My friend writes:
I was thinking more of how laid back, socially accepted, and relatively healthy the flesh trade is. There is an open recognition of a dividing line between women who market their sexuality and those who don't, and those who do are more or less all considered "bar-girls". They're not hookers, per se. It's more of a lifestyle. They're loose girls who hang at a certain bar and will sleep with you if 1) they like you and 2) you give 'em some money.
Of course, the dregs of desperation arise there as they do in any field, but for the most part there is no stigma. No one looks down on them, although few young ladies aspire to be a bar girls, admittedly.
As often as not, they land a white whale with the grisly, poison barbed harpoon of marriage, get them to pay for a village and transfer their money into a Thai bank account, then empty the account and disappear to live as upper class ladies. That's how a good number of Thai families make their upwards economic transition.
When the potential for exploitation is even on both sides, I think it's just called... business. Or politics.
My response--
I do see your side of the matter regarding this. I think that decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work internationally is a huge part of solving one of the many problems that exist in sexual culture globally, along with the problems of women's rights. However, I don't think that either of us really can claim to know what the life of the average sex worker in Thailand is like. I grew up in a working class family. My father painted houses. When I moved out of the house at fifteen, my parents, who have two other children, weren't able to provide me with financial support, and I really struggled a lot of the time, especially when I left school. I pitied myself and felt plenty desperate about my economic situation, but I have never experienced the situation in question here, because I have never been faced with a choice between death and sex work.
Unfortunately, that is commonly the case globally and domestically when it comes to sex trafficking. I have linked you to two articles. In the first one, you will see that in Appendix I there is a list of trafficking incidents in the US (which is not comprehensive, it goes from 1999-2001 and only refers to those that police actually busted. In about half of these cases, each of which sometimes involves 700+ women and children being forced to pay off 'immigration debts' of $40,000 or more, the women originated from Thailand, or Laos. No other country contributed as often.
Here is some analysis I have done with information from the first article. The article suggests that there are 50,000 women annually trafficked into the US., and 12,000 into Thailand. However, the population of Thailand is one-fifth that of the United states. So this means that 1 out of 5,000 women in Thailand is trafficked. In the U.S. the number is 1 out of 60,000. This means 12 times as many women per capita are trafficked into Thailand, leaving aside the number of women who are already imprisoned or who are being trafficked internally.A 2004 estimate by Dr. Nitet Tinnakul from Chulalongkorn University gives a total of 2.8 million sex workers in Thailand, including 2 million women, 20,000 adult males and 800,000 minors under the age of 18. This means that about 2,800,000 women and children, out of a total population of a little more than 30 million Thai women, are involved in sex work. This is nearly 1 in 10. Studies (done, yes, prior to concerted public health efforts on the part of the Thai government) have suggested that 44% of Thai sex workers are HIV positive. The majority of Thailand’s HIV infections (around 80%) occur through heterosexual sex. HIV prevalence among pregnant women, which reached a peak of 2.35% in 1995, had fallen to 1.18% by 2003. Studies have shown that men in Thailand and the United states will consistently pay more money for sex without a condom than with one. Nearly 50% of the time they pressure women not to use one.
Most of the women who are trafficked into Thailand come from Myanmar. They are either forced by crime rings, lured by the promise of legitimate employment -- or they are fleeing one of the worst absolute military dictatorships in the world. They do not usually work in places that Westerners frequent, so you probably would not have seen them were you to visit. However, most of the criminal organizations which control sex trafficking also run larger rings of prostitution. Most women who are in sex work or trafficking are undoubtedly almost never there because of their own volition. They are there because of their pimps, US military servicemen and tourists (who often marry Thai women, and bring them back to the United States in order to force them into prostitution here) or pressure from their families, as you said, to become economically upwardly mobile. Again, the sex trade is ubiquitous, diffuse throughout the entire country -- every major city and province in the country -- not merely large cities like Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket. So, while some women in larger cities may indeed be willingly working at bars, this is by no means the rule, but the exception. And even then, willing dancers and bar-girls usually only get 2-3 days off per month.
Thai elites tend to be polygamists, and men are considered to have a right to as many mistresses as they like. My close family friend, Mrs. Cho, is originally from Myanmar. While in Myanmar she was forced to have an abortion by her family while drugged because she had run off with an impoverished Buddhist man she wanted to marry, rather than the extravagantly wealthy Muslim one they had arranged for her. As you said, she is not by any means considered a sex worker. However, she remains with the wealthy man in the United States and is not permitted to even go out to dinner without his permission. And he does not grant that permission. As you can see, the cultural lines between sex work and "legitimate" marriage are not always so clean. There are usually no other "employment" opportunities save marriage or sex work for large numbers of uneducated rural women -- who deserve other options.
You are totally right. Some forms of acceptance of and honesty about the sex trade are a huge improvement upon the Ted Haggard style sexual hypocrisy that reigns supreme in the United States. It is certainly good to not blame a woman for taking the best available economic opportunity. But there is no reason for this to extend to not blaming the customers for continually creating the demand that permits this economic stranglehold to remain the status quo. Western customers are encouraged -- by the government -- to visit Thailand and pursue sex workers and slaves, because such a huge portion of the Thai economy has come to rely upon sex work after various forms of economic depression (including opium suppression programs). It is not at all clear to me that this is a good thing. There is no simple or moralistic solution to the problem -- it is cultural and economic, and yes, a large portion of the work must be done by the women themselves.
However, among trafficking victims the women never even see the money they make. The Yakuza consistently deceives women -- mostly Thai -- into coming to Japanese brothels, either under the guise of legitimate work or at least sex work under humane conditions. There have been reports there of wealthy Western businessmen paying to rape and kill young children. There have been reports in the U.S. and abroad of women being locked in hotel rooms, drugged intravenously, and having their clothing stolen from them so that they cannot leave their hotel room. They are then forced to service men indefinitely for artificially low prices in order to pay off an arbitrarily defined "debt." This is all recounted in the last article below.
In the United States, thousands upon thousands of Asian "massage parlours" operate, staffed by illegal immigrants who are strictly forbidden to provide sexual services to any non-Asian men who frequent them so as not to blow their cover. People who think they are being hired for legitimate secratarial, au pair, or even stripping gigs arrive illegally, illiterate or at least not speaking the language, totally dependent upon their traffickers, only to get raped and beaten. 52% cannot speak English. In Thailand, women have reported being kept by armed guards in squalid conditions at their brothels. They have, in both Thailand and the United States, sought help from the police only to find that the police force is one of the main customer bases for the pimps, who then bring them back to their brothels. Or they have been considered hysterical since they arrive half-dressed and cannot speak English, and end up in psychiatric wards. While they are enslaved, these women are shipped from city to city continually, sleeping on concrete floors in the backs of massage parlours and often being woken up at four in the morning with no warning, and forced to other sides of the country -- lest any given customer base lose interest in a parlour for its lack of variety of women.
Sex trafficking always operates through the front of a legitimate business, such as these bars you mention. Even if all bars are not involved in sex trafficking, all sex trafficking tends to operate either as a legitimate bar, strip club, or massage parlor, or an organized criminal network with governmental collusion. The burden of proof should not be upon those who feel that the two (sex work and sex trafficking) are related, but those who feel that they are not.
Child sex tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry currently enslaving 2 million children under the age of 18.* Thailand is widely known in the United States as the prime location for this practice. There are frequent stories of pedophiles and traffickers fleeing the United States to seek "asylum" (a phrase not without some irony here) in Thailand, which again shows that being content to remove the social stigma from sex work can have terrible repercussions. Bangkok is one of the primary destinations along the main smuggling route for Asian sex traffickers. Further, no trafficking organizations internationally, except possibly some in Russia, can compare to those in Asia with respect to scale, scope, and sophistication. In the U.S., trafficking operations are usually limited to one- or two-man operations. Most of these traffickers also traffic general male and female laborers into conditions of slavery which are every bit as significant as sexual slavery. We have heard at New College, for example, from the Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian Immokalee workers in Florida (www.ciw-online.org). In the city where I live, San Francisco, the "yellow slave trade" has been around at least since the 1800's and possibly longer.
I really think it makes no sense to suggest that the potential for exploitation is even on both sides. Although there are isolated cases of sex workers or pimps robbing Western tourists, there is absolutely no ring of Thai women who traffic pudgy white men internationally in order to sap their bank accounts through forced and repeated Cartier gifting. Poor and uneducated Thai women, kathoeys, adolescents, and children really do not have the ability to, via their sex appeal alone, force Asian or Western men to sign away the deed to their house and their children's college funds.
Force is a strong word, and it means something very specific here -- that there is a threat of death through violence, lack of healthcare, starvation, botched abortion, insufficient care during childbirth, or disease. Even if a woman is "successful," and independent, and perhaps persuades multiple johns to support her, there is no reason for any woman's best economic option to put her at a huge (44%) risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, not to mention the risk of violence, kidnapping, or perhaps a simple desire not to sleep with 7-45 men a day (on average). No matter how maligned men who have stupidly involved themselves in sexually dissatisfying marriages, or who have come to Thailand seeking a solution to an Orientalist fetish, may be, there is not even the weakest case to suggest that the disadvantage their blue balls put them at compares to the situation on the end of the sex workers they purchase.
I can envision, and hope we can achieve, a society in which sex work will a healthy part of the cultural life of a country. But the work required to get there should not be under-estimated. It will require radical re-structuring on the level of kinship, global economics, and moral culture -- and would not be quite recognizable in comparison to the world we live in today.
*Here are two obvious, publicly-available examples of girls who have clearly been sold into marriage while under 18. The makers of this website (lifepartnermatchmaker.com) brag that the dock from which their brides (complete with certificate of virginity) leave Vietnam is unowned property so you do not have to worry about being caught.
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=33
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=12
Here is a five-year old blind girl who was adopted out of who knows what conditions, and can play piano by ear. I am well aware that I sound like a late night celebrity voice-over for a Feed the Children infomercial, but I think it is clear that these girls deserve greater opportunities.
If you are interested in reading more, here are my sources:
- A wonderful, comprehensive, 141 page report by professors at University of Massachussetts, Amherst and University of Rhode Island on sex trafficking in the U.S. as it compares to the international situation
