sexwork

For those who never saw this review of my book, a reprise, with the original picture. The use of ‘myth’ here is not my choice, by the way. That would imply that no abuses or problems exist in migration, which is a far cry from the truth.

The New Statesman       27 March 2008

The Myth of Trafficking 

Brendan O’Neill

Most migrant women, including those in the sex industry, have made a clear decision, says a new study, to leave home and take their chances abroad. They are not “passive victims” in need of “saving” or sending back by western campaigners.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Laura María Agustín Zed Books, 224pp, £16.99

It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. Laura María Agustín’s trenchant and controversial critique of the anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter - in this case, “human trafficking” - on the operating table, dissects it, unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a capital W. It’s a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years.

Most of us recognise the ideological under pinnings of old-style baiting of migrants. When newspaper hacks or populist politicians talk about evil Johnny Foreigners coming here and stealing our jobs or eating our swans, it does not take much effort to sniff out their xenophobic leanings. Agustín’s contention is that the new “discourse” on migrants (in which many of them, especially the women and children, are seen as “victims of trafficking” in need of rescue) is also built on ideological foundations. Like its demented cousin - tabloid hysteria about foreign scroungers - the trafficking scare is based on a deeply patronising view of migrants, rather than any hard statistical evidence that human trafficking is rife.

Agustín begins by challenging the idea that there is a “new slave trade” in which hundreds of thousands of women and children are sold like chattels across borders. The US state department claims that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labour or sex worldwide every year; Unicef says a million children and young people are trafficked each year. Upmarket newspapers - which have embraced the seemingly PC “trafficking discourse” with the same fervour as the tabloid newspapers screech about fence-leaping job-stealers from Sangatte - tell us that “thousands” of women and children have been trafficked into Britain and “traded for tawdry sex”, and that some of them (the African ones) “live under fear of voodoo”.

Agustín says the numbers are “mostly fantasies”. She does not doubt that there are instances of forced migration, or that, in a world where freedom of movement is restricted by stiff laws and stringent border controls, many aspiring migrants have little choice but to seek assistance from dodgy middlemen. Yet, having researched trafficking and sex workers’ experiences for the past five years, both academically and through fieldwork in Latin America and Asia, she concludes that the figures are based on “sweeping generalisations” and frequently on “wild speculation”. “Most of the writing and activism [on trafficking] does not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by academics,” she notes. Many of the authors rely on “media reports” and “statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity about definitions”.

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to inter national issues), even though the CIA refuses to “divulge its research methods”. The reason why the “new slavery” statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes “trafficked persons”, basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that “all children and the majority of women in the sex trade” should be considered “victims of trafficking”. As Agustín says, such an approach “infantilises” migrant women, “eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent”. Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not “passive victims” who must be “saved” by anti-trafficking campaigners and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape “small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families”. Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what Agustín refers to as the “rescue industry”, she has discovered that some poor migrant women “like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others”. I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín’s chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes about the “rescue raids” carried out by police and non-governmental organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent back home - for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it is called “rescue”.

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as autonomous, sentient, albeit “morally depraved”, adults. By contrast, as the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

Agustín reserves her most cutting comments for the flourishing “rescue industry”, arguing convincingly that it is driven by a colonial-style, maternalistic attitude to foreign women. In its world, “victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers become saviours - a colonialist operation”. Bitingly, she compares today’s anti-trafficking feminists with the “bourgeois women” of the 19th century who considered it a moral virtue to save poor prostitutes, who were “mistaken, misled, deviant”. Like them, anti-trafficking crusaders see women as weak, easily victimised, and in need of guidance from a caring chaperone.

In truth, poor women - and men and children - migrate for many different reasons and have many different experiences, some good, some bad, some tragic. Such migrants are wise and wily, says Agustín; they have gumption, ambition and hope; they are often cosmopolitan, too, working, mixing and having flings with migrants from the other side of the world whom they meet in some big city in Europe or the United States. And many of them have far more liberal attitudes to freedom of movement than the westerners who campaign on their behalf. She quotes a Kurdish migrant to the Netherlands who thinks borders should be abolished: “I don’t come from the sun or moon. I’m from earth just like everybody else and the earth belongs to all of us.” Now that’s an argument I can get behind.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked

I am in Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, to give a plenary talk at the opening of a conference on harm reduction called CLAT (Conferência Latina sobre Redução de Riscos in Portugese). I had rather sketchy notions of how harm reduction could be used as a framework for talking about sex work/prostitution, which is most often understood in relation to reducing the harms of injecting drugs. On top of that, the panel I’m speaking on is titled Human Rights and Harm Reduction, which found doubly confusing. So I have been asking around amongst academics and activists and now feel at least capable of describing the complexities. There are five panels addressing sex/sex work and several good activists will speak, mixed with outreach/academic folk. 

Some people in the harm-reduction field don’t think sex work should be there; they want policy on drug injection to be the focus. And some people in the sex workers’ rights field don’t think it should be, either. But the conference has six streams:

1 Drugs on the Street
2 Parties: Pleasures Management and Risks Reduction
3 Alcohol and Harm Reduction
4 Sex: Pleasures, Risks and Sexual Work
5 Other addictions
6 Human Rights and Penal Control

So all kinds of ‘addictions’ and ‘excesses’ are potentially included. A broad definition of harm reduction in Wikipedia is as clear as any:

Harm reduction, or harm minimisation, refers to a range of pragmatic and compassionate public health policies designed to reduce the harmful consequences associated with drug use and other high risk activities.

Many advocates argue that prohibitionist laws cause harm, because, for example, they oblige prostitutes to work in dangerous conditions and oblige drug users to obtain their drugs from unreliable criminal sources. This usually involves softening punishments on risky behaviour, assisting people to stop the behaviour and addressing the reasons people engage in such behaviour.

Pragmatic sounds good, but compassionate sounds condescending. The emphasis on the harms caused by laws that prohibit and criminalise activities sounds good, while assisting people to stop is problematic.

It’s also true that some people who want to abolish prostitution and the sex industry hate harm reduction efforts, which they see as conspiracies to continue the enslavement of women. I’m told the term harm reduction is forbidden at some of their conferences. See interesting comments on this issue at Bound Not Gagged.

Both sex work and drug injection are widely criminalised: that’s the most important point to keep in mind. Prohibitions on activities often don’t succeed in stopping people from doing them, which leads to their taking place in hidden, more dangerous ways, including relying on dodgy if not criminal characters (drug/sex traffickers, for example). Decriminalisation is therefore a major demand of harm reduction.

Mira este video de una marcha en Lima llevada a cabo el 2 de junio, Día Internacional de los/as Trabajadores Sexuales. Here’s a great, colourful video of a pro-rights march held in Lima on 2 June on International Sex Workers Day.

La marcha forma parta de un proyecto de CiudadaniaSx: activismo cultural y derechos humanos, que enfrenta el estigma y la discriminación a través del arte y el activismo cultural. El proyecto sobre el trabajo sexual, llamado Intervención Bochinche, tiene como meta

confrontar el estigma y la discriminación que sufren cotidianamente las trabajadoras sexuales mujeres y trans (travesti, transgénero, transexual) debido a la criminalización del trabajo sexual, motivo por el cual suelen ser víctimas de diversas formas de violencia y violación de sus derechos.

Según donde estés, la palabra bochinche significa jaleo, alboroto (mess, row, racket, upheaval) o chisme (gossip). En el caso de esta inciativia, los dos significados pueden servir. Antes de la marcha, el proyecto colocó por Lima pancartas con interesantes mensajes, jugando con las palabras y las políticas represivas de la municipalidad. Entonces:

Street prostitution is advancing - neat!

Caresses available

Pick them up - We’re not watching you

The city is filling with lust - great!

Operation Sodom is also coming

Hookers’ Summit in Lima

The new Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) has once again been issued by the US government. I went back to a piece I wrote about this annual shameful phenomenon in 2007, when the Philadelphia Inquirer rang to solicit a piece on the subject. The only thing different now concerns the perceptions of US citizens outside the US: abysmal and worsening then, slightly better now with the election of Obama. It remains to be seen whether this new administration will be able to see and grapple with the imperialism inherent in the TIP, however. Everything else I said two years ago I stand by today. The paper didn’t change my text but did change the title badly (my original appears first below). 

What’s Wrong With the ‘Trafficking’ Crusade?
Well-meaning interference?

The Philadelphia Inquirer   Sunday 1 July 2007
Op-Ed page

Laura Agustín

It’s the season when the United States issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). Having named sexual slavery as a particular evil to be eradicated, the United States grades other countries on how they are doing.

On the one hand, it sounds like an obvious way to do good: Describe the ghastly conditions you as a rich outsider observe in poor countries. Focus on places where sex is sold. Say all women found were kidnapped virgins and are now enslaved; announce to the world that you will liberate them. Organize raids. Denounce anyone who objects - even if their objection is that you are intervening in their country’s internal affairs. Ignore victims who resist rescue. Use lurid language and talk continuously about the most sensational and terrible cases. Justify your actions as a manifestation of faith, as though it exists only for you. Mutter about “organized crime.”

This is also the season when tourists leave the United States en masse to visit the rest of the world, where their country is more disliked all the time. People who used to say: “It’s just the president [or the government], ordinary Americans are all right,” now say it less often. Ignorant, destructive interventions into other countries’ business have been going on too long.

Grading everyone else on moral grounds is highly offensive, particularly when such grades are accompanied by threats of punishment if the line isn’t toed. It’s distressing to witness the deterioration of what good will is left toward this country since the post-2001 wars were initiated and campaigns intensified that presume the United States Always Knows Best.

For crusading politicians and religious leaders, a rhetoric of moral indignation is effective in uniting constituents and diverting the collective gaze away from familiar problems at home. So the culprits, those who get bad grades in the TIP, live far away from U.S. culture, which is assumed to be better. Intransigent local troubles - prisons overflowing with African Americans, millions of children malnourished - are swept aside in the call to clean up other people’s countries.

This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors’ bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.

It is easy to haul out sensationalistic language (sex slavery, child prostitution), but it is much harder to sort out the real victims from the more routinely disadvantaged and trying-to-get-ahead. Those who know intimately the problems of the poor in their own cultures rarely deny that they can decide to leave home and pay others to help them travel and find work, in sex or in any other trade.

“But sex for money is disgusting and degrading; no one should have to do it.” And should anyone have to clean toilets all day? Risk being maimed in unsafe fireworks factories? Should children have to spend their lives in lightless tunnels of mines, or women have to remain married to men who are cruel to them? The world is full of things we wish we could eradicate - but isn’t starvation the first of them? Why is there no equivalent moral furor over hideous poverty? Are we meant to believe that sex without love is worse than military violence? All over the world, selling sex pays better than most jobs readily available to women, and many do not believe it is the worst possible experience they can have.

What’s questionable about the TIP is not the defense of children or anyone else against true violence - it’s one government’s assumption that it has the right to judge everyone else and apply a draconian definition of exploitation that does not ask people whether and how they would like to change their lives. Questionable is the focus on the photogenic, cowboy moment of rushing in to rescue slaves, with no interest in what will follow.

Victims are “protected” rather than granted autonomy. At the Empower Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, signs written by migrant women “rescued from” selling sex include: “We lose our savings and belongings”; We are locked up”; “We are held till deporation”; “We are interrogated by many people”; “Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.”

From the standpoint of social science, the TIP is gravely faulty. It never explains how data were gathered and compared across so many languages and cultures, or who did it exactly under what circumstances. A raft of other research shows enormous diversity among people who sell sex, and a wide variety of experiences in the sex industry among both migrants and people who stay at home. Studies show that the worst kind of trafficking can happen to people doing other kinds of jobs - and to men. Women all over the world, including the poorest, repudiate being characterized as above all sexually vulnerable.

In assuming its creators’ moral values are or should be universal, the TIP ignores local cultures and the complexities of human desires and functions - yet another reason tourists from the United States will be less welcome everywhere this summer.

I have excerpted here some of the ethnographic material from a research article that has much more in it, on how Mexican migrant men’s loneliness affects their sexual behaviour. The article illustrates how ethnography can illuminate our understanding of the sex industry. It’s a description of one particular place in New York City and the activities of one specific group of young men from Puebla, Mexico. I’ve chosen to excerpt two kinds of material: 1) description of the site and dancing and 2) how male socialising may depend more on watching and talking than directly on sex.

Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Arturo Quispe-Lazaro. ‘Loneliness as a Sexual Risk Factor for Male Mexican Migrant Workers.’ American Journal of Public Health 2009, Vol 99, No. 5, 806-7.

‘. . . The signs on the outside of the La Garza club provided an accurate depiction of the differences between strip clubs or brothels and this type of social space. These signs said in both English and Spanish:

Every day beautiful dancers; Monday - Mexican nights tequilazo; Tuesday - all dancers in sexy babydolls; Wednesday - bikini nights; Thursday - sexy dancer nurses; Saturday - all dancers in micro-miniskirts; Sunday - school girls night; Happy Hour from 4 to 10pm, $3 beers and house drinks; no caps or hats, no sneakers, no jeans; decent place to dance; we are looking for dancers.

. . . La Garza was a 1-floor [table-dance] club with bathrooms in the basement, a 20-foot-long bar, 1 large-screen TV, 1 pool table that can only be used by VIPs, a dance floor in the center of the club, and 3 small seating sections around the dance floor. There is no entrance fee. Each dance costs $4 but clients can get a private dancer for $40 per hour.

. . . some couples danced physically close whereas others did not; some danced fast, others slow. However, reggaeton songs were danced almost the same across patrons; men were pressed against the columns or standing by the walls by the women dancers who would thrust their backs and buttocks against the men’s penis area (this is also known as grinding). Reggaeton was probably the most erotic dance in the club, and, yet, the most common behavior among men in the club was drinking and watching women dance, with other men, by themselves, or with other women.

. . . The men who attended La Garza can be divided into 3 main groups: (1) those that went mostly to dance with women, (2) those that mostly spoke and flirted with women and rarely danced and; (3) those that went to drink and watch, but rarely danced or spoke with the female dancers.

. . . [In] the second group . . . men paid women to speak with them for the duration of a single song (approximately 3 minutes) but most often they started their conversation in the middle of the previous song). They expressed that they had a better chance of getting together with any of the women by talking with them rather than by dancing and grinding. . . .  Men . . .talked about their experiences in places like La Garza as a way of being able to talk to women without the ‘complications’ of doing it at work or in the neighborhood. As expressed by research participants, these complications induded the difficulty of initiating a conversation with a strange woman, the need to avoid sexual harassment in the workplace, and prohibitions on men being able to talk to clients in many of the restaurant establishments in which they worked. . . .’

This is another story of how attempts to get rid of prostitution result in changes, not eradication, as people adapt to the new conditions. Baina, a tradtional red-light district in Goa’s port city of Vasco, was flattened by city authorities five years ago, and now what was contained in a small area seems to Goans to be everywhere! Excerpts from The Times of India and highlights by me.

The expanding red light district 

The Times of India
10 Jun 2009

. . . Baina’s dingy rooms have given way to fancy cubicles in massage parlours and air-conditioned rooms in starred hotels. Taxi drivers and motorcycle pilots as contact points have made way for waiters, chai boys and beach hawkers. The modus operandi too has adapted to the needs of the solicitors and the solicited.

With the contact point shifting from the cramped lanes in Baina to just about everywhere: beaches, parlours, hotels, lodges, bars, restaurants, streets, markets, even fishing trawlers, the modus operandi nowadays is to pre-arrange a meeting point for the customer and the girl. Alternatively, women are also sent to certain areas to directly solicit, finds a study by Baina-based NGO, Arz.

The 2007-08 study, whose findings will be released soon, focused on Goa’s prostitution phenomenon after the demolition of Baina and the closure of dance bars in Mumbai. Information was collected by talking to sex workers, pimps, legislators, government authorities, hoteliers etc. The study reports that nowadays, it is not uncommon to find girls, including foreigners, soliciting on beaches, bars, restaurants, shacks and even at tourist bazaars.

Another common meeting point are night clubs where couple entry is the rule. Some girls solicit around major crossroads, traffic circles, junctions, gardens and bus stands. . .

. . . “After the demolition in Baina, prostitution has spread all over the state,” says Dr Pramod Salgaonkar, chairperson, Goa State Commission for Women. “While middle-budget prostitution is flourishing in the tourist belt in the form of massage parlours, prostitution along highways, hotels and houses is also on the increase,” she adds. Arun Pandey of Arz, says, “The Baina demolition has led to an escalation in highway prostitution, prostitution in isolated places like jungles and prostitution in vehicles (private four wheelers).”

“There is an increased vulnerability of women and children in prostitution to forced sex acts and rapes. Clients would not be able to film prostituted women and children or have group sex in a brothel. Now this is possible,” he adds.

Goa police’s public information officer SP AV Deshpande calls it “old wine in a new bottle”. “The business is the same. But girls are now better educated and pimps are using the latest technology to operate and attract high paying clients. The business has become more sophisticated.”

* Information from study: Trafficking for Commercial Sexual Exploitation in Goa, by Baina-based NGO, Arz

I’m trying to paint a picture of the sex industry that shows its complexity and how commercial sex is embedded in ordinary daily life. The following report acknowledges decriminalisation would just be the first step in a social and legal process. See website of SWEAT - Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce, and book Selling Sex in Cape Town.

South Africa: Decriminalizing sex work only half the battle

Johannesburg, 29 May 2009 (IRIN)

Proposals to decriminalize sex work in South Africa have been moved back to the front burner after the newly installed premier of the country’s richest province, Gauteng, remarked that the issue should be addressed “objectively and with an open mind”. A review of the current legislation is underway.

The Sexual Offences Act of 1957 prohibits all sex work, and any activity associated with it - keeping or participating in the management of a brothel, procuring someone to become a sex worker, soliciting or selling sex, and living off the earnings of a sex worker - is a criminal offence. The Act was amended 50 years later to make buying sexual services a criminal offence.

Enforcement of the sweeping law is extremely difficult; the police generally use municipal by-laws that target street-based sex workers under the guise of being a “public nuisance”, leading to claims of police harassment, while the authorities ignore thousands of classified adverts for sexual services in daily newspapers and elsewhere.

The South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) sets out four scenarios in a report released in May 2009: maintaining the status quo, partial criminalization, non-criminalization, or the “regulation of adult prostitution and prostitution-related acts.” Public submissions and comments on the proposed changes can be made until 30 June 2009.

The country is divided on the issue. “Worldwide, you will find it [sex work]… We must begin to appreciate that commercial sex work is an industry, here in Gauteng,” said the province’s female premier, Nomvula Mokonyane.

“The best is to recognize commercial sex work, make sure it has different support systems … have a designated area, register people, let them be subjected to periodic health tests, and also let them be subjected to what me and you are subjected to — tax.”

‘Lowering morals’

Although Mokonyane did not explicitly call for sex work to be legalized, her view was at odds with South Africa’s chief prosecutor, Mokotedi Mpshe, who told local media that decriminalizing sex work would be bad for the country’s morals.

Proponents of decriminalization said changing the law would not destigmatize the sex industry, but would improve the health and safety of sex workers.

Lauren Jankelowitz, of the Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit (RHRU) at the University of the Witwatersrand, which runs sex worker-friendly clinics and outreach programmes, said most sex workers were reluctant to access health services or report incidents of rape and assault to the police, fearing both stigma and arrest.

At a forum in Johannesburg on 28 May, Sex Workers and the World of Work, sponsored by the South African Business Coalition on HIV and AIDS (SABCOHA), Jankelowitz said a change in the law would be a step in the right direction, but given the prevailing conservative views of government, this was unlikely.

Regardless of the law, South Africans had to change their prejudiced views of sex workers, and the police, health workers and the public should be sensitized, she said.

Eric Harper, director of the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Task Force (SWEAT), told IRIN it would take more than sensitization training to change the treatment of sex workers.

“The emphasis has to be less on opinion change and more on actual practices to make sure people are treated in a humane and dignified way, and are given access to the services they deserve,” he said. “If I’m a health worker, I have to know that I have to act in a professional way, regardless of what I think about what people are doing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some sources say the recession is good for the sex industry (people always need sex, or it’s a distraction from problems or release from stress), while other sources say businesses are suffering. Mostly such stories are speculative and anecdotal. The reporter of a story about Malaysia has relied on just a few sources, too, but one is a guy who gives more details about money than usual. Note the ambiguity about declaring income and paying tax, or not. These are excerpts from the story. NB: Conversion: 1 RM = .20 euro

The New Straits Times, Singapore

Malaysia: Sex sector does not need economic stiumulus

25 May 2009
By David Yeow

. . . solicited sex in Malaysia is going through a boom. Sources in the local prostitution scene say they raked in more than RM3.2 billion last year. And that’s just the earnings of sex workers, not including the income of pimps and other spin-offs.

. . . a prostitute usually works a seven-day week, charging RM150 an hour. “Serving an average of eight clients a day, she ends up making RM1,200 daily and possibly RM36,000 a month”

. . . the syndicates that run the brothels usually have up to 100 girls under them. This could mean that a syndicate could rake in about RM120,000 a day and a whopping RM3.6 million a month. . . Malaysia has hundreds of such syndicates, each operating several brothels in their designated areas.

Many brothels in Malaysia double as “health centres” offering massage services. . . clients are willing to pay from RM60 to RM100 for an hour of massage, followed by an additional RM150 for sex. “Prostitutes who double as massage ladies also get a fee from their handlers for massage services, usually about RM20 per customer.” . . .  eight out of 10 customers will have intercourse with their masseuse, the remaining two might opt for lesser services such as foreplay.

So, in addition to as much as RM36,000 monthly from sex alone, a prostitute can add on another RM9,000 for offering “half services”, bringing her monthly untaxed income to a whopping RM45,000 (RM540,000 per annum).

. . .  “RM200 a day wages for massaging an average of 10 customers . . . a legitimate RM5,200 a month or RM62,400 a year. They can choose to pay tax on that, but most don’t.” Pimps . . .  usually collect about RM3,000 a month from each sex worker they manage.

Another recent story claimed the opposite, however: ‘Brothels and pimps in Kuala Lumpur are marketing prostitutes as “rent a wife” packages for 6 to 24 hours, says a local tabloid.’

It’s pretty much impossible to know the facts about money made in the grey economy.

I’m interested in the great variety of sex-money exchanges all over the world, and Japan is home to many. These cards advertising sexy dating and talking services are pasted all over public telephone kiosks there.

The Japanese term enjo kôsai (援助交際, subsidized companionship) describes women who meet male strangers for dates that may involve sex in exchange for money or gifts. Some campaigners simply call it child prostitution, since nowadays the term mostly signifies teenage girls who go out with older men, often, in Laura Miller’s words, to

a karaoke box for several hours and are paid for their time. They essentially replace the much more expensive bar hostess, who likewise puts up with fumbled gropes and juvenile utterances but for a much higher price. What the media finds most irritating about the phenomenon is that the young women involved feel no shame or remorse at all. According to a 1996 police report on more than 5,000 girls involved in subsidized dating, 39 percent gave “monetary gain” and 34 percent offered “curiosity” as their motivations (Iwao 1997:45). The young women themselves often express disdain, pity, or contempt for the men they see themselves as exploiting, rather than the other way around. [The girls] like to have sex with boyfriends their own age, but if they have sex as part of enjo kõsai, they say that they “lie there like a fish” (maguro ni naru, literally ‘become a tuna’).

The subsidized dating trend is supported by several related industries, including terekura “telephone clubs”). These clubs provide a space for men who have paid a fee to sit and wait for phone calls from girls who want to arrange dates. Because the girls are able to call at no charge, this is the most common way that enjo kôsai operates. *

Rey Elbo notes that websites now allow men to contact many offering enjo kosai, as all a man has to do ‘is to put up an ad that he’s willing to spend 40,000 yen for dinner and sex.’ [295 euros]

You can read one rather detailed account of enjo kosai behaviour here. One kind of karaoke connexion is discussed here.  

* ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2004, p. 225-47.

For those interested in prostitution policies and their failures, here’s an article I published recently in an academic journal. For copyright reasons I can’t reproduce it here, and the journal’s not subscribed to by a lot of universities, and the language is roundly academic. Still, here is the reference for a rather caustic piece on the subject of the West’s assumed superiority.

Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution

Laura Agustín‌

Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Vol 5/4, 73–86, 2008

Abstract

To assess the reasonableness of projects to improve the governance of commercial sex, the author explores how rationality in its current hegemonic Western sense is a cultural construction, perceived differently across time and space within Europe. The author examines some aspects of how varying conclusions are reached about which legal prostitution regime to impose, taking into account the role of cultures, worldviews, and interpretation. The author avoids the conventional classification of policy by country that results in unsubtle and overdetermined nationalistic explanations. Current projects to govern prostitution show how the traditional Western idea of rationality fails to lead to social betterment. Worldwide, social policy on prostitution tends to follow Western cues, in seeming acceptance that West is the best, with the most progressive, most enlightened approach. The rational project is, therefore, not limited to European geography.

If you can’t get access to it and are interested, write me on the contact form in the right-hand column.