Is Sex Trafficking Turning into Self Trafficking?

I read a terrible story recently about a 25-year-old woman who was filmed having sex with 22 guys in 11 hours. Then I came across a story that was even worse of a 23-year-old woman who was filmed having sex with 101 guys in 14 hours. These young women were interviewed about the incidents and described the aches and soreness that occurred during and afterward. You might think their interviews happened at a police station and that they were both sex trafficking victims. But it turns out their interviews were with major publications and podcasts to help promote their “accomplishments.” You see, both did these sex acts to create video content for their OnlyFans pages, and they were more than happy to tell their story in great detail to get more people to log in and sign up for their OnlyFans accounts.

These stories got me thinking: have we gotten to a point where people are ok with, in a sense, sex trafficking themselves or self-trafficking? If you had only read the first half of the paragraph above and stopped, you would have thought that these young women were just part of the seemingly endless list of sex trafficking victims. But because they both chose to do this to themselves, they weren’t trafficked. But make no mistake, they are still victims. They are victims of a society and culture that makes them think that these over-the-top sex stunts are ok. And let’s not forget about the 123 men who also agreed to participate in this. They thought it was ok to take advantage of these women. Sadly, society has devalued sex to such an extent that we’ve ended up with women who are willingly letting their bodies get sexually ravaged for hours so they can get more clicks and become more “famous,” no matter the consequences.

I believe much of the fault for the devaluation of sex is because of the prevalence of internet pornography. And exposure to it happens before most kids become teenagers. Studies show that, when being exposed to pornography at such a young age, many children want to copy the behavior they’ve seen without understanding the implications. Internet pornography has been around for almost 30 years. Is it possible that these two women and the 123 men mentioned above were exposed to internet porn at a young age and are now copying the behavior without understanding the implications? I’ll let you decide. What I do know is that we need to do a better job as a society and as parents of protecting our children from the dangers that lurk on the internet because if we don’t, their exposure to it could have life-altering consequences.