Mexico' Current Cultural Model Justifies Exploitation of Women and Girls - Expert Study Elizabeth Velasco C. - La Jornada
go to original March 21, 2013

In the second most profitable crime in Mexico, thousands of women are forced into prostitution and trafficked across Mexican borders to make some men very rich. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Behind the trafficking of women and girls is a consumer market for sexual services, mostly for males, in which a remarkable emotional rootlessness prevails. In many and various ways, this 'rootlessness' reproduces the popular discourse that legitimizes both the perception of women as objects-bodies of male desire and the prevailing discourse that naturalizes the unstoppable sex drive in men, which forces them to resort to sexual services, says Mauro Antonio Vargas Urias, director general of the Gender and Development Association.

The study, "Men Who Purchase Bodies: Approaches to Consumption Associated with Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation", by Vargas Urías and Melissa Fernández, warns that masculinity and sexual consumption are closely related to a hegemonic culture that legitimizes the use of women's bodies as merchandise, so much so that establishments offering sexual services are as "natural as the corner store".

The wide-ranging study was conducted based on a series of interviews with men from Tlaxcala, a state that is not only a center for the generation of traffickers but that has high levels of sexual exploitation, and from San Luis Potosí. The study concludes that the problem of trafficking is not due solely to structural poverty, poor education, crime and trafficking; it is, above all, a problem of culture and sex education.

"One fundamental aspect to understand is that behind this problem lies a cultural framework marked by the patriarchal dynamic in which we live, that always generates inequalities by placing man in a supposed superior status that undermines all institutions and social environments," says Vargas Urías to La Jornada.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

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