Love thy neighbour - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Craig Scutt
IN 2005, A TEAM FROM THE University of New South Wales led by Dr Robert Howard surveyed nearly a thousand Westerners who were or had been living in Thailand. A third of the respondents left the country in less than two years. Of those who left, 20 per cent said it was because they were disillusioned with life in Thailand. One said, ‘Thais look down on whites. They don't like us and I got tired of it.' Should this come as a surprise? I don't know of any culture – past, present or future – that's made up of masochists desperate to be dominated, subjugated and exploited by a foreign power.
When I asked my squash buddy whether he slept with prostitutes in Australia, he laughed and said of course he didn't. So why did he do it in Thailand? He told me, ‘Because that's just the way it is over there.' As he said this, I felt something in me starting to burn. I wanted to stand up, challenge him, tell him what a lame excuse that was for behaviour he wouldn't accept on his own turf. I wanted to ask whether he thought the respect he was shown by prostitutes was real, or whether he knew he had bought into an illusion and just didn't care. I wanted to know if it mattered to him what circumstances had delivered these women to his bedside, made them strip off seductively and lick him all over. But my fire went out in silence and I ordered us another beer. He's my mate. Who am I to tell him what to do? He isn't the first Australian to go to South-East Asia for sex, and he definitely won't be the last. He's merely part of a groundswell of men, and now women, who believe they have the right to exploit the sons and daughters of neighbouring nations. The precedent was set long ago.
The process of European colonisation in South-East Asia began five centuries ago with the arrival of Portuguese and Spanish sailors, but it was not until the British began expanding their trading posts by taking control of Singapore in 1824 that the rhetoric to legitimise colonial ‘sexploitation' entered British and later Australian discourse. In her book Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (Routledge, 2003), Philippa Levine, Professor of History at the University of California, writes, ‘Prostitution, as colonial officials were fond of asserting, "offends no native susceptibility". It was a routine part of life and evidence of native disorder.' Levine suggests that whereas the British were civilised and controlled, their ‘subjects' were promiscuous, immoral whores.
These attitudes were carried to Australia aboard the First Fleet. Governor Phillip's first set of instructions from the Admiralty had been to proceed to Tahiti before landing at Botany Bay to procure enough females so as to prevent ‘gross irregularities and disorders' (sodomy) among the male convicts and marines when they arrived at New South Wales. Since 1766, Tahiti had been fabled for having beautiful women of ‘little virtue'. A hundred and ninety three female convicts were transported from England, primarily to serve as concubines, and spared the Tahitian women from that fate. Their suffering has been well documented, though to some extent it has failed to inform the thinking of future generations. Levine writes that in the late nineteenth century, ‘In the wealthy colony of Queensland, the preponderance in the sex trade of Aboriginal and Japanese women, and among whites, of Irish-born women, was likelier to draw comments about racial tendencies than sympathy for the economic disadvantages these women experienced.'
On Loi Kroh Road, the night drags on. For every girl shaking her booty at passing tourists, there are another four slumped behind her at the bar looking bored, bemused, jaded and pissed off. A man walks past me, his white hair and red skin contrasting with the black Rolling Stones t-shirt he wears. His eyes sweep the bars' perimeter. A glint in his eye tells me he suspects he has died and gone to heaven.
He doesn't notice the brooding glares coming from the young Thai men. Nor does he notice the dwindling figure of Abang, one hand in his pocket to hide the bulge of condoms stuffed inside, the other clutching his wilting flowers, which he knows are not the only thing he has to sell. Around us neon lights twinkle like fallen stars caught in an invisible web spun by the syncopated rhythm of a hip-hop beat. Pot flashes me a smile. Like he's apologising for showing me the dark heart of his city. Or maybe it's just my imagination. ♦