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BODY MATTERS
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Comment “We’ve lost the plot where bodies are concerned” says Susie Orbach in her book ‘Bodies’. Apparently there are websites that will digitally enhance pictures of your children, so that later you can ‘remember’ the beautiful baby you never had. Win a men’s magazine competition, and you can present your girlfriend for breast surgery, to get her sliced about and stuck together to match the celebrity whose breasts you most desire. What are we doing? How people view their own and each others’ bodies has an impact on and is impacted by human trafficking. Bodies are needed for the sex trade, and the traffickers see them only as that and not as people – bodies that can be abused and treated as of little value by purchasers and ultimately devalued by the person within. In many cultures, even if a woman escapes the sex industry and did not choose to enter it, marriage is not then an option for such ‘damaged goods’. Others are trafficked for the porn industry, forced to engage in ever more exploitative practices while being filmed for the enjoyment of others. Does the porn industry, and the beauty industry, affect what people are prepared to do to their bodies for cosmetic sexual surgery? ‘Designer vagina’ plastic surgery after child-birth – for regaining pleasure or reaching for some other ideal? What of those who are trafficked for their body parts, or forced to sell something of themselves for the sake of their family income and survival? And who has the right to say what should or shouldn’t be done to our body – only us or are there times when individuals should be stopped against their wishes? In the ‘70s when black African women were discovering their own culture and feminism, some went back to Ghana for ritual cutting (see the section on FGM in ‘Cultures’): ‘what slavery took from me, but my people would have done’. It’s illegal in Britain and we also can use child protection laws to prevent children being taken elsewhere for it to happen – while others argue it is their culture and their right. See a review of Susie Orbach’s book
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