'Travels in the Skin Trade' by Jeremy Seabrook

Review by Alexander Turner

Sunday Morning. Duan, my wife, is somewhere between sleep and waking. Fred, my son, is playing with his digimon toys. Like most children he has an inventive mind and does all the voices.

"Hey you super garurumon. Glass power. Zooooom."

"Ha ha. Glass power cannot hurt me. Take this super fire magic."

"Aargh."

I've just been checking the various e-mail accounts. A few invitations to join worldwide terrorist organisations. How the hell do these people know my hotmail address? The tax office again wants to know where I was between 1991 and 1993 for their permanent records. Hit delete. The only way to deal with most of life is to hit delete.

Duan stirs and wakes up. "Are you making a cup of coffee ?" She says.

"I wasn't making a cup of coffee, but I will make a cup of coffee. Do you want a cup of coffee ?"

"If you're making one."

"You want one or not ?

"Up to you."

"I know it's up to me and I will make one if you want one. Do you want one?"

"Not if you're not making one."

"If you want one I will make one."

"That's okay."

"So you want it or not ?"

"Yes. But not if you're doing something else."

"Well I was doing something else but I'm not doing something else now."

"What are you doing now ?"

"Now I'm making a cup of coffee."

"Are you having one ?"

"I will have one yes."

Such is the nature of marital communication. No major cultural misunderstandings. The phrase "up to you" apart there's little about my wife's Thai-ness that rankles me and I've been married a little over six years now. There is nothing notably spectacular about our marriage. We argue fiercely from time to time, but even the heaviest arguments are usually forgotten after we have retired to our separate corners for twenty minutes or so. There are a few things that play on Duan's mind. Due to eating at night and lack of conspicuous exercise she's put on quite a bit of weight since her days as a Bangkok bargirl. In fact it is often hard for me to believe as I see her frying up fish in the kitchen or walking back from school with our son that she ever had a part in that world. There are photos of her dancing in the bar and sitting with customers, but they seem like pictures of a different woman living a different life.

She's not secretive about this other life. She certainly feels no shame over it. In fact she tells people, with something approaching pride, how well she played her role. She tells her Thai friends all the stories of her three and a half-year walk on the wild side. She tells of the various handsome farang she won that other bargirls failed to entice. She tells of the men who bought her gold when she told (not asked, told) them to. She tells them of the many men who gave her money without even asking sexual favours in return. She talks of her free holidays on Phuket and Koh Samui and the fortune that passed through her hands, usually shared out with other less capable bargirls. She boasts of the number of farangs who sent regular money to her bank account while they were working and freezing back home and could be called on to send more at almost any time. Her friends seem surprised by her candour, maybe because most of the Thai women with farang husbands have elaborately woven tales of how they met their husbands while they were waiting on tables or making beds in some hotel room.

It is impossible for me to say how my life would have turned out had I never gone to Thailand. Maybe I would have wound up in a similar marriage to someone from my own culture. Maybe not. But I do know that, for me, and I suspect for most people who spend any degree of time there, the attraction of Thailand itself had very little to do with the bar scene. I can't see any reason why anyone would spend the time, the money and the effort in travelling half way around the world just to sleep with prostitutes. Thai culture is one of the most welcoming in the world to the casual visitor. The women running my Khao San Road Guesthouse at once treated me like a member of the family inviting me to eat with them and chat to them at all hours of the day. I couldn't get passed the live in first floor landing that they lived on without being invited to taste some Thai food or have a cup of coffee made while I was guided through a photo album. If I went for a drink in one of the small bars near Thammasat University I would within minutes be engaged in conversation with educated young Thais who wanted to talk about films and politics and life in the UK. There was none of the elitism or reserve you encounter in students in most countries if you are over 25. When a few months later I watched the protests by the democracy monument on TV being cut down by the military I wondered if any of the figures being shot at were people I had drunk with.

When I did, eventually, go to Patpong with other Khao San Road traveller types I was simply awed by it. The atmosphere was a million miles from that of any European red light district. It was open and seemed joyful. The first woman I met there stunned me. She was honest, never hassled me but took me into her arms and held me there. After attempting valiantly to resist the idea I eventually went with her to her apartment where we ate, had sex, watched TV together, laughed. Whatever it was it was nothing like what I thought prostitution is supposed to be like. Of course I soon became dark and troubling things soon came to be a part of my experience in Thailand. I saw the absurd, the beaten and the frightening. I wandered into situations with total passivity that seemed dangerous and troubling. Any fantasies I had about Thailand being a better society than my own were soon dispelled but I never lost that initial sense of being welcome. In many ways I still think those first impressions of Bangkok were the most accurate.

Leaving the country after that first three month stay proved to be a great wrench once I was back in the UK. The cold and foreboding experience of walking into a British pub you don't know seemed ridiculous after the warm and convivial atmosphere of bars in Thailand. Within days of being back at work in merry England I was determined flat out to find a way back to Bangkok. I bought the Thai language Linguaphone course and practiced every day. I sought out every book I could find about Thailand and Thai culture. Even if a book had a small section set in Bangkok it was a book worth reading. I started reading business pages for information that might help me find out something that would make it possible for me to relocate there despite a complete lack of experience and education I was looking for ways to become some kind of professional type living in Thailand. I put those parts of my life that had nothing to do with Thailand into cold storage and saved money as if my life depended on it. Why spend money in pubs or renting videos in London when that same money could keep me just a bit longer in Thailand?

Ten years on I sit here in a large room in Oxford. A cup of coffee leaves a damp stain on a fake wood surface. Small shrines full of Buddha images, amulets and Thai money sit high on the wall. A foot high bronze coloured statue of King Rama V sat upon an ornate bronze coloured throne overlooks a small glass of whisky and a tumbler full of rice and burned out incense sticks. The faint aroma of last night's jasmine still hovers in the air. On my bookshelves Thai videos and books seem to jostle for space alongside English videos and books. The kitchen cupboards are filled with herbs, spices and vegetables that ten years ago I'd never even heard of. Pages from Thai Rath, Thailand's biggest selling newspaper, are downloaded and printed off every day. In fact as I sit writing this I'm sure my wife is just itching to relate some atrocity that has befallen some poor soul in Thailand. The atrocities that befall people in Thailand seem about three times worse than the atrocities that befall people back in the UK.

Some nights, just as I think I'm about to drift into sleep, I am brought harshly to consciousness by the pok pok hammering of pestle against mortar as Duan prepares herself a late night som tam salad replacing, as cost dictates, the grated papaya with grated swede. Some nights Western television will be displaced in favour of the latest Thai soap opera doing the rounds on three double play four-hour videotapes. The Thai community in Oxford have a lot to answer for.    

Duan loves the lottery and buys about five lines a week. She feels that if she won the lottery she would be able to see her extended family more often. Apart from this we function, we live, we are even happy. If our marriage collapsed tomorrow it would have already outdistanced the longest marriages of my friends most of whom married within their own race and their own culture.

Yet there are times when I know this marriage is doomed. After all my wife is Thai and worse than that she was a bargirl. This marriage deserves to collapse. After all am I not a fiend who used the relative strength of my English pounds to exploit the endemic flaws in Thai culture that facilitate the sordid interactions between tourists and Thai women? Am I not exactly like one of those sorry fellows who form the backbone of Jeremy Seabrook's book Travels in the Skin Trade.

"Here are some of the elements that go to create the invisibility of a conspicuous sex industry: economic and social laissez faire; a disdain by the rulers of Thailand for the underprivileged; an avoidance of conflict entirely on the terms of the most advantaged; a deeply rooted view of the poor which sees them as a lesser order of human being, a caste-based indifference whereby the fate of the poor is of no consequence. Just how far these views are of a piece with the attitudes of many Western visitors to Thailand will emerge in the following pages."

Jeremy Seabrook's work has appeared in numerous publications from the New Internationalist to the new Statesman. His gift is being able to take a story that most journalists would treat as statistical information and give it a human face. In his book Travels in the Skin Trade he examines the causes of Bangkok's reputation as being the world's biggest brothel and the effect sex tourism has on the people who work in it, the country as a whole, and the sex tourists themselves. Throughout the book he covers issues as diverse as child prostitution, the international trafficking of Thai women, and the spread of AIDS.

His overview of the trade and his interviews with sex tourists, bargirls, and concerned parties present a pretty dour view of the whole business, but his research is impeccable. The average reader is more likely to pick up some realistic idea about the various factors affecting prostitution in Thailand from this slim 175-page volume than half a dozen fatter books. His knowledge of economics and politics are frequently brought to bear on his analysis of the bar scene and he has an unflinching eye for details that reveal character.

I have no doubt about the authenticity of his subjects but found reading and re-reading this book hard going. For all the careful presentation of facts and testimony in this book he kind of misses the fun of the place. I know a serious book covering sociology and current affairs has no remit to entertain the reader with jokes and witty anecdotes but such gravity can be exhausting for the non-academic reader. I thought of the critic who, in writing a scene by scene analysis of The Marx Brothers Go West, forgot to mention it was funny.

And Bangkok is, more than anything else, a comedy. There's plenty of madness and despair and shit. There is in any large town. But even while the shit is flying most people keep on laughing as if the stink cannot touch them.

When my wife was first pregnant with our son we were visiting Thailand for a few weeks. We went for a drink to an upstairs Patpong bar called Queen's Castle. She didn't know anybody in this bar but after telling some of the staff about her recently discovered status as a mother-to-be we were soon surrounded by well wishers. Everybody was laughing and drinking and smoking. The girls doing the shows on the stage kept making mistakes and laughing about them. Ping-pong balls were popping across the stage and landing in lady drinks. Bottles opened by vaginas only opened after several tries and when the feat was accomplished there was wide and spontaneous applause. There was no sense of shyness or embarrassment. True, some farang gawped at the naked women as if it was there first experience of seeing naked women and some old guy was getting a hand job in a secluded corner of the bar but on the whole it was like a joyful occasion. When the trick show was over other women danced on the stage and they were young and pretty and seemed to exalt in the fact. A barmaid joked around and did magic tricks with a pack of cards. Some of the tricks worked and some of them went wrong. Another woman joked with her that her boyfriend had arrived. An old man with a gold tipped cane walked into the bar and she screamed. When he sat down the barmaid ran over and jumped on his lap. He laughed and was flattered by her attentions. She laughed and accepted his large tips. Everyone seemed to be laughing having fun. I dare say that they were probably masking deep-seated pain at being at the heart of some hideous Western exploitation but only a sociologist would have been able to perceive this pain. To the average idiot like me it looked like the opposite of pain. At a moment when we were alone my wife's eyes fixed on the beautiful naked girl on stage who smiled good naturedly back at us and she turned to me and said "You know, there are times when I really miss working in the bar." 

"Buddhism values the non-self, non-attachment to the things of the world. In this context, women have been traditionally seen as activators of desire and were therefore despised and feared by the monks. Women were felt to be impure and carnal. The sexual misconduct of women is a consequence of their karma, their demerit in a former life. In this way, men can express lust without demerit because it is caused by women. Women must be reborn as men to achieve high status."

Prostitution is at least as old as civilisation. In fact, let me take that back, it's considerably older. Sex has always come at a price. Ask any male black widow spider. Given that men know how easily they can be sexually manipulated by attractive women it is hardly surprising that so many cultures have viewed sexually licentious women and prostitutes with disdain. Of course it hasn't always been this way in every society. Many ancient cultures less patriarchal than our own were able to worship the idea of the sexually strong female and prostitutes, women who had sex for money, could be seen as priestesses. In Ancient Rome a good prostitute could find herself at the top of society looking down on the wives and mothers.

Of course all this seems a bit fantastic to us. Our societies are steeped in notions of the prostitute as either a pitiful victim of pimps or as some vulgar wanton destroying the financial stability of happy families. In the West even the girl who has fairly indiscriminate sex with men she hardly knows would see herself as on a much higher level than a prostitute who might be a bit more discriminating.

One idea that could account for this attitude, to some extent, could be the relative power and independence that a prostitute could enjoy. Until very recently few women enjoyed independence. A woman owning property would automatically surrender the ownership of that property to her husband upon marriage. One of the reasons Queen Elizabeth the first avoided marriage was that her husband would have automatically become the throne, even if he was French. There were very few professions open to women other than midwifery and even midwives were among the major victims of witch hunters. Prostitutes, where they were not managed by pimps, were the only women able to maintain themselves financially while remaining independent of men.

Looking at Thai history and Thai culture is a tricky business. For a start it's a history where mythology and reality are very hard to distinguish. Trying to get an honest picture of Thailand three hundred years ago is, for the Western reader at least, like trying to look at Europe in medieval times. There are stories of female independence and strength like the siege of Khorat that make one little Joan of Arc figure seem a very paltry feminist icon. If we look at the Thailand of just over a hundred years ago, however we are looking at a society in which there can be little doubt about the low status of women. Women were owned and traded like cattle. The more women a general owned the more potent he would become.

Most of this kind of thing came to an end with the abolition of slavery in 1905 by King Chulalongkorn, Rama V. An advocate of scientific advancement who travelled broadly throughout the West Chulalongkorn wanted to bring Thailand more into line with the West. He gave poor Thai people back their freedom, something recognised by even the least educated Thais. His radical effect upon Thai society probably accounts for the high position of his statuette in my living room and the way his image is supplied with so much whisky and incense.

The position of Thai women has advanced considerably over the past hundred years. There are many women in positions of power within Thai society but the general status of poorer Thai women is still pretty bad.

During WW2 the 'friendly' occupation by Japanese forces brought new dimensions to Thai prostitution. While officers enjoyed their leave in Thai or Chinese run bordellos, enlisted men got their kicks in bamboo brothels mostly populated by girls who had been kidnapped from small villages. The appalling use of 'comfort women' by the Japanese military throughout Asia is well documented but most of the countries in which women were used and victimised in this way were Japan's enemies yet Thailand was, according to the prime minister of the time, an ally. After the Japanese went home many of these bamboo brothels persisted with bonded labour. There were two tiers of prostitution one which was voluntary and well recompensed, the other which was not not actually prostitution at all but abduction plus slavery plus rape.

These two tiers of Thai prostitution have traditionally been bundled together by the Western media as if they were aspects of the same thing. As a result, when a few years back a brothel burned to the ground while women were chained to the beds unable to get free, the pictures that accompanied the article in the western media were of go-go dancers or girls behind a window in a massage parlour. The message given was that rich western sex tourists were somehow helping these conditions to persist. The same phenomenon has occurred with stories covering the international trafficking of women and child prostitution both of which Seabrook covers in some detail.

As under the Prostitution Suppression Act of 1960 all prostitution is illegal in Thailand the law also fails to make these important distinctions. This law allows the police to swoop on such brothels and, as anyone who has a wife that reads Thai Rath will know, they do so with great regularity usually finding girls who are underage or girls who are being held in those brothels as prisoners. So why, we might ask, are massage parlours and go-go bars able to function ?

Because, as Seabrook points out, of the Entertainment Places Act of 1966 which "regulated nightclubs, dance halls, bars, massage parlours, baths, and places 'which have women attend male customers.'" Thus, when Thailand opened itself to GI's on R&R, a profitable and popular industry was able to function without too much difficulty.

Of course it's confusing. Thai society confounds all speculators with its use of paradox. A Thai politician or police chief can get up and, with clear conscience, claim that there is no prostitution in Thailand. And it's true. Admittedly there's a large industry that serves men in ways that may include the odd bout of sexual intercourse but that's not the same thing. Any individual caught engaging in an act of clear prostitution will be given a very sound ticking off. And that's official.

"Thai society believes that boys are mischievous, men naturally promiscuous. Men need sex, but good women (this usually means the well to do) are expected to remain virgins until marriage. Prostitution is the only mechanism that can satisfy these asymmetrical arrangements - provide sex for men while enabling high-class women to remain virtuous."

Travels in the Skin Trade frequently refers to the racism and sexism implicit in Western men seeking something in Thai women that Western women no longer embody.

Of course myths about Thai women and eastern women generally are difficult to avoid. The media always portrays them as these delicate bone china beauties that live to serve the men they love. Absolute horse manure of course but who can forget scenes like the one in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice where Bond has been invited by the head of Japanese Intelligence, one Tiger Tanaka, to take his first civilised bath. As soon as the hirsute Sean Connery steps out of his robe and into the water he is surrounded by models from the Japanese edition of Playboy who vie for the privilege of lathering him up and twittering like little birds as to who will have the honour of bedding him. As Bond luxuriates in this Tanaka proudly proclaims "In Japan the man always comes first."

Racists that we all are I'm sure the jumble of heroines such as these and Suzie Wong and any other oriental temptresses all go some way to influencing our ideas about Thai women. Of course the casual visitor to Thailand who steps into a bar with a bulging wallet might be forgiven for thinking that any number of myths he had earlier dismissed as myths are, in fact, true. You can hear these myths being repeated over and over. Thai women don't care about age. They like a big belly on a man. Thai women enjoy taking care of you. Thai women are still real women unlike all those feminazis back home. Thai women are right hot little nymphos. Etc. And because of these myths and the ability of some Thai women, for a price, to play up to them a large number of men can wind up believing in Santa Claus again.

In reality Thai women are no different from any other women. They might start to genuinely care about a man who spends huge sums of money on them. A Thai woman might well fall in love with a man who is old and fat and expects to be treated like a king. Stranger things have happened. But this is no more likely in Thailand than anywhere else. The problem is that men are paying for a performance and then, at some point, forget they are paying for a performance and become embittered that what they are paying for isn't real.

"Don't believe anything you hear about Thai women. They're arseholes." Says one of Seabrook's interviewees.

Another expounds "The point is, they know when they have you hooked. They will play it to the last cent. That's why she asked for nothing in the beginning, pretended every little gift came as a surprise. They wait until they can do what they like with you. You think you're in control, because even though you might not be well off by Western standards, you still have more money than they do. They play you like a fruit machine."

Paranoia is rife among the clients of Thai prostitutes. It becomes very hard for many to see where acting ends and reality begins. As long as a client is paying good money it is equally hard for the prostitute to stop acting. Of course in addition to the normal acting there are also those prostitutes who are adept conmen who just use sex as part of their confidence arsenal.

Some of Seabrook's interviewees are worse than others. Somehow he manages to get a paedophile to sit explaining his paedophilia justifying his acts with girls between twelve and fifteen as consensual sex. Another of his interviewees is a German man looking for a Thai wife. Once he has her living back in Germany he intends to put her on the game so he wants to find a pretty one that he can easily manipulate. A homosexual explains his desire for sex with heterosexual men and how Thailand is the only place his money can buy this. Another of Seabrook's interviewees has contracted HIV and figures that if he gives it to somebody else in Thailand it is their problem not his. He has nothing left to lose.

In addition to the actual participants in the scene Seabrook various parties with opinions and interests in the scene including workers at EMPOWER (the organisation set up in Patpong to help Thai sex workers learn English and deal with their customers on a basis of equality) and for contrast one Dr Kua who provides the observation that "Sex workers send their children to the village or leave them there with their grandparents. The children and the elderly survive on the earnings from the bars of Bangkok. It is very touching, very human: and it shows these rather garish places in a quite different light. In that sense, the sex industry is not a force for social disintegration."

But one of the most affecting of his interviewees, and one who counters a lot of Seabrook's own ideas about the exploiting nature of sex tourism, is an American in his mid sixties called Tony. Tony's adored wife had died of cancer and he felt he needed a holiday. Visiting a bar on Patpong he met Nok. At 40 and with a sad face that had seen a lot of life, Nok wasn't getting barfined too often. Other men didn't see the beauty in her but he did and he bought her out the bar surprising all the younger girls who thought they were the hot stuff. Since then he has been back often and whenever he goes to Thailand Nok comes to meet him. He sleeps on the thin mats in her poor house with cockroaches running around and he thinks he knows the meaning of happiness. He'd never take her away from Thailand because she would miss her children who have completely accepted him in the way his daughter will never accept Nok. He says "I don't want to hear any crap about Bangkok being sex and sleaze and the rest of it. You can find happiness anywhere in this world and wherever it is, that place is holy." 

"The women in the sex industry often regard themselves as small entrepreneurs. They believe that prostitution offers them a chance of upward mobility, the opportunity to meet a farang, or marry a rich man, which will raise their status. Although this can happen, it is rather rare."

Duan finishes her coffee and comes to ask me what I'm writing. I tell her. She laughs.

"Has it got any pictures ?" She says.

"No. Just a lot of words."

She looks briefly at the cover and then puts it down again as if it comes from another dimension. It could be a sex novel except the farang on the cover staring up the legs of a go-go dancer looks thoroughly bored and miserable.

"Why somebody want to write a book like this ?"

"People are interested. Same way as you like the stories in Thai Rath. People love to read stories about people worse off than themselves."

"Oh it has stories."

"Yes. But of course it's much more an exploration into the personal tragedies and socio-economic malaise that affects Thailand giving rise to the terrible racist and misogynistic exploitation of poor Thai girls much like yourself by people like... me."

"You want some more coffee ?"

"I thought you'd never ask bitch."

Travels in the Skin Trade by Jeremy Seabrook (1996)
Published in the UK by Pluto Press Price ???
175 pp

Review: Alexander Turner 2001