Reposted from the Ms. blog

Today in totally mis­guided phil­an­thropy, we have “The Girl Store,” a pre­sum­ably well-intentioned girl empow­er­ment project that—for some utterly illog­i­cal reason—masquerades as a child pornog­ra­phy site.

Head on over to The Girl Store and you’ll be greeted by shaky footage of a disheveled Indian girl smil­ing bash­fully as an unknown cam­er­ap­er­son pans up and down her body, lin­ger­ing on her lit­tle hands, before finally set­tling on her face. The accom­pa­ny­ing text reads:

100% gen­uine girls
…young…
…inno­cent…
…and avail­able.
Expe­ri­ence the sen­sa­tion of buy­ing a girl
….her life back.

…Buy a girl before some­one else does.

In case that dis­turb­ing, voyeuris­tic intro didn’t clearly com­mu­ni­cate the website’s pur­pose, let me clar­ify: It sells school sup­plies. To whom it sells these school sup­plies is debat­able, but let’s just give the site’s cre­ators the ben­e­fit of the doubt and assume that they’re not try­ing to exclu­sively solicit dona­tions from inter­net pedophiles. (While we’re at it, let’s also assume that the home­page—which fea­tures a num­ber of miserable-looking lit­tle girls sway­ing against a white backdrop—isn’t sup­posed to resem­ble an auc­tion block.) But that said, why does the sale of note­books and pen­cils war­rant the clear and delib­er­ate eroti­ciza­tion of small chil­dren? Is the video sug­gest­ing that the alter­na­tive to edu­ca­tion is sex­ual abuse? Is it sup­posed to make us—the hap­less and happy-go-lucky consumer—feel com­plicit in that sex­ual exploita­tion? Or are we just sup­posed to feel creeped out? Most impor­tantly, what the hell does this have to do with school supplies?

Accord­ing to the web­site: every­thing. The Girl Store, so the web­site claims, is “the first e-commerce site where pur­chas­ing school sup­plies help girls avoid being sold into mar­riage or sex slav­ery.” That is quite a state­ment. Of course, no one both­ers to explain how a $14 pen­cil case or Han­nah Mon­tana back­pack (yes, it sells these actual prod­ucts) some­how deters sex­ual preda­tors, let alone saves them from being “sold for…terrorism.” (I, for one, would like to know whether wear­ing the Han­nah Mon­tana back­pack is enough to stave off the vil­lain­ous, or if the ridicu­lously over­priced pen­cils dou­ble as a weapon.)

Granted, edu­cat­ing girls—whether in the U.S., India or elsewhere—is cru­cial to fos­ter­ing gen­der qual­ity and cre­at­ing eco­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties for women across the board. But how does pur­chas­ing a hand­ful of school sup­plies hand­ily solve the ram­pant global prob­lem of human traf­fick­ing or the much less visible—though sim­i­larly pervasive—sexual abuse of chil­dren within the home? It’s an out­ra­geous and absolutely erro­neous notion, and one that implic­itly places the onus of per­sonal safety on the child rather than on her fam­ily, her com­mu­nity, or the poten­tial perpetrator.

A child doesn’t, after all, will­fully resort to pros­ti­tu­tion or slave labor because she is une­d­u­cated. She’s forced into it, by an impov­er­ished and mis­guided fam­ily that regards her as an asset or as a bur­den, or by oth­ers who view her as a com­mod­ity that is always in demand. The peo­ple who would abuse and exploit her would do so with­out regard for whether she could read or write—and whether or not she had the lux­ury of doing so with over­priced imple­ments. Financ­ing an under­priv­i­leged girl’s edu­ca­tion, while pow­er­ful on an indi­vid­ual level, does noth­ing to change the struc­tural fac­tors and sys­temic prob­lems that under­lie the sex­ual com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of women and girls. Claim­ing oth­er­wise for the pur­pose of hawk­ing cheap wares—even char­i­ta­ble wares—is not only irre­spon­si­ble but unscrupulous.

It’s appar­ent that the cre­ators of this project are striv­ing for the the edgy, viral appeal of the sim­i­larly over­sim­pli­fied (but much less per­ni­cious) “Girl Effect” mar­ket­ing cam­paign that we all know and love (and loathe, in turns). But it’s one thing to assert, as the Girl Effect does, that buy­ing a cow for a girl will solve com­mu­nity poverty, hunger and gen­der inequity, and quite another to ped­dle to a Han­nah Mon­tana back­pack as the sim­ple solu­tion to sex­ual slav­ery (I’ll leave the obvi­ous anti-globalization cri­tique to some­one else). The fact that this project so cal­cu­lat­edly exploits the sex­u­al­ized images of young girls, pur­port­edly to com­bat the sex­ual exploita­tion of young girls, adds insult to injury.

Cheap trick. Bad mes­sage. Ques­tion­able product.

The Girl Store opened a brick-and-mortar store­front in New York City this week, so Man­hat­tan­ites may have the priv­i­lege of pro­tect­ing a Third World girl’s honor for the mere cost of a latte. I won­der how many school sup­plies one could pur­chase with the cost of com­mer­cial rent in NYC?

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