Profits, as recently reported by the BBC, that a forced prostitute will reap on behalf of his or her master:

$67,200 in industrialized nations
$45,000 in the Middle East
$23,500 in transitional countries
$18,200 in Latin America
$10,000 in Asia and Africa

By means of comparison, the average annual salary of a Bulgarian worker: $2,600.

Sex, and more broadly forced labor and exploitation, sells; the International Labour Organisation reports that forced labor is a $31 billion global industry.

Mimi Hanaoka

Forcing her Peugeot through the streets of Tehran at 80 kilometers an hour in a 30-kph zone, Laleh Seddigh — 28, indefatigable, and beautiful — is quite literally racing her way to the top of Iran’s car-racing community. Seddigh has been notching a number of firsts: She is the first woman since the Islamic Revolution occurred, in 1979, to compete against her male counterparts in any athletic competition; she is the first Iranian woman to compete against men in car racing; and she was first to cross the finish line during Iran’s national racing championship, which was held in March of this year. Lest her detractors think that she has traded brawn for brains, she has already received her BA and MA from Tehran University, and she is currently working towards her doctorate in industrial management and production.

As one of the 70 percent of Iranians younger than 35, she has a bold confidence and a message that may well be a function of her youthful vitality: “In this society, women don’t believe in themselves … They have to believe in their inside power.”

Mimi Hanaoka

Swedish researchers have, using brain-imaging techniques, concluded that gay men and straight men respond differently to two different scents that are potentially involved in sexual arousal.  So what does all this sex on the brain mean? Firstly, it may give credence to the notion that humans, like animals, may have pheromones, which are chemicals that invite certain types of behavior, such as sexuality, within a species; secondly, this data may prompt researchers to consider the biological and chemical foundations of sexuality and sexual preference.

The study, however, should only be seen as a beginning and certainly not as proof that there is a biological explanation for sexual orientation and behavior; it is still unclear whether it is sexual behavior that transforms brain chemistry or whether it is the brain chemistry that dictates sexual preference.  Furthermore, Dr. Ivanka Savic of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who headed the study, issued the curiously vague comment that while the subjects in her research included gay women, the results of that aspect of the study were “somewhat complicated” and therefore cannot yet be published. We should, then, cautiously understand this study only as a foray into the biological causes and effects of sexuality and as a door that is beginning to be opened, but not as a definitive statement about sexuality or sexual behavior and orientation.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Freedom to kill is not a true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being into slavery.”

— Pope Benedict XVI at the basilica of St. John’s in Lateran during his installation as the Bishop of Rome, speaking about this “unequivocal” condemnation of abortion and euthanasia.  The 265th Pope has already earned the moniker “God’s Rottweiler” for his unrelenting and inflexible conservatism.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Evolution is a great theory, but it is flawed … There are alternatives. Children need to hear them. We can’t ignore that our nation is based on Christianity — not science.”

— Kathy Martin, 59, a member of Kansas’s state board of education and a former science and elementary school teacher, who is presiding over the board’s recent inquiry into the role that evolution should play in the science curriculum of the Kansas public schools. Martin, who makes no attempt to hide her religious affiliation, has found many like-minded individuals, and Kansas is not the only state engaged in the debate over the legitimacy of teaching evolution; Ohio has already passed a measure guaranteeing that teachers may, in their classes, challenge the theory of evolution. Far from adhering to the notion of the separation of church and state, Martin and those who are on her intellectual and spiritual horizon are aggressively, legally, and insistently wedging the presence of the church in the ostensibly secular state.

Mimi Hanaoka

If we’d smugly thought — or hoped — society had progressed beyond superficiality, we were, apparently, dead wrong; a study out of the University of Alberta claims that parents are culprits of a strangely intuitive but menacing type of favoritism — parents treat attractive children better than they treat ugly children.

The team of researchers at the University of Alberta, led by Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, head of the university’s Population Research Laboratory, scattered themselves across 14 supermarkets, of all places, and then observed over 400 interactions between parents and their children. Having rated the child’s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, the researchers used the following as some of the criteria for how a parent treated his or her child: whether the parents safely belted the child into the seat of the grocery cart, whether the parents’ attention waned or lost focus, and whether the parents permissively or absent mindedly allowed the child to wander away or frolic dangerously in the grocery store. The results of the study — although, to be fair, the findings have yet to be published, so the academic community has not yet had sufficient time to pass judgment on Harrell’s claims — point to the creepy conclusion that parents take markedly better care of attractive children over their less attractive peers.

Harrell, who led the search, insists that, “like lots of animals, we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value … Maybe we can’t always articulate that, but in fact we do it. There are a lot of things that make a person more valuable, and physical attractiveness may be one of them.” The treatment of the child, according to Harrell, can be reduced to tendencies that make evolutionary sense, with attractive children and their attractive genes meriting more care.

While academics have not yet had time to sink their teeth into Harrell’s argument, some have already dismissed the study. Robert Sternberg, a psychology and education professor at Yale, pooh-poohed Harrell’s methodology — such as ignoring the socio-economic status of the parents and children who were observed — and dismissed the evolutionary theory as “speculative.”

Regardless of whether Harrell’s theory carries any scientific or intellectual legitimacy and parents do, in fact, enter into some sort of bankrupt aesthetic calculus when deciding how to treat their children, we can at least know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and not least in the eyes of the researchers.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Voicing their opinion in the starkest terms, the tribal council of the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in America, which houses over 300,000 members, voted 63-0 last week in support of a bill that would ban gay marriage. Joe Shirley Jr., the tribal president, has previously opposed such a ban, and he remains undecided on how he will proceed with the issue. The bill was passed on Friday, April 22, and the tribal president must decide within the current 10-day window whether he will sign the bill.

In a parallel but related move, earlier this month Connecticut joined Vermont to be the second state to allow same sex civil unions.

Mimi Hanaoka

“A law as profoundly iniquitous as this one is not an obligation; it cannot be an obligation … This is not a matter of choice.  All Christians … must be prepared to pay the highest price, including the loss of a job,” was the brutal response that Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo spat out regarding a proposal put forth in the Spanish parliament that would permit gay couples to marry and adopt children.

Cardinal Trujillo, who leads the Pontifical Council on the Family, was speaking to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and made clear his belief that anyone who is asked to perform a gay marriage should be a conscientious objector and refuse to do so.

If Cardinal Trujillo’s remarks are any hint, the 265th pope, Benedict XVI, will likely be uncompromisingly conservative; he has already made it clear that he condemns birth control and the ordination of women, and he asserts that Communion should be withheld from those who support the “grave sins” of abortion and euthanasia. Pope Benedict XVI’s unflinching — not to mention rabid — conservatism has already earned him the moniker “God’s Rottweiler.”

Mimi Hanaoka

“We call it a boutique synagogue. You might have to RSVP. There might be a roped line. It will totally be a scene. But it’s all kosher.”

— Dovi Scheiner, an Orthodox rabbi who this autumn will be opening the doors to SoHo Synagogue in Manhattan, a Jewish house of worship for the young (rabbi Scheiner is 28), moneyed (the synagogue will organize Shabbat services in the Hamptons, a refuge for the rich), and Orthodox.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“Prosecuting and imprisoning people for homosexual conduct are flagrant human rights violations…Subjecting the victims to floggings is torture, pure and simple.”

— Scott Long, director of the Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, condemning the recent sentencing by a court in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, of over 100 men to jail terms and flogging for alleged homosexual conduct.  The men were arrested last month at a private party and, according to a Saudi newspaper, were accused of dancing and “behaving like women.”  

Mimi Hanaoka

“The worldwide campaign against terrorism has given Beijing the perfect excuse to crack down harder than ever in Xinjiang. Other Chinese enjoy a growing freedom to worship, but the Uighurs, like the Tibetans, find that their religion is being used as a tool of control.”

— Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch’s Asia Director, speaking about China’s suppression of the ethnic Uighur minority, who live in the oil-soaked northwestern section of the country.

The Uighurs comprise eight million of the 19 million people in the Xinjiang province. They are Turkic Muslims, speak a Turkic dialect — most speak little or no Chinese — and desire a greater level of autonomy from China. Uighurs are now becoming even more of a minority in their home region; largely due to the influx of Chinese Han settlers, the Uighur population in Xinjiang has plummeted from 90 percent in 1949 to 45 percent today.  

Sharon Hom, Human Rights in China executive director, emphasized that the Chinese government is using the war against terror as a guise under which to suppress the Uighurs, who lie on the geographic, linguistic, and cultural fringes of China. “As Islam is perceived as underpinning Uighur ethnic identity, China has taken draconian steps to smother Islam as a means of subordinating Uighur nationalist sentiment,” states Hom.

The repression that she refers to runs the gambit from the scrutinization of imams and mosque closures to detentions and executions.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest a new Japanese history textbook that glosses over Japan’s wartime atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanking Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, as well as the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.”

Like an open sore that is constantly chafing against history, the Sino-Japanese rift is constantly being agitated. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s and other ministers’ repeated visits to Yasukuni shrine, where Japan’s war dead are enshrined — including class A war criminals — are frustrating Japan’s Asian neighbors. The ministers who visit Yasukuni state that they are paying their respects to the Japanese war dead, while many Chinese insist that they are glorifying war criminals, such as General Hideki Tojo, who is enshrined at Yasukuni.

Japan’s revisions of history and refusal, unlike Germany, to apologize for its atrocities perpetrated during the war years, have very concrete ramifications on Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors. The Chinese are protesting Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and Kim Sam-hoon, South Korean Ambassador to the UN, recently fumed that “a country that does not have the trust of its neighboring countries because of its lack of reflection on the past” cannot fulfill the “role of a world leader.”

Mimi Hanaoka