Commoditizing Humans

What does child porn have to do with Victoria’s Secret?
What do aborted female fetuses in China and North Korea have to do with classified ads in major U.S. newspapers inviting women to sell their eggs for a small fortune?
What do British adults nurturing life-like baby dolls have to do with women in India renting their wombs for Western women’s babies?

What all these modern developments have in common is the commoditization of human beings. In a world where babies are seen as customizable products, where children are seen as both merchandise and marketing target, and where women’s bodies are treated as manufacturing sites and consumables, truly anything can happen.

Here’s more recent evidence that human life—in particular the most vulnerable among us—children, women, the poor—is being devalued as the human race increasingly looks for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Fortunately, even the mainstream media are beginning to ask where this trend is heading. See any connections in the following articles? Let’s talk about it.

Living Dolls from AOL.com
Explore the extraordinary lives of women who buy hand-crafted lifelike dolls called ‘Re-Borns’. Treated as real infants and costing hundreds of dollars, these ‘human’ babies cry, squirm, and are the objects of intense affection by their ‘mothers.’ Loved like real babies, they’re taken for walks, bathed, and even have their diapers changed.

"Outsourced Wombs" by Judith Warner for the New York Times (1.3.08)
What’s going on in India—where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business—feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

Naughty - and Definitely Not Nice by Karen Heller for the Philadelphia Inquirer (10.31.07)
A quick perusal through the 188-page Victoria’s Secret holiday catalogue reveals marketing directed at teen girls, if not ’tweens, contributing to what can be called the continuing “slutification of America.”

Adult-Porn Industry Drives Child Porn Views from Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink (12.04.07)
Communities across America are struggling with news of doctors, businessmen, educators and the average family man being caught downloading graphic, illegal images of child porn.

Confessions of a Child Porn Addict by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck for the Buffalo News (10.16.07)
"It was a drive, something like a fix. I needed more, and if I didn’t get it, I felt empty.” - Clarence Johnson, convicted child pornography addict

Politics and Misogyny by Bob Herbert for the New York Times (1.15.08)
If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.

China to act on gender imbalance from BBC (8.25.07)
The Chinese government says it is drafting new laws to tackle the growing gender imbalance caused by the widespread abortion of female fetuses.

As Demand for Donor Eggs Soars, High Prices Stir Ethical Concerns by Roni Caryn Rabin (5.15.07)
Samantha Carolan was 23 and fresh out of graduate school when she decided to donate eggs to an infertile couple. Ms. Carolan concedes that she would never have done it if not for the money, $7,000 that she used to pay off some student loans.

'Love+Sex with Robots': Our Future? by Don Oldenburg for USA TODAY (12.18.07)

This review of David Levy's new book, Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (Harper, 2007), looks at humanoids designed and programmed to satisfy our every psychological and sexual need, want, and desire. According to artificial-intelligence expert David Levy, within the next 50 years, falling in love with and making love to artificial but remarkably human-like robots will become a socially accepted alternative.