Called It

I’ve been telling my buddy for ages how the “sex-trafficking” issue is used to obscure and distract us all from more serious human rights abuses that don’t involve naked ladies, and how it’s becoming a part of everyday assumptions and is given mythic qualites and so on, and he always doubts me, but a week or so ago I totally called this one, I knew it’d only be a matter of time, and my buddy was totally impressed.

I’d read a comment on an article, a comment reeking of bullshit, and one tiny part of it said this: “Read Dave Zirin’s recent comments about the adored Golfer’s refusal to even speak out against the sex trade industry.” Ever obedient, I did as instructed and found the applicable part:

In 2008, Chevron entered a five-year relationship with Tiger Woods’ foundation under the guise of philanthropy. But if Woods had a shred of social conscience, this partnership would never have existed. Lawsuits have been issued against Chevron for dumping toxic waste all over the planet. Even worse, Chevron has a partnership with Burma’s ruling military junta on the country’s Yadana gas pipeline project, the single greatest source of revenue for the military, estimated at nearly $5 billion since the year 2000.

Ka Hsaw Wa, co-founder and executive director of EarthRights International, wrote in an open letter to Woods, “I myself have spoken to victims of forced labor, rape, and torture on Chevron’s pipeline–if you heard what they said to me, you too would understand how their tragic stories stand in stark contrast to Chevron’s rhetoric about helping communities.” Chevron is underwriting a dictatorship but Tiger Woods apparently sees them as upstanding corporate partners.

Then there is Dubai, the site of the first Tiger Woods-designed golf course. Located at the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, Dubai has been a symbol of both economic excess, and most recently, economic collapse. It has been called an “adult Disneyland”–complete with indoor ski resorts and unspeakable human rights violations. As Johann Hari wrote in The Independent, it is a city that has been built over the last thirty years by slave labor. Paid foreign laborers work in more than 100-degree heat for less than three dollars a day. Dubai also has a reputation as ground zero of the global sex trade. The Tiger Woods Golf Course cost $100 million and Woods said nary a word about his benefactor’s business practices. This is business as usual for Tiger who would sooner swallow a five-iron than take anything resembling a political stand.

Now that Woods appears to have been involved in a domestic dispute, the media is wondering if there is “another Tiger”. They are desperate to pillory the man for his personal problems. It would be more appropriate if they took this opportunity to scrutinize him for the right reasons. Woods has every right to keep his personal problems personal. But when he makes deals that benefit dictatorships and unaccountable corporations, all in the name of his billion-dollar brand, he deserves no privacy.

That last bit – “deserves no privacy” – who among us has NOT made a “deal” with “unaccountable corporations”? Are we all prepared to account for those sorts of things? Are we ready to sort through all of our possession and our investments and renounce those that support “unaccountable corporations”? Think about it first. Should we look at our medications and our life saving tools, and reject them on the basis of their connection to unaccountable corporations?

I agree, it’s something we should do, but to serve up Tiger Woods as the poster child representing people without “a shred of social conscience” is ridiculous and spiteful and seems just a selfish way to push the responsibility onto someone – anyone – besides ourselves. I’m pretty sure somebody summed that up with something like “he who is without sin cast the first stone” and something about “planks-in-eyes” maybe.

I thought the treatment of Tiger Woods was reprehensible before, but this shit is just so far beyond the pale that I’m speechless. Am I the only one who has the feeling that this is a lynching? The adultery accusations are based on rumor and speculation, not one thing has been proven, and if it is, if it all is and then some, SO FUCKING WHAT? I hope that every one of you haters has the good fortune of having your lives exposed, your lies found out.

Anyone, man or woman, who thinks that infidelity deserves violence – fuck you – thousands of women have been killed for adultery, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions throughout history. In some areas in this world women are still killed for adultery, suspected or proven. Is this gender equality? Now men can be stoned to death too? Or is it only if he’s the color of coffee and she’s the color of milk?

Fucking disgusting.

And oh yeah…… SEX TRADE INDUSTRY? Right. I read that article a few days ago, the one by Johann Hari on the Independent, it was very interesting, but somehow Hari forgot to mention that Tiger Woods was responsible for all the misery in Dubai.

That article told true stories of people trapped in slavery in Dubai, these are people who still have not been rescued – these aren’t the saved sex-slaves that NGO’s trot out to secure themselves funding, they were men and maids and I’m glad that Hari was concerned for them, and took care to get their stories. If you want to find the people who really enabled the slavery in Dubai, look to Governments and Financial Markets, not golfers who fuck a lot.

The whole thing is so sick – the treatment of Tiger, the attitude that “cheaters” should be beaten severely, if not killed, – which is sick sick sick because marriage, the institution itself, has been the system where Men owned Women, all over the world for thousands of years – and when we say “CHEATED” we are buying into that whole sense that you can OWN another person. Abolish Marriage if you’re concerned about people “cheating”.

All the hate, for Tiger, for his various and sundry sluts – the judgement that has been passed by those who consider themselves without sin – just thank your gods that the whores all over this world aren’t stepping forward and calling you ALL out on your hypocrisy because, guess what folks, we remember you, we saw you, we know you – you hypocrites, you sinners, you liars, you fools.

When it comes to the slavery issue, if we call it only “sex” slavery, it diminishes the plight of labor slaves – and I think a lot of people do that on purpose – they want to distract us from the labor slavery, and have us believe that it’s all about “women and children, especially” and they’ve framed prostitution, and all prostitutes as “slaves” when many many of them, most of them, are not slaves, they are merely women who sell sex, and possibly in a country they snuck into, but it makes good publicity, and hey, everyone wants to help “women and children, especially”.

Meanwhile, the men who labor with concrete and stones, and the women who are chained to sewing machines – those slaves make money for REAL industries, not the sex industry, and those REAL industries don’t want anyone fucking with their free labor. Those industries are overjoyed that all the attention is on the whores, and not on the factories owned by the men who run the world.