. It’s like when you go to the mall, and you walk by the window of like a Macy’s or something and you see those mannequins in the window.

That is what the scene looks like in Amsterdam except the people are real and for 50 bucks. You can go behind the window and do whatever you want. So the only thing that was really babying these women’s lives and saving them was the fact that they have panic alarms in their rooms, but these men would come and send on these women. So you have to think, and you know, this ties back to liberated, what is happening in the social experience of these men growing up or reach a point to have that level of entitlement in their heart, in terms of how you approach or treat women. What we tried to develop and liberate is this understanding that in our culture today, which I would refer to as a pornographic culture, a culture that cast men as sexual predators cast women as sexual objects and cast sex as a meaningless recreational act. in that equation, you cultivate men who think about women in these highly objectified ways, with an entitlement Their bodies in a very low value for sex. Now pause enough apart for a second and think about this. In Germany, there are 1.5 million purchases of sex every single day in Spain, or 1.5 million purchases of sex every single day. Israel, a very small country, there are 1 million purchases of sex per month. In Brazil. 70% of men purchase sex in Cambodia, 70% of men purchase x. These are just countries where studies have been done. The numbers are astronomical. So what we’re talking about is not a few people on the margins of society off in a dark corner of the park late at night with a hood over and horns underneath. Those aren’t whose text fires are sex fighters are doctors lawyers are from every walk of life, every part of society. This is a global phenomenon. So when something becomes that widespread, you have to start looking at the socializing influences that are shaping these people’s conceptions of what it means to be a man what it means to be a woman what it means to be a sexual being. So Some level, there’s a facilitating culture again that I would refer to as a pornographic culture, a culture in which pornography is the wallpaper and backdrop of our lives. That creates this kind of like social conditioning that produces a mindset that ultimately leads to behavior. Or me that kind of critical analysis is really important at getting to the bottom of how we put an end to commercial sexual exploitation. The other thing that we saw in Amsterdam was that the streets were littered with pornography. So pornography was being used, both as a form of exploitation of a way to exploit the women who are in prostitution, but also as a way to lower the men into prostitution. I’m just using this one kind of red light district as a XAML of an epicenter that connects all these dots. So then you think about the broader landscape of pornography consumption in our world today is universal. I mean, look at The numbers on porn habits all over the world, billions of hours consumed. I mean, it’s so widespread in our culture today. And so regardless of one’s view of whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing or anything like that there are very empirical objective studies and analysis that show pornography impact on people’s attitudes, sexual behaviors, levels of consumption affect our neurology. And so white explicitly the sex industry sees the value of pornography as a way to draw men into an encounter with a woman in prostitution. There’s a second component, you have the pornography component, you have the cultural component, cultural conditioning, in a person’s upbringing that leads them to a point role of pornography to sort of like pour gasoline on the fire. And then you have the trafficking component. So Mind you, Amsterdam is not advertised as a city for trafficking is advertised as a city for prostitution.

So that’s the cover narrative. And what that suggests is that this is all aboveboard. These are all people who have voluntarily chosen this. And really, there’s nothing to see here, unless you want to go there and use one of the women. But what they came to realize in Amsterdam is that when you set out a legal system of prostitution, you cannot stop organized crime. And you cannot prevent human trafficking. Rather, it opens the floodgates to human trafficking. This is consistent with every part of the world, where this experiment of legal fully decriminalized prostitution has taken place leads to the expansion of the sex industry, the reduction of the autonomy of the women being used in prostitution, and vast amounts of traffic and coming in through the back door. So 80% of the people in Amsterdam are from foreign countries. Well, this became such a huge problem that the mayor of Amsterdam shut down half of the red light district in an effort to get organized crime now, they realize we can’t get organized crime out. So in Amsterdam, what you have is a situation where you have people converging into the city, who have grown up in a pornographic culture, have developed an object sexuality, and who are now looking to express that in the context of prostitution, the role of pornography in that content in that context, in flaming that desire, advertising to women and marketing them, and then the role of Pimps and traffickers and brothel owners to procure women to be subjugated and used for the purpose of these men. And so I think Amsterdam is a good city to reference that kind of embodies the connection between all these various moving parts of the sex industry and ultimately, how it connects back to us as a society. And so, while I’m referencing Amsterdam, these realities are at work in cities all over the world. Because ultimately, to understand the sex industry, you have to understand it from the point of demand. And the fact is that there is a demand for commercial elicit sex all over the world. Meaning, yes, sure, there are always men who would be willing to buy a woman or child for sex out history, right. But the staggering numbers that we’re seeing today is different. And I think that can only be attributed to the role of pornography in our world today. That’s just to make an objective observation, rooted in research and make that conclusion. I’m not making that conclusion based on some kind of like, Moral objection, inherently pornography, although I think that’s a worthy discussion as well. It’s just to state facts.

Sasza Lohrey

What’s interesting is that, again, if we were to discuss things from a more objective, factual view, even if you look beyond pornography, if one were to say, Okay, well, there are studies that show less of this, or some studies showing, but it’s not totally conclusive. So much of our culture and the political system we have set up, and the fact that certain crimes against women are not punished as harshly as other crimes related to drugs or other things. They’re men making decisions about women’s bodies and their reproductive systems. There are all kinds of messages out there. That are influencing us in ways that might be influencing this kind of hierarchy of thought of power and respect. And so a lot of times when people talk to me about BBXX, if we get to the point where we’re talking about really what’s at the root of all of this, we BBXX is about sexuality, intimacy and communication. But if you really go beneath that, to the why that kind of three levels, all of our relationships, a lot of this is about power and respect, and how they play off of each other. And how creating a system of respect allows healthy relationships to flourish. allows for so many different things. And when you take that away when people don’t understand that, not even just talking about how to give respect, knowing that You are worthy of respect. When people don’t recognize that they have agency, they have power, they deserve respect. That’s really when a lot of things go wrong because then perpetrators can act on that vulnerability. Or even if that belief system wasn’t there from the beginning, they can break somebody down and start building this new belief system based off of that. And so this all kind of really plays into not just this topic of human trafficking, or even porn, but again, society, culture, politics, the media, all of our thoughts and behaviors, standing up for our friend if you see somebody treating them wrong, people knowing that they’re in toxic relationships, that they do have the power to leave, understanding how all of these things We work together to influence not just our greater culture on an individual level, our belief system, the way we use our voice, and our own actions and behaviors.

Benjamin Nolot  

I think it’s a really helpful way to dialogue about this. Look at the micro lens and then to look at the macro lens. For me, like I mentioned with that story of Abby, I mean, I could name many, many stories alongside of her as a similar nature. You’re getting into that macro lens, really staring at one person’s suffering, and realizing this one person’s life matters. This one person’s life is worth giving my life to. I feel like there’s tremendous value in building the conversation around kind of the micro lens of looking at the most egregious manifestation of this sexual sickness in our society. But then also pulling back and trying to Understand it on a global geopolitical systems level like across the landscape of our society, living in a pornographic age living in a highly polarized political age, living in a consumerist society, fill in the blank, etc, etc, etc, is also helpful. When you pull back to that level. I think the challenge that we face in our society today is to develop an inner life. And I think that in the absence of an inner life, we become vulnerable to the consumerist addictions throughout our society today, like there is always something for us to gravitate to, that allows us to bypass working through real pains, struggles, working on real personal growth and development. And so for example, you can’t understand monography addiction person who would describe themselves as a pornography addict. You can understand that, apart from understanding, a larger culture of addiction, a shopping, addiction, entertainment, addiction, sports addiction, we have like these, what I would consider unhealthy outlet addictions that inhibit cultivating an inner life and leading us into working through real issues to become a whole human being, and to discover what it means to be a healthy human being. So that the interplay between all of those things are a part of what we have to navigate in this unique time of history. And just to speak to one of those things, you know, that I think is a prominent factor in this conversation that we’ve been having. unite together is, is this idea that we are essentially the first generation in history to live Media saturated age.

Sasza Lohrey  

And the three six mafia sown, it’s hard out here for a pimp. Some of the lyrics go, they come hoping every night, they don’t end up being dead. Wait, I got a snow Bunny and a black girl to you pay the right price and they’ll both do you. That’s the way the game goes. Got to keep it strictly pimping got to keep my hustle tight, making change off these women. To reiterate how much culture is so closely tied with language, which is so closely tied with the way we interpret things as being an issue or not. This song, not only glorified, being a pimp, and selling and implicitly abusing women, but it won the Academy Award. 2006 for Best Song. This is just one of countless examples of how such important topics get minimalized or even glorified through our language and through pop culture.

Benjamin Nolot  

What comes with that if we are living in this unique time of history in which we are growing up in an image based society, where we are saturated with visual stories and social media, what effect does that have on us as a species? And I think it’s important to take an inventory for that. And we don’t fully know the outcome of that yet, but we’re beginning to see manifestations of that in a lot of these things that we’re talking about. And so I do appreciate kind of the larger macro level conversation about how these various aspects of the unique time and landscape in which we live. And help us understand things like commercial sexual exploitation, and the various three aspects of sexuality that we talked about at the beginning.

Sasza Lohrey 

So, it was interesting because when you said micro and macro, I thought, yeah, it is really important for people to reflect on themselves. Because one of the biggest issues that this system is perpetuated by is the belief that this could never happen to me. This doesn’t have to do with me or anyone I know it could not happen to me or anyone I know. And so when you kind of break that down, and you then think okay, were my circumstances different could hi have ended up in a situation that was would make me vulnerable to this. Do I know any friend or acquaintance who has ended up in a toxic relationship of some sort, were I not to have been raised in a certain way. And were instead given a belief system about gender dynamics about power and respect. If I perhaps didn’t have good examples, and again, I’m not even talking about myself in this case at all. But without good examples without that influence to think, well, is it so hard to believe that I perhaps would have ended up in unhealthy situations, unhealthy relationships. And so I think really just understanding again, on the individual level, and where we are in all of this to better understand the way that we can move within it, and make moves in the sense of change and create kind of if we’re within that same pool, we can create a ripple effect versus If we just imagine we’re outside of it in another place or standing on the side watching.

Benjamin Nolot  

I’m so glad you’re saying it because I think it really hits the nail on the head. And that is, how do we elevate our consciousness concerning the vulnerability of ourselves and people around us in order to mitigate against potential predators or finding ourselves in a situation where we can be exploited. And thing to say about that is there are a vast number of things that make a person vulnerable. And each one of those vulnerabilities increases the likelihood of exploitation or person, especially given the backdrop of our larger society and culture today. Just say very directly, we live in a society that is experiencing massive amounts of sexual abuse, massive amounts of sexual trauma. We’re living in a generation That has experienced a deformed sexuality and a weaponized sexuality. The second thing is that we are living in a culture in a society where there’s still still today extensive amounts of shame around sex. And the third thing is that we’re living in a society where there’s extensive Oberst emulation, and where everything is sexualized. And so the backdrop of our culture and our society is already set up in a way or someone’s vulnerabilities to be taken advantage of. And that’s why we see so many people that experience sexual abuse is a part of our life. So in talking about those vulnerabilities, though, in order to kind of like elevate our consciousness about the vulnerable in our society, I think, for starters, like one very obvious thing is being a woman, I think is a vulnerability because we still today live in a Very patriarchal world that has a long ways to go to achieve egalitarian, or gender equal society. Also, because of the way in which our society past women as sexual objects that a messages and culture internalized by young women, is that my value is my sex appeal. And so I think at the outset, like women are already by virtue of this culture predisposed to being preyed upon by the predatory stakeholders on the commercial sex industry. And then the second thing is, you know, if you’ve experienced some form of childhood sexual abuse, if you are in a marginalized group, and we see much higher levels of exploitation in groups of indigenous people, like up in Canada, or even here in the United States, so if you’re a racially marginalized group, if you have some form of status listeners, we as a society, historically have not done a good job about caring for the vulnerable of our society. And we use cover narratives. Like for people in the sex industry, we use the cover narrative of the sex industry as a way to avoid facing our own shame and complicity allowing this to happen. We would rather believe that she likes this deserves this and is making money off of this, then face our own shame and complicity at letting it happen. We would rather believe that this is an industry of empowerment, sexual liberation, and equality and human rights, then we would see it or the extremely predatory, violent and exploitative industry that it is. So I’m glad that you brought that up. Because I think that’s such a huge part of this conversation. We have to build better systems to address homelessness, help single mothers to address the disaster that is foster care to better protect vulnerabilities of people in our society and create better support systems.

Sasza Lohrey

There’s this Harling quote that basically tells the story of a woman where she had been getting kind of sexually abused her whole life. And the day that somebody offered to pay her for it was this incredible revelation. And she thought, oh my god, you can get paid to do this. If she had already been doing that her whole life, this was now this great new opportunity. Well, you know, if she had to kind of suffer through this, and justice, she might as well try and make money off of it. whether or not she ever got any of that money is another story, but I just think the Paradox of Choice In this kind of facade of choice, it’s really fascinating. And you mentioned kind of here, we’ve talked a bit about money. And earlier you mentioned kind of this culture of capitalism or consumer society. But again, all of these things are so intertwined. power, money, sex, respect.

Benjamin Nolot  

Can I just comment on your on your observation about choice? I just wanted to just quickly comment on that, because that is the question that that you have to ask when we look at how do people wind up in the commercial sex industry? Like, how does somebody wind up living their life in a window in an Amsterdam, brothel? 12 hours a day, seven days a week or 65 days a year? How does somebody end up there? And the question is, like, how do we qualify the choice of somebody who has an up in that in that situation? I talked with one survivor named Holly Smith, who at 14 years old ran away with her quote unquote boyfriend who turned out to be a trafficker. On the first night, she meets up with him at the hotel, gives her some clothes to wear scantily clad clothes. And he says, I’m actually more than your boyfriend, I’m gonna be your pimp. He puts you out in the streets of Atlantic City, or sale. And as she’s describing this story to me, I just could not add them at 14 years old. Something like that happened to me. She had a little bit of discontentment in her home life. But really, I mean, she wasn’t like your prime candidate for somebody to be traffic. She was just drawn away by this man and told he was gonna help her have this modeling career really appealed to a vanity of our culture that seduce her into this situation. But there she is on the streets of Atlantic City and high heels in a short miniskirt or sale. We’re 10 years old and I asked her what was it like to be out there? On the streets of 14 years old, you know for sale. And I was expecting her to say something like, I was so horrified. It was so traumatizing. And she goes, Oh, I felt empowered. My head was like spinning, like that little exploding head emoji. I was just like, what I don’t even know what to say next. You know, I was just like trying to wrap my mind around it like you were empowered. And I go, so explain that to me. So I go, how did you feel empowered in that situation? She was I was groomed by my culture long before I was groomed by my trafficker. And my culture taught me that have sex was to be valuable. As an insecure young teenager. She goes the fact that men would pay money to have sex with me. I thought I was valuable. I thought I was powerful. Now, that illusion only lasted until the next morning when her boyfriend violently raped her. But in that situation, thing that I want to say is that for all intensive purposes, anybody passing by the street that night, seeing this girl for sale would draw the assumption that this is somebody who has chosen this likes this and is making money off this and deserves this. But in her own experience, there’s a much more complex story and the intersection of all these different realities that we’ve been talking about growing up in the culture of vulnerability, and being in trafficking component, and its intersection with prostitution. Ultimately, it comes back to this question of how do you qualify choice. And what we have said as a society is that anybody under the age of 18, that is in prostitution is by definition, a trafficking victim. Why? Because we do not qualify the choice of somebody under 18 years old, to choose prostitution. What we assume at the level of federal law in our country, is that somebody has not developed bio psychosocial development, maturity and skills to be able to make a qualified choice that involves true agency enter into the sex industry. So every person under the age of 18, that is in prostitution is considered a trafficking victim.

Well, now they have their 18th birthday. And then what? Then how do we qualify the choice of somebody who’s in prostitution, like Rachel Morin said, a person who, quote unquote, chose prostitution. She said, my choices were simply these have men on or inside me, or suffer homelessness, and hunger and despair. And so, really, prostitution, oftentimes, in most cases, is the choice of those with the fewest choices. And when you listen to survivors and you learn their stories, and you look at what we were talking about previously, the vulnerabilities that drive somebody Towards prostitution. In most cases, it’s difficult to qualify the choice of those who have entered prostitution as a real choice. One other quick thing is regarding the point of power. And in my view, that is the best way to understand the dynamics at work in the sex industry. It is an issue of power and powerlessness, and an issue of power and subjugation. And so 98% of women who are trapped in prostitution around the world, our women, this is a very gendered issue. 99% of the men are buyers, the entire system is a construct of male demand. And so by its very nature, prostitution is a system of gender inequality. She exists to meet his demand. And so one thing to say about that is that by You have that I virtue of the fact that prostitution happens on the basis of a lack of desire. Therefore, money is exchanged means that the women experiencing sex in prostitution experiences a form of sexual violation that they agreed to it or not. And the money simply bribes, their silence about the crime that is happening to their body. If you put two people in a room, right and you and the woman and the man and you put $100 on the table, and say you can take the hundred dollars and leave, or you can take the hundred dollars in state for the sex and times out of 10, she’s going to take the hundred dollars and leave why because she doesn’t want him. He doesn’t want his sexual desires, or the man after hammer the hammer the man after him. So she experiences as a form of sexual violation, which is why PTSD is almost universal in prostitution for the women. On the male side of this equation, men want to be powerful in their world, but the reality for most people Is that they feel powerless, especially in the area of their sexuality, especially in relationships with women, men, ear women. And one way to overcome that fear is to be able to bypass all the social interaction that forces them to be a real man. Hence the attraction to pornography. I get all the sexual satisfaction and access to this woman without actually ever having to go through the Proving Ground and a testing ground of the social interaction that would bring me together and mutuality of desire with another person. Men have your women because men have been rejected by women. This is not the fault of women. But every young boy has the experience of being told no by a woman. So it’s the kid in junior high, who’s turned down by the cheerleader. It’s a kid in high school who has a crush on his teacher. It’s the office executive with an attraction for his secretary. And in all these situations, has felt rejection. And the cumulative experience of rejection from women causes most men to feel powerless. Now, we’re somebody who is oriented, especially growing up in this culture to be powerful. This is like his kryptonite. And so the way that men who are buyers of sex have explained to us is that buying sex is a way for them to not only vicariously experience that power, where they have felt powerless, but also as a way to exact revenge against women. And so one sex buyer told me, he said, eyeing sex is a way to make her Pay for being a woman. That was that was his exact quote that he said to me. And another man said that we men don’t consume pornography and consume women in the sex industry, because we love women. We consume them in the sex industry, because we hate and then. And so there’s a deep underlying misogyny, and a lot of these men’s hearts by virtue of the experience of powerlessness, and rejection that drives them to use money in order to achieve that sense of power and sexual connection that they lack in every other area of their life. That would require them to be a real man. And so that’s why it comes back to this issue of the lack of an inner life and medicating our anxieties through distraction and numbing and deadening rather than facing them, navigating them, expressing them and serving others. So in this wounded consumer society that we live in with a lack of healthy outlets, that is driving men to be powerful, and then placing in front of their reptilian brain, the access to harness the sense of power in the sex industry without ever having to become a real man, it becomes a very, very broken system, a very, very broken cycle of exploitation of both men and women.

Sasza Lohrey

It’s interesting because I think it is even bigger than, you know, men against women. It’s men against anybody who has hurt them in the past, or when they feel they haven’t had control whether it was an abusive father, other relative having no one, so much of this. But when we talk about those main things, there’s also just this and this was actually the last note wrote at the end of my 11 pages that I typed up when watching various. I’ve just said, People need love. That’s what I wrote is so much of this, whether it’s on the perpetrator side, whether it’s on the victim side comes down to not feeling loved, being deceived into thinking you are loved not knowing or being loved, means feels like looks like. It’s just these huge, bigger underlying themes. And so I think that for a lot of those men, for some, I’m sure it is about women, but I think for some of them, it’s just these other feelings of insecurity of feeling invalid of needing some form of control because they didn’t have any or because that’s the way people treated them. And so that’s all they know. And also, again, there are uniquely twisted minds involved in some of these things. But as we talked about in the beginning, when you said these aren’t the people under a hood, on the edge of society, these are in a study in the US with 7000 men who had bought sex, over 80% of them had full time jobs over 40% had bachelor degrees and other 35% had partially partial college, over 40% were married. These are people on the fringe of society. These are people who on the surface might be in somewhat quote unquote, normal looking relationships. And it’s all built on this paradox of power and this fallacy of choice. And so I just kept finding it so interesting when you told that harrowing story of Holly, how she used the word, empowered and just when it she turned it back on You and said that kind of culture had groomed her so long before just proving that so much of this is about power, the desire for the kind of miss perception of what power is looks like feels like why we need it, why we want it, who should have it. And that fallacy of choice on the other side in terms of women thinking they have no other choice, people on the outside believing it was their choice. And just that reminder, that as you mentioned, if you were to have seen Holly, or whoever else, you don’t know what is happening, maybe they’re on the street or in an ad online. And maybe it’s nothing too extreme, but maybe they’re being addicted to drugs. Maybe they’re not being given food, maybe they’re being beaten. I mean, let alone that girl who you mentioned in the dog kennel but We don’t know what’s happening. We’ve gotten to the point where even with social media, we know that our friends and the photos they post on social media is not the full story is not at all any representation of their life of their reality of who they are. Yet, I think we would like to look at a glossy advertisement of a very young looking girl and not ask those same questions when we should be asked infinitely more. So I’d love to give people a bit of background and discuss what does human trafficking actually mean and some of these other terms, but if you could kind of just give us perhaps your definition of, of trafficking, and then I have some other terms noted that I can dive into a bit as well.

Benjamin Nolot  

Sure, yeah. Where we find human trafficking is really on the basis of how we see it happening. And so we would define human trafficking as exploitation of vulnerability. And we don’t try to find in and out who is a worthy versus an unworthy victim based on the notion of choice, because we have observed that the entire system of prostitution is destructive towards individuals in it. The entire system of prostitution operates as a system of violence, exploitation and gender inequality. And so we gave up trying to define in and out who is choosing this not choosing it victim versus unworthy victim A long time ago, Sweden built their law to address this issue, based on 30 years of research and listening to the voice of survivors and recognized at Human trafficking is simply the exploitation of vulnerability. So they created a system of law that holds the men accountable, or the purchase of sex, as well as pimps and traffickers and brothel owners. But it decriminalizes the women and instead offers them programs and services to address that vulnerability. So we understand prostitution. And we understand human trafficking as employee exploitation of vulnerability and women talk about survivors talk about how that because the experience of prostitution was so repulsive, that they had to limit access to specific parts of their body, where they could channel their humanity in order to survive the extremely revolting experience of having their body arbitrarily used by a stranger with all of his fantasies. And so someone would say that it wouldn’t Let them kiss them, or they wouldn’t let men touch their left arm or it was some specific way in which it had to create boundaries to how’s their humanity survive this experience and then having to act and be judged based on their the appearance that they’re enjoying it. One survivor told me that she had to be the quote unquote, Best Actress in the world. So it’s a lot of mental and psychological and emotional gymnastics that women have to go through in order to survive the experience of prostitution in order to prevent being violently perpetrated against or killed and the experience because men who feel like they’ve been charged too much or like the woman didn’t enjoy it, or May after the experience be provoked anger and so there’s a mortality rate and prostitution that is 40 times higher than the national average. And so it’s a For a person to survive, again, we view human trafficking assembly, the exploitation, vulnerability that is, I think, most helpful way to understand the entire system.

Sasza Lohrey

Yeah, I think it’s very useful for people to hear that definition, which I’m sure could be quite different than what people might have imagined. But it’s also so much simpler. And really, when we talk about exploitation, how that also makes it much more broad exploitation being treating somebody unfairly and benefiting from their work, existence actions, but again, that aspect of force or lack of control of taking advantage of that person in their vulnerability, and that can be within the context of specifically sex trafficking, but then there are all of these other facets of forced labor in other industries and migrant workers. And vulnerabilities not just in terms of income background, but ability to speak the language and so many other things. And so it’s really fascinating when you start to dive into all of this and get into human trafficking and get into the broader concept of modern day slavery. But I think the woman you mentioned who talked about it as the greatest acting job in the world, I think that was actually the same woman who talked about when she was 14.

Sasza Lohrey  

An example of this comes in one of Benjamin’s documentary films, nefarious merchant of souls. When a woman from the UK says, when I was 14, a man offered me money. And I couldn’t believe that someone would actually pay for it when they could just take it from me, because I didn’t think I owned my sexuality. I thought I was there for the two And for anybody to steal this from me was perfectly okay. And when someone offered me money, I was blown away. It’s extremely difficult to convey the level of abuse, manipulation and hollowness that victims of sex trafficking, sustain and maintain, even after they might manage to get out. In fact, the trauma is often so deep and profound, that it is all they know. And many girls who have been rescued, end up retreating back to prostitution, just to regain a sense of normalcy, as their identity has been so obliterated and manipulated. That is often the only sense of self they have left. Particularly when you consider the fact that the average age of these children and young women is 11. You can only begin to comprehend the profound level to which their minds and their identities have been warped by these experiences. Even if in some cases, these activities might begin with what appears as a choice, they often end up continuing because the victim thinks it is the only choice they have. And if there are no other choices, then taking the one thing you think you have and can do, or anyone will ever want from you, isn’t much of a choice at all. One example from the movie nefarious comes from a woman named Yatra. The same woman who had been previously abused and at the age of 14, was enthralled to know that she could finally get money in return for her abuse. She said, quote, I felt like every time I was selling my body, I was selling my soul. A piece of me was gone every time and I was tired of having that empty feeling inside of my body, inside of my soul. The feelings so deeply so clearly communicated, identified and felt. And yet, shortly after this interview, Dr. Dre returned to prostitution. Dr. Dre made the choice. He quote unquote, choice to return to prostitution recognizing what this Whole is built on top of and then she later says that she has friends who don’t even want to continue living, that they’re working in the sex industry. They’re so sad. They are so hooked on drugs so devastated with what they’ve done. And all their tricks, aka, the people buying sex from them think they’re having a great time. And she says I would say it’s the greatest acting job in the world. I think it’s so overwhelming and feel so dark when you think there’s no solution. But through educating yourself and through knowledge and understanding, you can begin to see that there are ways that we can change this. And if we can change the belief system that people are raised on if we can change The ways that we react on a cultural level on a judicial level, which is a whole other story. But there are so many ways that we can work to create change. And I think with hope, we can view this all through a different lengths. And so I think in the beginning part of that comes with a bit of changing these terms and terminology and clarifying what we’re actually talking about. And so you kind of talked about human trafficking and that definition of an exploitation of vulnerability. And now, the verb prostituted is used a lot rather than she became a prostitute, which implies that choice ownership. When we hear that our brain registers it in one way versus to hear she was prostituted, it makes it more of kind of an unknown and it doesn’t automatically Assume that choice that power over her own circumstance, etc.

Sasza Lohrey  

I wanted to interject to expand a bit more on the importance and the power of language. For example, with being a prostitute versus being prostituted, one implies perhaps an election, a choice, a job, while the other implies a state of being, perhaps as a result of outside influence, and does not presume choice. It has become more popular today, particularly in developed countries to refer to prostitution as a choice that people have the right to choose to be a sex worker if they desire. But when you look at the numbers in the United States, states and 95% of women in prostitution were previously sexually abused. It really makes you question what that quote unquote choice really means.

So another couple of the things we’re how these women are called victims while they are in the industry while they are being trafficked, or quote unquote, working. So the women are referred to as victims and then if and when they managed to make it out and leave the industry they are then referred to as survivors. And speaking of going off of the fact that the vast majority of these women are not receiving any money. at all, and of people being trafficked in general, so outside of sex trafficking, migrant labor, etc. These people end up in situations that are referred to as debt bondage, which is something I hadn’t a concept I wasn’t familiar with before, in which essentially they are never paid. They are charged for their transportation, their clothing, their housing, all kinds of things, migrant workers brought over the border. Sometimes they don’t even have a bed. They’re not being fed at all, yet being charged like hundreds of dollars for a bag of chips, just totally, totally irrational, completely made up economic systems, which, in a factory workers, there’s just so many different kinds of human trafficking, but they’re basically second debt bondage. The perpetrator says Sure, you can leave whenever you want. But you have to pay me my $6,000. First, if you look have during debt from all the food, I’ve given you the roof over your head, the time it’s taken me to set you up with clients, and so they’re ever trapped by this completely made up system of debt. And so then they are often entrenched further, where people say if you do more, if you work harder, if you give me more, if you let me take advantage of you more, then it’ll help lessen your debt when in reality, it will be there forever. Just want to go over some of those terms and terminology to help give people a bit more of a background on the industry. And so then the industry itself is The world’s fastest growing criminal industry. But this whole thing about how there is so much less risk and this is what the traffickers, otherwise known as pimps, again with the language how people are using other terms rather than pimp, which has this whole cultural connotation as being cool as being whatever, really just remind ourselves of the cultural context we are living in and through which we see the world.

Sasza Lohrey  

And one of the books I read while preparing for this interview, they also touched on the importance of language. I could go on about the importance of language forever, but it truly does shape the way we think the conversations we are having but are also able to have with other people and the culture at large in which we are living in. One of the books for example, talked about the word pimp. pimp is something that has been made a positive thing by our culture. So how does using a word that people associate with a joke? Something fun, someone cool. Help us understand the role that person is playing in a system of exploitation. Nita bells emphasizes the importance of learning to use words that accurately describe the activities in which each party is participating in. For example, the term john is often referred to somebody who is buying sex. JOHN Tric, date, client, customer or hobbyist. While she suggests we use the terms sex buyer, prostitute or purchaser of commercial sex, perpetrator or criminal, and to avoid using pimp use perpetrator, trafficker capture or criminal, which is also meant to show respect for those who have been trafficked by naming the activity as the crime that it is.

So, these perpetrators talk about how there’s so much less risk in selling humans Not only is more lucrative, which we’ll get to, but the victims, especially in the past, you mentioned in Sweden, how they started kind of arresting the men who were going to buy sex, but in the past, a lot of times the woman or the person on the street, whether it’s a woman or not the person on the street, who is being sold for kind of a sex trade is the one who is the easiest to track down to catch to a rest. And often they have been taken to so many different cities. They’re on a circuit where they’re changed every couple days, weeks months. They’re so disoriented. They’re kept inside, they might not even know exactly what city they’re in all kinds of stuff, let alone any real information about where they live the address their perpetrator, so it’s hard to build a case that will actually bring the perpetrator to criminal justice after drug dealing. Human trafficking is tied with the illegal arms industry as the second largest criminal industry in the world. And today, it is the fastest growing One of the most disturbing things I came across in all of my research is the concept that human traffickers have discovered that this industry is not only more lucrative than almost any other criminal activity, but it is also by far less risky. Unlike drugs and weapons in which each sale requires a new supply or a new product, people can be sold over and over and over again. Not only multiple, perhaps even a dozen times a day, but for years on end, while a criminal who sells drugs and weapons has to be constantly replenishing their supply and investing more of their own money. If a police pulls over a car with two kilos of cocaine or a box of firearms, there’s no question to What’s happening and the legality of the situation. However, if a man is pulled over driving a car, who says he’s simply taking his niece’s back to his sister’s house, and the girls in the car don’t say a word of contrary, or perhaps even support the story, law enforcement has very little to go off of. in this industry, perhaps as compared with drugs in arms sales, there might be less middlemen and profit shares. For example, not only has the victim not paid for their abuse, which is the case in almost every case, but if they are being quote, unquote, paid any amount at all, they are simultaneously being charged for shelter, food, clothing, quote, unquote, care even if it’s for dehumanizing standards of living, so that even if they are being paid, and especially if they aren’t, they owe it back plus costs and expenses. So not only are they not getting a cent, but they are racking up debt and entering into a system that is referred to as debt bondage where they can’t leave until they pay their debt, which the traffickers often use as additional leverage, soliciting more desperation and even higher engagement in more abusive activities in a desperate attempt to pay off their debt and be able to escape when in reality that will never be possible to begin with. It’s disturbing enough on its own to realize that exchanging money for people not only makes more money, but is less risky than exchanging money for drugs and fire. Not only that, but when drugs and firearms are transported, the traffickers Make sure to look after them carefully, packaging them, regulating them, keeping them in good condition and perhaps look after them even more carefully. And the human victims who are treated far worse than objects.

One other study at Hastings women Law Journal mentioned that women in the US on average going to the industry between 12 and 14 years of age and so at that rate, By the time they would be old enough to drive, they have probably been sold, and essentially used by 4000 men. By the time they could legally vote 8000. And by the time they would be illegal to drink, they have probably been sold for sex 12,000 times. So just to really put the kind of industry into the context and help people understand, not just the numbers, and again, how a lot of this comes down to money, and all of that, but who the key players are, and, again, that many of these women have no control in the process, and will not see any of the money that they have, quote, unquote, made the entire time. And it’s so dark. It’s like, where do you even go from there?

Benjamin Nolot  

I’ve heard somebody say one time there are two things that your human heart tragedy and beauty And I like nefarious captures of those in a very palpable way. And so the invitation to people watching this area isn’t just to confront a dark issue, but really to remind ourselves that we are alive. We are part of this human family that we are interconnected, and that there is tragedy, but there is hope in the midst of tragedy. And so it’s a awakening of our consciousness, to our purpose and reason for being alive, you know, to help each other, to serve each other, to love each other. And to work towards having a better world where the vulnerable aren’t falling through the cracks of our society.

Sasza Lohrey 

Yeah, and I think that concept of how is really important and going back to, when you look at this, through the lens of believing in your own power to change Change or have hope for change is totally different. And I think it’s extremely important. I mean, if people outside, not directly within the system can’t have hope for change, or for those who are trapped in it, then it will never change. Because this isn’t an example where they have the power to change the criminal justice system or raise awareness. These people are trapped in this system, and there aren’t others. Uniquely, we don’t know what it’s like a lot of us don’t know people directly who are within it. Other children don’t even know this issue exists so other children won’t say you’re just like me, I’m going to speak out for you. So this issue is just a lot more complicated in terms of trying to generate a voice to speak out against it and speak up for those within it. And so I think it’s just so important for those of us who are privileged enough to be able to watch a movie like that, to see it in a different way and think, Oh, I’m not, you don’t have to learn about this tough topic, I am privileged enough to be able to learn about this and understand what is happening and why. And to be able to be part of change.

Benjamin Nolot 

One of the things I feel like that we’ve been trying to draw attention to in this conversation that I see being illuminated through this conversation, is this idea of the many shades of grey, that are embodied in the sex industry really as a way to deconstruct the polarization in terms of how people view the global commercial sex industry. So most people understand it as Either sex work that these people are being empowered as independent entrepreneurs, who go out and make a lot of money versus human trafficking, which is somebody who’s been abducted and gang raped and beaten and forced into prostitution. Those are like the two ways that people understand it. And those are really, of the extreme ends of this spectrum of ways that people are exploited in the sex industry. And that’s why, you know, what we’ve been drawing attention to, is the many shades of grey, when you look at commercial sex industry, it’s really important to understand it, the system’s level of analysis that acknowledges and recognizes on the basis of literally decades of international research, and the voices of a growing and powerful survivor movement, that prostitution simply is not a system of sexual liberation, empowerment, etc, etc. And it is a system and we can understand it’s warm, and it’s shape is a system of violence, exploitation, and gender inequality. The best book ever written on this already into Catherine MacKinnon, Harvard professor is a book called pay for by Rachel Moore. And I highly recommend that everybody gets it. She’s a survivor of prostitution is the most insightful book on this object is learning how we understand form and shape of this larger system of trafficking and prostitution and the global commercial sex industry. The second thing that we touched on is how women are uniquely predisposed towards being seduced, recruited, drawn or compelled towards a commercial sex industry, because of the way that they are socialized in our society today. And I’ll just give one example of that as kind of like a summary example and just kind of like one galvanizing example of how this happens. Rihanna had a song called Ord up in which song eaters her riding around on a stripper pole and saying it’s all about dollar bills and stripper poles. So, again, if you’re an impressionable, young, insecure, young, 10 1112 year old girl, who is really looking at the world around you to construct your idea about what it means to be an empowered woman, and you see a pop culture icon who appears to be powerful and successful, projecting that message, and then you internalize that, as the way to be a powerful woman is to make money riding around in a stripper pole. I mean, what do you think is going to happen like this is just one example of literally scores and scores of example, are all telling a very single story about what it means to be an empowered woman in our culture today. Hence, you have the story of holly Smith, who said she felt empowered on the streets at 14 years old, because men wanted to buy her because she was groomed by her culture, long before she was groomed by her trafficker, or thing that we touched on is how men are predisposed towards using women in the sex industry again, similarly, the way Men are socialized in our culture, and what they are meant to believe about what it means to be a powerful men. And then this adoption of the performance of masculinity to kind of achieve this this status of manhood. Again, just looking out at the pop culture icons, you know, this has been going on for a long time if you go all the way back, Hugh Hefner and then the James on character and then the psyches commercial, the most powerful man in the world, the most interesting man in the world and then, and bilzerian you know, Joe Rogan, calling him biggest baller on the planet. Everything about each one of these men is predicated on their sociopathic use of women is nothing more than sexual ornaments and trinkets satisfy their own sexuality. And so, men are predisposed towards using women in the sex industry. Then the last thing is just we touched on in this is that cultural complicity, the way in which our society works to not only create a vulnerable demographic Have people a demographic of predators, and then the conditions that allow or the interplay of those two realities to be housed in kind of this industry with a cover narrative over it, sees it as just kind of some erotic, guilty pleasure. And so I hope that in this podcast that we have been able to tear down some of these cover narratives that we have been able to help illuminate people’s understanding of some of the dynamics and underpinnings and undercurrents at work in our world that are contributing towards a system of exploitation, who would refer to as human trafficking, that by virtue of that more people will get involved and really trying to be a part of helping to make a difference?

Sasza Lohrey

Yeah, I think, like we talked about in the beginning, being able to see this not as one nice dark corner of the world issue but as this broader, inter connected concept that, again is broad not only in the sense of geography and the types of people involved, and the different ways it might look on the surface or behind the scenes, and so being able to recognize the different layers of it, and again, viewing the macro and micro levels, and understanding the concept as it relates to other people, but then kind of reflecting and understanding where we stand in all of this, how we can through educating ourselves and better understanding it, how we can equip ourselves to start to shift the conversation. narrative from vocabulary to the way we might speak with people we come into contact with who might be involved in these worlds, to changing the cultural narrative and the image we portray, and the realities we choose to ignore or put up on a pedestal. And so I think that all of those things are extremely important. And again, understanding how those four concepts of power, respect, money and sex are all very, very intertwined. And how the base of everything there’s this need for love that sometimes is so desperate that people choose to control other people if they feel they haven’t gotten it. They feel if they, quote unquote, don’t deserve it, neither do other people. Or people are disillusioned into thinking that love means one thing or the empowerment means another thing. And so really understanding how we ourselves define these concepts and what they mean to us and to the people we are close with. So that through that we can help change the system that is built on top of that unhealthy relationship between those things and kind of reconstruct the narrative and help people identify their own value, their own worth, that they are deserving of love, and that we are indeed capable of changing this. Extremely difficult, but there we are extremely good. capable of changing this, particularly if we work together. And that starts with beginning to talk about it, since so many of us don’t even know what’s happening or have missed information. So it really begins with stuff like listening to this podcast, reading that book, sharing it with a friend, not letting it and they’re sending the movie to somebody, opening our own minds, but also opening the minds of others in the floor to hosting this conversation.

Benjamin Nolot  

Absolutely. And I would add, just to have a fully awakened conscience, because that’s what it means to be human, and to live with a sense of empathy in the world, and in the way that we consider ourselves like in the world, in order to become healers in the midst of a society that is wounded and hurting and broken and traumatized. Yeah, I love documentaries, because I feel like they’re the still small voice of conscience that help remind us of our humanity. And like I said, to live with a fully awakened conscience. Thanks a lot for having me on this podcast again and loved back anytime. And I hope that your listeners and viewers get a lot out of this conversation.

Sasza Lohrey

Thank you so much for joining us for this segment of what I feel will need to become an ongoing series, just because there’s so much more to get into. But I definitely look forward to continuing to explore this topic and helping our listeners as well.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this interview. And for taking a step towards helping to make a difference. I just want to read iterate, this needs to become a mainstream issue. This is not just a religious issue. This is not a women’s issue. This is a global human issue. And this is part of the system that we all are shaped by and participate in. We have the power to change. I hope this interview has helped equip you with the knowledge and some of the fire inside that motivates you to help make a difference. One of the biggest conclusions I had from my research on this topic is that the missing quality in all of this is love. People need love and whether victims can find That hope and love through a friend through a new example of what they’re capable of, through the hope and the knowledge and the awareness that they can do more that they are worth more that they can be more that they do have a choice. And that this is not the only one. At the end of nefarious one of the women who manages to get out. She finds that love through religion, but she says, This is life. This is what we have been looking for. This is true life and true love, love that is enduring. Love. That is pure love that can’t be found anywhere else. We can all be a part of creating a system of love rather than exploitation. Everybody needs that love and not everybody is fortunate enough to have an example of that, to know that exists to be given that or to ever even be shown love as a possibility in their life, but we can help change that. And empathy is the beginning of that process is the beginning of the path to helping people realize that they have a choice and opportunities and that they are worthy of love, and that they deserve to be love.