Sex Shop Convo
I'm still not exactly sure how to describe what happened today, I'm honestly dumbfounded; both by how God worked in the conversation and of what I heard and saw. I set up a mic attached to my ipod and started recording before me, Erin B and Lauren went into the sex shop "Erox". I enter and there was a woman working the counter and she immediately asked for our ID's; she told us how she gets in big trouble if she lets someone underage in the store and thus the conversation began. We went in and presented ourselves as customers, three girls trying to get a budget and ideas for a bachelorette party; I felt that as portraying ourselves as "customers" the people would be most likely to open up to us, especially since some other team members haven't gotten anywhere by simply going up to the people and saying, "Can I ask you some questions?"
The real open door was when I recognized her foreign accent and turns out she was Russian! So BAM there was my open door! I'm still baffled at how she just poured out information; she ended up talking to us for 30 minutes! She was just revealing all these details and there was no question that I asked that she didn't answer. I asked how she got started working in stores like this and she told me how she couldn't find any other work and she got so fed up with it that she told her husband that the next job that comes up, I'm taking it and it ended up being at a sex shop. So here's a woman who was just trying to find work and had to resort to working in this awful and disgusting place, which she admitted she had to wrestle with at first. She began to tell me how hard it was at first and how shocking it was for her to see things. She brought up how it was shocking not because of the products but because of what goes on behind the scenes, the drugs, the alcohol, the addictions, etc. Just absolutely stunned me the things she brought into the conversation.
Another thing that really stunned me the fact that she just looks so respectable and she demands respect from people. She verbalized her frustrations and intolerance for men who come in and don't treat her with respect. Yet she totally doesn't make the connection of how the products she's selling demeans women. What does she expect? She expects people to treat it like a business reaction and, in her eyes, she is running a respectable business. She's worked her way up to a manager position and, in some way, takes a little pride in what she's become. Erin noticed that she had a small tv behind the counter that was playing porno films the whole time, basically for the person on the clock to watch when they want; so she's not separate from it, rather she's very much a part of it now.
We "got to" go into the back and have a look at the private rooms and the theater where people pay to go watch porn flicks, it was hard not to vomit. A tiny black room with a chair, tv screen and a roll of toilet paper on the wall. The chair and the floor were stained from seamen....."respectable business?!"
Things like this are allowed to go on because we don't stand up to it. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing. We walk by in the mall and are disgusted by the Victoria Secret pictures and displays, but if your only action is your own personal disgust than you haven't done anything. We want to complain about the lack of morality and the lack of virtue in our world and on some level it is out of our control but the idea of being tolerant has seeped into the Church like a foul odor and that's what we fall back on when things bother us. We're so afraid to be rejected or offend people, so afraid to be disliked but we're mostly afraid, I think, of being responsible. We feel like if we do step out once we'll have step out every time and "who has the time?". If you don't have the time to stand for what's right and to stand for what you believe in, if you're not willing to make the time, then what are you making time for? If justice was served on a silver platter, everyone would do it. Yes it's hard but when in the entire Word of God did Jesus say it would be otherwise? Sure it's time consuming. Sure it's disgusting. Sure it's hard and you may never see the results you desire. But please, we need to stop sitting on our bums just talking about things and start doing something about the things in our society that bother us. Why the Church has separated itself so far from activism, I don't know but I think it's due time we started to rise up and take a stand against evil that is allowed to be mainstream!
The real open door was when I recognized her foreign accent and turns out she was Russian! So BAM there was my open door! I'm still baffled at how she just poured out information; she ended up talking to us for 30 minutes! She was just revealing all these details and there was no question that I asked that she didn't answer. I asked how she got started working in stores like this and she told me how she couldn't find any other work and she got so fed up with it that she told her husband that the next job that comes up, I'm taking it and it ended up being at a sex shop. So here's a woman who was just trying to find work and had to resort to working in this awful and disgusting place, which she admitted she had to wrestle with at first. She began to tell me how hard it was at first and how shocking it was for her to see things. She brought up how it was shocking not because of the products but because of what goes on behind the scenes, the drugs, the alcohol, the addictions, etc. Just absolutely stunned me the things she brought into the conversation.
Another thing that really stunned me the fact that she just looks so respectable and she demands respect from people. She verbalized her frustrations and intolerance for men who come in and don't treat her with respect. Yet she totally doesn't make the connection of how the products she's selling demeans women. What does she expect? She expects people to treat it like a business reaction and, in her eyes, she is running a respectable business. She's worked her way up to a manager position and, in some way, takes a little pride in what she's become. Erin noticed that she had a small tv behind the counter that was playing porno films the whole time, basically for the person on the clock to watch when they want; so she's not separate from it, rather she's very much a part of it now.
We "got to" go into the back and have a look at the private rooms and the theater where people pay to go watch porn flicks, it was hard not to vomit. A tiny black room with a chair, tv screen and a roll of toilet paper on the wall. The chair and the floor were stained from seamen....."respectable business?!"
Things like this are allowed to go on because we don't stand up to it. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing. We walk by in the mall and are disgusted by the Victoria Secret pictures and displays, but if your only action is your own personal disgust than you haven't done anything. We want to complain about the lack of morality and the lack of virtue in our world and on some level it is out of our control but the idea of being tolerant has seeped into the Church like a foul odor and that's what we fall back on when things bother us. We're so afraid to be rejected or offend people, so afraid to be disliked but we're mostly afraid, I think, of being responsible. We feel like if we do step out once we'll have step out every time and "who has the time?". If you don't have the time to stand for what's right and to stand for what you believe in, if you're not willing to make the time, then what are you making time for? If justice was served on a silver platter, everyone would do it. Yes it's hard but when in the entire Word of God did Jesus say it would be otherwise? Sure it's time consuming. Sure it's disgusting. Sure it's hard and you may never see the results you desire. But please, we need to stop sitting on our bums just talking about things and start doing something about the things in our society that bother us. Why the Church has separated itself so far from activism, I don't know but I think it's due time we started to rise up and take a stand against evil that is allowed to be mainstream!