How Do I Feel About Prostitutes?

With my hands...About a month ago, I blogged about a brothel sign in Mong Kok that I saw. Ching388left a comment that was a series of questions, and I think they bear answering. I am just sorry it took me so long to get to them, but as you see, I wanted to give thorough answers.

Let me say at the outset that I am interpreting the questions as best I can, and if I am wrong, I apologize and hope  she will both forgive me and clarify.

Let me also say that my apparent encyclopedic knowledge of the horizontal refreshment industry in Hong Kong is a direct result of researching Hong Kong film as well as teaching a class called Media, Sex, and Violence.

So...

"What do you think about the night life in Hong Kong or American night life?"

I'm going to assume that she means a particular kind of night life, the kind that involves sex for sale. I doubt she's asking about bars, clubs and concert venues.

In America prostitution is illegal in 99% of the country. It exists, but it is a tolerated deviance.

It's 'peak hours' are after dark.

Which, given the aesthetics of the vast majority of American sex workers, is a good thing.

American prostitution is populated to a very large extent by women who have no other choice. I will assert that the majority of them are drug addicts who do not have a choice about whether or not to engage in a money-making activity. Given their condition due to drugs, prostitution is often all they are capable of.

It's the only job in the world where you can just lay there and still get paid.

There are, supposedly, high-end (and high dollar) escorts who are young, educated, funny, disease-free and smartly dressed.

They can also suck a golf ball through a garden hose, but unlike the preceding qualifications, its of little or no benefit in a restaurant or other public setting.

These women want to make college tuition, or big, fast money. Which they can apparently do.

By and large, prostitution in America is an incredibly un-glamorous phenomenon.

The night life in Hong Kong is different. But not necessarily any more glamorous.

One of the immediate differences is that there is 'night life' available 24 hours a day.

The other is the very clear division of labor. There are several distinct kinds of prostitutes in Hong Kong.

Some women do it part-time. Young girls dabble in it to buy new phones or clothing. Some domestic workers do it on weekends for extra cash and a chance to sleep in a hotel room instead of the maid's quarters. Some women do it for extra money for bills.

Wanchai and East TST are homes to the 'bar scene', where working women congregate in specific bars and coerce men to buy them drinks and later go to hotel rooms. The vast majority of these women are not from Hong Kong or China. There are Russians, South Americans, Fillipinas, and others. Some of them come here knowingly, but many others are duped by offers of jobs as maids or waitresses, and it is not until it is too late that they discover what has happened.

Chinese prostitutes fall into different categories. I will rank them by cost which, as we will see, is not necessarily equal to income.

The top of the 'food chain' is populated by young women from China who come here on tourist visas. As young as 18 and rarely over 25, these women work in hotels, where their pimps send clients who call the pimp to make an appointment. The clients pay from $800 to $2000 dollars for an hour with a young girl who may or may not be very skilled sexually. Many of these women are also not very skilled at safe sex and engage in unsafe activities. Virtually all of them pay a significant, even major portion, of their income to the pimp, who is often part of the organization that brought the girl to Hong Kong in the first place.

So HK$2,000 isgross, not net...

The next division is the 1-woman brothel, also known as 141, meaning 1 woman for 1 flat. In Hong Kong, any woman can prostitute herself as long as she is the only one in the place of business. This law is designed to discourage brothels, because brothels are run by gangsters.

Funny how the pink signs of brothels run by gangsters line the streets of Kowloon, but a 14k t-shirt gets confiscated immediately... These one-woman brothels are also controlled by gangsters, who are in charge of (and, in fairness guard) the buildings and women. The woman's work hours are hers to decide. Some women live in these flats, while others commute. These women make between $250-600 dollars per transaction.

The bottom rung is most easily observed in Yau Ma Tei, which is kind of the 'chicken' version of the elephant Dying Ground. These women are veteran prostitutes with little market value save for the willingness to engage in more deviant (and unhealthy) sex acts for a startlingly small amount of money. In some cases, for $100, you enter a room where a woman is standing, bent over, with her pants or skirt around her ankles. Five minutes and a condom later, business is finished.

How do I feel about this industry? Well, it's what you get with rampant capitalism. If you set up a system where money is the key to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, some people will be willing to do almost anything to get it. Especially those people without educations or connections or social standing.

I used to wonder why a young, often well-educated woman from China would want to come to Hong Kong and peddle her @ss for money. Well, it pays much better than most entry level (pun intended) jobs, the work is comparatively easy (and for some of them fun, at least at first), and they are often far enough from home so that no one will know where they got their windfall.For many Chinese women, prostitution is the lesser of two unpleasantries (!). For uneducated girls, the reasons seem even more compelling. If your big job opportunity at home is something like cracking open car batteries with your bare hands for RMB$500 a month, three months riding strangers in a nice Hong Kong hotel room for money seems pretty good.

Prostitution doesn't cause air pollution or cut off people's fingers in its machinery or give your kids lead poisoning.

I've read of women who work next to Chinese  coal mines for RMB$10 per person.

Most of the women reading this probably can't fathom having sex with a stranger (unless it's the Rugby 7s).

I'm sure you can't imagine having sex with a stranger for money.

Or having sex with a coal miner for money.

Doing it for RMB$10? That'sbeyond comprehension.

As is, apparently, having sex withme for any f@#$ing reason whatsoever. But I digress... But you have to ask yourself, what are these womens' options like such that they do this? What could be worse than having sex with coal miners?

Apparently, somethingis.

And it's not evenme. Don't get me wrong. A lot of these women are lazy or selfish. They want a lot, and they want it now. They are willing to sell their youth for everything they can get out of it.

I ruined my back doing construction, and I didn't get rich doing it.

The other is that women here are not always choice-less. Some have gambling debts.

Of course, none of that really addresses her question, which was asking how I feel about it.

Without meaning to sound cynical (but succeeding marvelously), I think that it really doesn't matter what I think about prostitution. It exists, and it always will exist.

Basic capitalism means everything can be reduced to a calculable value. In addition, prostitution is, in some small way, the Golden Goose of the market economy. As my mother once described it,

"You have it, you sell it... you still have it!"

Money gets us what we want. The more money we have, the more we can do. That is the motivation behind both the buyers and sellers of the sex trade.

"How do you explain to your child about this sign?"

Luckily (for all of us), I have no children. But I see parents with their kids walk past these signs all the time. Like most Chinese parents, they probably deflect this (and any other question) about sex, either changing the subject or reprimanding the child. But most of them seem to treat it as no big deal.

"Should these sign be moved out of the way?"

They're advertising. They're illegal both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly, they advertise an illegal entity; a brothel. Explicitly, they violate a city ordinance about advertising. The police occasionally do 'harassment sweeps' where they confiscate all the signs. It forces the gangsters to buy new ones, but does nothing to stop the trade.

They confiscate a lotof signs.

My friend Sidney used to work for the Police Public Relations Bureau, and used to meet lots of actors who were in movies that had some kind of police presence. My favorite picture is this one: I asked him for one of the signs, but he said he couldn't give me one.Notice the large pile of confiscated signs in the background; it illustrates the idea.

Now, if Ching388 means should these signs (and prostitution) be done away with, well... good luck. You can't stop prostitution. And I get the distinct impression that in Hong Kong, organized crime is tolerated for a number of reasons, among them its ability to prevent dis-organized crime like muggings. Getting arrested for purse snatching is a luxury; more likely some guys with tattoos will kick f@#$ out of you and throw you into the harbor.

Besides, prostitution serves an important social function in our fair city. It allows people to look down on others. I once asked my class if they thought prostitutes were immoral. 90% of the class said yes. I then asked if the men who visit prostitutes are immoral. 20% said yes.

What kind of hypocritical bullsh*t is that?

Well, typically Hong Kong bullsh*t. It's important to make yourself look better by casting aspersions and indignation on others; by pushing other down, you look taller.

Well, f@#$ you.

99% of this city is shorter than me and not as well educated. I'm part of the 40% of people in Hong Kong who make enough to pay taxes. Literally and figuratively, the vast majority of the people in this city are in one way or another 'beneath' me.

But so f@#$ing what?

I don't look down on most people, because I realize that it doesn't make me look any better (at least according to my own culture). In my culture it's considered a sh*tty thing to do that only proves what  a small-minded, bad person you are. In other words, the accusation convicts you, not the other person.

I don't look down on people who have less than I do, because that's too easy. It's a cheap shot, and I try not to take those.

I dolook down on hypocrites and phonies.

It's not my height that makes it such a common activity here.

"It is dangerous; it sounds like you have to be very careful."

No, miss, youhave to be careful. I'm from America, where gangsters have guns. 90# criminals don't scare me.

The fact that organized crime controls the street in Hong Kong actually makes it safer. Roughing up customers (potential or otherwise) is simply bad for business. So people don't do it. I have walked through the 'bad' parts of town (actually, there are none, other than Lan Kwai Fong on weekends) at 2:00AM and never had as much as a speck of trouble.

Of course, as my inmate-students used to tell me, I really don't fit the 'Optimal Mugging Victim' profile...

"Tell me more how to  lower the crime rate in Hong Kong or anywhere in the world."

If I knew that, I'd have done it. Maybe by making education more available, or making jobs more available. Or shooting pimps in the head on streetcorners and leaving their bodies there to rot and remind people that it's a crime.But pimps (and other 'wai yaan') are like roaches; you kill the ones you see, but there's always more. Oooh, how about regulating prostitution? That way, they can be checked regularly for diseases and have some kind of legal (and therefore social, even if minimal) status.

Cops who visit prostitutes can stop 'paying' for services by flashing their badge.

The women who are streetwalkers can actually use condoms. They don't now, because police harass them by searching their purse, and if the cops find a bunch of condoms, the woman gets hauled in for solicitation.

Of course, no one in this fair city would (publicly) stand for regulation (and the implicit acknowledgment it would bestow on people who are at present studiously ignored until several of them are murdered). Instead, they would adore the chance to trumpet their opposition this idea (they do it regularly now) so as to look righteous and good and virtuous in ways that an LV bag just can't do for you.Whispers and Moans/性工作者十日談is an incredibly realistic snapshot of prostitution in  Hong Kong, and I recommend it highly.

I know because I took a 'research informant' to see it, and she couldn't wait to phone her co-workers and tell them how good and accurate it was and that they should see it. Later, while interviewing her in a small restaurant, she said that she had seen two former clients that day; one in the theatre, and one in the restaurant. It was, for me, one of those moments when I realized with acute clarity just how motherf@#$ing lucky I am to live the life I have.Bonus Question:"Does your wife read Chinese or do you actually know Chinese?"

I have no wife. I know Chinese people, but I can't read Chinese.But thank you for assuming that someone on earth would find me tolerable enough to marry.It's a short list.