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Includes bibliographical references and index
"Once I was convinced of the pervasiveness of the problem, the immediate question facing me was why and how female sexual slavery has remained invisible.
First, there is direct suppression of the evidence by authorities. In addition, it is invisible as a problem to those who handle practices of female sexual slavery every day. When I would illustrate to an authority how a particular situation fit the most rudimentary definition of slavery, generally I found that they saw the abuse but *accepted sexual exploitation and violence as normal for particular groups of women under specific conditions*. I noted how, after women are enslaved in their homes or in prostitution, they are accepted as part of the group of women destined for that life.
When I challenged authorities, I ran up against the “don’t confuse me with the facts" attitude. Despite evidence of force and dehumanizing violence in many cases, they were incredulous that anyone would question prostitution or see it as other than a necessary service for a particular group of women to perform.
Yet other, more subtle effects have contributed to the invisibility of the slave trade. For example, most research on prostitution looks at female motivation rather than the objective conditions which bring many women into prostitution, shifting the causal assumptions from those who traffic women to the psychological states of the women themselves. To those who study the victims of the practice I have called female sexual slavery, these women are the exceptions for whom exceptional behavior is normal; to sociologists they are deviants, to psychologists they are sadomasochists. *Their life and experiences are construed as normal for them while they are supposedly different from the rest of us.* It is in this kind of contradiction that feminists have learned to look for larger truths about female experience. It is in female sexual slavery that I have found conditions which affect all women.
Because of these problems it was necessary for me to develop a perspective for analyzing both the documentation of female sexual slavery and the attitudes that define it as normal, which would reveal self interest on the part of those who label it. That self interest may range from the *actual profit from the traffic in women to a general participation in the sexual power that accrues to men from female sexual slavery*. As I studied the attitudes that accept female enslavement, I realized that *a powerful ideology stems from it and permeates the social order. I have named that ideology cultural sadism*. In Chapter 9 I have described the perspective or view of the world which is derived from the ideology of cultural sadism and determines what is known about sexual practices as it shapes attitudes and values toward them."
If you want to follow along I'm going to keep posting about this book under the tag #female sexual slavery
