Fellow blogger @puffles2010 referred me to a piece entitled Sex trafficking in the digital age: is it becoming a legitimate business?.

I commented, but thought I would express my views in more detail on here.

The digital age is also known as the information age or era and represents the instant accessibility of information through technology. one of the key ingredients of this era is the fact that the majority of accessibility to information and products is free. This is in spite of continual attempts by businesses, organisations and governments to restrict accessibility or attempted charge, tax or profit from such accessibility. As such, the only successful market has been the purchase of the tools through which information is accessed, be it through laptops, mobile phones or the all singing, all dancing pads, likely to be superseded by something even more fantastic in the next 18 months.

As indicated by cultural developments in the 20th century, carefully and critically described by the Frankfurt School of sociologists working from the Marcuse conception of capitalism, our consumer driven commodity focused society has become limited and exploited to every extent.

It could be argued that nothing has been more exploited by capitalism than sex. As the article on Postdesk observes, “the entertainment industry is part of, and the acceptable face of, the flesh trade”. We now live in a world where it is acceptable for girls under the age of 10 to have the Playboy bunny on their stationery and for a desirable career choice to be a Wife-and/or-Girlfriend of a footballer. The focus is on the attractiveness of the woman and not on any other accomplishments she may have.

As Nina Power’s book The One-dimensional Woman observes,

“From the boardroom to the stripclub, one must capitalise on one’s assets at every moment… the all pervasive peepshow segmentarity of contemporary culture demands women must treat their breasts as wholly separate entities“

(that book really should be compulsory reading for all secondary schools).

As such, unlimited and continual accessibility through technology to information has also provided unlimited and continual access to the sexualisation exploitation of women. This is the true link between the digital age and sex.

As I have said of the Millenial generation, sex is also available to be hosted through Facebook, serialised on blogs and dramatised through YouTube. Or RedTube.

One could present the argument that there is nothing wrong with sex, and indeed bodies, being presented as commodities. Indeed a recent so-called academic study of women in business attempted to point out that women should utilise all erotic capital at their disposition in order to get ahead.

The problem largely with the ever-increasing currency of sex is that women are presented as the commodities and men are presented as consumers. If one is to compare the amount of pornography produced for females against the far larger amount of pornography produced the males one is able to analyse not only the supply and demand requirements but also the continual detrimental and diminutive representations of women in both arenas.

As a result, there are byproducts of an increasingly sexualised society through which generations of young women are raised to consider the so-called liberation of their sexuality as something to be traded and marketed. this has resulted in the perhaps milder end of bikini tops for three-year-olds and Playboy bunny pencil cases through to the more severe and detrimental Labiaplasties that were the focus of a recent UK feminista March.

Unlimited and easy access to information has presented unlimited and easy access to the pornification of women. I don’t necessarily feel that increasing the amount of pornification of men will redress the balance in any way. Several years ago I attended a hen party that had male strippers is the main attraction. However, the male stripper onstage simply pulled a hen up in front of crowds of screaming women and reduced her to a sex slave in the name of entertainment. That is not redressing the balance between the genders.

Instead, we need to counter the concept of aspiration, ambition and the value of the human body and indeed the human being. Prostitution may be the oldest occupation, but that does not mean that it has to be the most popular one today.

To descend into a discussion on sex trafficking within the digital age would require several years of research!