When you add to this the fact that it's almost a tradition among some Thai men to continue to use prostitutes even after marriage, and that they then carry any infection back into their families, the real consequences of even an approximation of a "life given over totally to pleasure" are grim indeed.
One of the saddest pages in this book describes interviews with Thai wives who are asked how seriously they treat visits by their husbands to prostitutes. The first reaction is laughter. Then they tell the interviewer that they don't mind too much so long as he doesn't do it too often (my italics).
This displays a terrifying ignorance of the situation regarding sexually transmitted disease, and the likely end-result of AIDS infection when people cannot afford the expensive modern drugs that represent the victim's only realistic hope.
The academic nature of this book is its main weakness. We get airings of all the conventional sanctities currently fashionable in universities, but what is missing is a touch of genuine passion.
A far more powerful book was published three years ago, Chris Beyrer's War in the Blood (White Lotus Books, Bangkok, and Zed Books, New York and London). Beyrer spent many years working alongside doctors and nurses battling HIV/AIDS near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. In the small town he was located in, Fang, such a high percentage of the prostitutes were HIV-positive that the medics found it best to work on the assumption that they were all infected.
Nonetheless, Beyrer went on to point out that Thailand was pursuing the most enlightened anti-AIDS tactics of any country in the region, undertaking sex-education, condom promotion, free provision of needles for heroin addicts, and so on. Elsewhere in the area -- in India, Malaysia and the PRC, for instance -- political ideology stood in the way of such simple but effective measures. Condoms were felt to encourage sexual promiscuity, and clean needles to condone drug use. As a result, AIDS infection was going down in Thailand, while the opposite was the case elsewhere.
Unfortunately no such trenchant, campaigning rhetoric is in evidence here. Even so, while hardly compulsive reading, this book provides a welcome antidote to romantic Western preconceptions of the exotic East. In the place of over-simplified ideas of Thai sexuality, it looks at a situation rooted in economic power -- the power of the rich, of wage-earning husbands, and of the developed, industrialized nations -- and the need of the poor to make money by what they perceive as one of the few means available to them.
As such, it's a modest but useful addition to the consideration of one of Asia's most threatening problems.
Publication Notes:
Genders and sexualities in modern thailand
Edited by Peter A. Jackson & Nerida M. Cook
289 pages
University Of Washington Press
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