Джерри Хопкинс - Thailand Confidential

No one knew how big, or profitable, the business was. Bernard Trink, a longtime American expat who for decades had a half-page column every weekend in the Bangkok Post to report on what he called the “demimondaine”—something that never would have been allowed in the more politically correct U.S.—said there were three hundred thousand prostitutes in Thailand. Others said more, or fewer. But whether they were men or women or katoey (a term generally used to mean transsexuals or transvestites), there was no question they were numerous, and it was estimated that the “sex industry” contributed between eight and thirteen percent of the country’s visitor revenue, depending on which academic or NGO or bureaucrat was doing the wild guessing.

A businessman friend of mine who lived and worked in Asia for more than twenty-five years, all of his business in the travel industry and much of it in Thailand, said he didn’t like it that the country had an international reputation of being “a whorehouse with temples.” He wished the government would just ban public sex outright, close all the bars and massage parlors and so on, and keep them closed for two years, so everyone could see how much of the nation’s economy really was dependent on it. Not just in foreign exchange, but in jobs. Close the bars and other sex venues, he said, and you crippled airlines, hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, taxicabs, tailors and jewelry shops, and uncounted other categories of commerce, putting half a million people out of work in Bangkok alone. Then, my friend said, the government could legalize or decriminalize and regulate the trade responsibly or else maybe get serious about finding some other source of foreign revenue.

Maybe he was right. Thailand used to recognize prostitution as a legal trade. A law designed to fight venereal diseases in 1909 called for the registration of brothels and sex workers, along with mandatory health checks, but otherwise regarded the job without the condemnation that now seems so universal. Then in 1960, sex for sale was outlawed and in 1996 more laws were passed in an attempt to control trafficking, rape and child abuse. By 2003, the government started talking about making it legal again, or at least decriminalizing the trade, the idea being to eliminate the criminal element while opening up new sources of taxation.

It should be noted, by the way, that what my friend was talking about and I was a part of—sex tourism, and all the wonderful and horrible things it led to—comprised the most visible part of the sex industry, but only a small part of it. Although farangs and other foreigners frequently were blamed for creating this highly profitable industry, the truth was quite the opposite. Thailand’s sex market had been examined numerous times by sociologists, historians and many others, all of whom agreed that prostitution was an integral part of Thai society long before Vietnam, and that most of the sex business then and later was conducted by Thais and for Thais. Numerous international organizations such as the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) and various UN agencies concentrated their efforts not on the go-go bars and massage parlors and so on that catered to travelers, but on the brothels and other “local” sex venues and trafficking of Thai women overseas (as well as the “importation” of women to Thailand from Burma, China and Cambodia), because that’s where the more serious problems were. In the farang places in Thailand, the women were there by choice, and even if most venue owners treated the women like cattle, they still were free to come and go.

(Many, if not most, sex workers were given only two or three days off a month, there were no benefits, there was no sick leave, and fines were levied for missed days, lateness, and a host of other minor infractions. Some bars required a minimum number of “bar fines” a month—in the busier places, as many as twenty—and pay was deducted for every one they were short. So, too, with hustled drinks. Although some were promised salaries as high as US$200 a month, double what she might earn in a factory or as a retail clerk, few actually received it. Brothel workers and massage women had it even worse; most got no salary at all, shared their earnings with the boss, and had to pay off the cops. In the bars, that was the owner’s responsibility.)

In a book published just after the country’s economic crash in 1997, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle , for my money the only book on the subject on a crowded shelf worth reading, the authors said the boom was “fueled by national and international development polices that deliberately functioned to impoverish certain regions of the country, in order to maintain a heavy flow of age- and gender-specific workers for low-paid unskilled jobs, including those in tourism.” This led, they said, to “more desperate families, more and younger women recruited to prostitution and worsening labor conditions, greater competition, smaller incomes, and more menacing health conditions, as safe sex becomes a luxury fewer girls can afford to insist on.” I thought this a cynical view, but not entirely off the mark.

In the winter of 2001-2002, a new Minister of the Interior launched a campaign to create a “New Social Order” and dozens, maybe hundreds of entertainment venues (mainly bars) were raided by police looking for underage drinkers and administering piss-in-a-cup drug tests on the spot. [See “Piss in a Cup,” page 119.] Few were arrested, but the media invited to go with the cops on the raid dutifully reported how hard at work authorities were at cleaning up Bangkok.

At the same time, Bangkok and a majority of other provinces were zoned and if your business wasn’t inside one of the approved “entertainment zones,” closing time was moved, for many, from two a.m. to midnight. Dancers were told to put on their clothes and sex shows were shut down, as were a number of clubs. (Oddly, in numerous gay bars, open anal and oral sex continued undeterred.) Forecasts of gloom and doom followed, but I don’t think it meant much. It wasn’t necessary for a woman to shoot darts at balloons and smoke cigarettes with her you-know-what or disappear beer bottles and live frogs in the same cavities to get a traveler’s attention. A bikini on stage and a smile over a cola that cost a couple of dollars afterward was more than most men could find anywhere else.

Whenever I returned to the U.S., inevitably I was asked about AIDS. I always said most of the problem was not in Thailand’s tourist bars—although it is there, too—and that government studies showed that more generally it was in places that catered to Thai men, whose promiscuity was as well known as it was rampant. It was a cultural tradition in Thailand for young men to be taken to a brothel by an older friend or relative when they were teenagers as a rite of passage, I said, and it was accepted that they then returned to the brothels for the rest of their lives. Thai law also permitted a man to take a mia noi , or “minor wife,” and when the leading political party announced in 2004 that it would not allow their party members who were adulterers and polygamists to stand for re-election to Parliament, the protest was so vociferous, the proposed ban was dropped. [See “Shadow Wives,” page 65.] Thailand was, like so many “emerging” nations, still up to its hips in chauvinism and testosterone.

It was further shown in studies conducted in 2004 by Assumption University that Thai teens were having sex at a younger age, with one survey claiming that twenty seven percent of those aged thirteen to nineteen had had sexual experiences, and the average age was fifteen. More and more female university students admitted selling themselves by the hour in order to buy cell phones, clothing and other fashion accessories.