Dear Stacey,
Before you hitch up that high horse, you might want to look around the house at all the products you buy that were created through low-cost youth labour in third world countries. Just because you didn’t finger fuck the person who made them doesn’t make you a barometre of moral rectitude.
“What is true is that sex tourism is alive and well,” says prostitution activist Jenn Clamen. “People also come to Montreal for the same reason. It is also true that there are cases of coercion in every workplace, and that is why we are working to decriminalize the industry, because these cases can be easily identified, instead of millions of dollars going into trapping and arresting women who are working willingly for their money.”
So yes, every country including ours has disinclined sex trade workers (along with a host of others haplessly employed), but this is not the whole story. You may be surprised to know there is an organization of prostitutes in India called the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, and one of their objectives is to get Americans to stop sending them money to buy sewing machines. Believe it or not, these people would rather be independent sex workers than labour in filthy, ill-paying factories sewing clothes for Kathie Lee Gifford, and there are 60,000 of them.
Clamen says the perception that all Asian sex workers are forced into the trade “is born out of xenophobia and complete ethnocentrism.” As the Thai organization Empower collectively writes in an article for the Prison issue of the sex worker magazine Constellation, “We are seen as empty pages that the anti-prostitution lobbyists and other misled bleeding hearts can write upon. They do not respect us as adult women with full histories, lives, skills, plans and dreams of our own. They think we are stupid, ignorant and pity us and judge us as powerless. We are not recognized as working women and the family providers who support five to eight other adults. The way we migrant sex workers are perceived and treated as victims of trafficking reflects the attitudes towards our work.”
It’s the same story everywhere. Anti-prostitution activists refuse to believe that anyone would want to do sex work, and their well-sustained position and tactics often present bigger problems for the workers themselves. From the same article by Empower: “They force us to learn, whether we want to or not, never stopping to consider whether we already have the skills they are so anxious to thrust upon us or not. For example, most of us can already sew, weave and cook. In the past, the Thai government gave funding to Thai sex workers to start small businesses after we had been re-trained. After three to six months these businesses failed. The government learned what we already knew: that the economy is flooded with such small businesses.”
Worse, many women who come to Thailand from other Asian countries are often deported after “rescue and rehabilitation” efforts, sometimes back to countries with military regimes like Burma—countries that don’t take at all kindly to their citizens leaving illegally to do sex work. You can read the entire article by Empower online at www.chezstella.org/stella/?q=en/RR, and here are two other Web sites for you to better acquaint yourself with the diverse realities of sex work in Asia: www.empowerfoundation.org and www.durbar.org. We are inclined, when it comes to prostitution and in a way that we don’t with any other business, to railroad those with positive experiences simply because others have so clearly been hurt. I often wonder why we can’t turn the same ever-vigilant eye to the business of war.
