Sun, Jun 03, 2001 page18

• Looking at the horror behind the face of sexual tourism

  Cliches about the exotic east have done much to create the hotbed of AIDS and human traffic that is a stubborn stain on Thailand's international image

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  In a poor rural village in northeastern Thailand, among the buffalo and the children in rags, a well-dressed man arrives. He's looking, he says, for young people to work in hotels in the south, catering to rich tourists. Wide-eyed adolescents eagerly gather round. He studies them carefully, selects a handful and, after they've signed contracts, he leaves. Their parents are joyful and unsuspecting. Here is the chance of salvation from a poverty that has continued for generations.

  A brochure from the UK's biggest tourist operator gives as its opinion that Thailand resembles "a distant planet peopled by a race of people whose life [is] given over totally to pleasure." A Western business journal asserts that Thais look on sex as "an indoor sport" and that "indiscriminate love-making goes on in every hotel in the land." And The Spartacus Gay Guide insists "Thailand is a gay and a tourist paradise ... with such warm, friendly, happy people and such handsome young men, it is a Mecca for gays ... The most heterosexual young man may readily make love with you if he likes you."

  In place of such dangerous and life-threatening simplifications, this collection of academic essays, Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand, offers a sobering picture of a highly organized sex tourism industry, driven by powerful Western fantasies that have little to do with Thai reality, and everything to do with Western desire, fueled by Western tourist dollars, plus a significant proportion of Thai baht.

  Among the issues discussed are rural poverty, migratory labor, male privilege, anti-feminine traditions within Buddhism, the traditional payment of a bride price, and the long-established institution of prostitution in Thailand.

  To this list could have been added the aristocratic nature of traditional Thai society, where 95 percent of the people work to please and satisfy the other 5 percent, and social hypocrisy, where powerful business interests profit from the prostitution of working class adolescents, but ban any depiction of this in the bookstalls of the luxury hotels they also so frequently own.

  Prostitution is, needless to say, the heart of the matter. It's an operation that these days spells death to many of the sex-workers involved.

  Even before that their lives are routinely harsh. Their employers naturally see to it that they dress well, but the underlying reality is rather different. The way fifty young faces turn towards you in appallingly innocent hope as you enter a bar in Pattaya or Bangkok's Patpong district is a memory that doesn't go away easily.

  In addition, women and boys enticed to Thailand from Burma are frequently held in conditions approaching slavery. They live in cramped and grubby quarters which they're not allowed to leave except with a client. Payment of any kind is routinely withheld until they are judged to have "paid off" the expense of bringing them there, sometimes a period of up to two years.

  Condom use is the crucial issue, representing the difference between life and death for these young people. They might, in today's circumstances, request their customers to use one. But if the customer refuses, as some inevitably do, any worker who then attempts to refuse sex is likely to face brutal treatment from her or his employer. In such circumstances, eventual infection with HIV/AIDS becomes almost a certainty.

  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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