Human Goods

(photo source: Vitaly Shepelev/flickr)

After the Christmas 2004 tsunami, Hannah Lobel, in a 2005 article from the Utne Reader, described “slimy ’sexpatriates’ who’ve set up shop as purveyors of women free from the influence of ‘feminazis’” that took advantage of young women and girls struck by the disaster. She’s referring to an article by Alex Renton describing the tendency of international sex tourists to exploit regions of the globe most brutally hit by natural and economic hardship.  Renton writes:

It was the tsunami, of course. Patong beach, one of the worst hit parts of Phuket island, is among Thailand’s best known destinations for tourists seeking sex. So the men transferred their holidays to Bangkok. Happily for them, there was a drought in northeastern Thailand at the end of 2004. The poor rice crop that resulted sent more young girls than usual down from their impoverished villages on the plains of Isaan to harvest the tourists in the big city. This seasonal migration goes back, historians of the sex trade will tell you, to the Vietnam war and the establishment of Thailand as a brothel for American GIs on leave. Prostitution for foreign visitors developed into a major industry, although official Thailand shrouds its economic and social significance in misinformation and a variety of interesting hypocrisies.

Sex tourism, Renton argues, is at best difficult to measure.  Immigration officers don’t list sex as a qualifier when questioning incoming tourists whether their trip is for business or pleasure.  He adds, however:

Westerners form an important—albeit not the major—part of this economic picture. A few have settld here because of it, calling themselves “sexpatriates.” In towns like Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand, on Phuket island and in the sex trade districts of Bangkok, they run bars, hotels and brothels, mediating the transactions between male tourists and Thai women. They are vocal on websites and in local publishing ventures, churning out guides for sex tourists. Some of these men see themselves as exiles, refugees from the “feminazis” who are crushing the spirit of the western male. Here, the old order of the sexes still reigns. Women know their place, they wash your feet before they have sex with you, they say thank you and help you in the shower afterwards. And, of course, westerners’ savings and pensions go a long way. Beer is a dollar a bottle, and a woman for the night available for £10 or less. It’s the “last place you can be a white man,” says one bar-owning sexpat on his website.

Interestingly, Renton also identifies another industry revolving around the Thai sex trade– that of NGOs that seek to combat sex trafficking.  Despite all the activism around the issue, it is difficult for journalists to obtain accurate statistics measuring just how big the problem is.  This is, perhaps, because no one actually has such numbers.

Nevertheless, Renton predicts that the trend will continue to escalate as long as tourists have disposable incomes and oppressed countries have disposable people …

The country’s beaches are overexploited, its forests shrinking and the islands poisoned by tourists’ waste. But Thailand and its neighbours retain one renewable resource for the tourists that is not in danger of running out—the supply of poor, smiling women.

“Victims of slavery tend to be isolated, relatively poor, and badly educated,” former U.S. ambassador at large on modern-day slavery John Miller writes in the current Wilson Quarterly.  “They don’t hold press conferences.”

Miller gives an outline of the nuanced topography of today’s fight against slavery founded in both global policy and personal experience.  He describes some of the slaves he has met around the world, from a young woman kidnapped by the LRA in Uganda and forced to serve as a concubine and killer until her jaw was shot off during combat, to a teenager terrorized for years by her Minneapolis pimp.

Miller keenly looks to historical abolitionists of other slave trades to point out the critical role of language in framing, describing, and awakening the world to the realities of slavery:

As I grappled with the enormity of the crimes I en­countered and the near silence that surrounded them, I turned to history for insight, and especially to the example of William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the great British reformer who led the 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Atlantic … For today’s ­anti­slavery activists, I realized, much of the task is the same as it was in Wilberforce’s time: to awaken others to an abomination that most people barely recognize. It is a measure of the challenge that remains that activists still need to persuade human rights organizations and other groups to pay attention to slavery…

In Wilberforce’s day, slavery was shrouded in euphemism by its defenders: “field hand,” “laborer,” and “houseboy.” Today, the news media and academics unthinkingly use words—“forced laborer,” “child soldier,” and “sex worker”—that have their own anesthetic effect, and along with others I have insisted on calling slavery by its right name. I have never understood why we constantly use the bloodless, bureaucratic term “human trafficking.”