Tag Archives: sex tourism

Migrant sex worker in a Thai brothel: Le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim

I collect well-styled and informative descriptions of sex-industry settings in novels, here John le Carré’s 1990 The Secret Pilgrim. Fiction can transmit far more of the atmosphere and goings-on in sex venues than social-science research, not least because authors get to express their personal feelings. Here the migrant sex worker is Cambodian, girlfriend of a spy being searched for in a Thai brothel called the Sea of Happiness. The voice changes as I’ve cut to include only bits relevant to clients and sex work.

He’d popped up here on a flying visit. One day, that’s all. One day, one night, then back to the missus and a book. Offshore leisure consortium wanted him to buy a hundred acres of prime coastland for them. Did his business, then off they all go to this girlie restaurant, Duffy and a bunch of his traders – Duffy’s not averse to a bit of the other, never has been. Place called The Sea of Happiness, slap in the middle of the red-light quarter. Upmarket sort of establishment, as they go, I’m told. Private rooms, decent food if you like Hunanese, a straight deal and the girls leave you alone unless you tell ‘em not to.

At girlie restaurants, he explained, somehow contriving to suggest he had never personally been to one, young hostesses, dressed or undressed, sat between the guests and fed them food and drink while the men talked high matters of business. In addition, The Sea of Happiness offered a massage parlour, a discotheque and a live theatre on the ground floor.

Duffy clinches the deal with the consortium, a cheque is passed, he’s feeling his oats. So he decides to do himself a favour with one of the girls. Terms agreed, off they go to a cubicle. Girl says she’s thirsty, how about a bottle of champagne to get her going? She’s on commission, naturally…

…First Henry had had a drink at the bar, then he had watched the show. Then he had sent for the Mama San, who hurried over assuming he had a special wish. He had shown the Mama San his translator’s card and said he was writing an article about her establishment – the superb food, the romantic girls, the high standards of sensitivity and hygiene, particularly the hygiene. He said he had a commission from a German travel magazine that recommended only the best places. The Mama San took the bait and offered him the run of the house. She showed him the private dining rooms, the kitchens, cubicles, toilets. She introduced him to the girls and offered him one on the house, which he declined, to the head chef, the doorman and the bouncers.

“But who is your farang who carries the bottles for you?” Henry had cried out with amusement to the Mama San. “Must he stay behind and work because he cannot pay his bill?”

The Mama San laughed also. Against farangs, or Westerners, all Asians feel naturally united. “The farang lives with one of our Cambodian girls,” she replied with contempt, for Cambodians are rated even lower than farangs and Vietnamese in the Thai zoology. “He met her here and fell in love with her, so he tried to buy her and make a lady out of her. But she refused to leave us. So he brings her to work every day and stays until she is free to go home again. She is number nineteen,” said the Mama San, with a shrug. “Her house name is Amanda. Would you like her?”

Henry could not resist taking a look. The girls who were not with clients lounged on plush benches behind a glass wall, wearing numbers round their necks and nothing else, while they chatted to each other or tended their fingernails or stared vacuously at an ill-tuned television set. As Henry watched, number 19 stood up in response to a summons, picked up her little handbag and a wrap and walked from the room. She was very young. Many girls lied about their age in order to defeat the regulations – penniless Cambodians particularly. But this girl, said Henry, had looked no more than fifteen…

…An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the passive, much painted features of girl number 19.

She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy Japanese style make-up covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny breasts poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me “darling” and saying “please.

“Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her. “Put on your wrap.”

When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. “I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. “I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.” I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht. — John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim, 1990

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sexwork and migration fiction (4): To go with sex tourists or smugglers?

urlOf all the characters destined to work selling sex in The Three-Headed Dog, Marina has the most experience. Now in Spain for the second time, Marina comes from a backwater of la República Dominicana. Sharing the island of La Española (Hispaniola) with Haití, Dominicana is a poor, weakly governed nation popular with tourists on tight budgets. Many of these are called sex tourists by critics, meaning a central purpose for their visit is to buy sex and romance with natives, in a typically tropical setting. Marina reflects on how she got started in her present career.

d5d43c2ca5485db793354630fd176c90… if nice trees and flowers were enough to live on she would never have left home. She would have made do with slaving away as shop assistant in her aunt’s colmado or as a maid to some pretentious lady in the city, either way for pennies. Instead she took a job as hostess in a beer-hall, and her mother sobbed like it was the end of the world. It was okay for a while, but Marina was always looking to better herself.

Schafer_Whores&Madonnas_05

http://www.hookstrapped.com/peter-brian-schafer-portfolios

She got taken on at an open-air nightclub in a larger town. It had twenty rickety tables, strings of coloured lights and loud music equipment. There was a platform made of two-by-fours where a single spot was turned on women dancing naked. It was close enough to beaches that tourists rode up on flimsy motoconchos, guys of all different nationalities, some who could barely stay on the bike. Motos with five Dominican kids would pass them roaring with laughter. Marina learned which men danced the best, which were most polite, and which gave the biggest tips.

scene_typique_ambatalok_nosy_tnThe craziest thing was the lines they spun! Come with me to Berlin, you’ll be a queen. There’s no one like you in my hometown. You’re a real woman, like we don’t have anymore. What a beautiful colour your skin is. Foreigners said island girls were sweet and willing to do anything they were asked. She fell for it only once, but the Romeo gave away his plan when he let slip how nice she would be able to make his apartment. If she wanted to be someone’s wife, she could have stayed home.

Marina wants to strike out on her own, not tied from the outset to anyone who believes he has the right to control her. She wants to go abroad like other women she has known; traditions to go to Europe are old in her country. She chooses to buy papers and services from small-time ‘travel agents’. On her second trip to Spain things go wrong, but not because of smugglers’ evil intentions against her; rather they are competing with each other for pieces of the smuggling pie.

Discussions of the fate of women like Marina generally talk over their heads. The wrongness of sex tourism and lack of options for females under patriarchy are the topic, while the pragmatic decisions women make in the here and now are sidelined. In The Three-Headed Dog, as in Sex at the Margins, their actions are the story.

hqdefaultMany times, their goal is to make enough money to build a simple house back home. Other times, they decide to try to stay abroad.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Cry with trafficked women: Colonial prurience and 3-star hotels

I’ve been ill a great deal this year and for the past month bowed down by a death, but the imminence of August cranked me up sufficiently to vent my now annual disgust at tours from the US that take well-paying travellers to gawk at and pity poorer people in Other Countries (who always smile in the photos taken, of course). If there is anything I hate it’s this. In 2011 I wrote Have fun, take a tour to meet victims of sex trafficking, learn to be a saviour, illustrating it with the egregious Kristof, who has not a jot of shame about looking like a Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider. Given the sexual aspect, the word prurience came to mind: socially-sanctioned permission to be a voyeur, to go to bars abroad you wouldn’t set foot in at home as part of a do-gooding ‘social justice’ trip. To my mind, this is sex tourism.

This year’s tour to Thailand Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking is aimed at aspiring individuals. What might they mean by that? And why do they call this a delegation to end trafficking rather than, if not pure tourism, a first step towards understanding trafficking? The pretension is obviously meant to provide something to add to CVs, the way internships in impressive-sounding organisations do, though at least those last some months, whereas this tour takes a week (5 -12 August). Look at the rhetoric:

Global Exchange Reality Tours is facilitating this delegation to Thailand geared specifically to confronting the realities of the global trade in human beings. Participants will receive a comprehensive education in the mechanics of human trafficking, as well an understanding of its underlying causes. Participants will meet with those who have been freed from slavery and learn what it means to rebuild one’s life after having been a victim of trafficking, and will also engage directly with groups and individuals on the frontlines of the struggle to expose and ultimately end the trade in human lives.

This is B-movie-type public-relations prose: facilitating – delegation – geared – confronting – realities – global trade – human beings – comprehensive education – mechanics – human trafficking – participants – comprehensive education – mechanics – underlying causes – freed from slavery – rebuild one’s life – frontlines of the struggle – expose – end the trade – human lives. Nothing concrete, nothing real.

For those who aren’t clear as to why I call this colonialism, note the clear differentiation between Subject (tourist) and Object (exotic other). I believe this is the first time they claim tourists will talk with people who have been freed from slavery – an obvious pitch to the cheapest of sentiments. I am appalled that Global Exchange maintains any credibility. Last year I wrote the following in Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk, because online sales of folkloric and supposedly authentic third-worldish objects is how GE started:

Gift-buying and helping projects wrapped together: One can see how the founders leapt to the idea of taking people on tours. Global Exchange says We are an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Easily said. A list of current tours includes Caring for Cuba’s Cats and New Journey of a Lifetime to India with Vandana Shiva. Sound harmless?

I had doubts back then and still do, but those in favour argue the tours are a way for folks who know something is wrong with what they read in the media to see the truth. That’s in theory; the question is how easy is it to provide the truth with anything called a tour? Who decides where to go, what the focus of tours will be and which natives will provide entertainment? Is the idea that all middle-class people have to do is arrive in a poor country and set their eyes upon poverty and suffering in order to experience enlightenment? It’s a short jump from that lack of politics to becoming an Expert who knows What To Do about other people’s lives. Imperialist projects to interfere follow quickly.

Although individual tourists may learn good things from conscientious tour guides, a tour is a holiday, a vacation, whether you set out to see the temples of Bangkok or the bargirls or the trafficking victims. You take a tour for your own benefit and pleasure, even if your pleasure consists in feeling angry and sorry and guilty about what your own government does to people in poorer countries. You go to look at exotic others, and you can’t help drawing conclusions about whole cultures based on what you see – just as tourists and business travellers do. If you happen to talk with someone not on the tour agenda – on a bus, in a bar – then you probably feel chuffed that you saw real people and experienced authentic culture. This is all relatively harmless unless you happen to add this experience to your CV, claiming temples, bar girls or sex trafficking are subjects you are expert in.

This year they provide an itinerary, which includes:

In the morning drive to Chiang Mai: Check into Guesthouse
Visit local project
At night visit nightclubs and bars to observe night activities

It’s been made clear to me that ordinary people in the US have no understanding of what colonialism means and how they themselves perpetuate it. That needs work. Perhaps having broken the spell of not writing I’ll begin again now, even if it is August.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk

Last September I wrote about so-called Reality Tours to meet victims of sex trafficking. Now it’s August and several people have written me from Bangkok about the tour taking place there this past week. I remember when I first heard about Global Exchange educational tours, while visiting a little storefront in San Francisco in 1989. I have a memory of puzzling over the brochure amidst shelves and tables piled with ethnic jewellery and objects from Other Cultures. The shop on 24th Street is still there, according to a contemporary description:

Global Exchange offers fair trade crafts produced in over 40 countries. Proceeds go toward improving lives in these villages. They have a vast selection of unique items from all over the world. This is a great place to pick up a gift for the person who is hard to shop for.

Gift-buying and helping projects wrapped together: One can see how the founders leapt to the idea of taking people on tours. Global Exchange says We are an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Easily said. A list of current tours includes Caring for Cuba’s Cats and New Journey of a Lifetime to India with Vandana Shiva. Sound harmless?

I had doubts back then and still do, but those in favour argue the tours are a way for folks who know something is wrong with what they read in the media to see the truth. That’s in theory; the question is how easy is it to provide the truth with anything called a tour? Who decides where to go, what the focus of tours will be and which natives will provide entertainment? Is the idea that all middle-class people have to do is arrive in a poor country and set their eyes upon poverty and suffering in order to experience enlightenment? It’s a short jump from that lack of politics to becoming an Expert who knows What To Do about other people’s lives. Imperialist projects to interfere follow quickly.

Although individual tourists may learn good things from conscientious tour guides, a tour is a holiday, a vacation, whether you set out to see the temples of Bangkok or the bargirls or the trafficking victims. You take a tour for your own benefit and pleasure, even if your pleasure consists in feeling angry and sorry and guilty about what your own government does to people in poorer countries. You go to look at exotic others, and you can’t help drawing conclusions about whole cultures based on what you see – just as tourists and business travellers do. If you happen to talk with someone not on the tour agenda – on a bus, in a bar – then you probably feel chuffed that you saw real people and experienced authentic culture. This is all relatively harmless unless you happen to add this experience to your CV, claiming temples, bar girls or sex trafficking are subjects you are expert in.

The tour to Bangkok is entitled Thailand: Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: Delegation? Delegates are meant to be official or elected representatives. I shudder to think who people on the tour believe they are representing. Why not call themselves what they are – tourists? Those who think themselves sexually liberal may sneer at Christian tourism – aka missions – but there is not so much difference from the point of view of the objects of their solidarity and pity.

My analysis is not purely theoretical. A couple of decades ago, I happened to be working on the Mexico-US border, in a project whose main task was to provide legal advice to migrants who’d crossed the border illegally and wanted to make a claim for asylum in the US. (Yes, another kind of helping). Lots of people wanted to but few could provide the kind of evidence required by immigration authorities. While stories were checked and papers processed, asylum-seekers had to hang around in halfway-houses found for them by the project.

On one occasion, I was at the enormous garbage dump in Matamoros, where hundreds of people live amidst rubbish of all kinds, picking and carting bits to sell outside.  A group of Reality Tourists came up to some children to ask them questions. The children, accustomed to flies crawling over their faces, did not move to brush them off. The tourists, horrified by the flies landing on their own eyes, faced an excruciating dilemma: They wanted to express interest in and respect for the garbage-dwellers at the same time they wanted to run away screaming. But if they ran away, what would it say about the humanity they were fleeing?

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Girls who buy sex from beach boys: Sex tourism in Bali

beach boys sex touristsBeach boys and women sex tourists: every journalist’s dream topic. A Swiss television reporter interviewed me about a documentary he was making, incorporating footage from Cowboys in Paradise, a film about Kuta Beach in Bali. I happened to be in Basel, nearly missing Catherine MacKinnon when the reporter contacted me, so he came into the room where I was giving a talk and interviewed me afterwards. Some bits of those are cut into this 11-minute television clip, and although most of the English and Indonesian are overlaid with German, the pictures are good and you can follow the narrative easily. Note especially the testimonies of two women: one is the young wife of a beach boy who feels okay about how he makes his money and the other is a young Swede who asks why she shouldn’t have whatever sex she wants.

[The original embed-code is kaput so here’s a link to the video. Note here the tourists are young women. Reporters want to know if the boys are ‘really’ prostitutes and why the girls are paying; they have trouble figuring out who is exploiting whom. It’s a bias, of course, to insist someone has to be exploiting since money and sex are involved, rather than seeing these as ordinary relationships, the kind that travelling people have been having since human life began. Some want to believe that women are morally better than men and therefore won’t pay for sex just because they have the money and freedom to allow them to fly to places like Bali and do it. I don’t think women have any moral traits as a class, and the fact that some like these breezy holiday situations the same way men do doesn’t surprise me. (That’s why I end up laughing during interviews like this – because to me what I am saying is just common sense not requiring any professorial analysis.) There’s a theory that women are more keen to be romanced than men, which I consider pretty silly since plenty of male tourists have stars in their eyes and are wound around the little fingers of those poorer women they are said to be exploiting.

Then some want to see these largely white-skinned women as racist, an interpretation I also don’t share, for the same reason: travellers like to meet others who seem interesting and different; they like to talk, drink, eat, dance, tour and have sex with them. That’s banal. In such situations, travellers often can and are willing to pay for their fun, and since I don’t see having sex as different from those other activities I’d have to condemn travel itself if I am going to condemn the sex. Unless people are wanting a condemnation of global economic inequalities that mean the beach boys don’t have lots of other great ways to make money: well, fine, I condemn that. But please note that the boys interviewed here find pleasuring tourists a lot easier and more fun than other jobs. And that they don’t see themselves as sex workers or as prostitutes; no professional identity need attach to ambiguous relationships. Is this all the erotic side of imperialism? I guess so. But we are all caught up in it; there is no perfectly clean place to stand; telling people to stay home is no solution, whether they are tourists or migrants.

Other stories about sex tourism here.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex Industry Pictures: Sex work, sex tourism, brothels, history

There is now a sex industry picture gallery on this website intended to informally illustrate the variety of commercial sex. Nothing x-rated in it, actually, but the gallery shows something of the diversity of activities and places encompassed in the idea of a sex industry, across time and geography. By no means encyclopedic or representative it also does not include every picture ever used on this website. The gallery is imported from facebook, where I have been keeping it for the past couple of years; I didn’t take the pictures myself but have given credit where I could. Contact me if an uncredited picture is yours and you want your name to appear or the photo removed or if you have more details about a picture (or comment directly on the picture’s page).

The collection is part of my effort to break down the monolithic term prostitution that exercises such a strong hold on the popular imagination. People say prostitution as though it were completely obvious what it means, as though we all knew – and then, quite often, as though we all were in agreement that it is bad and wrong. Nearly every media article reporting about the sex industry uses the same tired image of a woman in fishnet stockings and high heels or high boots leaning into a car window or standing in the street waiting for a car to stop. This stereotype is what sticks in everyone’s brain and is associated with the sex-money exchange that most bothers everyone: the one that neighbourhood leaders protest about, and police try to get rid of, and researchers show to be most violence-prone and where the classic pimp figure is most likely to be seen.

In this collection, people are often shown socialising, not just standing about being symbols. Some of what’s shown is undoubtedly not fair and not legal, but only if we understand what people are actually doing can we hope to improve the world overall. Included here are images of tourism and sex worker activism, both interesting facets of the industry in our times. Campaigning against the industry is not included – you can find those images all over the place.

Words are my own usual vehicle, as in my proposal for a Cultural Study of Commercial Sex, which I have written about several times. But images do something else. I look at pictures to process ideas differently, and I actually like that this gallery doesn’t classify in any way – there is no meaning to the order of the images, though facebook provides the date on which I happened to decide to upload the pictures to that website. The whole collection, which updates when I update at facebook, is a page on the menu at the top of this site.

Sex tourism at guesthouses by older lgbt people? Bring in the anti-trafficking police immediately

Sex tourism, gays, western perversion – what is this story, and these arrests, actually about? No mention is made of any trafficking accusation in this report of a police raid on a brothel in Cambodia – just the cop’s satisfaction at having spent a month investigating a place where people pay for sex. The rather ridiculous salacious slant would have us believe that this brothel is different because gays, lesbians, old ladies and foreigners use it. Well! Presumably the most special customer is a non-young non-Cambodian woman who likes women? Is this a category the police are afraid of? Are we meant to read between the lines that anyone employed in this brothel must have been trafficked and forced (are old-fashioned heterosexist brothels better, then?

It is old news that the US imperialist Trafficking in Persons report has caused Cambodia to institute legislation that has police persecuting sex businesses on principle. This is merely an early stage of the movement that now has a new name: End Demand, which can be followed by several phrases: sometimes we hear End Demand for Sex Trafficking, and sometimes End Demand for Commercial Sex Exploitation, and then there is End Demand for Modern-Day Slavery. All are semantically strange, since the demand these campaigners don’t like is a demand to pay for sex. The demand isn’t for the process – traffiicking, slavery or exploitation. I wonder why the whiz-kid business consultants didn’t make sure the slogan was clearer.

Perhaps there was a special frisson in the fact that a guesthouse has become a brothel, although the report also doesn’t explain what the evidence for that is, either. Presence of sex workers in the building? Manager shows guests an album with pictures of possible escorts? Or is there something noteworthy in the fact that the business is the type associated with alternative-style travel, less luxe, more home-like, cheaper?

Note that all this surveillance for a whole month netted them 14 people, only 3 of whom can be charged with anything – the clients and workers they don’t know what to do with.

Raid closes specialty brothel

Buth Reaksmey Kongkea, 27 February 2011, Phnom Penh Post

Anti-human trafficking officials last week cracked down on a guesthouse in Phnom Penh’s Prampi Makara district that offered sexual services for a select clientele. Keo Thea, director of the municipal Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Office at the Ministry of Interior, said a raid of the guesthouse-turned-brothel in Veal Vong commune netted a total of 14 arrests, including the guesthouse owner, two accomplices and 11 sex workers, on Saturday. “We have been investigating this house for about a month before we took superb action in cracking down on it,” he said. Keo Thea added that the guesthouse offered specific sexual services.

This place is hidden and illegal and provides sexual services for [gay] men, lesbians, old ladies and foreign people in Phnom Penh.

He said police research had uncovered that the guesthouse had been a popular destination for people seeking its specific services for many years. The detained were being held at the Phnom Penh Municipal Police Department for questioning prior to being sent to provincial court today to face charges, Keo Thea said, though he expressed doubts about the fate of some of the people arrested during Saturday’s raid.

We are now waiting for the order from our superiors about what we should do with these 11 people, who are sexual service providers and those who had come for sex. But for the house owner and the two accomplices, we will send them to court for charges.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Bisexual men have wives, tourist boyfriends and also sell sex in Kenya

Those who work in outreach know the fluid, category-resistant sexual behaviour common amongst so many people. So-called sexual orientation, ideas about family and a distinction between sex-with-money and sex-without-money cease to be very useful, as this story shows. Note that homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, as an earlier story about MSM relationship explained.

Kenya: Bisexual male sex workers run big risks

20 April 2010, Irin/PlusNews 


Photo: Jimmy Kamude/IRIN
 

At a nightclub in Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, Tito Bakari a local man, and Leonard Smithberger, a tourist, make out in a dark corner before the bouncer asks them to leave. Hand in hand they walk to another bar nearby, where they party through the night. “My love from Germany has been here since Easter – the party has just begun,” Bakari told IRIN/PlusNews. Smithberger visits Kenya a few times every year and showers gifts and money on Bakari, who moves out of the house he shares with his wife and child and into his lover’s hotel.

Up to 60 percent of male sex workers in Mombasa also have female sexual partners, according to a recent study presented at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco. “Although most sex partners of MSM-SW [men who have sex with men sex workers] are men, sex with local women is also common, usually transactional, and often unprotected,” the study noted. . .

My wife knows that I am bisexual, but I provide her needs and equally satisfy her sexually. I even have two children with her, so she never complains,” said Ben Maina*, a male sex worker in Mombasa who doesn’t always use condoms with his clients, and never with his wife. In 2007, another study in Mombasa found that the high prevalence of HIV in Kenyan MSM was probably due to unprotected receptive anal sex and low condom use. Despite the risks and the lack of acceptance by society, Maina makes too much money to consider leaving the trade – in a country where half the population lives on less than US$1 per day, he can earn up to $365 per week. “The cash assists me in providing for my family,” he said. . .

Dr Mary Mwangombe, a researcher at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), in the coastal town of Kilifi, said HIV programming for men who have sex with men and their partners – both male and female – was difficult because of the illegal nature of homosexuality and the public’s intolerance of it. “Most male commercial sex workers live and go about their business secretively to avoid being victimized, either by the council officials, the police or the public at large”. . .

Policing sex trafficking in Rio, with farcical elements

Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil, by Paul Amar, in Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 513.

. . . Operation Princess and its sister campaigns were launched by the police in seeming disregard for the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil. The Pentecostal evangelical leaders of Rio  . . . gave biblical legitimacy to the campaign, brushing aside questions of legality or sex workers’ resistance to being ‘rescued’. . . .

. . . proclaimed he would purge corruption and promote moral rectitude . . . by bringing back the spirit of the Vice Police stations (Delegacias de Costumes), which had been closed for the most part in the 1940s when prostitution was legalized. Simultaneously, President Lula declared a nationwide war against sex trafficking . . .

. . . ‘Operation Princess’ resonated perfectly with the 19th-century iconography of missionarism, child rescue, and abolition in Brazil. . . Avenida Princesa Isabel is the grand boulevard that brings travelers . . . into Copacabana Beach, a mixed-class and mixed-race coastal community that also serves as a center of sex tourism and international diplomatic conferences. Copacabana was a focal point of the new vice-policing operations. . . the statue of Princess Isabel, with her arms outstretched, blessing those she liberated from slavery and radiating a spirit of tolerance and welcome at the gateway to the topless dance clubs and all-night saunas of the Lido.  . .

. . . [the] Black Movement in Brazil ha[s] rigorously critiqued the ‘Princess Isabel Syndrome’, or the commemoration of this child monarch as the agent of abolition. . . it takes credit away from the centuries of sacrifice and mobilization among Brazil’s Afro-descendants and their efforts . . . Thus, the princess metaphor in Rio de Janeiro . . . resonates vibrantly with the politics of social ‘whitening’ (embrancamento), infantilization of black slave agency, and religious moralization.

. . . By the time Lula assumed power in 2003, a massive child-rescue initiative was deemed essential to Brazil’s plans to legitimize and empower itself on the world stage, as well as to address social-justice concerns at home. For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic global south and make a claim to the proposed new seat on the Security Council, it wanted to change the image of Brazilian law enforcement from death squad to rescue mission, authoritarian to humanitarian. The national landscape had to be cleared of lawless, victimized children.

‘Operation Carnival’ became the first test of this revived vice-police campaign. As if to mock the new police operations, a ‘Group A’ Samba School . . .  celebrated ‘Prostitution in Copacabana’ as their theme that year; their 4,000 sequined dancers, the ‘Lions of Nova Iguaçu’, marched through the downtown Sambadrome, singing a samba about the joys of the sex trade. In its debut, the police’s anti-sex-trafficking campaign netted a total of one arrest . . .

During ‘Operation Shangrilá’, the Federal Police raided a showboat in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Forty Brazilian prostitutes and twenty-nine American tourists were arrested for having committed the crime of ‘sex tourism’. This incident was immediately trumpeted as a major bust of a ‘human trafficking’ operation. . . . But . . no Brazilian law had been violated. None of the prostitutes were underage, nor had they violated any pimping or brothel laws. The only way this situation could be imagined as ‘trafficking’ was because the tourists had crossed international frontiers, although without breaking any laws or visa restrictions. Furthermore, ‘sex tourism’ is not against any Brazilian law, unless one assumes that sex tourism is the same thing as forced sex trafficking.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Hay que tener una visión de las cosas: Mujeres brasileiras en la industria del sexo en España

Con todo el debate ideológico sobre la prostitución, salen poco simples testimonios de personas que han decidido viajar y trabajar en la industria del sexo. Cuando digo ‘decidido’ quiero decir que puede que tengan pocas opciones para salir adelante pero sí tienen algunas y pueden preferir unas a otras. Es un planteamiento básico, que no niega el sexismo del mundo ni la injusticia para los países menos ricos sino que destaca la dimensión personal donde el candidato a la migración mira su situación y opta por viajar. Y muy fácilmente sale una historia no solo de ganarse la vida sino una visión empresarial y emprendedora, de personas que calculan sus chances, planifican sus futuros y son todo menos víctimas. Los siguientes relatos vienen de un trabajo de Adriana Piscitelli, de la Universidade Estadual de Campinas/UNICAMP, Brasil. He marcado frases en las que se puede oir la voz de personas que están informándose mediante redes, que están tomando decisiones y que tienen una visión a largo plazo de sus vidas.

    ‘¿Salir de mi país para trabajar para comer? Comida tengo en mi país. No preciso estar lejos de mi familia para comer. En Brasil si plantas una mandioca, crías una gallina, comes. No es hambre. Es tratar de hacer algo… Siempre me preocupé por el día de mañana. Cuando tenga 60 años… Tengo un objetivo, quiero juntar dinero para mandar a Brasil y hacer las cosas… Y aquí, si fuera a trabajar en otra cosa, ¿en que sería? ¿Limpiando pisos? Eso no entra en mi cabeza porque se gana muy poco. Si ganase bien, barrería la calle, sin ningún problema. ¿Pero trabajar y ganar 800, 900 euros?

Cuando él [cliente italiano que pasó un período de vacaciones en Fortaleza] se fue, me mandó un e-mail… Empezamos a hablar varias veces por día. . . .  En un mes pagó las deudas que yo tenía en Brasil. Me mandó dinero para que comprase mis cosas, para que hiciera la documentación… Y compró mi pasaje. . .  Hice lo que tenía que hacer, porque si no me casaba tenía que volver al Brasil… Y funciona así. Si una brasileña conoce un extranjero, tiene que casarse porque si no, no deja la vida de allá.

Yo iba siempre a una discoteca… Y había un taxista, que era conocido nuestro. Y me dijo: ¿nena, no quieres ir a trabajar al extranjero? Invitó también a una amiga y a una prima mías… Dijo que se ganaba muchísimo. Le dijimos que sí. Fue con nosotras para que sacáramos el pasaporte. Y un día llamó avisando que íbamos a viajar… Nos dieron el pasaje en el aeropuerto, fuimos a San Pablo y ahí tomamos otro avión. Vinimos por París… Teníamos que venir a Bilbao en tren, donde nos esperaba un hombre… Cuando nos encontramos, nos llevó a tomar café y después a la casa de él, para descansar y después nos llevó al club…  Ellos pagaron el pasaje, la deuda fue un poco más de 3000 euros…

Había una amiga mía que conocía otra, que conocía otra… Y así conseguimos la información, en una agencia de viajes que tiene contactos con clubes de Andalucía. . .  si tú sabes del sitio específico, club de José o de María, pues bien, te damos la información, te ponemos en contacto con la persona. Fui primero a un club de Almería… No era un lugar muy bueno. Pero yo tengo una amiga y ella tenía contactos con una chica de Barcelona que había trabajado en un club y era muy amiga de la dueña. Al final la dueña de ese club de Barcelona nos ha enviado el dinero para pagar nuestra deuda y para venir hasta Barcelona… [Cuando llegué a Barcelona], me quedaban 800 euros por pagar, pero en la primer semana tuve suerte porque he cobrado 1700 y pagué y me quedó dinero para enviar a mi país y ya.

Mi hermana está haciendo una carrera en Brasil, en diciembre acaba y como no hay trabajo, ella viene a España y pagaré yo el billete. Está intentando venir con contrato de trabajo. Eso se consigue en Brasil en el consulado de España. Podría trabajar media jornada en trabajo normal, en el área de ella, ella hace tecnología de producción en Brasil, trabajar en esto y la otra media jornada en la prostitución… que es donde se gana el dinero.

Pagué la deuda en un mes, decidí quedarme [en el club en Bilbao] hasta completar los tres meses. Volví a Brasil. Pero cuando volví, mirando el cambio, me di cuenta que no compensaba más hacer “programa” allá. Dejé pasar los tres meses necesarios y volví a España. Llamé al club y pedí que me enviasen un pasaje, que quería volver para trabajar. Y en una semana estaba de vuelta.

Planeo volver. Tal vez tarde diez años, pero quiero comprar unas casitas, pequeñas, de R$10.000,00 o R$ 15.000,00 alquilarlas y vivir del alquiler. Digamos que compre cuatro casitas baratas, y las alquile a 100, 200R$, ahí tienes un dinero fi jo, sin hacer nada. Y, al mismo tiempo, puedes tener un negocio. Digamos que tienes 6.000 euros, y si aquel negocio no va bien estás arruinado. Pero todavía tienes el alquiler de las casas.

Todo el dinero que gano aquí, lo invierto en Brasil, porque en dos o tres años quiero estar allí. Quiero estar aquí tres meses y tres meses en Brasil con mi familia. Tengo tierras, tengo vacas, en Rondônia. Mis hijos están en Rondônia, entonces mi hijo cuida de estas cosas… Voy enviando dinero para mejorar, para no tener que trabajar más en un par de años. Mando más o menos 1500 por mes para Brasil. Por eso, siempre di valor a lo de aquí. Tengo paciencia con los [clientes] viejos porque sé que con los 20 euros que me dan por veinte minutos, pago cuatro días un peón, allá, en el campo. Hay que tener una visión de las cosas.’

Relatos extraídos de ‘Tránsitos: Circulación de Brasileñas en el ámbito de la transnacionalización de los mercados sexual y matrimonial,’ Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre, 15, 31, 101-136, 2009

Phuket’s Sex Tourism, Wife Seeking, Thai/tourist Marriages and a husband’s voice?

Joylynn Chong’s Collection

Another handling of sex tourism, this time from a travel-promotion site that celebrates ‘mixed marriages’ and multiculturalism in Phuket, Thailand. Most of what we get to read on the subject are condemnations of the men without any attempt to understand the different stories and social contexts involved, so this typology of western men who marry Thai women is interesting, if biased. This is a man’s account; I’ve highlighted some suggestive bits. Note how sex-industry and non-sex-industry interactions are treated with the same even tone.

Thai Wives in Phuket

Phuket News, 28 August 2009

Here on the beautiful island of Phuket in Thailand, there are a great number of mixed Thai-Western marriages. It is turning into quite a phenomenon. Around Phuket’s schools and playgrounds it is common to see mixed-race children happily playing with the 100% Thai kids. They are usually easy to spot with fairer skin, western features and non-black hair. A whole generation of culturally diverse, multi-lingual children is growing up and will soon be quite an asset to Phuket’s tourist industry.

This phenomenon of mixed marriages in Phuket has really exploded over the last decade. Of course, the major reason is the expansion of Phuket’s tourist trade. When you have more than a million western visitors a year, it is natural that some of them will meet and fall in love with local people. Especially when the local people are so appealing. But there must be more to it than that. The tourist resorts around the Mediterranean, Caribbean and US also receive millions of foreign visitors a year. There are mixed-nationality marriages at these resorts but not thousands in a small area like there are in Phuket.

One thing stands out when you look at Phuket’s ex-pat population -the vast majority of us are men. Probably around 90% of the ex-pat population is male. That is not the case when you look at the breakdown of tourist visitors where the split is only 60-40 in favour of males. So while there are many women visiting Thailand, only a small percentage of them decide to settle here. It is probably a similar percentage to those that settle at other holiday resorts. But the men are marrying Thai women and settling here in great numbers. There is an obvious conclusion to draw. There are a lot of men coming to Phuket to actively seek wives. They are not just falling in love while on holiday – they are coming with the pre-planned intent of finding a doe-eyed Thai beauty to be their spouse.

Many men seem to be dissatisfied with their experiences of women in their home country. Society has changed rapidly in the west over the last few decades. Women have become more confident and assertive. They can be intimidating to approach and fast with a withering put-down. They are much more demanding in their relationships and expect a lot of concessions from their partners. Many men do not like it. They still want the fifties ideal of a feminine, doting wife. So they come to Thailand in search of the answer to their problem. Here, they believe they can still find women who are beautiful, feminine and attentive to their husband’s needs.

It is dangerous to generalise too much about the men who marry Thai girls and settle in Phuket. They all have their own story. Just the same, there are common patterns. You can place a lot of these men into three broad groups:

Group 1. There are those that come to Phuket for ‘normal’ reasons such as work or a break from work. It is natural that some of these people will meet and fall in love with locals. This happens all over the world. There is no doubt that Thai women are very charming so perhaps it is more common here than elsewhere.

Group 2. Then there are those who fall in love with their bargirl. The girls who work in the sex industry are good at selling themselves; it is their job. It is amazing how many men fall for a Thai girl who they only planned to take back to their hotel for the night. It is not usually the hardened sex-tourists who fall. They tend to pick up a new girl every night with no emotional attachment. It is the new guys. The men who come to Phuket for the first time, not quite knowing what to expect. They probably have an idea that they are going to pick up a prostitute but they don’t know how it works. They end up doing the GFE (girl friend experience – see Phuket Naughty Nightlife). That is picking up a bar girl and then keeping her for the entire length of the holiday. They act as if they are boyfriend-girlfriend. The girl gets plenty of time to weave her magic. She tugs the guy’s heartstrings with her life story until he is brimming with sympathy. She gives him lots of affection and by the end of his holiday, he is in love.

Group 3. Then there are those who come with the pre-planned intent of finding a wife. They have thought about it and come to the reasoned conclusion that a Thai wife would make their life better. Some of these guys will look for their new wife around the sex venues of Patong. Others want to stay away from the sex industry girls. They may try dating agencies or internet matching services. Some of them will try to meet ‘good’ Thai women away from the tourist resorts. Their approaches may vary but the conclusion is the same – they think a life in Phuket with a Thai wife would be better than their current life back home.

Whatever the reasons, the mixed Thai-Western marriage is now an established part of Phuket’s scenery. Not all of these Western men find their dream wife. Many of these marriages run into problems but that is true of marriages the world over. There can be extra problems related to marriages between people from different cultures. Still a lot of western men are very happy with their choice.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Beirut’s sex tourism, sex industry, sex work – and a pimp’s voice

I notice that more of these reports from around the world are asking pimps for information, particularly about money issues. The voice of the pimp usually brags, claims terrific success, high earnings. Sex workers sound like passive objects indeed. Take, for example, the report from Malaysia. But rather than discount everything these businessmen say, I listen to the logistical information they provide. Note in this story about Beirut how arrangements are made between tourists and sex workers – not so different from those mentioned in a recent post about seamen, ships in port and party girls. Note, too, that the first sex tourist mentioned is a young Saudi woman who enjoys freedom and night life in Beirut: no mention of paying for sex in her case.

The concept of sex tourism is another that gets thrown around without much investigation about what it means in specific circumstances. Many people on holiday feel like experimenting, want to go wild, enjoy breaking their hometown’s sexual norms. Paying may be involved, but payments may be made to guides, translators and natives who present as pick-ups. To say sex tourist is to imply that someone conspired to travel abroad for the express purpose of having sex; more often tourists buy all sorts of services, sometimes including sex, and sometimes not getting what they bargained for.

I talked not long ago about different prices for sex workers from different ethnic groups, in relation to a sign in Hong Kong. This issue arises here, too.

Beirut’s seamy side offers sex and fun for Arab tourists

Weedah Hamzah, 22 August 2009, m&c

Beirut: On the surface, the Mediterranean coastal city of Beirut is an upmarket tourist destination, offering Arab tourists good weather, good food, and good times. But beyond the tables heavy with food and the shining lights, Beirut’s greatest attraction is sex. Arab tourists flock in the thousands to Lebanon from Gulf countries every summer. More and more, Arab men seem to be attracted by the growing opportunities to engage in sex tourism.

Lebanon has long been known to cater to all desires: a place where Arab tourists can break taboos they must contend with in their home countries. Some just want some freedom. Hind, an 18-year-old Saudi girl, is spending her summer in Lebanon, enjoying the chance to show off her striking red lipstick, large black eyes and black veil. She cruises in her three-wheel all-terrain vehicle at midnight in the overcrowded main streets of Aley, a town 30 kilometres from Beirut, where most of the cafes and restaurants are packed with Gulf tourists and Lebanese expatriates.  “For me this is total freedom, I can meet people and enjoy the night life as well,” Hind told the German Press Agency dpa.

But much of the growing tourism industry is still focused on men interested in sex. One man from Saudi Arabia, who requested not to be identified told dpa, “in Beirut there is good life, good weather, good service and most of all beautiful girls.” Lebanese women – with their outgoing characters, love of life and, most of all, their trendy European looks – have in recent years become central to attracting more Arab tourists into the country.

One of the hottest spots for such tourism is Maameltein, the red- light district of Lebanon, 20 kilometres north of Beirut. It’s a place where Arab tourists can watch beautiful women from Belarus, Ukraine, and Romania performing naked on stage. A night out with one of the dancers can cost 1,000 dollars.

One pimp in Maameltein, who asked to be identified as Carlos, told dpa that there’s no shortage of women, either local or from Europe, in Maameltein. ‘The rates vary, the Eastern European girls are the most highly paid, Lebanese come next, and then Iraqis,’ Carlos said. ‘During the summer our main clients are men from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states, while in winter we have many Lebanese clients,’ he said. In his late 40s, Carlos is often described as the best pimp in the district, catering to a clientele of mostly rich Saudi men.

Touring Maameltein with Carlos, one can see dozens of cars packed with young and middle-aged Gulf tourists cruising the area to get what Carlos describes as a ‘good catch.’ During the drive, Carlos receives calls from his clients. ‘My friend, I need three Ukrainian and one Lebanese for tonight to come to a party at my residence,’ Carlos quoted the caller, whom he said was from Saudi Arabia. This would cost ‘between 5,000 and 6,000 dollars per night because this is delivery to the residence,’ he said, puffing a large cigar.

Elsewhere, many of the women are Iraqis who have fled their wartorn country and discovered prostitution as an easy way to earn money. ‘I fled to Lebanon after the war in Iraq, with my mother and sister after my father and two brothers were killed,’ said one woman who wanted to be identified as Noura. ‘We were without money, so we started working here.’ Noura, her mother and sister work in three different bars. I know this is not a good job but we want to live and this is the easiest way to earn a living,’ she said, waving goodbye as her client arrived.

Noura’s pimp, who asked to be identified as Kamal, said Iraqi women find that ‘this is their only means of survival, especially if they have no other training or skills in which to support themselves.’ Asked the rate for an Iraqi woman, Kamal says: ‘If they are virgins and it is their first time, I can get a good price: between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars. If they are experienced, then it’s between 400 and 500 dollars.’ As for Lebanese women, ‘we sell them only to foreign men for fear that one day their families would know about their secret job,’ added Kamal. ‘I can tell you this has been a good season this year for us here,’ Kamal said as he drove away.

Prostitution in Lebanon is practised undercover after a 1998 law forbidding brothels. Legal licenses are limited to places offering sex shows. Continue reading

Taxi-drivers protest police discrimination against migrant sex workers, Mallorca: Taxistas denuncian discriminación policial contra prostitutas migrantes

Taxi drivers in Palma de Mallorca have complained about excessive police controls intended to dissuade migrant prostitutes from entering Magaluf, a tourist area. More specifically, they accused police of targeting taxis carrying women from sub-Saharan West Africa (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, etc). This is obvious discrimination based on an idea that sex workers from this part of the world are more aggressive about getting business, because they work in groups, plant themselves in front of cars to talk to drivers and so on. The unnamed group here are the clients they are travelling to get to, so I’ve put a picture of guys here.

La idea de que ‘las nigerianas’ son las más agresivas es, claro, discriminación flagrante. Viene de su estilo de trabajar: en grupos, plantándose frente a los carros para hablar con los choferes. El grupo invisible que no está nombrado en este reportaje son los clientes, así que pongo una imágen de chicos aquí.

Taxistas de Palma, molestos por los controles sobre las prostitutas, diariodemallorca.es

I. M. Calvià: Taxistas de Palma han expresado su malestar por la excesiva rigurosidad de los controles policiales que ha habido en los últimos días a la entrada de Magaluf, unos controles que, según el relato de varios profesionales, iban encaminados a disuadirlos de transportar prostitutas a la zona turística de este núcleo calvianer.

La explicación ofrecida a este diario por algunos conductores fue corroborada posteriormente por el presidente de la Asociación de Autónomos del Taxi de Mallorca, Gabriel Moragues, quien detalló que esta semana han mantenido una reunión con representantes municipales para pedir explicaciones acerca de estos hechos.

En esta reunión, los taxistas reprocharon que la minuciosidad de los registros se centrase únicamente en aquellos vehículos que transportaban mujeres subsaharianas. Según destacó Moragues, los representantes municipales les pidieron disculpas y les garantizaron que no se volvería a producir una situación así.
Los conductores consultados por este diario relataron que en los controles policiales objeto de polémica se paraba a los taxis que llevaban mujeres subsaharianas, se las obligaba a bajar y eran registradas por policías equipados con guantes y mascarillas, ante el temor a un posible contagio por gripe A. A continuación, de acuerdo a esta versión, los agentes procedían a inspeccionar con esmero la documentación del taxi.

Gay tourism, ‘lewd adverts’ and the sex industry in Tel Aviv

An article in Ynetnews.com’s Travel section reports that a map-brochure to attract gay tourists to Tel Aviv contains advertisements for saunas and sex shops. The pictures and presence of adverts for certain businesses cause offence to some, and comments from readers focus on how the image of Israel, as a nation (the Holy Land), may be damaged by advertising gay sex. Since the story doesn’t say who exactly feels offended and uses the morally biassed word ‘lewd’ to describe the adverts, it would seem to be Ynet itself that objects. I’ve highlighted in bold some words that stand out. Here are the pictures, one of a community centre:

Gay tourism leaflet promotes sex shops in TA
Yoav Zeitun, 18 May 2009

A Tel Aviv city map that was distributed throughout Europe in recent weeks in a bid to promote gay tourism to the city contains lewd adverts for sex shops and sauna bars. The map was jointly commissioned by the Israeli Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Association, the Tel Aviv Municipality and the municipal center for the gay community. The map, which is written mostly in English, advertises 50 businesses that cater to the gay community, including gay-oriented nightclubs, Israeli travel agencies that specialize in “gay tourism”, pubs and restaurants. At least four of the businesses are part of the sex industry.

One of the largest ads is for the Paradise sauna bar on Allenby Street, which offers visitors a dark room, private booths and “relaxing massages.” Another ad promotes Sauna City on Hahashmonaim Street, which offers similar services. The ads also contain provocative images of muscular, half-naked men. Additionally, the map contains two ads for sex shops.

The leaflet’s front cover features a photo taken during the local Gay Pride Parade, while the back cover shows four men playing on the beach. Photos of lesbian women are nowhere to be found in the publication, except for in advertisements.

The Tel Aviv Municipality said in response: “To the best of our knowledge these businesses are not illegal, and therefore should not be prevented from advertising.”

The images appear conventional and harmless to anyone living in a contemporary big city. Is the Pride Parade itself annoying? What does the reporter mean to imply by pointing to the absence of photos of lesbians except in advertisements? I wonder whether the complainants in this case object to the ‘sex tourism’ most, to the fact that the sex tourism is gay, to sex workers or simply to the existence of out gay entertainment venues.

There is a widespread tolerance within segments of gay communities for commercial sex, whether opportunistic, veiled or cheerfully open. The result is that many ordinary gathering places tolerate sex workers and cater to their clients without making a fuss or distinguishing them from other patrons. This tolerance can be perceived as moral decay, as we see daily in both Christian and Muslim objections.

Tolerance for sex work within gay entertainment venues is felt as a relief by many, but can also mean a sort of reverse stigma, as explored in a Kenyan sex worker’s story.

Webcam girls, virtual sex, sex tourism and the tax man

A search for ‘webcam girls’ just bought me 4, 470, 000 hits in google. I was investigating the following story from The Local, a news source in English about Sweden. I noted a couple of suggestive points in bold in the text and made further comments at the end of it. Note that the statistics treat Sweden alone. And what about webcam boys?

Swedish taxman chases webcam strippers

Charlotte West, 8 April 2009

The culprits are primarily girls who take off their clothes and offer sexual services in front of a web camera. The Swedish Tax Agency, Skatteverket, estimates there are between 300 and 500 individuals who earn money this way. So far the agency has identified close to 200 people. What the majority have in common is that they have neglected to declare their income.

“Young people are usually seen as poorly informed about how to file their taxes. That might be one explanation, but another reason is that their clients don’t want to be identified,” Dag Hardyson, project manager for Skatteverket’s investigation of online businesses, told TT.

In the last three years, Skatteverket has looked into three different areas: pills, poker and porn. During the course of their investigation, they noted that paid pornography sites have had an increasing difficulty peddling their wares as so much free content is available. But they also discovered that the demand for “webcam girls” has increased. At first, Hardyson and his team didn’t believe the phenomenon was particularly widespread in Sweden. “But our colleagues in Holland said, ‘We have a problem, so it’s obvious that you have a problem’,” he said.

They also explained that the success of the “webcam girls” rests in the fact they can speak Swedish with their Swedish customers, and it is that interaction that is most important. The business is entirely legal, but requires those offering the service to register for a corporate taxation certificate, as well as maintain records of expenses and income. According to Sveriges Radio, only one of the individuals audited by Skatteverket has submitted an income declaration. The businesses are estimated to generate around 40 million Swedish kronor ($5 million), at least 20 million of which is tax revenue.

While people usually imagine the biggest issue for webcam workers to be having the nerve to perform on camera, other problems are more important. As with phone sex, it’s an advantage to be able to work from home, but the question is how clients will find you, which leads to chat rooms, advertising and/or being part of big website agencies. Virtual brothels provide rooms and technology and pay wages. As usual with unregulated businesses, workers can get very bad deals. Recently I was sent a link to Cam-girl Notes, a site that describes itself as a place to ‘discuss the cam life and how people can cope with it.’

Most of the sex industry now uses the Internet in one way or another. Not long ago I posted something about paying to watch brothel sex. Let me know about other new forms you hear about (contact form to the right). I’m always interested in the blurry boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex. Read about the cultural study of commercial sex here and here.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex industry adapts to anti-trafficking laws, Korea

This story shows how laws aimed at suppressing the sex industry are met with creative resistance. Businesspeople invent new ways to put workers and clients together without drawing so much police attention. The police know this will happen but are anyway under-funded to make more than a minimum effort. The report provides some historical background that links present-day commercial-sex forms to earlier colonisation of Korea by Japan and the USA. I’ve drawn attention to interesting details in bold. Note the presence of a Minister of Gender Equality and the photo of thousands of sex workers protesting the anti-sex trafficking law.

Joong Ang Daily, Seoul

Commercial sex survives despite crackdown

A man walks down an alley in Mia-ri Texas, Seoul, where sex workers still operate.

By Brian Lee, 16 March 2009 

“Oppa, wanna have some fun?” A middle-aged woman throws a questioning look at a male passerby who shakes his head and goes about his business. She’s standing at an intersection in Yeongdeungpo, western Seoul, which used to be one of the better known red-light districts in the capital. Most of the storefronts are shuttered during the daytime and come alive at sundown.

But business is slower than usual, partly because of the bad economy but also, according to government officials, due to the success of the Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, which was enacted five years ago amid great fanfare to beef up existing anti-prostitution laws. However, except for cosmetic changes, the lucrative sex trade is still very much around, experts say. The only difference is that since the law was enforced, the sex trade has evolved.

More visible outlets such as the one in Yeongdeungpo have taken the brunt of the law as have the once notorious neighborhoods of northern Seoul’s Cheongnyangni and Mia-ri Texas, which are both scheduled for urban redevelopment. But it is still possible to buy sex in these areas, like Cheongnyangni, for as little as 70,000 won ($47.50).

Business as usual

A tell-tale sign that business was, if not booming, reasonably healthy came earlier this month when the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced it would transfer hundreds of police officers in the southern Seoul districts of Gangnam, Seocho and Suseo. The move has been widely interpreted as an effort to sever ties between the police and entertainment establishments offering sex services. The decision to transfer the officers, all from a range of departments, came after it was discovered that police officers had inappropriate relationships with massage parlors in those areas. The current going rate for massage parlors is 170,000 won in cash and 190,000 with a credit card. As credit card records are easy to trace, customers and owners tend to prefer cash.

3000 Seoul sex workers protest Anti-Trafficking Law, 2007
3000 Seoul sex workers protest Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, 2007

Nowadays, adding to the sex-for-cash businesses,  hyugae-tel (resting rooms), where customers can call up sex workers and then later join them at another venue, are expanding rapidly, while commercial sex offered online, which is harder to track, is also growing. Still, government officials say the implementation of the law from five years ago has helped significantly reduce the scale of the sex industry. Continue reading

How does the sex industry look? a facebook album

With all uproar focused on the morality of buying and selling sex, most people have little idea what much of the sex industry actually looks like. Or rather, the media repeatedly show the same images of women in short skirts and high boots leaning into car windows, giving the impression that street hooking is the dominant situation, which is far from the truth. And, of course, we are constantly shown horrifying images of the worst sites and victims of trafficking and exploitation (you can provide those yourselves, so no link).

At the same time, millions of people the world over work in the sex industry, in jobs other than providing sexual services. And more millions visit, drive or walk past sites without even thinking about it because they look ordinary.  I’ve created a theoretical framework for doing research about the sex industry in all its detail, called the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex, and other researchers are doing this ethnographic and evidence-based work. So I think it’s interesting to show some ordinary pictures, and I’ve made an album on Facebook that’s accessible to everyone (even people who would rather die than join social networking sites themselves – you know who you are). You can click on each photo to see it larger, with its caption, and comment on it if you like.

Photos include strippers, a Soho walk-up, brothels in the Czech Republic, Austria, Cambodia, Mexico, Australia, the USA and Germany, Soi Cowboy and Pattaya in Thailand, sex shops in Finland and Taiwan, hostess and karaoke clubs in Japan and China, brothel paintings by Toulouse Lautrec and Vincent Van Gogh and historical pictures. See the album here. It’s a work in progress, so if anyone has pictures to contribute, let me know, as long as you have permission to send them.

What’s happening in Amsterdam? An overview of changing prostitution law

In the current trafficking debates in Europe, complex laws tend to be reduced to simplistic tags like legalisation or regulation. But those terms can play out in a variety of ways according to local cultures, histories and politics. The situation and the laws are changing in the Netherlands; the system that’s been in place since 2000 will be modified, not done away with. It’s complicated, but here’s an overview that does a good job of explaining what’s happening, for what reasons, with what goals and how various groups feel about it.

Jan Visser has been thinking about prostitution policy in the Netherlands for many years. I first met him in the mid-90s. He formerly worked with De Rode Draad and is now an independent consultant on prostitution issues. He calls the following a personal comment.

Prostitution policy under construction (December 2008)

Unauthorised representations on new developments in The Netherlands

Jan Visser

1. The Amsterdam Red Light District (Walletjes): Project 1012

On 5 December 2008, the City of Amsterdam presented a ‘strategy paper’ with a set of plans that will have a huge impact on the Red Light District. The Coalition project 1012 (named after the postal code of the inner city) aims to make the area safer, more attractive and more liveable. The two main reasons:

  • During the last decade, the inner city has become more and more under the influence of organised crime.
  • The inner city needs a quality impulse, to upgrade the entrance of Amsterdam (from Central Station to Dam square).

Crime

The argument is this: prostitution is not criminal, but the social and economic structure of prostitution give criminals opportunities. Therefore prostitution shall not be abolished but decreased and concentrated.

The Red Light District consists of shop window prostitution, coffee shops (for cannabis), smart shops (for mushrooms), money-exchange locations, mini supermarkets, gambling halls, sex shops, bars and 1–2 star hotels. This is defined as a fertile infrastructure for criminal activities, such as drug trafficking and dealing, trafficking of women, laundering of money. Criminological research has detected some groups of organised crime that have obtained real estate. This is seen as a trend that needs to be countered.

BIBOB

This is the name of a new law that gives municipal authorities the option to refuse or withdraw a license (for a hotel, bar or brothel) if the owner cannot prove that his background and finances are legitimate. The license can also be refused if the city suspects that the license will be used to do criminal business. Note: unlike normal laws, the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser. This has already proved to be a strong instrument. Some brothel owners have lost their licenses, and as a consequence sold their houses to housing corporations, under the direction of the city. (This happened to some 100 of the total of 482 windows in this area). These houses may or may not be used for prostitution again, depending on the future plans of the city. Continue reading

More cultural study of commercial sex, including sex tourism, stripping, rentboys, brothels, courtesans, pornography

In 2005 I proposed a cultural-studies framework for thinking about the sex industry. I then disseminated an announcement calling for articles using the new framework, for a special edition of the journal Sexualities, which publishes work from any academic field that ‘describes, analyses, theorises and provides a critique on the changing nature of the social organisation of human sexual experience in the late modern world.’  Which means the exchange of money for sex can be looked at just the way any other activity involving sex can.

The journal also likes ethnographic work, which means using information gathered amongst specific people in actual places rather than purely theoretical, such as whether you consider prostitution to be inherently exploitative or perverted or harmless or any other abstract term.

Although I received many responses to my announcement, most did not venture far from the traditional focus on the meaning and morality of prostitution, even when they used the term sex work.

Soi Cowboy, Bangkok

I chose eight articles, which then went through the usual academic review process, in which specialists in the fields discussed in the work give their opinions about it. All the articles were examined by at least two and sometimes three or four reviewers, people I found by searching high and low all over the globe. I had reviewers working on these articles in Japan, Australia, Israel, France and a long list of other places. For the same article they did not always agree, however, about whether the articles needed to be modified and how.

The best thing about this special edition is the absence of anything like victimising rhetoric or research results that prove anyone’s misery. Hurrah!

Here’s the Table of Contents for Sexualities, Vol 10, No 4, October 2007. If you have access to academic journals, the link to these pieces is here.

  • Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Laura Maria Agustín, Guest Editor
  • Performance, Status and Hybridity in a Pakistani Red-Light District: The Cultural Production of the Courtesan: Louise Brown
  • Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption: Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck
  • No Money Shot? Commerce, Pornography and New Sex Taste Cultures: Feona Attwood
  • Rent-Boys, Barflies, and Kept Men: Men Involved in Sex with Men for Compensation in Prague: Timothy M. Hall
  • Sex Work for the Middle Classes: Elizabeth Bernstein
  • Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil: Adriana Piscitelli
  • Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research: Katherine Frank
  • Questioning Solidarity: Outreach with Migrants Who Sell Sex: Laura María Agustín

Below is the full text of my Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex (Sexualities 2007; 10; 403). Or here is the pdf. (I’m having trouble with this file; if you need it, write to me on the contact form in the sidebar).

Laura Maria Agustín

The articles in this collection explore how the meaning of buying and selling sex changes according to the social, cultural and historical processes in which transactions are situated. Continue reading

Working in the European Sex Industry

Working in the European Sex Industry: Migrant Possibilities

Laura Agustín

Translated from the original Trabajar en la industria del sexo, in OFRIM/Suplementos, June 2000. If you read Spanish, read the original, it’s better.

Lautrec’s The Brothel Laundryman

Background to the article

When early in 2000 the editor of a Madrid publication asked me to write an article about migrants who sell sex, she stipulated that she wanted it to be free of moralising. I agreed without for a moment imagining the enormous conflict that would arise when I turned in what to me seemed to be an innocuous, purely descriptive piece. The drama began when a well-known Madrid feminist-bureaucrat found out about the piece and intervened, demanding it be removed – in other words, overt censorship. The editor refused. Delays ensued. The conflict rose in the social-services hierarchy until it reached the councillor at the top, who passed my article to her advisers, who gave it the okay. Several months late, the issue appeared with my piece in it. The censoring femocrat was scandalised and I became famous, or notorious, depending on your point of view. Here it is.

Working in the European Sex Industry: Migrant Possibilities 

Migrants who come to work in the European sex industry are of every class, colour, age, ethnicity and nationality, and they are not only women but men and transgender people as well. [1] They arrive via uncountable routes—alone, with friends, in couples or in accompanied groups. Some have money to spend, others arrive indebted. Their documentation may be true or false; some arrive with tourist visas. Many of these people have planned their trips personally over a long time, while others have been presented with an opportunity with little time for planning. Some of these potential travellers had already worked in prostitution in their own country. The great majority, agree sources from all over the world, have understood that their future work will either be prostitution directly or will have a sexual aspect. That is, they have opted for doing sex work.

Before going on I would like to point out that the subject of this essay is not to try to explain why prostitution exists, looking for its causes; nor is it define or judge it within any theoretical framework such as feminism, postmodernism etc. Nor am I going to identify which groups or individuals are found more in this industry and how the involved migratory networks function. Above all I will not be dealing with the question of whether any human being can really ‘choose’ how he works, whether in prostitution or anything else.

I begin with the fact that many migrants doing sexual jobs do not describe themselves as ‘forced’ or without other options in life. They may have fewer options or fewer agreeable options than other people, but they have them. It is also important to point out that among those who suffer from poverty, bad marriages and the entire array of possible causing factors, not all opt for sex work, as not all opt to migrate. No type of determinism can explain completely the human phenomenon of choice. Every choice is intervened by questions of class, gender, ethnicity, economic level and the social conditions at the moment in their country (war, dictatorship, famine, violence, unemployment etc.

Migrants act inside these geopolitical and economic structures and dynamics. The ‘underdeveloped’ countries suffer from the well-known policy of ‘structural adjustment’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The feminisation of poverty and migrations exists. Moreover, opportunities seem to be diminishing all the time, even for people with university degrees. However, within all this, migrants take actions and decisions motivated by the desire to live better. These are life-decisions they take when they uproot themselves from their homes, considering themselves brave and adventuresome, including when the future implies sex work.

While the majority of sex workers is female, increasingly they are men, transgenders and boy and girl children. Sexual services are desire also by women and transgenders, and not only by men. In an industry characterised by its ambiguities, it is better not to perpetuate the classical assumption of woman-prostitute/man-client. I will speak in neutral terms whenever possible.

Migrants more than once

These migrants play a transnational role within globalisation processes. Studies of migrations between, for example, the Caribbean and the ‘first world’ describe the powerful mentality of transnational migrants: the conviction of a Jamaican of the 1950s that London was his ‘capital’’ the effort that migrants from Nevis make to conserve the island as their ‘country’ though they live in Brooklyn; the great capacity to exist in two places at once of ‘dominican yorks’ (Hall, Fog Olwig, Guarnizo and others). Businesses engaged in charter flights, messenger services, long-distance phone calls, Internet and electronic transfers of money have much to tell us about these phenomena.

The fact of having a job in the sex industry does not take his transnational role away from a migrant. Moreover, migrant prostitutes are a special phenomenon: It is normal for them not to settle in one place to live. They continue migrating, or, rather, they continue travelling. The sex worker you encounter today in Madrid you may find tomorrow in Paris, next month in Amsterdam and a year later in Spain again. And this is not solely the result of efforts to avoid police controls; there exists a culture in which people want to get to know Europe and which people have their preferred places. Although they are often poor and illegal, many travel in a cosmopolitan fashion.

The European press almost always presents the subject of these trips in terms of deceived victims. In this essay the subject is those who have chosen, inside their possibilities, por a trip ‘arranged’ for a Some have chosen arranged jobs also; they have actively searched for opportunities in their home countries. There are those who have searched for them as well, to sell them trips and jobs in Europe: in this group are agents (known by a variety of names, from empresarios and travel agents to coyotes, snakeheads, and tourist boy- and girl-friends who have met them during their vacations, as well as family members and friends. When these travellers feel deceived, it is usual for them to complain of the labour conditions they have to accept at their destination. Frequently they have signed a contract without understanding the extensive surveillance and little liberty that it implies. That is, someone who is familiar with a few kinds of prostitution in his own country (for example, dancing with clients in a bar and having sex with two or three in one night cannot know beforehand how he is going to feel standing nude in a window in Amsterdam for twelve or fourteen hours a day, or standing next to a road in the Casa de Campo in Madrid). These are forms of prostitution which can be described as ‘industrial’. [2]

We are already talking of prostitution as work.[3] What does this work consist of? First it is necessary to ask: Which? Continue reading