"Women in Cages"

                When one thinks of the title “Women in Cages,” which is not recommended in the first place, does one’s mind immediately comprehend that this is obviously a protest/photo exhibit to illustrate the treatment of animals?  Should it? According to The Polaris Project, there are hundreds of thousands of women and children in bondage to the sex trade each year in the US alone, who are repeatedly raped, beaten, and otherwise coerced in the most dehumanizing ways.  How sensitive is it to have women, like Brooke Hogan, strip down and pose inside of a cage?  It’s a disgusting idea anyway because by placing a woman nude in the offending situation it affords her less dignity than those animals, but especially considering the real lives of so many women and children in human bondage who actually need our help.

                The fact that the models are nude sexualizes the pictures, thus adding fuel to a kind of social situation in which a sex trade flourishes.  So there really can be no socially redeeming value for the pictures.  They are crass and demeaning of a particularly vulnerable segment of society, women.  One would hope that this were not so in our American society, but news we hear leak out of the sex trade as a handful of women escape it tell of how women are lured into situations in which they are abducted, beaten, and continually raped to make money for their captors.

                Women in other countries are made vulnerable as they attempt to move out of economic calamity.  Women in America, especially young women are also vulnerable, girls run away from home to meet a man who’s been wooing them on the internet, only to have her rush to freedom turned into a “women in cages” situation.

                It’s heartbreaking what our society is teaching girls. It’s putting a growing percentage of them at greater risk and it must stop with us.  We can make our country safer for girls, but will we?  Is the only foreseeable reality for my little girl either to be exploited in a picture or in a world of sexual bondage?

                I will die first, but the sad thing is every little girl has a father who needs them to die before exploiting anyone’s daughter.  I call all men to stop the exploitation of women, even if it is for the sake of animals.