From Epstein to empire: The historical continuity of men buying and selling the bodies of women and young girls

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

I have kept one eye on the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell story, and another on research for the book on which I am working. There's a link between the two stories. It is the continuity of men trading, buying and selling the bodies of women and young girls, and, as I came to learn, 'managing' prostitution to protect European colonialists and settlers (white men) from diseased 'natives' in the tropics.
I should make a couple of things clear. Whatever is written below is taken from either official records and/or the research and the writing of British colonialists and settlers. Because of space constraints, I don't list all the references and use quotation marks only to draw attention to some of the absurdities of colonial policies, statements and expressed ideals.
So, as the Russians would say, Doveryay, no proveryay (Trust, but verify).
The set of chapters I am currently working on is about the societies that British colonisers and subsequent settlers created. It's not about South Africa, although I did drop in a short reference to the creation of gardens across the British Empire and the way they are being maintained by post-colonial governments.
The chapters look at prostitution, the trafficking of women and the creation of brothels in the colonies, and how the British colonists 'managed' the sexual relations between their bureaucrats and settlers. More below.
The faces of evil
Let's get the Epstein-Trump-Maxwell stuff out of the way, but keep in the frame the way that the bodies of women and young girls have historically been treated as 'things' that can be traded and used to satisfy sexual pleasures and perversions. Or, as British and US records show, to satisfy the lustful urges of invaders, settlers and soldiers.
My colleague Marianne Thamm has written about the Epstein story. I won't go into the sordid details.
What I will say, to illustrate further a continuity of cruelty, is that the late Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, the late Robert Maxwell (as venal, vile and corrupt a man as there has been) represent the face of evil. (Unless evil does not quite capture paedophilia, the trafficking of young girls, stealing money from his [Maxwell's] company's pension fund, and leaving people who had been paying into the fund penniless.)
He, Robert Maxwell, was ' up there with Bernie Madoff,' said Roy Greenslade, author of 'Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire'.
Maxwell was described as evil (see John Preston's book, 'Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron') and admitted that during the Second World War, he shot a group of German soldiers despite their displaying a white flag, and (much) later remarked to one of his sons, 'I once killed boys your age. I regret it deeply'. He would be considered a war hero by the British.
The continuity referred to three paragraphs above has come a long way, I would suggest.
Satisfying the lusts of colonists, invaders and conquerors
Let me work backwards. Though the following are not the main focus of my current work, I should start with a passage from The New York Times: 'When Cho Soon-ok was 17 in 1977, three men kidnapped and sold her to a pimp in Dongducheon, a town north of Seoul. She was about to begin high school, but instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a ballerina, she was forced to spend the next five years under the constant watch of her pimp, going to a nearby club for sex work. Her customers: American soldiers.'
In the prologue of ' Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in US/Korea Relations ', Katherine Moon wrote:
'The selling and buying of sex by Koreans and Americans have been a staple of US-Korean relations since the Korean War (1950-53) and the permanent stationing of US troops in Korea since 1955. It is not simply a matter of women walking the streets and picking up US soldiers for a few bucks. It is a system that is sponsored and regulated by two governments, Korean and American (through the US military). The US military and the Korean government have referred to such women as 'bar girls,' 'hostesses,' 'special entertainers,' 'businesswomen,' and 'comfort women.' Koreans have also called these women the highly derogatory names, yanggalbo (Western whore) and yanggongju (Western princess).'
In ' Pulp Vietnam, War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines ', Gregory Daddis echoed this abuse of women, and referred to 'sexual conquest of Oriental women' as a means to prove the virility of US soldiers and demonstrate power and dominance over 'savages' (see the chapter on 'War Heroes and Sexual Conquerors').
See also ' Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America' by Ji-Yeon Yuh.
Women's bodies as a colonial project
In South and Southeast Asia (and in early European settlement of North America), women were effectively traded, and prostitutes were corralled, as it were, into brothels under the guise of 'management' to protect white men from contracting diseases that were carried by the indigenous population. (It should be pointed out that the Japanese invaders in East and Southeast Asia also created brothels. My focus is, however, mainly on European, especially British colonial and settler expansionism.)
In North America, the colonists and settlers moved readily 'from the raping of a woman to the raping of a country to the raping of the world. Acts of aggression, of hate, of conquest, or empire-building [evolve to] harems of women and harems of people; houses of prostitution and houses of pimps.' (Jack Forbes, 'Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism', p 8).
In South and Southeast Asia, the sanitised basis for (venereal) disease control became a matter 'central to the state', enabled by the Contagious Diseases Act (in India) in 1886, where it was deemed necessary to provide soldiers and settlers with 'attractive' women, and make sure that everyone adhered to hygiene practices.
The overriding policy in parts of the European empire in the east (and subsequent settlers) was as much about domination and control, as it was to get prostitutes 'off the streets and into brothels' to better manage women's bodies, and make sure 'natives' were 'safe' for satisfying the lusts and libidos of 'white' men.
'Surrounded by garbage, domestic animals, crawling children, and the stench of human excretion, the whole area was a scene of filth, pollution and vice. Superimposed on this was the fear of the 'native' as a rebel. The 'native' prostitute was thus by her very origin perceived as an amalgamation of all three — filth, disease and crime.' (See 'The Indian Prostitute as Colonial Subject: Bengal 1864 – 1883', by Ratnabali Chatterjee).
'The Victorian age,' wrote Chatterjee in Prostituted Women and the British Empire, 'provided a paradigm of sexual and moral hypocrisy.' Beyond Asia, the British were more concerned with the preservation and protection of whiteness than they were with 'natives'.
The rise of eugenics, with attendant notions of 'racial purity', introduced a whole new raft of concerns about whether 'native' or 'white' prostitutes ought to be traded.
The examples I found in these cases were from the British colonial era in Nigeria. That was when 'all sexual activities of white women in the colonies were an important part of empire building and the maintenance of white prestige,' wrote Linda Bryder in 'Sex, Race, and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review' (pp 809 – 810).
In Southeast Asia, Dutch colonists considered the indigenous women 'untameable'. The indigenous women, too (not unlike the modern-day women who would lure girls into networks of abuse), would 'sell' young girls to colonists and settlers. (See ' Wives, Slaves and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia ', by Eric Jones).
Nonetheless, the female body was traded in European, notably British colonies, and as one historian of the era explained, 'The expansion of Europe was not only a matter of 'Christianity and commerce,' it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage.'
Robert Hyam's work is not without criticism (see Carina Ray's criticism in ' Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire '), but he explained, nonetheless, that 'sexual opportunities were seized with imperious confidence', and that such opportunities were 'a perk' of imperial expansion of the British Empire across the world.
He contended (further) that the sexual opportunities came with the service of empire, which freed men from 'repressive Victorian morality codes at home' and they could 'fulfil their libidinous desires with the colonies' sexually decadent 'natives''.
This use and abuse, trade and 'management' of the bodies of women and young girls is continuously exposed, researched and discussed. It is a part of my current research (not academic), which focuses specifically on the societies established by the British empire-builders and subsequent settlers.
With one eye on this history, the Epstein-Maxwell abomination represents, to me at least, a continuity of the history of the way the bodies of women and girls have been bought and sold — very often to satisfy the libidos of men.
It goes much deeper than mere misogyny and has to do with deeply embedded (cultures and habits) of assuming that women are things that can be played with, fondled and exploited for sexual pleasure.
Or, as Stephanie Pappas wrote in Scientific American, 'Our brains see men as whole and women as parts … sexualised body parts.' DM