Of Clothespins and Humanity

Being that our newly rented most-of-a-house came with almost no utilities, we decided to rent only a clothes washer. Why pay Entergy to dry clothes and heat up the house, and then pay Entergy even more to run the window AC units to cool down the house? It’s 90 outside and sunlight is free. Hey, if you’re worried about dependence on foreign oil, degradation of our environment, etc., go for clotheslines.

So I bought 200 feet of clothesline for $6.70 and a package of 50 clothespins for $1.00 (plus tax). Then with nails, wooden fences, boards, and cinder blocks, I strung up clotheslines in the side yard. Picking up the package of clothespins, I thought, “$1.00 for 50. That’s 2 cents each.” I looked closely at the package. Made in China. Of course.

Of the 2 cents per clothespin, probably 1 cent went to China, and some tiny percentage of that penny went to those in the American-financed factory who manufactured the pins, probably uneducated girls from the countryside, who are paid 25 cents or a dollar or whatever number per day. Neither American “liberals” nor American “conservatives” understand the reality or the importance of their work.

Isn’t it terrible for them to be paid so little? No. The buying power of their pay enables them to survive, and there as here, the Chinese like to live with others, friends if not family, pool their resources, and have enough to even improve the quality of life.

Isn’t it terrible to send work to China that could be done here? No. If these clothespins were made here, I couldn’t have afforded them. Entergy would probably have been cheaper.

None of those considerations are relevant. In fact, they are ludicrous. What is the real issue?

Melinda insisted I read a book. I finally did. It is Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn, the first married couple to share a Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting for the New York Times. It is meticulously researched. The title comes from something said by Mao Tse-tung (or ZeDong), of all people: “Women hold up half the sky.”

It is a profoundly disturbing book. Kristoff and WuDunn were ashamed when they realized that, in pursuing the hot stories, they had been ignoring probably the most important and appalling reality of our time: throughout the world, most women in most societies are denied education, medical care, and freedom, and can be kidnapped, enslaved, raped, beaten, and murdered with impunity. I too felt ashamed not to have known that, and I think any sane person would feel the same way.

Kristoff and WuDunn explain that, throughout the world, uneducated rural girls are regularly kidnapped or tricked into going to a distant city on the promise of a job. Instead, the trafficker sells the girl to a brothel owner, who enslaves her. She is raped, beaten, and threatened with death until her will to resist is broken. Usually she will die within a few years of AIDS. There are more sex slaves in brothels around the world right now than the total of all the black slaves that existed in America before our Civil War. The situation is worse, not better. One can reasonably think that American women have some nerve being concerned about their rights, equality, etc., when even the poorest women in America are better off than the vast majority of women in the rest of the world. (Well, except for the women enslaved in American brothels. That is a reality here also.)

You see, every young woman in an American factory in China has been rescued from that danger. The Chinese government knows that. It is doing more to combat sexual slavery than most other governments in the world. So, as I hung our laundry on the clotheslines, I reflected that every clothespin, or every so many clothespins, represented one more Chinese girl not sold into slavery, into a life that fits Hobbes’ description of being nasty, brutal, and short.

I also reflected on a related crime against humanity: the destruction of a person’s ability to enjoy sex. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promulgated by the United Nations at its formation and inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt, declares that having a satisfying sex life is a fundamental human right. The USA was a signatory to that. It should be an embarrassment that we do not enforce it.

Now, a fact, one rarely discussed in public, is that some people enjoy watching other people have sex. IF the people being watched are in fact freely consenting adults having fun, I do not think there is any ethical issue here. Further, if one understands a fundamental tenet of both Jewish and Christian theology, that the commandment in Genesis 1 to “go forth and multiply” proves that sex cannot in itself be sinful (the belief that sex is inherently sinful is certainly the most catastrophic heresy ever to infect Christianity—or any other faith, for that matter), then one cannot make out a prima facie case that there is any moral issue here either.

Given that argument, is it immoral to look at videos online of people having sex? If one were looking at freely consenting adults, perhaps not; depends on your own canon. If one is viewing films made by the folks in the San Fernando Valley who have their own annual version of the Academy awards, perhaps that would be the situation. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s not. Instead, one is looking at enslaved women being repeatedly gang-raped. That bothers my conscience. And every time one views such a film, one is to some degree encouraging the predators to find and enslave another young girl somewhere in the world.

There is a wonderful passage in the Didache, the first Christian liturgical manual, written toward the end of the first century, that I will use as a springboard: “There are two ways, the way of life and the way of death,” the way of clothespins and the way of pornography. Choose clothespins. Buy Chinese.