You Know It's Hard Out Here for a Ho

Do you think there's any connection between/among the promotion of black men as the "pimp" & black women as willing "ho" and the global emphasis on and anxiety around sexual slavery as practice, as commercial enterprise? In each case particular underlying economic (and other) factors, interests, causes are repressed. Think, for example, of Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes and his "purchasing" (abolitionist emancipation) of Cambodian prostitutes and his new focus on prostitutes in Calcutta. In his focus on prostitution Alexander Cockburn writes that he ignores that, "India has endured more than a decade of virtually unimaginable rural torment consequent upon imposition of neoliberal "reforms" editorially endorsed and endlessly hailed by Times reporters" and the relationship of "women's issues" to the "agrarian crisis." (See: The Nation (Nick Kristof's Brothel Problem).)

OK. Now the production of black man as pimp and black woman as (willing) ho stands in marked contrast to those who struggle to free themselves from prostition, who experience prostitution as degradation and not as "style" qua authenticity. Does this become a way again of making black bodies (and in particular black female bodies) incapable of being violated? Is this another return of the body (the subject) impossible to rape?