Ashton Kutcher vs. The Village Voice: Looking for Real Men on the Internet

Earlier this spring Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher launched their “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign. In an effort to combat the increasingly public issue of sex trafficking of underage girls, Kutcher and Moore produced a series of television ads featuring big name celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Jamie Fox and Sean Penn.

The ads were centered around quick scenarios of manly men doing manly things (such as fixing a grilled cheese sandwich with an iron or playing basketball on a broken ankle). After flashing the title card “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” the camera pans to a gallery of portraits of masculine icons like Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis; the camera settles on a framed picture of yet another celebrity endorser, with a buxom gameshow style babe next to the portrait saying “Donald Trump is a real man, are you?” Or, in other ads: “Arianna Huffington prefers a real man. Do you?”

The ads are an extension of Moore and Kutcher’s DNA (Demi ‘n’ Ashton) organization. Soon after launching the campaign the celebrity couple were making cameos at the UN, hosting press conferences and creating an online empire of philanthropy through social media sites like facebook and Twitter.

Last spring Moore and Kutcher appeared on CNN’s new Larry King replacement, Piers Morgan, to discuss their burgeoning DNA project. There they repeated the now infamous statistic that there were somewhere between 100,000 to 300,000 child sex slaves in the US. Demi and Ashton were bravely coming out against this.

“There’s a cultural conditioning in society,” Kutcher explained to the starry eyed British host, “mostly that happens in locker rooms and other places, where guys get together and say ‘Oh yeah, well, it’s not that big of deal [to buy an underage prostitute].’ And that’s where it’s gotta stop; those guys need to stand up and say ‘NO! REAL. MEN. DON’T. BUY. GIRLS.'”

Going after those who purchase the sex, the “Johns”, is a relatively new approach to the issue of prostitution. Many law enforcement agencies around the country are adapting this strategy, as opposed to prosecuting the sex workers who Kutcher believes are, for the most part, (regardless of age) having sex against their will.

“The reason we’re going after the demand side,” Demi Moore elaborated, “is that the risk is so low for the buyers and sellers. Eighty percent of the girls [involved in prostitution] are criminalized, and only four states have a Safe-Harbor Act, which identifies underage girls as a victim of rape.

“Seventy-six percent of all child sex trafficking is done online,” Kutcher said, laying out his strategy for combating the issue through his DNA Facebook page. “Inside our ‘action tab’ we lay out some specific initiatives that people can do online to flag this. We want the social web to become the police for human trafficking. You can go to craigslist and you can flag the pages that look like child trafficking, or you can go to backpage.com and flag that. People can start to unroot these things.”

Thanks to campaigns like Moore and Kutcher’s, craigslist.com were hauled in before congress in September 2010 to discuss the issue of “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking.” Several groups testified against the online advertising company, claiming they were partly to blame for the 100,000 to 300,000 underage prostitutes in the US.

The hearing ended with Craigslist announcing they were shutting down their adult classifieds section. Fearing a similar retribution, Village Voice Media, who owns backpage.com and have, for several decades, depended on the income of adult classifieds, began researching the claims that there were even “100,000 to 300,000” underage prostitutes in the US.

The figure had been accepted as gospel truth by most in the media, reporters for CNN, Media Bistro and Salon all running it unquestioningly; UN ambassadors have used it in testimonies and the Orphan Justice Center in campaigns. It was one of those things that no one ever thought to challenge. Or were ever motivated to. As Bill Maher joked with Christopher Hitchens on his Real Time HBO show “we never have anyone here who’s pro child molestation to argue that side.” It was an issue similar to global warming—no one felt the need to disagree until dollar choking legislation was at stake. Then all kinds of professionals came out of the woodwork to debunk the statistics.

After two months of investigating US police records of arrests of juvenile prostitutes, the Village Voice released a scathing article on the front pages of their many weekly newspapers (they own ¼ of all alternative papers in the country). Titled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight”, the cover featured an Ashton Kutcher look-a-like, confused as he held an abacus next to a thought bubble that read “I was told there’d be no math?”

Among dissecting the statistics of child trafficking, Village Voice also questioned the credibility of a Hollywood airhead like Kutcher involving himself in such a complex issue, referring to him as a “scruffy doofus”, “the titular dude of Dude, Where’s My Car” and a “technically literate, ill informed advocate.” Essentially saying: Why does Kelso give a shit?

Attacking Kutcher’s intelligence because of the characters he’s played in movies is comparable to saying Jerry Lewis was too nutty a professor to have really cared about muscular dystrophy, or that Johnny Cash couldn’t have been a devout Christian because he once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But when it came to the figures on child sex trafficking, the Village Voice article fired a flaming arrow straight into the bulls-eye of a once unargued statistic. There apparently were not 300,000 underage prostitutes in the US.

The statistic came from the book The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the US, Canada and Mexico (2001) by Richard J Estes and Neil Alan Weiner. Both University of Pennsylvania professors, their figure of “100,000 to 300,000” was apparently taken out of context by Ashton Kutcher (as well as a host of reporters and advocates that followed him). A simple examination of the text (provided, conveniently, by the Village Voice) revealed that what the professors were referring to were children who were “at risk” for being targeted by pimps, such as any homeless or transgender youth or any living in a town that borders Mexico.

In Village Voice‘s research of police records it was discovered that the average annual arrests of minors involved in prostitution (taken from 37 major US cities) was a paltry 827. Compared with the six figure numbers that Kutcher and Moore were quoting on Piers Morgan months earlier, the Village Voice seemed to have a slam dunk against the scruffy dufus that was threatening the stability of their company. The article also questioned the reliability of Estes’ and Weiner’s study, noting that it was never published in any pier review journal and had some sketchy methods of gathering data. “The study cannot be relied on as authoritative,” Professor Steve Doig, a Knight Chair in Journalism, told the Village Voice (who contracted him in order to critique the study of Estes and Weiner). He claimed Weiner and Estes were “citing various approximations and guesstimates done under a variety of conditions.”

When the Village Voice pressed professor Estes for a guess of how many children were being kidnapped and forced into sex slavery, Estes confided that it was probably around “a few hundred people.” The article went on to cite that Moore and Kutcher (who first learned of the child slavery problem while watching a documentary in the bed of their Hollywood home) hired renowned celebrity philanthropist Trevor Neilson to run their campaign. Neilson reportedly charges up to $200,000, a figure that Village Voice proposes could go to more pro-active solutions to combat child slavery.

The article contains some pretty convincing reporting that the figures cited by Kutcher’s organization are wildly inflated. It is difficult to finish the piece without feeling that the DNA campaign is simply another pretentious Hollywood philanthropy project that serves to massage the egos of celebrities more than help the needy. Yet despite the thorough reporting and admission of having a stake in the fight, you can’t help but feel in need of a good shower after absorbing all the sleeze and politics emanating from the Village Voice.

“There’s no one to admire here—at all,” said Slate Editor Stephen Metcalf when discussing the feud in his Cultural Gabfest podcast. “If there is one child being exploited for sex in America that’s a tragedy. The problem is: How you frame an issue determines what solution you craft in order to deal with it.”

“I’m inclined to believe the reporting of the Village Voice,” Dana Stevens, the Gabfest co-host responded. “The journalism seems sound, but the reporting, taken in the larger context of the skeezy business practices of the Village Voice, totally undercuts the journalism.”

Ashton Kutcher has worked very hard to become the King of Twitter.

Ashton Kutcher has worked very hard to become the King of Twitter. In 2009 he challenged CNN in a race to be the first to collect one million Twitter followers; he quickly breezed past the news giant, and has since reached seven million followers to his “aplusk” account. So on the Wednesday that the Village Voice article appeared, essentially calling him a misinformed airhead, the new Two & A Half Men star retaliated with a series of tweets that started a long public battle between the two media empires.

Here’s a small sample of the enormous transcript:

aplusk: hey @villagevoice speaking of Data . . . How many of your girls selling themselves in your classifieds are you doing age verification on?

aplusk: hey @villagevoice Find another way to justify that YOUR property facilitates the sale of HUMAN BEINGS

aplusk: hey @villagevoice I’m just getting started!!!!!!!!!! BTW I only PLAYED stupid on TV.

aplusk: hey @villagevoice hows the lawsuit from the 15 year old victim who alleges you helped enslave them going?

aplusk: No response @villagevoice? Oh I forgot U work business hrs. Maybe that’s Y you sell girls on ur platform. They tend 2 work the night shift.

The next morning the Village Voice responded through their Twitter account.

villagevoice: Wow, @aplusk having a Twitter meltdown!! Hey Ashton, which part this story is inaccurate?

villagevoice: what do you have to hide @aplusk?

villagevoice: where’s your fight now @aplusk? Did you sleep in, or are you just tuckered out from last night’s Twitter tirade?

villagevoice: Wow, @aplusk just deleted a tweet he twittered a minute ago that said, “i’m up now. been up.”

The two continued on with this same mature discourse for some time. At one point Kutcher upped the ante and began targeting backpage.com advertisers by saying “hey @disney @dominos are you aware that you are advertising on a site that own and operates a digital brothel?” And then later: “Hey @AmericanAir are you aware that you are advertising on a site that supports the Sale of Human Beings (slavery)?” Two hours later American Airlines announced that they were pulling their ads from backpage.com. In one Twitter post Kutcher referred his followers to a piece of writing he did on the subject of child trafficking weeks earlier. There he admits that the data on child sex trafficking is “extremely incomplete due to the psychological complexity of the issue.”

“Proving force, fraud, or coercion can be very difficult,” he wrote, “considering that the victims have often times been brain washed, beaten, raped, molested, threatened, and tormented and fear revealing the identity of their trafficker. Often times what appears to be a voluntary commercial sex transaction is not. Therefore gathering a precise data set can be very complicated. In addition to this, many of the ‘voluntary prostitutes’ are under the age of legal consent. . . . One must also consider a girl who may have been brought into the sex trade by a trafficker at a young age and now has grown to the age of legal consent. Even though this girl may now be choosing to sell her body for sex, given the pre-existing circumstances, it’s extremely difficult to assume that she would have made that choice had she been given prior free will.”

Perhaps unintentionally, with those comments Kutcher touched on an issue that has been a thorn in the side of many members of the LGBT community. For the last decade or so, many progressive activists have been campaigning for the rights of, as Kutcher puts it, “voluntary prostitutes.” The goal has been to change the image of the sex worker from the abused, helpless drug addict on the street, to a professional, consenting adult who makes his/her own money and is in control of the situation.

Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) is a widely respected national network of advocates dedicated to, according to their mission statement “the fundamental human rights of sex workers and their communities, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education and advocacy.”

As you could imagine, members of SWOP (or anyone who shared their view of sex working) were more than a little erked during the public battle between Kutcher and Village Voice when no one attempted to draw a clear line between a kidnapped, sex abused child and a consenting adult running their own business.

In a press release by SWOP-NYC, Sarah Elspeth Patterson, M.Ed., commented on Kutcher’s debunked facts by Village Voice Media, saying “it’s very sad to think that already shaky research is being used to make the American public believe that all sex work is trafficking, and that so many youth are already involved in it.”

I met with Beau Laurence, a member of the Denver chapter of SWOP, to discuss the DNA campaign. Laurence was excited to be interviewed for this article because “we rarely get invited to do have these types of conversations,” referring to the media’s lack of interest in the opinion of someone who is pro-sex worker when discussing child trafficking. “It’s harder to combat an image that’s already in people’s heads, rather than starting from a clean slate,” Laurence says, adding that the lack of separating slaves from consenting sex workers by Kutcher significantly damages the work of SWOP.

Beau Laurence was familiar with Kutcher’s message (he is certainly not the first to encapsulate all sex work as involuntary), but not having a TV Laurence had not seen the Real Men Don’t Buy Girls advertisements. I had an ipad with me and pulled up a few examples of the videos, one of them featuring Justin Timberlake shaving with a chainsaw. When they were over Laurence’s face was scrunched with bemused annoyance. “It’s insulting,” Laurence said, “beyond the larger issue of equating child trafficking with sex working, the definition [displayed in the video] of a real man is very limiting. In the progressive queer community there is a lot of effort to get away from the idea of what is a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman,’ because it leaves out the transgender community.” Laurence went on to point out how isolated the Hollywood community comes off in these ads, noting that the shower was running the whole time Timberlake is shaving, which was “environmentally unsound,” and that the campaign comes off to Laurence as a tired message of “wealthy people know what’s best.”

Like most rational adults, Beau Laurence agrees that child sex abuse is a horrible thing and that a great effort should be put to stop it. Though in that effort there must be a sober voice that will separate the issue of an adult sex worker from a child slave. At one point Laurence notes that not every child trafficked as a slave will end up in the sex industry, some will end up working in garment factories or as a nanny or a construction worker. And there is nothing inherently immoral about those professions—it only becomes a crime when that person is forced against there will and receives none of the profits.

It is easy to get support for your cause when you are fighting the rape and enslavement of children. Throughout popular culture it’s been a unifying theme used for horror and absurdist satire. In Hunter Thompson’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas Raoul Duke tries to terrify his acid-soaked mate, Dr. Gonzo, by suggesting they take his new young friend and “load her up on acid and peddle her ass to the drug convention. These cops will go thirty bucks a head to beat her into submission and gang fuck her. We can set her up in one of these outback motels, hang pictures of Jesus all over the room, and then turn these fucking pigs loose on her.” Though what Thompson used as a device for dark humor is unfortunately a brutal reality for many children around the world. In the 2007 documentary Very Young Girls a group of juvenile prostitutes are profiled, painting a brutal picture the of manipulation, abuse and enslavement of children that goes on in cities across the US. In an MSNBC profile of trafficked children stories are told of young teens being snatched off the streets, locked up and forced to work 15 to 20 hour days sexually servicing strangers, all while rarely being fed, regularly beaten and often hooked onto drugs that will ensure he or she will not run away or resist while being raped.

When Ashton Kutcher announced the launching of his DNA organization in a press conference last September, he got choked up when he spoke of traveling to Mexico and speaking with a girl who had once been kidnapped, brought to a field in the country, and raped by thirty men on a plastic trash bag. This is nothing anyone wants to be in favor of. It seemed that no one would dare argue with Kutcher when he launched a campaign combating the gang rape of little girls. The Village Voice took a monumental risk when they ran the “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight” article (and the growing collection of rebuttal articles that have since followed). Positioning themselves opposite Kutcher on this issue—especially when considering allegations of advertising underage sex in their adult personals section—can only serve to hurt them.

No matter how inane and offensive the Real Men Don’t Buy Girls campaign was. No matter now flawed Kutcher’s research and pompous his messianic persona had become. The Village Voice‘s near flawless research and reporting will never be credited appropriately so long as they have the sword of backpages.com hanging over their head.

They will lose money from pulled ads and Ashton Kutcher will go back to Three & A Half Men. Both of their reputations degraded slightly, everyone wondering if either was sincere in their efforts. Neither will be declared a victor, and neither the argument against child enslavement or the one for the rights of sex workers will be advanced. It’s lose lose any way you look at it.