Looking at a photo of an odometer the other day reminded me that I’m still thinking about that "Parking Meter" poem by Dean Marshall Tuck that was recently published in Rattle (2024), and the feedback I got about the piece I wrote in response to it. In his piece, Tuck compares prostitution to the act of feeding a parking meter, and suggests that paying for parking is like paying for time with a prostitute (Tuck, 2024). I was told that my response to Tuck’s piece - a poem called "Traffic" - was "too hot" and needed to cool down a bit. So I let it sit. And I thought about ways to cool it down. But it stayed hot. And so I started researching the elusive and woefully incomplete statistics currently available about the percentage of women and girls who are “prostitutes.”
Here is some of what I learned: Of the 4.8 million people who are sex trafficked each year, 94-99% of them are women and girls (International Labour Organization, 2017; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2020). And overall, a substantial percentage of these women and girls “in prostitution” or what is now called “sex work” - I can barely even stand to write that - are victims of human trafficking. So that means between 4.5 and 4.75 million women and girls are trafficked for the purpose of sexual assault each year (International Labour Organization, 2017; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2020). They are not “prostitutes” or “sex workers” by choice, but instead because they have been coerced and beaten and drugged and torraped and kidnapped and detained against their will and stolen from and forced into being presented as prostitutes. Not once (although that would be one too many times). Not twice. But over and over and over again. As Frank Figliuzzi argues in The Long Haul, it is misleading to regard trafficked women as freely choosing to be sex workers: "To me, it sounds more like involuntary servitude than free enterprise" (Figliuzzi, 2023). These women and girls are actually not “prostitutes” at all. They are victims of sex trafficking. They are sexual slaves. That’s right: 4.5 to 4.75 million women and girls are trafficked for the purpose of sexual slavery each year. And these crimes are hidden behind the thinly veiled and pernicious misnomer “prostitutes.”
To put this in perspective, this number is the equivalent to the entire population of the states of Louisiana or Kentucky, or the population of the countries of New Zealand, Ireland, or Costa Rica being sex trafficked every year (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024; World Bank, 2024). And let’s remember that in this particular thought experiment, all of the residents of those states and countries would be women and girls. Every year. We need to talk about this. We need to feel a burning hot rage about this widespread gendered violence against women and girls.
Think about this: It is estimated that the entire COVID-19 pandemic caused 7 million deaths over a period of 4 years (World Health Organization, 2024). And we did not tolerate that. We saw it as a global public health crisis. We recognized that it needed to be stopped. And then we took collective action to mobilize every possible resource we had to stop it. What will need to happen for us to take seriously and demand an end to the widespread and endemic sexual violence against women and girls? What will it take for us to recognize this as the global public health and humanitarian crisis that it is? What if the entire population of Ireland was sex trafficked this year? And then all of New Zealand next year? And then Costa Rica? Would we continue to stand by as if helpless to do anything about it? And what if it then spread further, to Kentucky and Louisiana? Would we ask those who were outraged by this to cool down? How is it that we continue to allow this to happen? How has this become normative for us?
The entrenched and longstanding socioeconomic inequalities that women and girls face – many of which are structural and systematically reinforced by governments and religious organizations – further reduce our already limited choice framework (Kristof & WuDunn, 2010; Amnesty International, 2020; United Nations, 2020; World Economic Forum, 2020). This makes it especially important not to allow writing that seeks to reinforce false ideas about prostitution being normal and morally equivalent to paying for parking to go unchecked. Or – even worse - to allow it to be celebrated. And so I have decided that I am not going to cool my poem down. I am going to let the hot rage I feel over this issue fuel me. I am going to keep writing. I am not going to censor myself so that I don’t write in a way that is too hot. Because this information should make people uncomfortable. It should force us to ask ourselves, how is it that we are continuing to tolerate this? Why are a literary journal and a university celebrating and showcasing a piece of writing that equates paying for time with a prostitute to paying for parking? We need to change this. We need to do it now. And we need to do it together, with the many people and organizations that are already working tirelessly to combat these crimes against women and girls, and all of those who are trafficked against what should be their basic human rights.
Traffic
In response to “Parking Meter” by Dean Marshall Tuck
It makes me almost too angry to write
that I spent some of my precious time
- 13 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back -
looking up the author's name
because I needed to confirm that the writer is a man
and I wanted to see his face
perhaps even his eyes.
Because in the list of things to spend money on
“prostitutes”
would never have made it onto any list
I would ever make
about ways to buy time.
If “prostitutes” makes it onto your list of things to buy with money,
what does that make you?
He writes that he started thinking about the ways we buy time on this earth
and in among the list of things that seem in some ways essential to life
things like music
connections to others
time in places we’d want to be
with people we’d want to see
there is this horrible word: prostitutes.
As if it were as ordinary
as a theme park
or a phone call.
Rent money
the light bill
food.
I hate this poem.
I hate that this word was slipped into a list of things that are otherwise normal and relatable
it is not.
And so, I ask-
what does that make you?
To have this word on your list
of things to spend money on
to extend your time.
What does that make you?
A man who sees women as commodities
things to be bought and sold.
The sound of coins dropping
into so many rented holes.
© 2024 Mary Simmerling
To learn more about human trafficking and sexual exploitation, watch the film Sands of Silence: Waves of Courage based on a 15-year quest to expose the underworld of sexual exploitation and trafficking from Asia to the Americas. The film will inspire you to speak out about the horrors of human trafficking and sexual violence.
References
Resources for Combating Sex Trafficking & Violence Against Women and Girls
