Buy These Pajamas & Rescue a Prostitute; Or, Why Rescue Brands Are Dumb

Punjammie fans and customers are proud of the work they’re doing by buying and wearing Punjammies. You see a lot of words and phrases like empower, good deed, and making a difference.

I imagine that these Punjammies customers are very nice. But I hope they don’t think they are contributing to the fight against human trafficking any more than I would be “helping fight illiteracy” by teaching one person to read. I would be fighting that person’s illiteracy, certainly, but if I really wanted to use words like “helping fight illiteracy” I would hope that I would spend some more time and effort on the systemic issues behind it.

I don’t mean to sound like a humorless undergrad—please, go ahead and buy Punjammies. Just don’t come all over yourself afterwards thinking that you’ve fought the good fight. If you’re truly interested in fighting human trafficking, you could donate a significant amount of money to a shelter in a region of your choice, or throw your time into advocating for decriminalization for sex workers. Or just start investing yourself in the full dismantling of the world economy, but know if your efforts work, it will probably suck for you.

The exact workings of these “rescue brands” often remain a mystery. They have an annual report on their website that provides almost no information. When I requested more detailed financials, a spokeswoman for Punjammies wrote to me: “In regards to more financial information, the women receive better than fair-trade wages and depending on the organization they are with, there are benefits that come into play as well. Another thing that is important to note is that as a nonprofit 501c3, all of the profits go back into the programs of IPP to help the entire ecosystem of the ladies and their children.” They also made a nine-minute promotional video in which not one Indian woman gets to speak, or looks at the camera directly—although the two white women talk quite a lot about how they give women dignity where there was none before. “We have a zero-tolerance policy on slavery,” the director says, in this video, breaking into tears. “It needs to be abolished.”

I understand that some people are working hard to help these women, and that as a result, some women are being helped. My critique of Punjammies has more to do with the way they present themselves than with what they actually do, though I am suspicious of that as well. An organization whose language about themselves and its workers is so careless and full of classic colonialist tropes can’t expect to be merely or automatically revered.

It is also certainly not a given that rescuing women in the sex trade is #makingadifference or #inspiring. Like Punjammies, many rescue programs or businesses openly capitalize on the dismal pasts of the women they are helping, meaning that the women within the programs may stay marked. In some cases, anti-trafficking programs can interfere significantly with public health work, as with this case study in Sangli, India. Aziza Ahmed and Meena Seshu write about neo-abolitionism, “a US-based movement of feminist abolitionists, conservatives and evangelical Christians to end trafficking globally,” in which, “despite common knowledge that trafficking can occur in many labour sectors, the majority of attention of neo-abolitionists is given to trafficking in the sex sector.” The emphasis depends on the basic idea that all sex work is trafficking, and Ahmed and Seshu refer to sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein’s research on these anti-trafficking movements in the context of the 19th-century “White Slavery” panic and carceral feminism; they refer to the movement as “militarised humanitarianism.”

The idea of Punjammies—that if you buy a pair of pajama pants then one less woman in the world will be forced to live a life of degradation and misery, and thus maybe also buying 10 pairs would be 10 times as good—is very nice indeed, though. And the Punjammie founders are almost certainly sincere. That said, imagine if 500, or even 100 years from now, the United States were extremely poor, and India were really rich. It’s very well within the realm of possibility. Imagine also, if you would, that a major ally of India had taken away a lot of the United States’ wealth and this was part of the reason—not all, but part—of why we were so poor. And what if handfuls of wealthy Indian women came here, and were like, “Oh my God, I see that a lot of you are prostitutes! That’s awful! Let me give you a way to make enough money to not have to do that!” Believe me, I would be first in line to sign up.

But if they then went back to their country and were like “Oh, this month is anti-sex slave day, every time you cross the street think about how some woman somewhere is a street walker, get it!” and used my photo in websites, smiling, showing me sewing clothes I couldn’t even afford, I would want someone to at least say, “Yeah, that is bullshit.” And, if one of those Indian women came to a place where there were hundreds of us former sex slaves sewing pajama pants for all her Facebook friends and their Facebook friends and she wrote a blog post that was all about how hard it was for her, like this one on the IPP/Punjammies website:

“It was certainly an emotional struggle to actually put faces to statistics and proper names to tragedies we had merely only discussed about. But it was necessary. And powerful. And messy. And I won’t lie, there was a lot of crying at inopportune times, and emotions that welled up in the my throat, making it hard to speak or even swallow,”

I’d want someone to say to her—just one person other than her shrink—”Lady. This isn’t about you.”

Sarah Miller writes for theawl.com, newyorker.com, time.com, thecut.com and others. Find her @sarahlovescali.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.