Excerpt from Suki Falconberg Book

I see a strong link between our treatment of animals and the way we also enslave people. The intensive confinement of ‘food’ animals and forcing women and girls into prostitution seem to involve similar levels of brutality and degradation.

It is all the same picture, when we torture something helpless, whether it be an animal or a human. The factory farming of bodies is one similarity: the way girls are confined to brothels and their movement restricted. In the worst scenarios, they are never allowed outside, and their lives consist of the hopelessness of constant, serial rape by customers. They have one reason for being: to sexually serve men so other men can make money off their bodies. I don’t know what kind of hopelessness a battery-cage hen feels, confined for her one purpose, but it must be similar. Pigs raised for food on our intensive-confinement hog farms also suffer greatly. Imprisoned in spaces so small they can barely move, the poor creatures go insane.

Cheapness. Another similarity. The girl in the wooden-shack brothel in

Cambodia

offered for $2 a lay. One

Vietnam

vet I talked to said that a guy in that country never wanted “to pay more for a fuck than he did for a pack of cigarettes.” It was just “cheap gook pussy and not worth any more than that.” That 99 cent burger at McDonald’s, which came from the cow that may have been dismembered while still alive, since the kill line goes so fast. Assembly-line sex goes along at a brisk pace, also. The end result is the same: ‘Cheap meat’ in both instances.

‘Cheap meat’ is the operative word. Assembly-line sex is one of the staples of sexual exploitation. The Romans practiced it: soldiers in

Britain

raped prostituted women until they bled to death. The Korean Comfort Women, teenage girl, virgins before their ordeal, were forced to service 30-50 Japanese soldiers a day.

Our soldiers behaved no differently. Destitute ‘Occupation Comfort Girls’ in Tokyo were forced to sexually served anywhere from 15 to 60 American soldiers a day in brothels set up for our troops after WWII. The physical torture of the girls’ bodies was disguised as a financial transaction. The conditions in the brothels were so unendurable that some of the girls committed suicide. (Sources: Historians John Dower, Yuki Tanaka, and George Hicks.)

The pathetic girls in the tent-whore brothels of

Vietnam

withstood man after man, for very little money. ‘Cheap fuck meat’ was the attitude of the soldiers.

Recently, I saw an ad for an escort service which calls itself The Meat Market, offering one girl for 39 dollars, two for 60, etc.

Brothels in Paris where turnover is especially high—women sometimes servicing as many as 160 men a day, each, according to Kathleen Barry (Female Sexual Slavery)—are called abattoirs, slaughterhouses.

As with the sale of bodies as flesh for sex, so is it with the sale of animals for our food: torture disguised as a financial transaction.

Incredible physical pain is another similarity. It needs to be described by someone, what all this feels like. No media coverage seems to be devoted to the sheer fact of physical pain. When I was in my twenties, I was gang raped by men who had raped in Vietnam . It went on for hours, and they tore me up badly. After this attack, I couldn’t leave the house for several months, and the whole world seemed terrifying—a heavy, harsh place controlled by male violence. Eventually, I ended up in prostitution, near a military base, for a time, because I felt I was a piece of public garbage, fit only for more rape by men.

Serial penetration by many men is not a mild form of torture. Just the tears at the vaginal opening feel like fire applied to a cut. Your genitals swell and bruise. Damage to the womb and other internal organs can also be tremendous. Physical pain is not a minor matter. How do we imagine what the battery hen with her depleted, fragile bones and her uterus falling out of her body due the massively unnatural egg producing she is subjected to, feels? She must be in pain all the time.

Degradation. The ‘rape rack,’ as it is jokingly called in animal husbandry. Animals defined as ‘for human use’ are allowed no dignity. Neither is the prostitute, defined as ‘for male use.’ She must withstand the disgust of being forced to allow strangers to invade that most private part of herself. Signs around Saigon during the Vietnam War read “Car Wash and Fuck”—indicative of the contempt that a woman’s body can be held in, reduced to. Her ‘cheap gook pussy’ was of no more import than getting your car hosed down. (Source: My conversations with

Vietnam

vets.)

The killing of the spirit. The ‘learned helplessness.’ The Korean Comfort Women said that the Japanese soldiers who continually raped and beat them, sometimes for years on end, took away their girlhood, their womanhood, their lives. What must it be like—to wake up knowing that the only thing you have to look forward to is sexual pain and abuse of your body? What does the battery cage hen, in her tortured state, wake up to, since she’s gone insane from confinement?

Ignorance—as to why they are being tortured in this way. Does the battery hen know why this is being done to her? Does some invisible, phantom part of her spirit know that there is sky outside—even though she’s never been allowed out of her cage. Since the Korean Comfort ‘Women’ were mostly ‘girls,’ teenage virgins completely ignorant of sex and men, when they were first raped, sometimes for hours, during their ‘initiation’ sessions, to ‘break them in,’ did they ever figure out why this painful, violent act was being inflicted on their bodies?

The hurting of the weak. A battery-cage hen is so fragile, with those thin bones of hers, so breakable since the demands on her body have depleted them of calcium. Or the way just-born chicks are sorted by sex: females heading toward the battery cage, males disposed of through suffocation or meat grinders since they’re useless to the egg industry. It’s because they’re small and helpless that they can be so hurt. I didn’t stand a chance against a group of men climbing on top of me. Even one could have hurt me so easily with his male strength.

Shame, another connection. Karen Davis, of United Poultry Concerns, says that it’s difficult to look at the hens in such pain in the battery cages since suffering is essentially a private thing. I know from my own experience that being used as a public dumping ground by those men left me with deep shame that I still feel in the pit of my stomach—it’s like a hard, heavy, sick feeling that never entirely goes away. They saw not just my completely helpless, naked body, but they heard me beg, and cry. They reduced me to something low and disgusting that suffered miserably in front of them.

Even years later, it has taken tremendous courage for me to put these words on the page, so deep is the cultural shame imposed on me for having a ‘filthy,’ i.e., raped body. There is a Jacobean play in which two girls are mass raped by an army. Their uncle blames them and says, “You should have kept your legs together.” Great advice—except that so many men are forcing them apart. It has also taken me so long to speak because of fear—that I will be raped again, for breaking my silence.

My last connection: compassion, and the compelling need to feel ashamed that one feels it for the animals and the prostitutes—after all, they’re just animals, aren’t they?

I read of an experiment where male mice were hyped up on a drug so that they would rape female mice. It was a Newsweek article, which coolly reported that the males raped the screaming females for hours—while distanced scientists looked on. Maybe the 60 American soldiers queued up to use that prostituted Japanese body regarded their ‘rape’ task with the same dispassionate and impersonal calm—in between the dirty jokes they must have made, to pass the time, in that long line. Maybe my rapists felt nothing for my pain.