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Sex Aware: Thai Sex Trade... |
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A few snippets from an article by Alex Renton |
| Soi Nana, off Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok is a
famous tourist site catering for a specific sort of visitor: middle-aged
western men. They come to Nana for one reason, to have sex cheaply. Such tourism goes back, historians of the sex trade will tell you, to the Vietnam war and the establishment of Thailand as a brothel for American GIs on leave. Prostitution for foreign visitors developed into a major industry, although official Thailand shrouds its economic and social significance in misinformation and a variety of interesting hypocrisies. No one knows how many foreigners come to Thailand every year to buy sex. Many people have opinions on the matter not least Thailand's government, which understandably resists the label "brothel of the world." It has threatened to expel journalists who impugn the honour of Thai womenfolk, and forced Longman's dictionary to change its 1993 edition, the entry for Bangkok which included the line "a place where there are a lot of prostitutes." Thailand, in its turn, has been considerably abused by statisticians and NGOs. Claims that there are 2m or more prostitutes in the population of 64m, as was once stated in a Time cover story, are absurd. This much-quoted figure was drawn from the statistics of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an international NGO. If true, it would mean that one in four Thai women between the ages of 15 and 29 in Thailand was a prostitute. Another anti-trafficking organisation, Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), claimed in the mid-1990s that there were up to 800,000 Thai child prostitutes a lunatic figure that still circulates in the US state department. The sex industry in Thailand generates fantasies. There are the fantasies of pliant girls which draw the western sex tourists, and then there are the fantasies of lurid exploitation which draw the western moralisers and NGOs. But what is the actual scale of prostitution in Thailand? And how serious is the trafficking problem? Selling sex has been illegal in the kingdom since 1960, but Longman's was right there are a lot of prostitutes. Ask most sensible analysts in Thailand and you will be told that the number of women employed in prostitution, though a long way short of 2m, is between 150,000 and 220,000 (male prostitutes are a tiny fraction of that). You will also hear that western sex tourism is not economically significant, that most prostitution in Thailand is for local men, and that most of the people who do come from abroad for sex are Asian. There is some truth in this. Sixty per cent of Thailand's 10m visitors in 2003 were from elsewhere in east Asia, and certainly the brothel-lined towns on Thailand's Malaysian border, and the entire streets in Bangkok that are devoted to sex clubs for "Japanese only," are evidence of the sex trade designed for the region. But the proof is there in Pattaya, in Phuket and in Bangkok that huge numbers of non-Asian visitors buy sex in Thailand. But how many? Sex tourism is notoriously difficult to measure. How can you ask at immigration if tourists have arrived in Thailand primarily for the prostitution? How do you know if a man on a business trip is likely to visit a sex venue with his Thai colleagues? Yet while the government, and the tourist and aviation industries, resist attempts to measure the significance of the sex trade, there is one way to gauge the extent of sex tourism, even if in fairly crude terms. A look at the Thai immigration department's statistics, culled from the cards foreigners must fill in on entry, reveals an interesting discrepancy: 60 per cent of visitors are male and only 40 per cent female. The gap grows when you look at arrivals from the rich countries who come to Thailand on holiday in large numbers the US, Japan, Britain, France. For these places, nearly two males arrived for every female in 2003. More British citizens visit Thailand than those of any other non-Asian country. In 2003 (the last year for which full figures are available) some 545,000 British residents arrived on visits. If you remove the children, and the British citizens visiting for business or reasons other than a holiday, you arrive at about 489,000 314,000 men and 175,000 women. That is 139,000 more British men than women coming to Thailand for a holiday a gap of 28 per cent. The French gender disparity 60,500 more men than women is 32 per cent, about the same as that of visitors from the US. The Japanese, at 35 per cent, is the highest over 300,000 more men. If you take Europe as a whole (though there are some countries, like Finland and Sweden, with virtually no disparity) the gap is 25 per cent 494,000 more men than women. A look at the major rich-nation visitors those from the US, Australia, Europe and Japan shows that 952,000 more men than women visited Thailand on holiday in 2003, a disparity of 28 per cent. (The 2004 statistics, not yet complete, will show a slight narrowing of this gap, but a leap of overall numbers of around 20 per cent.) This pattern is unique among major tourist destinations. Take, for example, the Caribbean, another popular tropical destination for economy tourism. Here, the disparity runs at 2 or 3 per cent the only country with a significant gap in favour of men, nearly 11 per cent, is Cuba, the Caribbean country most notorious for sex tourism. Do nearly a million men from the rich world come to Thailand to buy sex every year? The proposition deserves challenge. Men are capable of holidaying for reasons other than fornication with strangers. There is golf, after all. I asked Sasithara Pichaichannarong, director general of the Thai government's office of tourism development, how she accounted for the discrepancy. "Businessmen!" she said promptly. "They're counted as tourists in the statistics." But I had factored them out and in any case, only 31,000 Britons stated business rather than holiday as the purpose of their visit in 2003, less than 6 per cent of the total. So did sex explain the extra 950,000 men that arrive from wealthy countries? "Probably," she said. "But sex tourism exists everywhere, not just in Thailand." Not in such numbers, however. These extra men represent 10 per cent of all international arrivals in Thailand. He became tetchy. "Look, if you are really researching the social factors of this, you should consider if men might come here because they're fed up with the ball-breaking females they have to deal with at home. Maybe they want to meet the sort of gentle, beautiful, kind-hearted women they'll find here." This seemed to answer my question. The men are here for sex and, of course, golf. Or both. Female golf caddies who double as prostitutes are, anecdotally, one of the special features of the courses of Thailand. Sex tourism is a significant part of Thailand's economy. Tourism overall has been the country's major foreign currency earner since 1982. In 2003, international tourism alone accounted for 309.26bn baht (£4.56bn) in receipts about 6 per cent of GDP ranking Thailand 15th in the world. That year, the extra adult male holidaymakers from around the world probably generated almost £1bn over 1 per cent of Thailand's GDP. But prostitution in Thailand is much bigger than just the trade for tourists. There is no official measurement of the economics, but the clues are there. Many Thai men are habitual users of prostitutes, and the trade, while illegal, carries less stigma than in most countries and is acknowledged by the government as a source of revenue. In January, the Thai excise department announced that it was going to seek a larger take in the so-called "sin tax" from massage parlours, a common brothel front. But Thai tax collection is notoriously inefficient. A better indicator of the money around in the prostitution business came last year from Chuwit Kamolvisit, who was employing 2,000 prostitutes in six luxury massage parlours in Bangkok. Chuwit, the "Tub Tycoon," is an amusing rogue "very un-Thai," they say here who in February 2005 became an opposition member of parliament with an anti-corruption agenda. During his campaign he opened his books to the press, revealing to a largely unsurprised nation that his monthly bill for bribes and payoffs to the Bangkok authorities came to £160,000. Separately, Thailand's National Economic and Social Advisory Council (Nesac) said that massage parlour owners pay £62m a year in police bribes. The income directly generated by prostitution was estimated at 100bn baht (£1.5bn) by the respected Thai economist Pasuk Phongpaichit in a 1998 study. This is about a third of the value of the agriculture sector, which employs more people than any other in Thailand. Westerners form an important albeit not the major part of this economic picture. A few have settled here because of it, calling themselves "sexpatriates." In towns like Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand, on Phuket island and in the sex trade districts of Bangkok, they run bars, hotels and brothels, mediating the transactions between male tourists and Thai women. They are vocal on websites and in local publishing ventures, churning out guides for sex tourists. Some of these men see themselves as exiles, refugees from the "feminazis" who are crushing the spirit of the western male. Here, the old order of the sexes still reigns. Women know their place, they wash your feet before they have sex with you, they say thank you and help you in the shower afterwards. And, of course, westerners' savings and pensions go a long way. Beer is a dollar a bottle, and a woman for the night available for £10 or less. It's the "last place you can be a white man," says one bar-owning sexpat on his website. Their guidebooks picture a world of grasping, stupid peasant girls, known as "LBFMs" (little brown fucking machines), out to entrap and rip off the honest, randy male visitor, who must treat them firmly and be sure to stamp out any nonsense for the sake of the next bloke who comes along. Books like Sex, Lies & Bar Girls are available in mainstream shops, including at Bangkok airport. They are full of robust advice on "scrogging" as many Thai women in as short a time and for as little money as possible. One of the self-justifications put forward by the sexpats is that the business makes everyone happy the exploitation is two-way. It is not like normal prostitution, you hear. All the girls are smiling! ("All smile, all the time!" is an official tourism slogan). But you don't have to be a feminazi to see that the power relationship is grossly unbalanced. The real choices lie with the man with the wallet. The famous Thai smile hides a lot. The women of rural Thailand who descend on the tourist areas are driven by poverty. Around a third of the Thai population lives on less than $2 a day; in the agricultural northeast, where farmers are beset by drought and collapsing prices (chiefly because of the dropping of trade barriers with China), one in six people lives on less than $1 a day. A high proportion of prostitutes over 60 per cent, according to some surveys have left children at home in the countryside. In traditional Thai society, a girl's first duty is the support of her family. Seventy-five per cent of prostitutes, according to one study, entered the trade after the failure of a relationship "damaged goods" in a society that still puts a high premium on female virginity. Another common reason given for entering prostitution is the pressure of family debts. And the gains to be had are fabulous. The price of sex from a street prostitute in Nana starts at perhaps 500 baht, a little over £7. That is a fortnight's living costs in the countryside, or half a week's salary for a Thai police constable. There is little doubt that the sex trade is vital to the economy of the poor northeast, which is another of the well-rehearsed justifications of the sexpats. Tales of bar girls who retire rich and happy to their home villages some of them with a farang (foreign) husband are many, and there is no social disgrace attached. "The land a girl child ploughs lies between her legs," goes a saying from rural Thailand. But some women are broken in the process, and on my street, occasionally, you can see the damage that results. Still, there is a grain of truth in the sexpat argument. Soi Nana is not like the grim red light districts of London or New York, with their backdrop of organised crime, violence, and drug use. The only fight I have seen on Nana was between drunken Englishmen. Amphetamines are widely used by the prostitutes, it is said, but not heroin. I have spotted one used syringe in the gutter in our four years here: there was worse to be seen nightly on the crack-infected street in west London where we used to live. Most women soliciting rich-world foreigners are relatively free agents. Their worst affliction appears to be the corrupt Bangkok police. In Thailand, the industry is not generally pimp-driven and, although technically illegal, its openness undoubtedly provides some protection for women. The sex tourist is more likely to visit a bar or a massage parlour than a traditional "closed" brothel (these appear to be more common for the domestic sex trade). NGOs say that condom use is close to 100 per cent, and HIV infection has been in decline in Thailand for a decade. Vitit Muntarbhorn, a law professor and former special rapporteur for the UN secretary general said: "We've focused a lot on supply issues. It's time we placed as much focus on demand." The professor is a Thai, but his own country is set, if anything, to increase the demand for prostitutes. "The Thai government is committed to quality tourism," said Sasithara Pichaichannarong of the office of tourism development, "and that includes being anti-sex tourism." She gave no details of exactly what the kingdom is doing to oppose sex tourism though if you tried to set up a sex tourism business today you would probably be discouraged. It was not always thus. In the 1980s, overt sex tourism flourished with considerable government encouragement. Doctors were even asked to play down the threat of Aids in order not to put off tourists. Quietly, though, Thailand appears to have accepted its role as provider of sexual services to the rest of the planet. All that can be realistically asked is that it sets about doing it as cleanly and kindly as possible: that means tackling poverty in the rural north and corruption in the police force, as well as properly addressing the problem of the trafficked and the underage. The country would be aided in the latter by more honesty from the NGOs who have been given so many millions of aid dollars to tackle these problems. Travelling to Thailand for sex will continue. The brand is established. The beautiful young woman wrapped in silk with her demure but inviting smile is a feature of Thai travel posters across the world. The promise is of "happiness on earth" the delights of paradise just a cheap flight away. Most of the traditional tourist attractions are disappearing. The country's beaches are overexploited, its forests shrinking and the islands poisoned by tourists' waste. But Thailand and its neighbours retain one renewable resource for the tourists that is not in danger of running out the supply of poor, smiling women. |
| Thai Life | Climate: Climate Change Act now to stop Bangkok sinking, urge scientists (Feb 2010) |
| Background: Grovelling A Primer (Jan 2010) | |
| Travel Excessive Thai Airways charge $2200 for excess baggage (Dec 2009) | |
| Travel Oh My Buddha! Export of Buddha Images from Thailand (Aug 2009) | |
| Health: Jellyfish First Aid for jellyfish stings (June 2009) | |
| Money: New 2 Baht Coin A bit easier to spot (March 2009) | |
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Background:
Thai National Anthem An illuminating translation (Aug 2007) |
| Scams | Scams Thai-Anxiety on scams |
| Bangkok Scams at BangkokScams.com | |
| The Gem Scam at 2Bangkok.com |
| Speak Thai | A Thai Primer an introduction to speaking Thai (10th August 2007) |
| Months in Thai (15th May 2007) | |
| Not Enough Hours in the Day to Learn Thai (July 2006) | |
| Learn Online Suggested websites (March 2006) | |
| Sex & Slanging A few useful words and phrases (Jan 2006) | |
| Learn to Speak Thai in 1 Easy Lesson...and then ten years of summer school (Oct 2005) | |
| Use of the Word Farang ie Westerner (July 2005) |
| Pattaya Information | Diary Public holidays and special days in Pattaya |
| Pattaya Hotels Reader reviews | |
| Pattaya Phone Book Emergency Numbers & Hospitals (Dec 2005) | |
| Farang Radio PCNFM 105 radio station specifically for farangs (Aug 2007) | |
| Pattaya Transport Bus, Train, Plane | |
| On Google Earth jj's Pattaya place markers (Sep 2006) | |
| Pattaya Movies and Times Select Pattaya for cinemas at Big C & Royal Garden Plaza | |
| Pattaya Sophon Cable TV Listings |
| Pattaya Articles | Good guys go to heaven, bad journalists go to Pattaya (Dec 2007) |
| An Irish View Seedy Sex Resort Home to Hundreds of Irish (Dec 2006) | |
| The People's Paradise Tabloid town with broadsheet aspiration (August 2005) | |
| Costa del Pattaya British criminals said to settle in Pattaya (April 2005) |
| Sex Aware |
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