I would like to share with you some thoughts I had after reading Huck Finn. It's a response paper for class, but I think it translates pretty well here.

I've never read Huck Finn before and despite knowing what everyone said the controversy surrounding it was about, I found myself completely unprepared for the experience of actually reading a book. It is a singular experience to finally read a book as an adult that you've listened to people debate since adolescence. After finishing it I put the book down and thought to myself, "I don't know that I would let an adolescent read this book." I was not prepared to have that reaction.
I would, of course, support anyone reading any book, but the idea of someone reading this book at thirteen or fourteen being completely unprepared for the themes or issues examined and having no one to discuss said issues with bothers me. All that being said, though, racism isn't what I want to write my response paper on. At least not entirely. I feel that everyone already agrees racism is a bad thing and that this book deals with it (and fails to deal with it) in any number of ways. What consistently troubled me as I listened to Jim talk about himself and other characters talk about Jim, was how similar all the rhetoric was to how we still talk about women.
Jim says at the end of chapter 8, "I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'." As a reader I balked at those lines because they are painful--a body isn't a commodity and one of the horrors of slavery (or any -ism) is that it objectifies the group being marginalized and dehumanizes them. They are worth an amount of money because they are a pet, an animal, an item. Now compare this to a girl who is auctioning off her virginity for college tuition:

Natalie said she’s been forced to sell her cherry, because her stepfather took out a student loan in her name, so she’s unable to finance her education. She said, “I don’t have a moral dilemma with it. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalize on my virginity? I understand some people may condemn me. But I think this is empowering. I’m using what I have to better myself (http://www.dlisted.com/node/28167).

What are the differences here? The obvious one is, of course, that this young girl is not a slave--she is making a conscious (theoretically) educated decision to do with her body as she pleases, and she will keep the money. But Jim, thinking he is a freed man does the same. He "owns" himself and wishes he had the money to do with as he pleased. No longer a slave he yearns to have the capitol his body is worth to carve a life for himself.
This isn't an anti-prostitution paper, but a look at the way the same rhetoric is recycled and goes unexamined in society. When this news story was brought to my attention I was horrified that any girl would think to make use of her virginity as a commodity because doing so dehumanizes and objectifies a person. The other women with me were uncomfortable, but couldn't think of a response to argue against such an action. It wasn't until I read Huck Finn that I saw the words for such a relationship with one's body on paper and realized the incredible irony of how we sexualize ourselves (men and women) in modern society. Specifically, how we think of our bodies as something to be sold to another human being.
Much like Shakespeare's Taming of the Screw the power dynamic becomes very obvious if it's racial. Everyone sees that Jim, free or not, is surprisingly lacking in power. It's only good luck that gets him through to the end of the story and Tom Sawyer's need for adventure, cute though it may be, nearly gets everyone killed. But when it happens between a man and a woman, Katharina and Petruchio, or a woman with a bachelor's in women's studies and the man who pays for her virginity, no one can figure out exactly why it's so wrong. Or what it is, precisely, that makes us uncomfortable. And isn't that reaction, that inability to reconcile what we know with what we feel, incredibly similar to Huck deciding to go to hell and save Jim?