A (somewhat) brief field guide to sex workers in Cambodia

August 13, 2008 *I started writing this post a little while ago, but then got busy and never finished it.
1:30 PM ICT
Room 228, Salina Hotel
Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

So in conjunction with my research, I thought I should present a brief overview of the many types of sex workers one may encounter while touring Cambodia (or, perhaps, Southeast Asia in general, and maybe the rest of the world too). (By the way, this post is pretty essay-like… and grim.)

It should noted that most of these jobs are what is described broadly as “indirect sex work” – in other words, the women (the sex workers are overwhelmingly women here) have job titles other than ‘sex worker,’ but they still wind up selling sex – often because of a desperate need for money, too much drinking, the desire for a foreign sugar daddy to ensure economic security, etc. As a bonus, indirect sex workers’ bosses don’t feel any pressure to do anything that might improve the situation of their workers, because they can plead ignorance about any sex work occurring as a result of the job. Indeed, they often actually blame the women for selling sex. When Foster’s Beer packed up and left Cambodia a few years ago, a company official stated that it was because their beer girls were selling sex, and they didn’t want to have a proud symbol of Australia being sold by prostitutes.

Another problem with the indirect sex worker label is that not all women having these jobs are selling sex, and the label therefore has the effect of perpetuating stereotypes of these women as immoral, unmarriageable, and unemployable. On the flip side, if they aren’t identified as a risk group, interventions meant to aid sex workers often don’t get to them. Cambodia, for example, has had a relatively successful 100% condom use program with brothel-based sex workers – direct sex workers – but this program has done little to reach indirect sex workers. So, here we go:

a) Brothel-based sex workers are the direct sex workers. They aren’t many streetwalkers in Cambodia (at least in Siem Reap), but there are brothels. It used to be that brothels were everywhere – often clearly marked as such – with the full knowledge, and often support, of the police. There are fewer now, and more brothels are given other names (karaoke, massage – see below), but they are still often run with full support of the police. (Corruption in Cambodia is widespread, but very rule-based; despite being illegal, brothels are allowed to exist and are provided with police support, for a fee, but streetwalkers are arrested on sight and dealt with quite brutally.) Women working in brothels are often trafficked in and kept as sex slaves – and are often underage.

b) As brothels have gone underground, massage parlors have come to replace them. ‘Happy ending’ massage is hardly a new phenomenon, or an unknown one, but it’s incredibly widespread here. You don’t go for a massage unless you have done research, and you have confirmation from local contacts that you will only receive a massage. There’s a well-known Southeast Asian form of massage called Thai massage. It’s based on pressure points, and it’s apparently very painful at first, though it feels good later. As sex tourism increased in the region in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘Thai massage’ became a euphemism for ‘illegitimate massage’. In the 90s, there was a movement to get sex workers into skilled profitable jobs, and it was someone’s clever idea to ‘take back’ Thai massage, by training former sex workers to give actually Thai massages. Tourists, expecting sex, received a real, and quite intense, massage. Now, some places specifically advertise what they call ‘traditional Thai massage’ – with ‘traditional’ referring to the 1970s, so sex.

c) The other major brothel replacement to come about were karaoke bars. I had heard a lot about karaoke here, but I never really understood how it was sex work. Here’s how karaoke works here: the front room of the building is a wide open room with many couches, on which sit many many scantily-clad ‘karaoke singers’. You choose one (or more than one), then she leads you into a private room – with microphone and tv and bar service; as well as washroom, couch, and lockable door. Then she sings to you. So it’s like a hybrid of a private party and a bar trip; but it’s not hard to guess where it often goes from the singing. There is in fact a new movement of what’s called ‘karaoke hotels’. They’re new, so none of the people I’ve been working with really know much about them, but it seems they’re the same basic concept, but with the couch replaced with a bed. Yeah.

d) Most of the work I’ve been doing has been with beer girls. Beer girls are pretty girls hired by beer companies to wear (often revealing) branded clothing and sell their brand of beer in bars (they actually have the same thing in North America too, here’s an interesting article about American beer girls working for Budweiser). For Cambodian beer girls, the situation’s a bit different, though. Unlike their North American counterparts, Cambodian beer girls often sit and drink with the men they serve, and get drunk (and they are often encouraged to do so). Like most indirect sex workers, their monthly salaries don’t provide enough money (they get an average of $55 per month, and a living wage is closer to $110 per month) and so a man offering $20 for one night’s work seems to make sense. It’s also not completely clear who would be responsible for changing the work environment of the beer girls (or giving them proper health and safety training). They work in bars, but it’s the beer companies who employ them and bus them around to different bars. And the beer companies are international brewers, relying on a decentralized network of local contacts to actually deal with the day-to-day operations. I could say a lot more about beer girls (a lot), but I’ll just say this: the beer you drink may well be owned by one of these international brewers. Heineken, Carlsburg, and Inbev are the main offenders, and to see if your brand has beer girls in Cambodia, go here.

e) An emerging risk group, also in the bars, are hostesses. You see, the problem with beer girls is that they’ve been getting these international brewers a lot of bad press, which has forced the companies to get together and create a code of conduct – which says beer girls aren’t allowed to sit and drink. This isn’t getting fully enforced, but it seems there is some decline in the amount the beer girls are drinking. Good for the beer girls, good press for the international brewers, but bad for the bars – which now have a lot of lonely creepy men who are angry because they can’t pay girls to sit with them. The hostesses fill that void. They are hired by the restaurant to look glamorous (the standard uniform consists of a lot of classy makeup, carefully done hair, and outfits that most resemble prom dresses), and to sit and talk wit the men in the bar (and to flirt, and to drink). They’re kind of like escorts in Canada, except that as you walk into the bar, there’s a lineup of a dozen of them that stand up, bow, and make flirty faces at you. And unlike beer girls, who actually have the option of not sitting down and drinking, it is specifically the job descriptions of hostesses to do so.

f) Brief mention should be made of the young vendors – but not too much mention, because I don’t know too much about them, and what I do know creeps me out unbelievably. When tourists go to the temples at Angkor Wat (the main attraction near Siem Reap), they are mobbed by dozens of children (ages maybe 8-15) selling… crap. Stupid trinkets, flower bracelets, that kind of stuff. The children are almost universally poor, uneducated (they spend their days selling, and not in school), and many are orphans; so some take pity and buy something (the young vendors also sell the same stuff in Cambodian bars, for some unknown reason). But, according to one estimate, something like 21% of tourism to Cambodia is sex tourism, and much of this involves tourists looking for underage sex. So, small children desperate for money and trying to get close to tourists are obviously at risk.

Well I hope you’re all good and depressed now.