There can be found in South East Asia a massive following of ‘sex tourism’. It is primarily rich Western men going over to Asia and buying women or buying sex from women (Or their pimps as the case normally is). Although the Asian government like to be seen to look down upon this kind of activity it appears quite obvious that they are well aware of what is going on and just turn a blind eye to it as they know that it is an industry that creates them much revenue. Some people might argue that the sex industry is something that is created by the West taking advantage of the Asian economic vulnerability, however it seems to me that the sex tourism industry is something that is created internally ‘by’ the government ‘for’ the government.
To clarify and to give an example; when a group of prostitutes managed to escape from a brothel in Thailand earlier this year, they were reportedly caught by the police in Burma, lock up, assaulted and raped, and then released. They were almost immediately picked up again by the racketeers and returned to Thailand. There are no laws, restrictions or methods in place to stop this kind of thing from happening again and again and we must ask ourselves why not. I would suggest that it is because these Governments embrace the sex trade because they know it does their economy good, never mind what it does to, not only the women that are involved but also to women and their position in society as a whole.
In Thailand, the ‘official’ position on prostitution is that "prostitution does not exist because it is illegal,"
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(The Economist, 1992: page 32)
This is explained by the fact that massage parlours, restaurants, motels and tea houses may well offer sexual as well as other services, but they do not count as brothels. This side-stepping the issue is a severe handicap to the few campaigns that seek to provide safeguards for prostitutes and to limit the spread of AIDS. But this doublespeak is also vital to maintain a supposed clean bill of health for foreigners considering Thailand for their next sexcapade. Essentially the prostitutes are a national resource, these women play a vital role in the tourism industry which, including group sex tours, is Thailand's largest single source of foreign exchange. Ultimately, what it comes down to is that young Thai country women are just another kind of crop.
Looking at the problem of prostitution from the perspective of class yields a dichotomy between the wealth and opportunity available to the city-dwellers and the poverty that is the legacy of the rural sector, the source of the vast majority of prostitutes in Southeast Asia,
‘One study of 1000 Bangkok massage girls found that seventy percent came from farming families’
(Robinson, Lillian S, The Nation,1993: p496)
This is reinforced on multiple levels, including education, rate of development, development resources allocated and economic statistics: while only a relatively small
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Percentage of the population of Thailand lives in the Bangkok area, it accounts for half of GDP.
‘Income levels in Bangkok are nine times higher than in the north-eastern part of Thailand, where one-third of the population lives.’
(The Economist, 1993: page 35)
Thailand’s ability to provide prostitution on a mass scale has increased its ability to grow industrially. These women, once in the city, are cajoled, coerced and condemned to take up prostitution as the highest paying job available. Then, once they have begun to make some money, in most cases, they send large portions of those earning home. That, or the women start off indentured to prostitute themselves to pay off loans their families accept from their daughters's future employers.
It is an established phenomenon that access to education is an important indicator for establishing the extent to which a community is benefiting from the changes that accompany economic development. In the case of rural Thai women, that access has been severely limited, due in part, it seems, to their rural placement and also their gender. Effectively women and the female identity is suppressed in Thailand, women are commodities in the main part and those that do actually work in more professional jobs are few and far between and find themselves to be on lower wages than men in equivalent or even lower positions.
While the foreign aspect of prostitution in Thailand and the Philippines may garner the most attention and money, most of the customers, patronizing the cheapest establishments, are native: much of the impetus sustaining the incredible rate of
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prostitution in Thailand is cultural. Thai men think it is their right to have cheap sex, and there are enough poor Thai women to make it possible. Prostitution in many cases has become integrated with initiation rights: for many Thai men, a trip to the neighbourhood brothel is a rite of passage, a tradition passed from father to son. Certainly, prostitutes play a large part in forming the sexual identity of young Thai males; a demonstration of heterosexual orientation by having sex with a female prostitute is an important rite of passage for some groups of Thai men. The majority of Thai men have their first sexual experience with a prostitute - the act is often a part of high school and university hazing rituals - and according to particular studies, 95% of all men over 21 have slept with a prostitute. In addition to rites of passage, the activity of visiting a whorehouse has become a social activity in many cases, Sex with prostitutes seems to be a way for men to enjoy each other's company, it is often part of a night out with friends who share food, drink and sometimes even sexual partners. In response to this idea you could suggest that the male identity in Thailand and outh East Asia is predominantly thought to be much more important than the female identity, this is certainly how it seems anyway. These men have rituals to bond with each other to emphasize their ‘manliness’, while the women are merely the ‘meat’ used to satisfy the man and prove the male identity.
Prostitution, in some sense, allows the women that are able to take advantage of it the opportunity to live the American dream, to enjoy and extend increased consumerism to their families: modernization and sophisticated advertisements have also brought new desires for consumer goods to villagers and a shift towards a cash economy. In perhaps the most sad permutation of the prostitution situation, for some
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Thai women, an almost religious belief in the promised land - America - adds to the attraction of the hospitality business. Many of the girls pin their hopes on prostitution as a way of achieving their ultimate dream: marriage to an American. For these young women their customers are people who can give them things, like blue-eyed kids and a condo, not AIDS, as is what tends to be the reality of the situation. This scenario, however unlikely, was plausible during the existence of active U.S. bases on the Philippine islands. However, now with the bases gone, there are few customers who stay around long enough to develop this sort of relationship with the women, in fact, there are far fewer customers overall, leaving the women without clients, and without skills, hence without jobs.
Perhaps what best sums up the reasons for the continuing willing participation of many prostitutes is this remark of a 28-year-old Filipino prostitute:
"Of course, I hate this, but there is no other way to make this much money."
(Neumann, 1999, page 201)
And a young Thai woman asks,
‘Why work in a factory for 2,000 or 3,000 baht a month [$80 to $120], when one man for one night is maybe 1,000 baht?’
(The New York Times Magazine, 2002, page 26)
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As long as there are no other high-wage jobs available for those women, and as long as prostitution continues to pay more than the less detrimental alternatives, women will continue to choose prostitution in Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, the official attitude of coercion and condonement is currently fixed because too many people make too much money off the prostitutes. I have spoken of prostitution as among the highest earning jobs women can get in Southeast Asia, but in fact Airlines, travel agencies, hotels, madams, pimps - all take a chunk of the prostitutes' earnings - not to mention paid-off policemen and politicians. If one can ignore the egregious human costs, the toll that is exacted on the young women involved, prostitution, simply the commodification of a basic human, basic male, desire, is profitable for all persons involved. In this world marketplace, taking into account our unrelenting pursuit of mammon, prostitution, as practiced in Southeast Asia, is merely an efficient, unrelenting articulation of our modern market values applied to male sexuality and with in this, female sexuality and female identity is crushed, belittled and essentially eradicated.
Throughout my essay I have explained that prostitution, in the vast majority of cases, represents the ownership of women by pimps, brothel owners, and sometimes even customers for the purpose of financial gain, sexual gratification, and/or power and domination. I believe that prostitution is a method by which a male dominated society ensures the subordination of women and girls to their fathers and husbands; it is a strategy to destroy a woman's experience of her sexuality and thus the ownership of her body. Also when prostitution is accepted by a society as sex work, it becomes even more difficult for poor women and girls, socialized into an ethos of self-sacrifice,
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to resist economic and familial pressures to enter prostitution. As the numbers of prostituted women and girls expand, growing numbers become infected with HIV and die of AIDS while a smaller but still significant percentage are murdered by pimps or customers. Those women fortunate enough to survive sexual exploitation emerge, usually in their 30's, when they are no longer marketable commodities, with no job skills, traumatized from years of enduring unwanted sex and violence, and physically debilitated from sexually transmitted diseases and the substance abuse necessary to endure the sex of prostitution. What is available to these women? Destitution or a career as a madam, helping the pimps control the younger women who are marketable commodities.
Men and boys are sent the message that purchasing the body of a woman or girl for sex is no different from buying a pack of cigarettes. With no social stigma attached to buying prostitutes, the demand for prostitution escalates. At the same time, women and girls internalize the message that the female body is a marketable commodity. Girls begin to see prostitution as a career option, unaware that sex work is a trap that will deprive them of control over their lives. I would suggest that the values and dynamics of prostitution spill over into other areas of society, influencing the valuation and treatment of women and girls and lowering their status and the female identity as a whole.
Before we can begin to address the oppression of the female identity and the enslavement of women and girls by global sex industries, we need to recognize that sex trafficking, sex tourism, sexual exploitation on the internet, and organized prostitution are interrelated practices of gender-based domination and control that
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constitute contemporary forms of slavery. When this is recognised and the Asian Governments are prepared to enforce laws that might be able to penalize the sex industry profiteers as opposed to the real victims (the women), then we might be able to gradually decrease the amount of prostitution that goes on in the East in particular, and eventually perhaps get rid of it altogether.
3064 Words
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Bibliography
Books
Bristow.E.J, Prostitution and Predjudice, 1982, Clarendon Press, Oxford
Hart.A, Buying and Selling Power; Anthropological Reflections on Prostitution, 1998, Westview Press
Levine.J and Madden.M, A Story of Prostitution, 1987, Attic Press, Dublin
Melrose.M, One Way Street, 1999, The Children’s Society
Skrobanek.S, Human Realities of the International Sex Trade, 1997, Zed Books Ltd, London and New York
Magazines
Sense about sex, The Economist, 8 Febuary, 1992
Robinson, Lillian S, Touring Thailand's Sex Industry, The Nation, 1 November, 1993
The price of Thailand's prosperity," The Economist, 15 May, 1993
Neumann, A. Lin, Scandal in Manila: The X-rated Business Trip, Ms., February 1999
Erlanger, Steven, "A plague awaits," The New York Times Magazine, 14 July, 2002