He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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SELLING SEX (ii) |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  3 November 2003 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
Three weeks since the last column, I have now settled in Bangkok, at least to the extent of having an apartment to call my own, a telephone to connect me to the internet and a social life (albeit one that veers more towards the hedonistic than the cultural). I am therefore back in the business of looking for work and writing my weekly column. It's tempting to make my first contribution from this city a pithy comment on Thai mores, painting a picture of the exotic that is both amusing and patronising and that reinforces my image as a sophisticated globe-trotter. I could comment on the current state of the street stalls and sex shows in Silom Road, which ebb and flow according to the whim of the mayor or police chief or whether a host of foreign dignatories is in town. I could make reference to the difficulties of learning a language with five different tones, both aspirated and unaspirated voiced plosives, and a script that represents the same sounds with a range of superfluous letters. And I'm sure I could comment on a host of other phenomena, from the heat to the mangy dogs, from the traffic to the ubiquitous shopping malls. But to do so would draw yawns from one set of readers and mockery from those for whom Krungthep has been home for many years and who would either laugh at or be irritated by the misunderstandings and half-truths such a column would contain. So I'll refrain from commenting on life in the Big Mango (one of the stupider nicknames conferred on Bkk) and write instead on an issue that is currently the subject of debate among some of the chattering classes here - and which coincidentally I am also working on. (In doing so, I admit I am covering old ground; in a previous column I wrote on the issue from a slightly different perspective and used the same title that I am too lazy to change here.) The question is whether to legalise sex work. I do not know enough about this country to confirm whether it is the sex worker, the client, the third party (pimp or brothel keeper or whoever facilitates the meeting between worker and client) or a combination of the three who is theoretically the criminal. In fact, the issue is almost irrelevant, given that prostitution is so widespread and ingrained in Thai culture (as it is in many others), that strict enforcement of the law lies somewhere on the spectrum between between extremely unlikely and downright impossible. But whether the debate takes place here or elsewhere, it is usually grounded in one of two concepts: prostitution degrades women and must therefore be stopped, or prostitution indeed degrades women but it cannot be stopped, only controlled. It is true that there are elements of prostitution that are degrading, and many, if not most sex workers would prefer to earn their income through other means. Across the world women are tricked into sex work and find it difficult to escape; examples range from the Albanians trapped in London massage parlours to the Thai women who end up in bonded labour as sex workers in Japan. But to see prostitution as synonymous with the degradation and exploitation of women is to misunderstand the nature of sex work and of human sexuality. Any debate around prostitution is pointless without a clear understanding of why people have sex. And that discussion is often muddled by confusion between the concepts of, on the one hand, the physical, psychological and cultural impetuses that lead individuals to have some form of sexual contact with others, and, on the other hand, the circumstances in which we "should" have sex. Taking the first concept first, people have sex, or try to have sex, or want to have sex, for a multitude of reasons that range from the hormones that send blood flooding into our penises or clitorises, to concepts of masculinity and femininity that define socially acceptable partners, to the self-esteem, or lack of it, which encourages us to (or dissuades us from) be sexually active. From this perspective, sex is a physical activity no different from any other (such as sleep, eating, excreting and exercise) which is partly determined by our bodies and partly by our conscious and subconscious minds. There is no reason why we should not have sex as often as we like, with whoever we like, as long as our actions do not infringe our partner's autonomy - in other words, sex should be mutually agreed, should not be with minors, should be carried out in a manner that does not pass on disease and which does not result in conception unless both parties agree. At the other end of this concept as to why we have sex is the belief held by most mainstream religions, that sex should not be dictated by desire, or rather that desire should either be repressed or channeled into heterosexual marriage. (The Roman Catholic Church further insists that sex should only be for procreation, but most other religions are less restrictive.) While there are long-term historical reasons for preferring most sex to take place within the structure of marriage - concerned with acknowledging fatherhood, avoiding the implications of incest and settling property disputes in societies where women were considered to belong to men etc - to insist that the whole human race limit its sexual activity to within marriage is at best pointless and at worst hypocritical and harmful. The reality is, of course, that in cultures where most people have achieved a sense of physical and psychological wellbeing, most individual's attitudes towards sex is somewhere between the anything-goes approach and marriage-only approach; in other words they recognise that sex is at its best when it brings both parties physical and emotional pleasure, irrespective of the sex of the participants or the civil or religious union that they may, or may not, share. Ultimately, sex is no more nor less than a means of achieving pleasure. (In addition, for that minority of the human race which is at once (a) heterosexual, (b) fertile and (c) wants to have children, it is also the primary means of conception.) While some people believe, and many pay lip-service to the idea, that our existence is no more than a testing-ground that decides whether we spend a post-mortal eternity in bliss or torment, most people sensibly place that hypothetical question to one side in order to concentrate on more mundane concerns. For at least a billion of us, these are the daily need to find food, sleep and shelter, but once these necessities are met, we can focus on more long-term psychological, rather than physical, goals. At that point life becomes, consciously or subconsciously, a search for pleasure or at least an absence of pain. We may find that pleasure in many different ways - listening to music, playing tennis, founding a multinational software or media conglomerate - but pleasure is our goal. And one of these pleasures is sex. Consequently, any attempt to deprive people of the opportunity to derive mutual pleasure from sex must surely be denied. I will examine another time the different perspectives men and women have on sex, which are certainly culturally defined and may also be at least partly physiologically determined. At present, however, I will restrict my observation to the fact that it is mostly men who buy sex. They buy it for many reasons, but of course at heart it is the desire for pleasure. We may not always approve of the pleasure - for example, the rape of an underage girl - but as long as client does no harm, there is no reason to prevent him from buying sexual services as long as he does so in a way that respects the individuals from whom he buys those services. That brings us back to the argument that it is all very well for the male client to benefit from the encounter, but that does not justify exploitation of the female (or male or transgender) sex worker. True, but the one is not the cause of the other. My paying for sex does not automatically degrade the woman I buy it from. I could buy sexual services from a highly-educated graduate who earns more in a year than I do, who achieves greater job satisfaction and has higher self-esteem than I do. She chose, rather than was forced into, her work and derives greater pleasure from it than her former schoolmates who are trapped in jobs and marriages that they do not want. No, it is the context in which sex work occurs that determines whether or not it is degrading to women. A society that insists that women must be married in order to have sex will naturally insist that those women who have sex outside marriage are degraded; and that degradation reached by one of two steps - either the woman degrades herself by agreeing to have sex outside marriage, or the man degrades her by making her doing so through the payment of money. That does not mean that in societies where women are closest to being recognised as equals that prostitution has lost its stigma, but it is true that the stigma is beginning to fall. More and more women and some men are openly proud of being sex workers. We should respect them, as we respect all those who provide a public service, and in doing so, we may even begin to respect ourselves, and our sexual pleasures, a little more.  "You have at least one reader who feels substantially richer from the experience. You have a truly exciting ability to enter your characters. There is an old Indian saying in these parts: 'To walk in another's moccasins' and this you do superlatively. Thank you for sharing your indubitable talents with me." Thank you, David. Visit his website |
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2002 columns... 2001 columns... This month's good cause:  Native Languages of the Americas |
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