1 The idea of a long century is Fernand Braudel’s; in the case of the present essay, it bleeds from the late nineteenth century into the early twenty-first. To situate the issues and provide some necessary regional background, however, the first section here, on ‘Traditional prostitution’, deals with some patterns prior to the period at hand.

2 Lars, Ericsson, ‘Charges against prostitution: an attempt at a philosophical assessment’, Ethics, 90, 3, 1980, p. 335.Google Scholar

3 Several excellent studies of the dynamics of prostitution in contemporary Southeast Asia have been published recently but, to my knowledge, there is no extant study of prostitution in the region over the longue durée. By ‘prostitution’ I mean in this essay very simply the buying, selling, and/or trafficking of sexual services by women from men. I do not include a discussion of male-to-male prostitution here because many (but by no means all) of the issues involved render this an entirely different paper. For the situation in the region today, see especially Lisa Law, Sex work in Southeast Asia: a place of desire in a time of AIDS, London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2000; Lin Leam Lim, ed., The sex sector: the economic and social bases of prostitution in Southeast Asia, Geneva: International Labour Organisation, 1998; and Siriporn Skrobanek, Nattaya Boonpakdi, and Chutima Janthakeero, The traffic in women: human realities of the international sex trade, New York, NY: Zed Books, 1997, to name just a few.

4 J. M. Gullick’s work might serve as emblematic of the ‘traditional’ vantage, with Thanh-Dam Truong more neatly representing contemporary feminism. Their arguments are footnoted in this essay.

5 Standouts here include Anthony Reid and James Francis Warren, both male academics who have worked primarily in Australia (see the footnotes for their arguments). The best new book on women’s status in early modern Southeast Asia is undoubtedly Barbara Andaya, The flaming womb: repositioning women in early modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

6 Renée Hirschon, ‘Introduction: property, power, and gender relations’ in her edited volume, Women and property, women as property, London: Croom Helm, 1984, p. 1. There is a long literature on this subject. Of particular interest to this paper is Gail Rubin’s conceptual article ‘The traffic in women: notes on the political economy of sex’ in Rayna Rapp, ed., Toward an anthropology of women, New York, NY and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975.

7 The Philippines, which became increasingly Catholic under the expanding rule of the Spanish after the mid sixteenth century, lie somewhat outside the following schema. For early patterns along these lines in that archipelago, see Carolyn Brewer’s book Shamanism, Catholicism and gender relations in the Philippines 1521–1685, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

8 See the contemporary descriptions of van Neck as quoted in Anthony, Reid, Southeast Asia in the age of commerce: the lands below the winds, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, vol. 1, p. 155Google Scholar, which also seem to have been applicable for Javanese traders in Banda during the nutmeg season.

9 The situation has been described in this way for Chinese merchants in Batavia. See S. Abeyasekere, ‘Slaves in Batavia: insights from a slave register’, in Anthony Reid, Slavery, bondage, and dependency in Southeast Asia, St. Lucia: University of Queensland, 1983, pp. 286–310. Snouck Hurgronje commented that, even in prurient Aceh, it was ‘thought natural and permissible for all who acquire slaves at once to violate their female captives’. See V. Matheson and M. B. Hooker, ‘Slavery in the Malay texts: categories of dependency and compensation’ in the same volume, p. 198.

10 Anthony Reid, ‘Introduction’ in Slavery, p. 27.

11 Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, The Philippine Islands, Cleveland, OH: The A. H. Clark Company, 1903–9, vol. 2, p. 137.

12 For Rangoon see M. Symes, An account of an embassy to the kingdom of Ava in the year 1795, 2 vols., Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1827, quoted in Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. 1, p. 156; for Batavia’s and Makassar’s ‘shantytowns’, respectively, see Leonard Blussé, Strange company: Chinese settlers, Mestizo women, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia, Dordrecht:, Foris Publications, 1986, p. 169, and Heather Sutherland, ‘Ethnicity, wealth, and power in colonial Makassar: a historiographical reconsideration’, in Peter Nas, ed., The Indonesian city, Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986, p. 47.

13 A. Turton, ‘Thai institutions of slavery’, in J. L. Watson, ed., Asian and African systems of slavery, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980, p. 281.

14 Women in general, in fact, were seen to be ‘dangerous’ in the sense that they excited the possibilities of distraction from attaining Enlightenment. See Geoffrey, Parrinder, Sex in the world’s religions, London: Sheldon Press, 1980, p. 44.Google Scholar Also see Chatsumarn Kabilsingh’s essay ‘Buddhism and the status of women’, in B. J. Terwiel, ed., Buddhism and Society in Thailand, Gaya, India: Centre for South East Asian Studies, 1984, as well as Sukanya Hantrakul’s discussion in ‘Prostitution in Thailand’, the last essay in Glen Chandler, Norma Sullivan and Jan Branson, eds., Development and displacement: women in Southeast Asia, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1988, pp. 115–16.

15 Thanh-Dam, Truong, Sex, money and morality: prostitution and tourism in Southeast Asia, London: Zed Books, 1990, p. 148.Google Scholar For the Thai case specifically, see also Tamara, Loos, Subject Siam: family, law, and colonial modernity in Thailand, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.Google Scholar

16 S. Srisudravarna (pen-name for J. Poumisak), ‘The real face of Thai Saktina today’, in C. Reynolds, ed., Thai radical discourse: the real face of Thai feudalism today, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 134.

17 Turton, ‘Thai institutions’, p. 284. Many of these indebted or otherwise ‘owned’ women became prostitutes.

18 The pattern for the, at least partially, Buddhist polity of Vietnam was somewhat different. There, the rigid imposition of Confucianism under the Nguyen Dynasty (nineteenth century) gave rise to forms of prostitution more clearly Sinic in origin than overtly Southeast Asian. A good example was the rise of the courtesans called Ky Nu, who (like their Chinese and Japanese counterparts) provided music, poetry, and dance as well as sex. The combination earned a more socially respectable role than that given to many prostitutes elsewhere.

19 Cited in Reid, Southeast Asia, vol. 1, p. 157. For a good general account of gender in the Malay/Islamic world, see Wazir Jahan, Karim, Women and culture: between Malay Adat and Islam, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.Google Scholar

20 For some of the issues in insular Southeast Asia, see James Francis Warren, ‘Slavery and the impact of external trade: the Sulu sultanate in the nineteenth century’, in E. de Jesus and A. McCoy, eds., Philippine social history: global trade and local transformation, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1982, pp. 415–44. For a more general statement by a scholar whose expertise was in other parts of Southeast Asia, see E. R. Leach, ‘Caste, class and slavery: the taxonomic problem’, in A. de Reuck and J. Knight, eds., Caste and race: comparative approaches, London: Churchill, 1967, pp. 83–94.

21 Reid, Slavery, p. 25; see also James Francis, Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: the dynamics of external trade, slavery, and ethnicity in the transformation of a Southeast Asian maritime state, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981, p. 227.Google Scholar

22 John Bastin and Robin Winks, eds., Malaysia: selected historical sources, Nendeln: KTO Press, 1979, p. 224.

23 On the possible ramifications of getting caught, see H. C. Clifford, In court and Kampong, being tales and sketches of native life in the Malay Peninsula, first edition 1897, second edition London: Richards Press, 1927, pp. 182–5. Sultan Ahmad of Penang had three to four hundred concubines while Sultan Zainal Abidin of Trengganu may have had more. See Gullick, J. M., Malay society in the late nineteenth century: the beginnings of change, Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 50.Google Scholar

24 Clifford, H.C.The further side of silence, New York, NY: Doubleday Page & Co., 1927, pp. 66 ff.Google Scholar The enforcers in this case (as in most cases) were the Sultan’s budak raja, or bodyguard.

25 Braudel’s argument emerges most strongly in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972.

26 The notion that the heat of the climate and the spiciness of the food heightened European sex drives were two of these beliefs. For a fuller explication of many of these cultural assumptions (and the practical ends towards which they were used), see Ann Stoler’s two fine articles: ‘Carnal knowledge and imperial power: gender, race, and morality in colonial Asia’, in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: feminist anthropology in the postmodern era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 51–101; and ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 3, 1992, pp. 514–51.

27 See the postcards of Japanese prostitutes, their hair neatly coiffured, faces impassive, published in James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940, Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, plates 21 ff. A British visitor remembered them as ‘waiting odalisques, discreetly visible, magnificent in elaborate headdress and brightly coloured kimonos’: Bruce Lockhart, ‘Return to Malaya’, in Michael Wise, Traveller’s tales of old Singapore, Singapore: Time Books International, 1985, p. 238. A contemporary Dutchman was equally appreciative of the Japanese prostitutes living in the Indies: see his description in Donker Batavia, ‘Dee eer van de Geisha’ (‘The Geisha’s honour’) (1912), in Liesbeth Hesselink, ‘Prostitution: a necessary evil, particularly in the colonies: views on prostitution in the Netherlands Indies’, in Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof, Indonesian women in focus, Dordrecht: Foris, 1977, pp. 205–224.

28 Until the mid nineteenth century these women were actually allowed on board docking ships, in the belief that sailors would be less rowdy if they were able to bring the prostitutes back to their billets. See John Ingleson ‘Prostitution in colonial Java’, in David Chandler and M. C. Rickleffs, eds., Nineteenth and twentieth century Indonesia: essays in honor of Professor J. D. Legge, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Studies, Monash University, 1986, p. 125.

29 British patrols in Singapore, for example, were only allowed by law to search suspicious junks arriving from China. Chinese traffickers, therefore, unloaded many prostitutes in the Riau Archipelago south of Singapore, usually into waiting native prahus. Japanese traffickers such as Muraoka Iheiji stowed women away in the bowels of ocean freighters, and even Indonesian traffickers (who had the religious dictates of Islam on their side) brought new ‘wives’ into the colony with each successive trip, hidden under the formalized secrecy of the veil. See League of Nations, Report to the Council of the Commission of Inquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East, IV. Social 1932, pp. 77, 91; Ronald, Hyam, ‘Empire and sexual opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14, 2, 1986, pp. 67–8Google Scholar; and Yvonne Quahe, We remember: cameos of pioneer life, Singapore: Landmark Books, 1986, p. 80.

30 Warren, Ah Ku, front endpaper; Ingleson, ‘Prostitution’, p. 125; Nick Joaquin, Manila Sunday Inquirer, 10 July 1988, p. 3.

31 See especially John Butcher, ‘A social history of the British in Malaya, 1880–1940’, PhD thesis, University of Hull, 1975; and Yen, Ching-hwang, A social history of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800–1911, Singapore and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.Google Scholar

32 See Ingleson’s fascinating analysis of the circular, seasonal labour migrations of colonial-era Javanese, and how in towns near cities these migrations manifested themselves specifically along gender lines, in ‘Prostitution’, p. 136.

33 I periodically touch on concubinage in this essay because it served certain similar functions to prostitution, in organizing sexual access and availability in varied times and places. Women phased between these two situations on numerous occasions; a prostitute becoming a concubine usually saw this as a step up, while it was a step down in the opposite direction.

34 Arlene Eisen Bergman, Women of Viet Nam, ed. Susan Adelman et al., San Francisco: People’s Press, 1974, p. 44.

35 Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women in society and revolution: I. the French colonial period, Cambridge, MA: Vietnam Resource Center, 1974, pp. 35 ff. Especially in Tonkin and Annam, many women were forced to become concubines to rich landowners.

36 League of Nations, Report to the Council, p. 243.

37 Ann, Stoler, Capitalism and confrontation on Sumatra’s plantation belt, 1870–1979, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 31–3.Google Scholar See also a very good dissertation: Andrew Abalahin, ‘Prostitution policy and the project of modernity: a comparative study of colonial Indonesia and the Philippines, 1850–1940’, PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2003.

38 Butcher, ‘Social history’, p. 342.

39 Ibid., p. 326.

40 The coup de grace here was the Crewe Circular, which stipulated that planters’ and officials’ careers would suffer if it became known that they were still keeping concubines. See Ronald, Hyam, ‘Concubinage and the Colonial Service: the Crewe Circular (1909)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 14, 3, 1986, p. 170.Google Scholar

41 The information on Vietnam above is culled from League of Nations, Report to the Council, p. 217, and Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women, p. 87.

42 Prostitution, of course, still continued, only under significantly different guises. Taxi-dancing establishments, restaurants, and saloons all possessed women for hire, to be rented by the hour or for the duration of the night. For the denouement of open prostitution in the colonies see Warren, Ah Ku, ch. 7.

43 See Hanneke, Ming, ‘Barracks-concubinage in the Indies’, Indonesia 35, 1983, pp. 65–94.Google Scholar Concubines originally slept out in the open with the soldiers to whom they were ‘bonded’, but in 1889 morality debates in the Netherlands forced an end to this system. Hereafter, a curtain was drawn around the area where a soldier slept with his nyai (concubine). Eventually this too was discarded, as the women were banished to separate dormitories. Finally, concubines were legislated out of existence altogether, returning Dutch soldiers to the practice of prostitution.

44 Hessilink, ‘Prostitution’, pp. 217–18. See also Eric, Tagliacozzo, Secret trades, porous borders: smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 1865–1915, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, ch. 10.Google Scholar

45 Indeed, an entire separate paper could be written about the maintenance of prostitution services by sovereign Southeast Asian states for their own militaries.

46 For a record of this scenario in the Philippines, for example, see T. Agoncillo, The fateful years: Japan’s adventures in the Philippines, 1941–45, Quezon City: R. P. Garcia Pub. Co., 1965, p. 134.

47 Hartendorp, A. V. H., The Japanese occupation of the Philippines, Manila: Bookmark, 1967, p. 188.Google Scholar

48 See Sheila Coronel and Ninotchka Rosca, ‘For the boys: Filipinas expose years of sexual slavery by the U.S. and Japan’, Ms., November/December 1993, pp. 11–12.

49 See, for Malaysia, Raja Rohana Raja Mamat, The role and status of Malay women in Malaysia: social and legal perspectives, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia, 1991, p. 7.

50 The above information is culled from Amsakasasi et al., translated by Alison Garrod, Heidi Lindgren, and Kate Napthali, ‘Screams from a bamboo house’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 26, 2, 1992, pp. 77–89. For other perspectives on this period (many of them first-person), see Haruko Taya, Cook and Theodore, Cook, Japan at war: an oral history, New York, NY: New Press, 1992, pp. 108 ff.Google Scholar, and more generally Alfred McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese occupation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980.

51 Bergman, Women of Vietnam, p. 82.

52 Frances, Fitzgerald, Fire in the lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1972, pp. 352–3.Google Scholar

53 Susan Brownmiller reports that ‘by 1966 the 1st Cavalry Division at An Khe, in the Central Highlands, the 1st Infantry Division at Lai Khe, 25 miles north of Saigon, and the 4th Infantry Division of Pleiku had established official military brothels within the perimeters of their base camps’: Against our will: men, women, and rape, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975, pp. 93–5.

54 Quoted in Thanh Nam, ‘In the shadow of the American Embassy in Saigon’, South Vietnam in Struggle, 164, 11 September 1972, p. 2.

55 Kathleen, Barry, Female sexual slavery, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979, p. 61.Google Scholar

56 Bergman, Women of Vietnam, p. 86.

57 For an example of one serviceman who was trying to set up an ‘all-Vietnamese whorehouse’ in Honolulu, see Alan, Dawson, 55 days: the fall of South Vietnam, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977, p. 267.Google Scholar

58 The Philippines were hosting some 10,000 US servicemen daily by the 1960s, giving rise to a prostitution population of over 50,000. See Coronel and Rosca, ‘For the boys’, p. 13. Sex also became one of Thailand’s biggest businesses during the Vietnam War, catering to US air bases being used to fly missions over Vietnam. See Noeleen Heyzer, Working women in South-east Asia: development, subordination, and emancipation, Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1986, p. 59. Demand for young women to ‘service’ American soldiers spread even into Laos, as revealed by a United Nations Slavery Report (Mohamed Awad, Report on slavery, New York, NY: United Nations, 1966, p. 198).

59 See R. Simbulan, Bases of our insecurity: a study of the U.S. military bases in the Philippines, Metro Manila: BALAI Fellowship, 1983, p. 7, and Brenda Stoltzfus and Saundra Sturdevant, ‘The sale of sexual labor in the Philippines: Marlyn’s story’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 22, 4, 1990, p. 13.

60 Coronel and Rosca, ‘For the boys’, p. 13. The analogues here to colonial practices regarding prostitution are unmistakable. Recall colonial-era Vietnamese women’s copper ‘ID’ bracelets, as well as the ‘health charts’ placed at the foot of the beds of Indonesian women in the Dutch Indies. See Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese women, p. 110.

61 On the work of ‘casual’ local prostitutes, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics, London: Pandora, 1989, p. 87. The records of Olongapo (the town nearest Subic Bay station) showed that no prostitutes worked in the city, although 10,000 were registered with the Navy and a further 10,000 (unregistered) were said to be working. See Stoltzfus, ‘Sale of sexual labor’, p. 13.

62 On the provenances of long-term women, see Virginia A. Miralo, Celia O. Carlos, and Aida Fulleros Santos, eds., Women entertainers in Angeles and Olongapo: a survey report, Quezon City: Women’s Education, Development, Productivity, and Research Organization and Katipunanng Kababaihan para sa Kalayaan, 1990, chs. 1 and 6.

63 Coronel and Rosca, ‘For the boys’, p. 14.

64 Ibid., p. 13; Enloe, Bananas, p. 86. By 1987, the United States had over 68,000 Filipinos on the government payroll.

65 Coronel and Rosca, ‘For the boys’, p. 15. In 1987, the Philippine government reported twenty-five AIDS cases in the country – all of the victims were women, twenty-two of whom were ‘entertainers’ at US military bases. By 1988, the Philippines was debating a plan whereby all US servicemen would have to display certificates before entering the country certifying that they were free of AIDS. See The Christian Science Monitor, 18 February 1988; see also, Saundra Sturtevant, ‘The bargirls of Subic Bay’, The Nation, 3 April 1989, pp. 444–6.

66 Kathleen Barry, ‘The network defines its issues: theory, evidence, and analysis of female sexual slavery’, in Kathleen Barry and Charlotte Bunch, eds., International feminism: networking against female sexual slavery. Report of the Global Workshop Against Traffic in Women, New York, NY: New York International Women’s Tribune Center, 1983, p. 39.

67 See the accounts of Rome in the eighteenth century, Mexican border towns, Lebanon (vis-à-vis the Muslim Middle East during the 1960s and 1970s), and the Marquesas and Fiji, in Louis Turner and John Ash, The golden hordes: international tourism and the pleasure periphery, London: Constable, 1975, pp. 45–6, 94, 106, 240, 257. Also see Flaubert’s peregrinations (many of them sexual) through the female population of Egypt in Francis Steegmuller, ed. Flaubert in Egypt: a sensibility on tour, Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago Limited, 1987.

68 Here she is allied with several other authors, most notably Thanh-Dam Truong, ‘The dynamics of sex tourism: the case of Southeast Asia’, Development and Change, 14, 4, 1983, p. 533. For a more general account of tourism’s effect in Asia, see Elwood Pye and Tzong-biau Lin, eds., Tourism in Asia: the economic impact, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983.

69 Two of the best recent books on sex tourism on Southeast Asia are Jeff Pope, Assessing the economic benefits and costs of sex tourism, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, 2006, and Jeremy Seabrook, Travels in the skin trade: tourism and the sex industry, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2001.

70 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978. See also Talal Asad’s article comparing European visions of Asia and Africa: ‘Two European images of non-European rule’, in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the colonial encounter, New York, NY: Humanities Press, 1973.

71 Quote from Life Travel, a Swiss agency, in Jyoti Sanghera, ‘Poverty and prostitution: redefining some categories’, Diva, Sept/Dec 1992, p. 47. See also the advertisement of the Rosie Reisen Tour Group (Germany), published in Enloe, Bananas, p. 37.

72 Sanghera, ‘Poverty and prostitution’, p. 47. Marlise Simons has also noted that many tourists come ‘in search of sex that is expensive or downright dangerous to pursue at home’. Paedophile guidebooks and newsletters regularly place Thailand, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka at the top of their international destinations. See Marlise Simons, ‘The littlest prostitutes’, New York Times Magazine, 16 January 1994, p. 33.

73 I’m thinking here of Paul Theroux’s descriptions of Laotian women smoking cigarettes out of their vaginas, as depicted in his The great railway bazaar: by train through Asia, Boston, MA: , 1975, p. 207. See also the photo of a Thai adolescent girl partially hidden behind the slope of a European man’s back, only her eyes and nude shoulders visible, in Simons’ ‘The littlest prostitutes’, p. 31, as well as the photos of the world’s prostitutes in Margaret Hornblower’s article, ‘The skin trade’, Time Magazine, 21 June 1993.

74 Sanghera, ‘Poverty and prostitution’, p. 51.

75 Chat Garcia, ‘The bride trade in Australia: a case of trafficking’, in Women empowering women: proceedings of the Human Rights Conference on the Trafficking of Asian Women, April 2–4, 1993, Metro Manilia: The Coalition, 1993, p. 154; Truong, ‘Dynamics of sex tourism’, p. 533. The most complete work on the subject is Thanh-Dam Truong, Sex, money and morality.

76 See Geetanjali Gangoli and Nicole Westmarland, eds., International approaches to prostitution: law and policy in Europe and Asia (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2006); also worth viewing is the UN’s list of ratifications by individual Southeast Asian nation states when it comes to human rights laws, many of them having to do with trafficking and prostitution. The 2007 data can be viewed at http://www.un.or.th/ohchr/countries/ratifications.doc (consulted 27 March 2008).

77 Enloe, Bananas, p. 37.

78 Ibid., pp. 35, 38.

79 ‘Thailand stupefied’, The Economist, 1 August 1987, p. 82; ‘Survey Thailand’, The Economist, 31 October 1987. The best single study on prostitution in modern Thailand may be Ryan, Bishop’sNight market: sexual cultures and the Thai economic miracle, London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1998.Google Scholar

80 See Alex Renton, ‘Learning the Thai sex trade’ Prospect, 110, May 2005; available at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6889 (consulted 27 March 2008).

81 Enloe, Bananas, p. 35. Several revealing interviews with prostitutes in this city are published in Susanne Thorbek, Voices from the city: women of Bangkok, London: Zed Books, 1987, ch. 7.

82 Robert Wihtol, ‘Hospitality girls in the Manila tourist belt’, Philippine Journal of Industrial Relations, 4, 1–2, 1982, pp. 18, 36.

83 Liza Maza and Cath Jackson, ‘When the revolution came’, Trouble and Strife, 14, Autumn 1988, pp. 19–22.

84 Simons, ‘The littlest prostitutes’, p. 34. As many as 60% of these adolescents are sold outright by members of their families. The US$350–US$600 cash advances that the families ordinarily receive are roughly equivalent to one year’s income.

85 This information and the following statistics on Vietnam have been culled from Le Thi Quy, ‘Sexual policy on prevention and restriction of prostitution in Vietnam’, in Women empowering women, pp. 91–3. Nguyen Dinh An, Vice President of the People’s Committee of Quang Nam Danang Province, has stated that in his opinion there are about 200,000 prostitutes in Vietnam: see Mark, Bonacci, Senseless casualties: the Aids crisis in Asia, Washington, DC: Asia Resource Center, 1992, p. 19.Google Scholar

86 See William, Vollman, Butterfly Stories, New York, NY: Grove Press, 1993.Google Scholar

87 See ‘Banyak tempat hiburan jadi tempat prostitutsi’, Angkatan Bersenjata, 12 November 1997, p. 6; see also Syarifah Sabaroedin, ‘Matrix of a country report on trafficking of women in Indonesia’, in Women empowering women, p. 90. A good overview can also be found in Johan Lindquist, ‘Modern spaces, wild places and international hinterlands’, Anthropology Today, 16, 3, 2000, pp. 15–17. With the opening of new oil rigs off the coast of Indonesian Timor, North Australians are starting to visit Kupang for exactly the same purpose. See Garcia, ‘The bride trade in Australia’, p. 154.

88 Two of the best recent books examining these processes are Muhadjir Darwin, Anna Marie Wattie, and Susi Eja Yuarsi, eds., Living on the edges: cross-border mobility and sexual exploitation in the greater Southeast Asia sub-region, Yogyakarta: Center for Population and Policy Studies, Gadjah Mada University, 2003, and Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-wei Yeo, eds., Postcolonial urbanism: Southeast Asian cities and global processes, New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.

89 Khin, Thitsa, Providence and prostitution, London: Change International Reports, 1999, p. 2.Google Scholar See also Teresa Sobieszczyk, ‘Pathways abroad: gender and international labor migration institutions in northern Thailand’, PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2000.

90 Ibid., p. 2. In Vollman’s account of ‘Vanna’ in Phmom Penh, the prostitute will not stay all night with him in the hotel because she gets paid by the hour to work in the fields (presumably early in the morning) to supplement her sex wages. The hotel bellboy told Vollman, ‘These taxi-girls, you know, they do this to make money for the family. They never tell the family what they do.’ See Butterfly stories, p. 88.

91 May-an Villalba, ‘Understanding Asian women in migration: toward a theoretical framework’, Women in Action, 2 and 3, Quezon City: ISIS International, 1993, p. 14.

92 Leonora Angeles, ‘Between the devil and the deep blue sea: transnational issues and the trafficking of Filipino women’, in Women empowering women, p. 39. In January and February 1992, 1,157 commercial sex workers registered in the city, compared to 799 during the same period the previous year.

93 Similar increases happened after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in 1991 and, generally, in times of poor harvests or plagues as they hit individual areas. For Mt Pinatubo and prostitution, see The Philippine Daily Inquirer, 21 March 1992.

94 Jitlada Rattanapan, ‘The trafficking of women and girls for prostitution’, in Women empowering women, p. 78.

95 Thitsa, Providence and prostitution, p. 3.

96 Bonacci, Senseless casualties, pp. 21, 71.

97 The Thai case has probably generated the best studies in Southeast Asia: see Ara, Wilson, The intimate economies of Bangkok : tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004Google Scholar, and Leslie Ann, Jeffrey, Sex and borders: gender, national identity, and prostitution policy in Thailand, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2002.Google Scholar

98 Skrobanek, ‘Tourism’, p. 1.

99 For some of the larger arguments on trafficking in the region, see Karen Beeks and Delila Amir, eds., Trafficking and the global sex industry, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006, and Janice G. Raymond, et al, eds., A comparative study of women trafficked in the migration process: patterns, profiles and health consequences of sexual exploitation in five countries [Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Venezuela, and the United States], North Amherst, MA: Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 2002.

100 Jyoti Sanghera, ‘Poverty and prostitution’, pp. 49–50. This is a common procurement practice in many areas, in fact. For a Bornean analogue of deceptive trafficking between Kalimantan (Indonesia) and Sabah (Malaysia), see ‘Menyingkap jaringan perdangangan wanita’ (‘Revealing the network of commerce in women’), Tempo, 37, 13 November 1993, pp. 22 ff.

101 ‘Smuggling human beings’, Bangkok Post, 19 July 1992. For the Cambodian border, see Leviseda, Douglas, Sex trafficking in Cambodia, Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 2003.Google Scholar

102 Christina Mahoney, ‘Trafficking and forced prostitution of Chinese and Burmese women in Thailand’, in Women empowering women, p. 62; Rattanapan, ‘Trafficking of women’, p. 78. Estimates place 20,000 Burmese women in Thai brothels, with 10,000 new arrivals coming to replenish ‘depletions’ each year. See ‘The slaves from Myanmar’, The Economist, 5–11 February 1994.

103 Mahoney, ‘Trafficking and forced prostitution’, p. 59.

104 Ibid., p. 61. It has been estimated that there are over 1,000 Shan women working as prostitutes in Chiang Mai: see Rattanapan, ‘Trafficking of women’, p. 78.

105 For Cambodia, see Vollman, Butterfly stories, p. 44. For Indonesian ‘shipments’ to Malaysia via Denpasar, Surabaya, Manado, Malang, and Ujung Pandang, see Jakarta Post, 31 March 1988. The situation in Ruili, a Chinese town on the Burmese border, has been described as ‘like something out of the movie Bladerunner’. Chinese girls to Burma (en route to Thailand), guns, gems, teak, and tiger skins can all be made available on a moment’s notice. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AIDS percentages in this remote outpost of China are beginning to spiral out of control. Telephone interview with Edith Mirante, Executive Director of Project Mage (A Burmese Human Rights Awareness Group). See also ‘From China to Burma and then to Thailand’, Bangkok Post, 19 July 1993; ‘An international trade in sex slavery’, Bangkok Post, 18 July 1991; and ‘Silent suffering’, The Nation (Bangkok), 6 July 1992.

106 Alison Murray, No money, no honey: a study of street traders and prostitutes in Jakarta, Singapore and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 105–6. For two good accounts of the parameters of prostitution in modern Indonesia, see Terence Hull, Endang Sulistyaningsih, and Gavin Jones, eds., Pelacuran di Indonesia: sejarah dan perkembangannya, Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan bekerja sama dengan The Ford Foundation, 1997, and A. S. Alam, Pelacuran dan pemerasan: studi sosiologis tentang eksploitasi manusia oleh manusia, Bandung: Alumni, 1984.

107 Women empowering women, p. 16.

108 Sanghera, ‘Poverty and prostitution in Asia’, p. 51.

109 See the rather heartbreaking interview with a young Filipina woman who was about to go off to Japan to work in the ‘entertainment industry’ (but did not believe the whispered stories of abuse) in Ed Gerlock, ‘She went to Kara, far, far away’, Asian Migrant, trial issue, October/November 1987, p. 9. For other works on ‘Japayuki-san’ (Southeast Asian women working as prostitutes in Japan), see Oshima Shizuko, ‘Gathering the fires of help’, Yamazaki Hiromi, ‘Japan imports brides: can isolated farmers buy consolation?’, and Nakamura Hisashi, ‘Japan imports brides: from a new poverty discovered’, all in AMPO, 19, 4, 1988. Also see Nicholas Bornoff, Pink samurai: love, marriage, and sex in contemporary Japan, New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1991), pp. 341–6.

110 Manila Chronicle, 4 March 1990 quoted in Angeles, ‘Between the devil’, p. 41.

111 The traffic to Japan is just one aspect of the purchasing of Southeast Asian women’s sexual services abroad. Filipina and Thai women are regularly trafficked to Europe and the Middle East, while Indonesian prostitutes have even turned up in Jeddah and Riyadh (a pilgrimage of a wholly different kind). See (in order) Sabaroedin, ‘Matrix of a country report’, p. 89; Angeles, Between the devil’, pp. 27, 32: and Bornoff, Pink samurai, p. 341.