Prostitution in South East Asia and its effect on Female Identity.

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Prostitution in South East Asia and its effect on Female Identity

In this essay I will be exploring the state of prostitution in South East Asia today and I will be evaluating the effect that it has on female identity in South East Asia.  I hope to come to a conclusive decision about my position on the subject and I will fully draw my conclusion towards the end of the essay.

Prostitution is the exchange of sex for money, a practice that for the most part involves men buying sex from women, boys, or girls. Patriarchy has mislabelled prostitution the "oldest profession" to suggest that it is an inevitable practice. In fact, it developed during historical periods that excluded women from public life. Women who were not confined by either slave labour or domestic labour in the home were assumed to be prostitutes or had no alternative means of survival. Prostitution persists in this form in underdeveloped countries today, where there are few possibilities for economic survival for women who labour in the informal domestic sector. With industrialization, sex industries transform local, indigenous prostitution into major commodity markets.

        The twentieth century saw the rise of the world marketplace. In this new world market, Thailand and the Philippines have recently stepped in to play the role of whorehouse to the world. This is facilitated by developing agents having disregarded the development of women's opportunities for economic independence, leaving

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Prostitution as the highest paying job available to many of the women of Southeast Asia.  While these countries have benefited from the tourist presence and the resulting

Foreign exchange, the women who actually put themselves out for their countries development process are to a large extent victims of threefold oppression on the basis of gender, class and the particular role of their homeland in the games of international political economy.

        In Siriporn Skrobanek’s book, she interviews young women that have been forced into prostitution and one of the women that has been interviewed says,

        ‘The women who work in the sex trade in Bangkok can send home a lot of money to build big houses and to buy cars.  When you see people getting these things the whole business appears quite attractive….and it wasn’t difficult to follow the same path’

(Skrobanek;1997;p1)

        In my opinion, this statement encompasses all that is inevitable in the sex trade in the Eastern part of the world.  For example, the prostitutes, although some are not necessarily physically forced into prostitution, they are placed in a ‘catch twenty two’ situation where by they essentially have the choice between a rich life and being a prostitute or a very poor life and rejecting prostitution, but perhaps also at the same time being rejected and resented by their family.  For them, the choice is a hard one but ultimately they will always have to take the prostitution option all the while their country holds the attitudes it does and this makes their position in society as women

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greatly demoralised.  It is rare to find this sort of infringement on mens lives, it does occasionally happen, but it most certainly is a very rare occurrence.

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        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 ...

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