Traditional prostitution

There has been considerable debate in the literature as to how best to interpret the status of women in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. More traditionally minded historians, as well as (ironically) those with a more radically feminist agenda, have often viewed the lives of women as subservient to those of men.Footnote ⁴ This uneasy fellowship has recently been opposed, however, by a newer school of historiography, which chooses to accentuate female autonomy and independence in the sources that have survived.Footnote ⁵ In a broad-angled examination of prostitution in the region, elements of both viewpoints can be found to be applicable to the subject matter at hand. There is no doubt, as Anthony Reid has comprehensively shown, that pre-marital sex, divorce, and sexual pleasure in general were all highly available to Southeast Asian women in the region’s ‘age of commerce’, without the stigmas enjoined by other societies of this time. Equally clear, however, is a general state of affairs where certain strata of women were considered male property, to be dispensed with as their individual owners saw fit. The question posed by Renée Hirschon (and others before her) therefore comes to the fore: ‘To what extent and in what respects do women themselves constitute property?’Footnote ⁶ For ‘traditional’ Southeast Asia, this question must necessarily apply not only to the rise of prostitution but also to its kindred forms – namely, concubinage and the institution of debt-bondage. Partial answers can be garnered through an analysis of three broad categories: the polyglot trading ports, the predominantly Buddhist mainland, and the Islamic world of the sultanates.Footnote ⁷

European sources for the study of pre-modern prostitution are strongest for the ports, as these were generally the ‘ground zeros’ of cross-cultural contact in the region. From the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Europeans and other foreigners commented on the sexual arrangements of various cities, noting the systems of ‘hospitality’ available in regional centres. Throughout Southeast Asia, prostitution per se during this early period was not widespread: other sexual tenures seem to have been much more widely available. ‘Temporary marriages’, whereby women were contracted out as ‘wives’ to resident traders for a set amount of time, have been described for Cambodia, Vietnam, Siam, and Burma during these centuries.Footnote ⁸ Rather than a straightforward commercial arrangement like prostitution, this latter system incorporated individual choice, family involvement, and general social sanction in its structure. The buying of slaves for sexual purposes also became widespread in the region, however, with Chinese traders in particular gaining notice as having ‘second families’ away from their original homes in China. When one of these traders left Southeast Asia for good, he took the children of his union with him, leaving the bonded woman behind.Footnote ⁹ The increasing popularity of this sort of concubinage is attested by higher female slave prices (vis-à-vis their male counterparts) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as price ratios between the two sexes became skewed by 200–300%.Footnote ¹⁰ Prostitution did eventually begin to take hold in the ports, however, as the expectations and social norms of foreigners collided with local systems. The Spaniard Legazpi described perhaps the earliest instance of women being offered out directly for prostitution in the Philippines of the 1570s,Footnote ¹¹ with similar notices being posted for Brunei (same decade) and Patani (in Southern Siam) in 1602. Rangoon had an entire village of slaves/prostitutes in the eighteenth century, with further ‘shanty towns of vice’ developing outside Batavia and Makassar.Footnote ¹² A nobleman in Ayutthaya even managed to obtain a royal monopoly on the institution in the 1680s, pimping out six hundred women who had been bought or enslaved for various acts of wrongdoing.Footnote ¹³

On the Buddhist mainland, prostitution carved its own peculiar position into pre-modern society. Siam’s experience serves as a useful window here, conflating economic, religious, and political factors into one institution. Although Buddhism itself did not condemn prostitution, the very corporeal aspects of the profession and its connections with the ‘desires of this world’ ensured that prostitutes were often thought of as ‘impure’ beings. The sex that they performed was not itself sinful, yet the very fact that prostitutes made their livings off the ‘distractions’ and ‘delusions’ of physical lust symbolically placed these women as low in status.Footnote ¹⁴ The penalty for adultery among elite concubines, therefore, was relegation into the brothels: this constituted an acknowledged drop in the concubine’s class. Politically, however, such women were very useful: they could be advantageously given away (as they often were to soldiers during the Ayutthaya period) as rewards for military prowess. The Siamese monarchy lost little time in realizing the potential profits to be made from the institution, as taxing prostitution could generate substantial reserves of revenue. In the middle of the eighteenth century, for instance, 50,000 baht/annum was made from this trade, as opposed to the only slightly higher figure of 70,000 baht/annum made from taxing all of Siam’s fishing.Footnote ¹⁵ Economically, the end of the Ayutthaya period saw many more women entering the profession than ever before, as land was alienated by the impositions of the Sakdina class and poverty spread in the countryside. At this point there are references among the European sources to prostitutes beginning to sell their services away from the brothels, in an effort to keep more of their fees and to avoid state taxes.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet it would not be until 1909, when slavery itself was finally abolished in the kingdom, that prostitution really exploded in Siam, as the variant forms of sexual exploitation (debt-bondage and concubinage of sold-off women, etc.) gave way to ‘sly’ prostitution on a large scale.Footnote ¹⁷ Thai prostitution thus entered the modern age moulded by a confluence of factors: economic, political, and religious, all three intertwined.Footnote ¹⁸

The control of women’s sexual services has a somewhat different history in the traditional Islamic sultanates of the archipelago. Here there was a growing tension between the exigencies of local practice and the advance of Islamic law (shar‘ia), each of which stipulated different viewpoints on women’s lives in general. The nineteenth-century Sulu Code, for example, ignored the strict proscriptions of shar‘ia and punished different forms of female adultery with different measures; this can be transposed against neighbouring Magindanao, which executed women for this crime according to the letter of Islamic law.Footnote ¹⁹ Throughout the region, however, Muslim trading elites may have been less willing to enter into the temporary marriages described earlier than the merchants of other lands, unless the women were slaves and therefore had no rights over any resulting children.Footnote ²⁰ These tensions were not only historical, however, but also historiographic, as debates over the nature of sexual exploitation in nineteenth-century Malaya makes clear. Reid has argued that the traditional system among peninsular sultanates – whereby the ruler had the automatic right to take women off the land to serve him as he wished – was not in fact predatory, as the women’s ensuing lives of ease (and raised status) compensated for their removal.Footnote ²¹ While approaching the situation from a relativist standpoint has its merits, several extant sources (contemporary and modern) paint quite a different picture. Many of these women may have been forced to practise prostitution as a means of survival, as the court only provided them with an abode and no guarantee of food.Footnote ²² Illicit liaisons, undertaken to pass the time while rulers consorted among the three to four hundred other women who could sometimes form their harems, were punishable by immediate execution.Footnote ²³ Finally, small notices of peasants being struck down and killed as they tried to protect their women from being dragged off to the courts resonate with shades of a different reality from Reid’s.Footnote ²⁴ Though life may have been easier in the istana, it was still an existence away from one’s community, something no economic argument could bridge. In the mainstream of all three of these systems, therefore (port, kingdom, and sultanate) we find a milieu where Southeast Asian women were better off than their counterparts in many places, but still not fully in command of their own sexuality. The arrival of colonialism on a massive scale in the region would change these mechanics considerably, but not the underlying dynamic of exploitation which still permeated prostitution’s survival.

Colonial prostitution

The colonial blanket that began to be extended over Southeast Asia nearly everywhere in the late nineteenth century changed the preconditions of prostitution in several ways. First, the organizers of production on a societal level, as well as those who dictated what an ‘acceptable’ functioning of cultural life in the region should look like, changed from Southeast Asians to Europeans (with the exception of Siam). To draw on a Braudelian concept, the arbiters of the ‘wider structures of everyday existence’Footnote ²⁵ were no longer indigenes themselves but a small coterie of outsiders. This implied certain changes, which will be examined below. Second, these outsiders brought with them a new set of cultural ideologies, into which regional prostitution had to fit itself in new ways. Of importance here were several racial and geographic mythologies that acted to rationalize and give foundation to policies yet to come.Footnote ²⁶ Finally, the ascendance of the mature colonial state also implied the power to act on these newfound privileges, with the full spectrum of modern state structures – organization, information-collection, and physical coercion – at European disposal. The resulting configuration was one in which prostitution phased into dynamic new forms. Three dimensions of these metamorphoses will be analysed here: urban prostitution, rural prostitution (especially in the new plantations), and prostitution under the auspices of the colonial armed forces.

Colonial prostitution as an urban phenomenon took on many different forms. There are several unifying threads to these morphologies, however. First and foremost, the majority of urban prostitution as we have thus far defined it took place in the ports, the seats of European control throughout Southeast Asia. Prostitution in these centres exhibited a distinctly maritime orientation, which helped shape the institution along clear international lines. Paramount here was the heterogeneity of prostitutes’ ethnic identities, as women from all over Asia – China, Japan, and even India – travelled to Southeast Asia’s ports. Poverty drove these movements: a combination of overpopulation, underdevelopment, and increasing vulnerability to the vagaries of the global economy pushed women off the land in the poor southern parts of these three countries, particularly to Southeast Asia. The busy sea-lanes made these metropolises famous from a ‘pull’ perspective, usually as junctures where sailors could buy ‘any race of girl’, and where poor women could go to try to earn a living through the gradual accumulation of hard currency. Singapore postcards of the period solidified this reputation, representing demure prostitutes of several ethnic varieties,Footnote ²⁷ while even in lesser ports (such as Dutch Surabaya) prahus filled with women came to greet visiting freighters.Footnote ²⁸ Customs patrols of the major powers tried to ensure that only voluntary initiates to the profession arrived by sea, but these agents were often outwitted by sophisticated traffickers.Footnote ²⁹ Once in the ports, however, women were cordoned off by race and sent to serve in the brothels that had purchased them. Warren has published street maps of the geography of prostitution in colonial Singapore, while in Surabaya the canals were the focus of these activities. In American Manila, the Botanical Gardens occupied the same niche.Footnote ³⁰ Prostitution was not exclusively a phenomenon of the ports, however, as records from Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, and even tiny Taiping make clear.Footnote ³¹ The same process of rural-to-urban integration was occurring throughout Southeast Asia at this time, with similar dynamics and consequences being manifested in many places. As mostly male migrants left the land and entered the cities in search of work, prostitution evolved responsively in order to serve rising demand. Women came into the cities seasonally as well, either sold off the land by destitute families or even sometimes by choice.Footnote ³² The amounts of money that could be earned by prostitutes in urban areas often dwarfed the remunerative possibilities available through rural livelihoods.

Outside the cities, prostitution throve as well, only in significantly altered forms. The arrival of plantations on a mass scale in Southeast Asia changed rural conditions, providing new opportunities – and dangers – for women in the region. Prostitution, and the kin-institution of concubinage, became an important part of plantation systems.Footnote ³³ By 1945, 60% of the population of French rubber plantations in Vietnam was comprised of women workers, many of whom were used by the French for sexual labour as well.Footnote ³⁴ In a more general sense, the destruction of local cottage industries (such as weaving, animal domestication, and local manufacturing) by French economic policies pushed many more women into the bedrooms of local landlords, who took advantage of heightened poverty to ‘purchase’ landed women.Footnote ³⁵ From Sumatra the statistics are even more revealing: as late as 1930 only 30% of male plantation workers indicated that they were married,Footnote ³⁶ creating an atmosphere (very much by Dutch design) that was conducive to sexual marketing. Female Javanese contract workers were shipped to Sumatra by boat: their wages were then kept artificially low so that many had no choice but to prostitute themselves to survive. Exchange networks of these women circulated through the plantations: one woman was handed over a total of seven times in a year, while a Dutch overseer went through seventeen more in the same amount of time.Footnote ³⁷ In Malaya, planters hired by large companies could lose their jobs for this sort of behaviour, so Tamil women were exchanged from neighbouring plantations in order to evade the prohibition.Footnote ³⁸ Far more common, however, was the maintenance of single concubines (sometimes retired Japanese prostitutes from the cities, who had a reputation for being ‘clean’) by planters in the Malayan outstations. A colonial surgeon who made the rounds of these isolated homesteads noted that young women were pushed behind the curtains every time he visited remote plantations.Footnote ³⁹ This situation would only change in the closing years of British rule, with the development of more roads, the migration of European women, and the issuing of edicts forbidding such ‘colonial moralities’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet perhaps nowhere was prostitution more visible as part of the changes wrought by colonialism than in its connections with European armed forces. Imperial policies of all the great powers in the region took for granted that their troops would need access to sexual diversions. Southeast Asian women provided this labour pool in abundant variety. In Vietnam, the colonial administration regulated the ages of prostitutes through ethnic bifurcation: the few white women who made it out to Indochina had to be twenty-one years or older to practice the profession, while ‘natives’ needed only to have reached their eighteenth birthday. Registration and regular medical exams ensured a watchful eye on disease: prostitutes in government-approved houses were required to wear copper wrist-bracelets, which signified their freedom from the ravages of VD. This did little to ensure prostitute welfare, however. In 1933, French medical officers were still sending women to the hospitals, mostly from ‘very great exhaustion, having been obliged to receive an excessive number of customers’.Footnote ⁴¹ In the Straits, the extension of the Cantonement Acts (after the Contagious Disease Ordinances had already been repealed in Britain in the 1880s) ensured that soldiers could still visit ‘clean’ prostitutes, as the government maintained rights over female examination. When this too was lost in 1895, servicemen partook of pleasure at their own risk, at least until the late 1920s, when prostitution was outlawed throughout British Asia.Footnote ⁴² In the Indies, barracks concubinage was put forward as the answer to the military’s ‘woman problem’, which was debated both in Holland and Batavia on the basis of morality. Soldiers were allowed government-registered women as concubines in the garrisons, until pressure on the institution forced cordoned-off ‘sleeping chambers’, and gradually, abolition.Footnote ⁴³ With the decline of licensed concubinage, licensed prostitution took its place – the colonial army even supplied prophylactics, in the form of liquid drops.Footnote ⁴⁴ Only in the second decade of the twentieth century did the majority of these situations change, as imperial moralities were questioned throughout Southeast Asia and the matrix of prostitution changed.

Military prostitution

Systems of sexual exploitation practiced by the British, Dutch, and French imperial forces eventually found fuller expression in the later years of the twentieth century. The Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II initiated an elaboration of previous patterns, as Hirohito’s armies consolidated wide stretches of territory and then saw to the diversion of the troops. The American presence in the Vietnam War triggered a boom in that country’s prostitution, as an entire ‘R & R’ industry was erected to entertain soldiers away from the front. Finally, the maintenance of US bases throughout the Asia–Pacific region – but particularly in the Philippines in the 1980s – created another edifice of dependency, as a significant sector of the Philippine economy geared itself toward prostitution. These are only three examples of prostitution’s connection with the military in twentieth-century Southeast Asia, though there are certainly many others.Footnote ⁴⁵ What is compelling about these three examples, however, is the scale upon which exploitation operated, and the phasing nature of prostitution’s control into the hands of non-Southeast Asians. This trend had already started in at least one of our ‘traditional’ models: the multi-ethnic trading ports of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Under colonialism, this changing cadence became even more pronounced: shifts in the morphological structure of pan-regional prostitution were now primarily being dictated by outsiders. With the ascendance of ‘mature’ military prostitution in the middle decades of the twentieth century, this changing power dynamic became even more apparent. How this situation evolved, functioned, and progressed forms the content of this section.

Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia during the Second World War was a disaster for women in the region. In contrast to the workings of colonialism, which at least paid lip service to the notion of boosting indigenous welfare, the Japanese military saw Southeast Asian women as pawns to appease its own war-weary soldiers. From an economic standpoint only, a certain proportion of the sexual exploitation of the occupation was perhaps logical: the general instability and poverty created by the fighting generated situations where villagers often had to allow their daughters to go to the Japanese in order to survive.Footnote ⁴⁶ Less a by-product of troubled times, however, and more the unfolding of a discrete national policy was the systematic capturing of women into conditions of military slavery. These sexual directives are evident in pan-Southeast Asian dimensions. In the Philippines, the Ermita section of Manila was transformed into a ‘sprawling Yoshiwara’,Footnote ⁴⁷ at the same time that rural women were kept in caves over long periods of time to be raped by Japanese soldiers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many regional women learned simply to hide or disguise themselves at the approach of Japanese troops,Footnote ⁴⁹ though most were not so lucky. Especially in Indonesia, the record is rich (both from the standpoint of women’s and Japanese soldiers’ remembrances) as to how exploitation functioned. Japanese units in occupied territories often circulated announcements that wage-work was available in war-related efforts (that is, sewing, small-scale manufacturing, etc.), which drew women into their grasp, usually in the towns. Once it became clear that no such employment was offered, bamboo houses were erected, which were then surrounded by guards and high fences. Brothels sprouted up everywhere and were organized around rigid schedules. In Ambon the infantry came by day and the officers by night, while in Denpassar there were hours for the navy and a separate timetable for the army. In all cases, tickets were handed out, which were held by servicemen as they formed queues out of the door. One security guard wondered when the women rested, as many of the brothels were open twenty-four hours a day.Footnote ⁵⁰

The prostitution that appeared around the American arrival in Vietnam was less coerced in a direct sense, but perhaps no less so when one considers the rural depopulation tactics undertaken by the United States military. Forced urbanization, bombings, and defoliation eventually swelled Saigon’s population to four million, with the Senate Sub-Committee on Refugees estimating that more than ten million Vietnamese fled their villages between 1965 and 1973.Footnote ⁵¹ The American destruction of rural livelihoods (as the French had accomplished before them) ensured that Vietnamese footsteps were geared toward cities and bases, where prostitution became a standout in new shantytown landscapes.Footnote ⁵² Formally, prostitution was introduced gradually to soldiers in-country: first there were bar-girls, then there were massage parlours for the marines at Da Nang, and finally the multi-dimensional sin-complexes known as ‘Dogpatches’ began to circle bases.Footnote ⁵³ Although prostitution was still illegal in Vietnam, the government winked at its existence: one minister was even quoted as saying that ‘the Americans need girls. We need dollars. Why should we refrain from the exchange?’Footnote ⁵⁴ Tu Do Street became the epicentre of Saigon’s red-light district, with over 200 agencies for ‘recruiting’ and 20,000 bars, hotels, and brothels offering women for sale. By the height of the war there were 300,000–500,000 prostitutes in Vietnam, an estimated 54% of whom suffered from VD.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sex went for 300 piasters a session: about US$3 at the start of the conflict, but only 75 cents an encounter by the end.Footnote ⁵⁶ When America began to lose the war many GIs tried to ‘ship’ prostitutes back home, either as lovers or (occasionally) into new pimping networks of their own.Footnote ⁵⁷ Prostitution in the Vietnam era was not even confined to Vietnam alone, however: the staging bases, procurement networks, and poverty of the conflict drew in women from neighbouring countries as well, such as Thailand, Laos, and even the Philippines.Footnote ⁵⁸ American soldiers also travelled to these same countries by the thousands during their ‘R & R’ leaves for sexual purposes.

Indeed, ‘base prostitution’ in the Philippines as a partially vestigial manifestation of the Vietnam War has survived almost until the present day. While the Subic Bay naval base (built on 17,000 acres of rich coastal fishing grounds) had been in US possession since the turn of the twentieth century, other military stations (such as Clarke Air Force base, built on 55,000 acres of prime agricultural land) were much newer innovations.Footnote ⁵⁹ A total of 15,000 US servicemen resided annually in Subic Bay alone, with a further 18,000 disembarking in port every time a new aircraft carrier group arrived. Such vast numbers of regularly unattached males created a situation ripe for prostitution, which the United States military did everything to encourage. Navy retirees set up bars, clubs, and massage parlours around Subic Bay, with the military itself issuing ‘sexual report-cards’, which women had to present upon the demands of military police.Footnote ⁶⁰ When the big ships came to town, the numbers of Filipina prostitutes in Olongapo jumped from an estimated 20,000 (registered and unregistered) to 25,000 or more.Footnote ⁶¹ Most of these ‘casual workers’ hailed from the poorer parts of Pampanga Province and Metro-Manila, while the full-time workers came from destitute southern islands such as Samar, Leyte, and Luzon’s southern Bicol.Footnote ⁶² Twenty-four-hour shifts were not at all uncommon during these dockings, as US$200 per week could sometimes be made. (In ‘slow times’, money often had to be borrowed from pimps and the bar-owners.Footnote ⁶³) To see just how pervasive this ‘base industry’ had become, it is worth noting that, by 1985, the United States was the second-largest employer in all of the Philippines – with prostitution alone injecting US$500 million into the national economy.Footnote ⁶⁴ Cash was not the only legacy of the military’s stay in Clarke and Subic Bay, however, which only ended in the early 1990s. AIDS was also brought, as well as 50,000 mixed-race children. By the late 1980s, some of the older descendants of American servicemen and local women had already begun prostituting on their own, in fact, largely because of the barriers of racial discrimination and continued poverty.Footnote ⁶⁵

Sex tourism

The decision of the Philippine government not to renew the leases of American bases in the Philippines in 1991 single-handedly destroyed a large percentage of the prostitution industry in that country. The largest subset of Southeast Asian prostitution since the Vietnam War, however, has not been affiliated with bases: both for the Philippines and Thailand (the two countries with the largest American military presences during the conflict), tourism is the phenomenon that has most abetted prostitution’s growth. Kathleen Barry has commented that ‘sex tourism is the counterpoint to military demand for prostitution. It was originated by pimps when there was a slack in the market created by the withdrawal of troops at the end of the Vietnam War.’Footnote ⁶⁶ This is not wholly true. Sex tourism has existed for a long time on the global scene, in many countries and in many guises throughout history.Footnote ⁶⁷ Where Barry is certainly correct, however, is in ascribing a solid connection between the rise of tourism on an enormous international scale and the growth of prostitution throughout the developing world.Footnote ⁶⁸ This section of the article will chart three aspects of the ‘sex tourism phenomenon’ in Southeast Asia. First, a short overview will be given as to how the West is able to practice sex tourism in Southeast Asia – both from material and ideological standpoints. Second, two epicentres of the international sex industry – Thailand and the Philippines – will be examined as focal points of this ‘prostitution vortex’. Finally, the spread of sex tourism into parts of the region that are much less renowned for the institution – Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia – will also be touched upon. This last category serves as a useful lead into the final section of the paper: how prostitution links the centres and peripheries of modern Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁶⁹

Edward Said’s path-breaking book Orientalism has alerted the West to its own long-standing tradition of feminizing and disempowering ‘the East’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This gaze, and the very real practical ramifications that have stemmed from it, have been part of Western culture for several centuries: as a way of both conceptualizing a European identity and offsetting an Asian ‘Other’ (decayed, less powerful, and usually female) at the same time. Organized sex tourism to Southeast Asia is one of the most recent by-products of this continued tradition, but one which continually relies on – and refers to – a stockpile of cultural assumptions. Asia thus remains a poor, passive, and sexualized place in many modern images, which is reflected in the literature published by the sex tours themselves. Pamphlets that describe the waiting women as ‘slim, sunburnt, and sweet, (who) love the white man in an erotic and dedicated way’ perpetuate a stereotype that can be made a reality (through poverty) to the buyers of the tour.Footnote ⁷¹ Some organizations with fewer pretences to the ‘wholesome’ products they supply instead play on ‘forbidden fruit’ themes: ‘here if you want extremely young girls or … something for which you get “hanged” in your home country, you can find it without the risk’.Footnote ⁷² The use of these images in sex tour advertisements is hardly surprising, as they merely play off stereotypes, in a more honest and directly capitalist way, that are already culturally embedded. Yet it is the reiteration of these themes again and again in the Western media that partially predicates the existence of sex tourism as a purchasable reality. Literature and even well-meaning documentary journalism contribute in their own ways: writers describe at length the specialties of certain ‘clubs’, while photographs of child-prostitutes manage to sexualize their misery.Footnote ⁷³

A common denominator here is profit, as many philanthropically minded ventures still need to titillate (for sales) even while they instruct. And indeed it is money in the first place – lent money, from institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, which sought to build tourism as a revenue device for poorer nationsFootnote ⁷⁴ – which has most helped this dialectic along. As regimes such as Marcos’ in the Philippines sought to attract tourist dollars, the ‘beauty and hospitality’ of Filipina women – and their availability – were played up in promotions. These complicated confluences of issues – monetary inequalities between North and South, directed growth campaigns, and mythologies of sexual permissiveness – have come to create Southeast Asian sex tourism on a mass scale. Sex has been transnationalized, with prostitution flowing across borders. Over 50,000 Australian men now go on sex tours to the region each year, with over a million Japanese men visiting the rest of Asia for exactly the same purpose.Footnote ⁷⁵ International legal structures, even as recently as 2007, have struggled to keep up with these same massive human flows.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Philippines and especially Thailand have been at the centre of this storm. Both countries have been experiencing tourist booms for the past two decades: Thailand alone made US$1.5 billion from tourism in 1986, more than from any other source, including its traditional export staple of rice.Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet it is the nature of this tourism – not merely the numbers – that is instructive for our purposes. Bangkok has 400,000 more women living inside its city limits than men, yet male tourists outnumbered female tourists by 300% in the 1980s; at the same point, 85% of the Philippines’ incoming visitors were men.Footnote ⁷⁸ While some of these percentages were undoubtedly outside either government’s control, directed policies may have been partially responsible as well. The Thai Tourist Board was making an active effort in the mid-1980s to encourage more Japanese men to visit, and to induce them to stay longer than the four days per trip that was their average.Footnote ⁷⁹ By 2003, 60% of Thailand’s ten million visitors per year were coming from Asia, and most of these were men.Footnote ⁸⁰

Prostitution catering to foreigners, as might be expected, throve in this atmosphere. Although still officially illegal in Thailand, by the early 1980s Bangkok possessed 119 massage parlours, 119 barber shops-cum-massage parlours, 97 nightclubs, 248 disguised brothels, and 394 disco/restaurants, nearly all of which sold sex.Footnote ⁸¹ Government agencies in the Philippines at the same time estimated that there were 100,000 ‘hospitality girls’ living in Metro-Manila, all of whom could also be contracted for sex. A resounding 90% of these Filipinas said they had entered into the ‘sex tourism market’ because of economic need, with 83% remitting money to the provinces.Footnote ⁸² Bumping and gyrating on neon stages for fifteen-minute shifts at a time, they could be bought out of the bar for a night’s entertainment, sometimes undertaken in cubicles in the back. Whatever money these women did see after cuts had been skimmed off the top (by several people in the organization – owners, floor-managers, bartenders, etc.) would be spent on ‘work-related expenses’: clothes, make-up, and required medical fees. Money also had to be harboured in case of arrest: pimps, establishment-owners, and customers (as opposed to the prostitutes themselves) were not usually the targets of sweeps by police.Footnote ⁸³ This entire edifice of sex tourism prevailed in the Philippines until the mid 1990s, when the incoming Mayor Lim of Manila – on a campaign platform of cleaning up urban vice – closed down most of the clubs. In Bangkok, however, the physical structure of sex tourism has only become larger.

One of the ramifications of the full maturation of sex tourism has been a ripple-effect in areas far from the centre. Especially in poor border areas, for example, women are increasingly being marketed into the cities, where prices for sex are inevitably the highest. Marlise Simons noted a ‘striking absence of teenagers in Lahu, Karen, Akha and Hmong villages’ on the Thai–Burmese border, as young girls were sold for the tourist trade in distant Bangkok.Footnote ⁸⁴ This trend will be discussed further in the next section of the paper, but the movement of prostitution away from international centres of the trade seems important here. It suggests that sex tourism, like many other socio-economic phenomena, is often rhythmic in appearance: flowering in one spot until it becomes overripe, only to move on to new soil where conditions are better for growth. Something of that nature seems to be happening right now in Southeast Asia. Because of a complex set of reasons (increased education, internal politics, nationalism, and AIDS), sex tourism has fallen off in contemporary Manila: the Lim Administration drove it underground in the 1990s. There are many other parts of Southeast Asia, however, which are beginning to pick up the slack. In Vietnam, the upsurge of the market economy has created conditions ideal for sex tourism’s growth. With an estimated 3.7 million people nationally unemployed, plus the arrival of many new foreigners eager for investment opportunities, increases in the numbers of urban prostitutes have been universally reported.Footnote ⁸⁵ The government says there are 100,000 professional prostitutes in Vietnam (52% of them in Ho Chi Minh City), but these figures are probably low, and do not represent reality. The fact that the number of underage prostitutes in the capital has steadily risen in even the Ministry of Labour’s calculations suggests that the demand for virgins – ‘untainted’ (that is undiseased) sex, a hallmark of sex tourism in Thailand next door – is now reaching Vietnam. William Vollman’s published jaunts through Cambodia, where he picked up prostitutes in the new discos of several cities, shows that this particular aspect of sexual exploitation has started to emerge even in the residue of Pol Pot’s ‘killing fields’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Finally, Batam island in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago (which was recently joined with Singapore and the Malaysian state of Johore into an economic ‘growth triangle’) has become overrun with massage parlours and clubs, catering to the sexual needs of employees and foreign tourists. The traffic is especially high on weekend nights, when Singaporeans and Malaysians travel down to the island for cheaper sex than they can find at home.Footnote ⁸⁷ These are the newest sex tourisms of Southeast Asia, though they probably won’t be the last. To see why this cycle maintains such strength and durability in the face of change, we must turn to a final conceptual consideration: urban/rural ties, and how they interact in the region.

Cities, borders, and change

The new ‘global order’ (or disorder) of our planet is characterized by certain trends: the mushrooming rise of sprawling urban complexes, increasing instability on the world’s borders, and widening dichotomies between North and South, to name just a few. All of these phenomena relate to prostitution, pushing and pulling the institution into new shapes and forms. In Southeast Asia, the spiralling growth of cities has intensified a practice of long standing: migration into metropolises for wage-work, as peasants enter the economies of the wider world (regional, national, and international) while fleeing poverty and the land. Prostitution has become a salient part of women’s experiences within these processes, as it often offers the highest wages that lower-class women can earn. Borders between nations have also become the scene of increased prostitution, when wars, poverty, and lawlessness in general create zones conducive to the trafficking of women. Transnational factors can also come into play here in other guises, however, such as in the ‘gullibility’ of border peoples to larger systems of deception (by virtue of their comparative isolation) and the sanctioning role of religion (vis-à-vis prostitution or sexual permissiveness in general) on a single side of a border. Finally, the new world order is also characterized by a new internationalization of sex that is not quite ‘sex tourism’ as we have thus far defined it, but rather the varied optimizations of poverty by outsiders in the region. Expatriate living arrangements, out-migration of women to the bars of ‘First World’ countries (such as Germany and Japan) and even the presence of UNTAC troops in war-torn Cambodia all contributed to the exploitation of women, on national and regional scales. This final section of the article examines some of the implications of these trends as they relate to Southeast Asian prostitution’s ‘post-modern condition’ in a rapidly-changing world.Footnote ⁸⁸

First and foremost, prostitution in the region has always been (and continues to be) a predominantly domestic phenomenon. Although Patpong Road in Bangkok is an arresting image in and of itself, ‘the majority of women working in prostitution don’t do so under the neon signs of the massage parlors, but rather in traditional enclave brothels located in back streets’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pay for this kind of profession is invariably higher than that which is available elsewhere to women: in Thailand, urban prostitutes can earn 5000 Baht a month, as compared to an average of 840 Baht for all other women’s work combined.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is no wonder, then, that many women see prostitution as a rational economic decision – especially in countries such as the Philippines, where 80% of the population live below the international poverty line.Footnote ⁹¹ The vagaries of nature in the region can also help to make these decisions for women: in 1991, for example, after floods hit the southern Philippine island of Leyte, officials in Cebu reported enormous increases in the city’s population of women practising prostitution.Footnote ⁹² There are many other instances of this ‘natural’ dialectic at work.Footnote ⁹³ Yet it is also the presence of some very deliberate human forces – with an interest in prostitution as a means toward substantial monetary gain – that propels the system along. Trafficking networks and organized crime are obvious candidates here (about which more in a moment), but even police forces have managed to accomplish their share. In Chiang Mai, for instance, women pay a daily fine of 30 Baht to the police, which, if tabulated against the number of prostitutes and the number of policemen in the city, works out at 2,250 Baht payments every month, a boon for the average man on the force.Footnote ⁹⁴ Perhaps anticipating knowledge of this widespread state of affairs, a Thai General of Police has said ‘Often the police can’t do anything because they know that the men behind the operation … are those whose pictures are frequently seen in the newspapers, attending parties with top-ranking policemen and officials’.Footnote ⁹⁵ There is more to the story here than the implicit compliance of the police, however. The mores of many Southeast Asian societies themselves sanction prostitution, either as a legitimate sacrifice for a woman to make in the interests of the family economy, or as part of the inherent ‘privileges’ that should be available to men. A 1992 survey concluded that 75% of Thai men have visited prostitutes at one time or another, which is only partially the result of expectations that men should be ‘experienced’ by the time of their marriages, while women should not.Footnote ⁹⁶ The greater issue here is one of male sexual autonomy in general, alongside a ‘virgin/whore’ double standard that has been a feature of much of Southeast Asia as a region.Footnote ⁹⁷

Culture and ideology have also been bent in the service of prostitution across adjoining borders. It is no accident that a country such as Malaysia, which has much more rigid views on the place of women in society than neighbouring Thailand, winks at the illicit flow of prostitution across its border to the north.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nor is it an accident that traffickers have found fertile recruitment grounds for girls in the hill tribe areas between Thailand and Burma, where culture and geography have colluded to make many women unaware of the lives that they may be entering.Footnote ⁹⁹ Very few of these teenagers are actually coerced into the trade while still in their own territory: rather it is the false promises of jobs and cash that induces many families to part with their daughters on the assumption that they will receive ‘honest work’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Mostly, however, it is the ‘Wild West’ nature of these border regions that makes them so productive, usually as vast ‘feeder regions’ for markets somewhere else. On the Thai/Burmese border, for instance, ‘brothel gangs’ possess armaments and widespread geographic connections, reaching from Mae Hong Son in the north to Ranong in the distant south.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Girls are often held in safe houses surrounded by barbed wire fences (some of them electrified), while traffickers make faxes and telephone calls to gauge the prospective market.Footnote ¹⁰² Not all are shipped out, however: the Burmese military junta has made consistent use of the hill-tribe populations as sources for their own ‘comfort women’, who are then compelled to service soldiers while other divisions continue fighting.Footnote ¹⁰³ Under these circumstances, it is little wonder that some women will enter Thai prostitution on an almost voluntary basis, like one Shan woman in Chiang Mai who commented that ‘when I was in my village, the Burmese soldiers came and forced me to have sex with them. It was as if I was a prostitute, except I received no payment. At least now I receive some payment and it is not so dangerous for me.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While this situation may be worst along this particular border, it is by no means localized to Thailand and Burma. Elements of this dialectic can be found in Cambodia, Indonesia, and even Southern China.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Finally, the internationalization of the sex trade in Southeast Asia must be seen in its variant forms other than tourism. While sex tourism has certainly been the cause célèbre of activists against regional prostitution, it is only one aspect of a larger superstructure of outside exploitation directed against area women. Expatriates in Asia, for example, carry on a thriving business in buying local women at true bargain prices: the fact that the former get paid in the hard currencies of their own countries (which is then factored against global rates of exchange) ensures an ever-ready supply of sexual services for men away from home. Alison Murray has explored these interactions through her fieldwork in Jakarta in the mid 1980s: she found that most urban prostitutes dreamed of the day when they might land positions as long-term ‘contract wives’. This alternative was certainly better than small-time prostitution, which earned only US$2–US$3 per client and was still relied upon to feed up to eighteen relatives in the villages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Even well-intentioned outsiders who have travelled to the region have entered this dialectic in other ways: the arrival of the UN forces in Cambodia as peacekeepers during the civil war caused a boom in that country’s prostitution, with women from as far away as Vietnam being brought in to satisfy local demand.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet it is the appearance of another, related phenomenon on a mass scale that throws these varied experiences into relief: the movement of Southeast Asian women to other countries to work as prostitutes abroad, reversing the colonial pattern of movement in the opposite direction. Capital flows of investment here can almost be matched by alternative flows of women: 50,000 Thai prostitutes leave for Japan each year, while double that number originate from the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As with earlier scenarios, a significant proportion of these migrants are tricked into ‘the life’: the Yakuza and local (Southeast Asian) trafficking syndicates have now joined hands to ‘facilitate’ procurement processes. Some women, however, apparently know what their forged work permits really mean, although they often have no idea about the grim realities waiting for them in Japan.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A job selling sex in a ‘First World’ nation means currency to remit, so long as the degradation is not too dangerous or permanent. A mother from one Philippine squatter community may speak for many when she told the Manila Chronicle that ‘it is better that my daughter sleeps with men in Japan and makes some money than she sleeps with jobless men here and winds up pregnant’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Systemic poverty is one of the pillars of exploitation here, not just international trafficking. This helps to explain the wide diversity of Southeast Asian ‘sending nations’, as well as the avid response these prostitutes receive – themselves poor, disoriented, and often with little choice in the lifestyle set before them – from customers all over the world.Footnote ¹¹¹

Conclusion

Prostitution has a long and convoluted history in Southeast Asia. Traditionally practiced in both Islamic and Buddhist societies, the institution was fundamentally changed by the region’s collision with outsiders. Women’s sexual labour became a purchasable commodity in the ports, a different sort of ‘contract’ (strictly economic versus economic/social) than in the istanas or the courts. If prostitution in these latter venues still functioned within social sanction, however, cultural approval did not necessarily imply an existence filled with ease. Records from many sultanates and kingdoms have made this abundantly clear. Prostitutes were still exploited and subservient to men, so that even while escaping rural poverty their bodies remained owned by powerful outsiders. Colonialism only acted to exacerbate this exploitation, pushing more and more women into the market for sex. A certain proportion of this movement may have been incidental: in the transition to directed rule, instability and poverty created many desperate women. Far more apparent, however, is a legacy of prostitution as a frequently directed colonial policy. Imperial governments in the region often used indigenous sexualities toward clearly determined ends, even if there was heated discussion and debate amongst Europeans as to the morality of such programmes.

What tradition and colonial edifices built, armed forces elaborated and then perfected. Prostitution was brought to new levels of size and organization by various militaries in the region. The Japanese began this dialectic in the 1940s, but the cycle was not brought to full fruition until American involvement in the Vietnam War. The bases that remained in the region until the early 1990s, each surrounded by a prostitute shanty town of its own, served as a potent reminder of this history. When the soldiers left en masse, tourists began taking their place, continuing a venerable tradition of ‘sex tourism’ as old as prostitution itself. The numbers of sex tourists to Southeast Asia has increased every year, despite the potential spectre of a holocaust of AIDS. Sexual mythologies spur these vast migrations, as do systemic inequalities between global North and South. Yet it is the structure of the region’s ‘cultural economy’ – patriarchal, predominantly agrarian, but increasingly geared toward international capitalism – that sets the preconditions for exploitation. Sex tourism, brothel slavery, and trafficking networks into cities will not cease soon, until these building blocks of inequality have undergone a metamorphosis.

An examination of morphological shifts in Southeast Asian prostitution achieves certain aims. First, by adopting a wide-angled lens it becomes apparent that the vaunted historical ‘autonomy’ of Southeast Asian women’s lives is at best a relative concept. Women of this region may have been ‘freer’ in history than their Chinese or Indian counterparts, but this does not mean that they were free. Secondly, the linear progression of Southeast Asian prostitution reveals a coherent pattern: over the course of the twentieth century (and before), sexual exploitation existed but was exacerbated by contact with outsiders. Before the imposition of ‘high colonialism’, prostitution as we now know it was only a feature of the ports: yet soon plantations, mines, and colonial barracks everywhere also supported the institution. The heightened organizational (and coercive) powers of foreigners later in the century widened this gambit even further, but visitors finally settled on wealth – economic differentials – as a medium of control. Expatriates in Jakarta, club-owners in Tokyo, and tourists in Bangkok all rely on this disparity to enjoy Southeast Asian prostitution. While the exploitation of women would no doubt still exist if Europeans had never arrived, their appearance does seem to have acted as a watershed in the sexual history of the region. For this reason if for no other, modern prostitution in Southeast Asia can claim three parents as its own: culture, poverty, and the sidelong leer of the stranger at the door.