Carmina works as a dancer in a bar in Angeles City, Philippines. Possessor of a deep, sultry voice, she was occupied as a performer-hostess at a men’s club overseas for more than 10 years, and made a very good living. Her specialty was singing jazz standards, and she can rattle off any Cole Porter tune at a moment’s notice. She left her adopted country because it was time to return home and start a business. Carmina doesn’t really need the money she makes at the bar. In fact, she lends money to other bar girls at 20% monthly interest, and makes a small fortune off that every month. Twenty to thirty girls borrow money from her every month, and, she pays her mamasan a monthly salary to collect the interest (paid on a daily basis, at 400 pesos per day). The arrangement she has is that the mamasan is responsible financially for all unpaid debts.
So why is Carmina working in an Angeles bar?
“I want to have my own bar, but want to find western boyfriend, maybe get married, maybe have baby, maybe start a business running my own bar,” she says. “I don’t like Philippine man, Western man better for me, so I think I meet one here.” So that’s what Carmina’s doing at a job she really doesn’t need. She’s looking for a husband and a business partner, and knows she’s got her best shot finding him at a bar in Angeles. Whereas other Western men she may meet outside of the clubs may judge her based on their own moral philosophies, men she meets in the bar won’t. Carmina’s got a plan and a launching pad, namely the bar at which she works on Field Avenue in Angeles.
Carmina, if the irony hasn’t struck you, is the type of woman that is referred to in guide books such as Lonely Planet, as “exploited” (my 7th edition of LP’s Philippines guide mentions the “crooked police, politicians, and bar owners who make a living from exploiting sex workers”). In other words, the girls working these bars aren’t doing so of their own free will. Stories like Carmina’s convince me that Lonely Planet guide book writers don’t meet these women. Instead, they have pre-formed ideas, then fit Asian bar girls nicely into their categories. How could a woman sink so low as to sell sex in a bar, unless there was were some horrible man making her do it, they seem to ask.
By contrast, last year, we attended a party given by a western woman who told us proudly that her wedding cost her and her husband-to-be $800,000 USD. OK, we’ll repeat that number. $800,000 USD. We asked her husband to confirm the figure, and he did. “It was sort of her idea, and I went along with it. After all, you only do it once,” he said, and it was said with a conspiratorial tone that indicated no expensive wedding, no marriage.
We don’t have a moral problem with the western woman selling herself for nearly a million dollars any more than we have an issue with Carmina offering herself at a more attractive price point. Each of these women is trying to move on to the next step in her life in the way she so chooses. But let’s stop calling bar girls second class citizens, or thinking of them as not being intelligent enough to make their own decisions. Publications such as the Lonely Planet guide mentioned earlier perpetuate the myth that these women aren’t making their own career decisions. As abhorrent as it must be to the authors of these publications, perhaps they should walk into a bar, buy a girl a drink, and engage in a discussion. They might learn something. But of course they never will, because by buying a $2 USD drink, they feel they’ll be adding to the profit of the bar owner “exploiting” the people who work there. And so the ignorance of western travel guide writers on the subject of women who work in bars is perpetuated year after year.
If travel writers wishing to investigate exploitation as it relates to bar girls want the real scoop, they should interview Carmina. They’re welcome to buy her a “lady drink” for her time, and she’ll even lend them some money at her customary 240% per annum rate.
Oooh, you’re such an inspiration. I love this blog!
Nice post.
Yes, ALL children exploit their parents. That’s my point. Just taking a woman out of the commercial sex industry would not remove ALL the exploitation from her life.
I just finished writing a book about Thai bar workers, and as research I talked at some length with about thirty former bar workers and half a dozen who are still working. I think it’s very careless — even misleading — to lump them in with brothel workers and others whose treatment takes exploitation to a whole new level. While I doubt that any young woman would choose prostitution as a life’s work IF SHE HAD VALID ALTERNATIVES, the women who work the bars have much more freedom (and make much more money) than brothel workers, massage parlor girls, and so forth.
Yes, economics and a paucity of life choices lead them to the bars. And yes, they go through nightmares sometimes as they learn the ropes and occasionally come up against dangerous, even brutal, customers. The fact is, however, that they can say no to a customer or a whole series of customers in most bars; that they can earn some money simply by being bought drinks; and that no pimp takes the money the customer pays them. (I think they should be given a big piece of the bar fine, but obviously the bar owners disagree with me.) Yes, they have to go with a certain number of men every month, but by and large, they’re in charge of which men those are. Also — and this is important — they can quit when they want, they can change bars, they can move to Pattaya or Chiang Mai or wherever they can support themselves. Or they can quit the trade altogether without fear of repercussions.
And it always seems odd to me that it’s bar workers who are singled out as examples of exploitation when they’re only there in the first place because virtually every other form of employment open to them is even more exploitive — garment factories where they work on dangerous machines for 12 hours for virtually no money, for example, or electronics assembly plants that are badly lighted, unventilated, full of carcinogens, and pay miserably. It’s as though a woman’s not exploited unless sex is involved, which seems to me a Puritan way of looking at things.
And I have to say that the notion that bar workers are exploited by their dress makers, their hair stylists, their parents, and their children (not to mention each other) is kind of odd. I think hair stylists exploit many of their customers, not just working women, and growing children exploit their parents as a matter of course. I certainly exploited mine.
Of course, most workers in the sex trade are exploited and victimized, but Thai bar workers are less so than many others. It’s a mistake to lump them all together.
Interesting point of view. I tend to distrust it because it’s the point of view expressed by sex tourists in Asian bars every night. These men find such logic convenient; it validates their lifestyle and relives them of responsibility. Unfortunately, finding one data point that is an anomaly, among hundreds of thousands of data points that point to a radically different trend, is spurious logic.
I wrote the Southern Thailand section of the Insight Guide to Thailand for two years. I knew Joe Cummings, who wrote the entire Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand for 20 years, quite well. I don’t know who the author of this post is, but I’d be willing to bet money I’ve spent as much time in Asian bars and brothels as he has. Joe Cummings has spent far more time in them than either of us. Whatever I wrote in my guide book, and whatever Joe wrote over the course of two decades in the Lonely Planet Guide, I promise you it was based on first-hand observation and careful consideration.
Sex workers are vulnerable to exploitation in a million ways, by their customers, by their pimps, by bartenders, taxi drivers, dress makers, hair stylists, and by their parents, children, spouses and each other. A few, like the one you describe above, are able to defend themselves; the vast majority are not.