I recently looked up some recommendations for action movies and came across Taken (2008), a non-Hollywood production starring Liam Neeson who is known for his roles in artfag movies, and Schindler’s List. The movie was surprisingly good. Critics did not really like it, and they liked the two sequels even less, but they are still better than any recent Hollywood movie I can think of. I do not think that I can wholeheartedly recommend Taken 2 and Taken 3, though. The premise of Taken is grounded in reality: criminal gangs kidnapping naive women, forcefully injecting them with drugs, and pimping them out. This happens to the daughter of the main protagonist and her friend. Liam Neeson sheds his artfag background, travels to Paris, ignores plot holes, and saves the day.
The story of Taken is quite forgettable. Nonetheless, the setup of the movie is quite remarkable as it depicts female deceptions at a level I have not encountered in a mainstream movie yet. It is surprising enough if a movie shows one lying cunt. Yet, in this movie you get the following setup:
– (premise) the protagonist is divorced and has shared custody of his daughter together with his ex-wife
– Mother and daughter meet with the protagonist to get approval for a “study trip” to Paris. The daughter tells him that her friend did this the year before and is now “practically fluent in French”
– The protagonist agrees, but insists that the daughter calls him every day. Knowing that his daughter and her friend will stay with members of the remote family of her friend puts his mind at ease as well as there will be adult supervision.
This may seem straight-forward, but look at how this unravels:
– The protagonist later discovers that his daughter is planning a multi-city trip all across Europe. When confronting the mother, she tells him that they “had to” lie to him because otherwise he would not have agreed and that “all the kids are doing this”. The travel dates supposedly refer to tour dates of U2, but this is not a band that is popular among teens, so the mother may have lied to the protagonist, or the daughter to the mother who then unknowingly relayed this information to the protagonist.
– The friend of the protagonist’s daughter can barely speak French, so the daughter lied about this.
– Both are staying at an apartment on their own, without any adult supervision.
– The friend of the daughter wants to push the latter to party and lose her virginity, which she is not comfortable with. In short, the friend is revealed as a corruptor who wants to use the protagonist’s daughter to have someone to party with.
Thus, all the women are lying to each other as they pursue their goals, and it is depicted as completely normal. The mother wants her daughter to “spend some time abroad”, the daughter wants to see all of Europe, and the slut wants to drag her friend down to her level. Quite frankly, this is pretty normal female behavior, in particular women encouraging other women to engage in behavior that dramatically lowers their sexual market value.
Women seem to not even have a concept of “lie of omission” and otherwise quite frequently have a somewhat flexible approach to truth whereas guys are much more often straight shooters. You can learn this from interacting with the real world. By watching the beginning of Taken, you can also learn this from a movie. As an added bonus, Taken also shows female stupidity having serious real-world consequences. The friend reveals their address to some guy who approaches her because nothing could go wrong as she wants to fuck him so she shall get her fantasy, right? Well, the next thing that happens in the movie is that some guys break into the apartment, kidnap the girls, and kick off the main story of the movie. The slut is later shown to have died of an overdose in a makeshift brothel for immigrant workers.
I watched in when it came out in theaters, back in the day, it was a half decent action flick by Hollywood standards.
My biggest issue with that film is that it exploits and perpetuates the sex trafficking myths that have done so much damage.
The “typical” trafficking scenario where good girls (usually white) get kidnapped by strangers and forced into sexual slavery is a myth. It mostly functions to punish prostitutes and their clients, and to steer government money to activist organizations and law enforcement.
Both conservatives and leftists get something out of it, so there is a bipartisan consensus not to question that narrative.
Are you sure that sex trafficking is a myth? I agree that the narrower sense, i.e. kidnapping of white girls, is a minority of cases even though there are several known high-profile cases involving minors if not pre-teens. Here is a somewhat recent mainstreams paper on the worldwide scope of the problem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3651545/
Also, I do not see how prostitutes are being punished by law or society. There are several countries where a lot of money flows into pressure groups (NGOs) and even when prostitution is formally illegal, only the male gets punished. Of course, I do not deny that prostitution is a field many women go into willingly. After all, where else can you make a large multiple of the average wage by lying on your back? A prostitute who is smart with money can save up enough in a few years to retire, albeit most probably are not quite that smart with money and rather blow it on drugs, shoes, and handbags.
The image people in the west have about it, like in Taken, certainly is a myth.
Pretty much all women who enter the sex trade do it willingly, albeit forced by the miserable conditions of their lives. Its not a pretty life, and they do get exploited more or less the same way migrant workers get exploited. Girls who get trafficked for sex are usually aware that they will be (or they already are) prostitutes, but may have been misled as to their destination, working conditions or pay. A lot of them enter the trade because they are miserably poor, drug addicted, or have other issues, and need to engage in survival sex.
With so many poor women willing to enter the sex trade, it makes little economic sense to incur the risks of kidnapping and holding people against their will. That would also imply that there is a very large base of male customers willing to pay for raping sex slaves, which sounds quite unlikely. All it takes is one guy taking pity on the girl and report it to the authorities. (Here in my country that actually happened once, a girl being held at a brothel under threats simply told a customer of her plight and he gave her his phone for her to call the cops herself).
I am not saying it never happens, but it is vanishingly rare in the west. Organizations like Polaris make their money by creating “awareness” ie making up shit and distributing it via “fact sheets” and websites (afaik they dont even actually help any trafficked women).
Its telling that vulnerable women who are “rescued” often dont even consider themselves victims of trafficking (and where prostitution is illegal they may self-identify as such to avoid prosecution).
That paper you linked cites Polaris sources, for example. It is also telling that they include the “wheel of power and control”, which is a dubious model cooked up by a bunch of marxista feminist activists with little scientific basis. Its called the Duluth Model, and it is also behind much of the policy response to domestic violence (with equally dismal results)
I stand corrected. Thank you for this insightful comment. Also, I was not aware of the term “survival sex”. It’s quite catchy, so I wonder why feminists have not picked it up, claiming that women who trade sex for food, shelter, and access to money under the veil of a relationship only do so for the purpose of survival.
Your example of customers helping the girl only works if the customer is sympathetic to the woman. I came across reports of sex trafficking in Israel that seems to imply that a woman who was forced into prostitution and ended up in a place like Tel Aviv may not be quite so lucky. I was surprised to see that even the ultra-leftist Wikipedia has a page on the problem of human trafficking in Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_Israel
I’m assuming that in Asia it’s pretty bad. An acquaintance saw a grandma with her granddaughter on a motorbike. 2 male Viet motorbikers drove by and snatched the child.
Children being kidnapped may well be a bigger problem than sex trafficking. Of course, there is the aspect that the elite are pedophiles and need to get their supply from somewhere, engaging people like Mark Dutroux. However, I think more often those kids simply get sold as part of the “adoption” business. Middle men are lining their pockets while some bleeding-heart liberal Western couple of which the woman was unable to conceive thinks she can both virtue signal and satiate her maternal instinct by raising a kid from a third-world country. Of course, I am not making the claim that kidnapping or trafficking is involved in adoption cases in general.
yes most women lie by omission and do not call that lies …