Customer Reviews

Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I've been involved in and taught cultural anthropology for 27 years. I don't normally underline very much in a book, but after combing through this one I found I had made some 174 major underlinings, mostly critical. I also made 137 major separate notes in the margins and at the end of chapters, alas, also mostly critical. For those of you who do not wish to read the whole of this review, let me advise you to use this book only as a classic example of how not to do anthropological research and how not to write it, and to a certain extent, how not to publish it (the backing falls apart in less than two readings and you are ultimately treated to piles of pages).

It is difficult to summarize in such a short space all the concerns I have for the serious or critical reader of this volume. Rest assured, I have no axe to grind, know none of the authors or folks associated, and have only been to Thailand once, but having invested the better part of three days reviewing this as a possible text for one of my courses, Gawd, this book is an awful waste of time. It is a little like a romance novel that seems to keep promising the academic ecstasy of greater things if you just keep reading, like solutions to the "problems" the authors keep formulating or imagining. But there is no ecstasy and nothing happens and there is no elaborated point that is not covered in the Preface and chapter one. For all of its criticism of the Thai life system, not one solution is ever postulated, not one piece of advice for the Thai government, not one applicable idea. A few vague references from the authors suggest agricultural reform and other governmental "reorganizations" would somehow keep these pathetic poverty-stricken Thai farming people from selling their daughters into the ever present malevolent, (but dang it) lucrative, prostitution profession, and the subsequent loyalty requirement that the girls send at least some of the money home to keep the farm up and their folks `comfortable'. What happens to these women as they grow older is not explored well at all. To paraphrase, "I wonder how you keep them down on the farm after they've seen gaye Bankok?" It is as though underneath it all, the authors really don't want to allow the Thai people to have their own way of life, thank you.

In its own way, the book has bitten off more than it can chew. It tries to describe and contrast the differences between the contexts in which Thai folks struggle to make an agricultural living (never really described), the relative worth of the individual (male or female) in this process, family loyalty, the way Thais look at beauty, sensuality, sex, proper behavior, and world view in general, and the way "westerners", meaning folks as diverse and evil as German males and American males and perhaps Japanese males look at the same. No small task! But the book decries the life and condition of the Thai sex workers (mostly female) and how they got to Patpong and the Soi Cowboy. The male sex workers are not considered to be equally pathetic and as a result are all but entirely ignored.

The description of fieldwork, interviews, and results are absolutely minimal for the book as a whole, and forms all or parts of only three chapters. In reading Bishop's transcribed interviews, one wants to read more, to have more interviews, enough so that we can make better comparisons, to make our own judgements. The others could have been put in an appendix. But, alas, we get told what to think about these things, as short as the interviews are, and come away feeling suspicious about the authors' conclusions.

Considering the extent of the Japanese market, the German market, and the over rated but apparent "American" market for the services of the sex workers of Thailand, virtually nothing is said about the context of why German or Japanese men are attracted to Thai sex services. In "exploring" an American female's perception of American male's concepts of sexual attraction (Chapter 5, Imagining Sexual Others), Robinson (& Bishop?) impose too much of a connection forced from a naïve interpretation of the widespread classic "King and I" as the cause of it all, meaning, much of the American male's attraction to Thai women. There are heaps of literature on what attracts males to females and vice versa in a culture bound sort of way, and more on the concept of femininity. How Thai culture presents the concept of femininity, even if it is for sale, is strangely little explored. The authors tend to "over portray" the stark contrast between the ideals of otherwise "sweet little innocent girls" versus the raw, savage, foreign male sexual appetite. They barely touch on the relationships between prostitutes and their Thai male customers. See below.

Their cited references are many, but this book reviews extensively their faults rather than any of their positives, as though they were competing authors, not contributing authors. Several chapters are devoted to nothing but book and article reviews, including poetry and songs. So much are they involved in this, that they even review fictional accounts as though they were real and pass judgements upon them. They imply that Internet chat room jargon and "first-hand accounts" of men's Thai sex worker experiences, also on web sites, count as some sort of field work. Again it tells you about the authors' need to set up straw men and knock them down to prove their own preconceived point.

You get the impression they are trying to settle old scores in print. Their first genuine compliment to another author is on page 242 out of 252 pages of text, to one Wendy Chapkis.

Chapter 7, The Unspeakable, is probably one of the better sections, and touches on what can and cannot be talked about in Thai society, and thus how that contributes to ignoring the sex worker's way of life and raison d'etre, the crux of the entire book.

When it comes to attitude, this book is agony. Ms Robinson's feminist ethnocentrism first appears blatantly on page 11, though she attempts transparently to mask it or excuse it, and so the ethnocentrism continues on through the whole of her portion of the text. She falls victim to the technique that if you say something often enough, you then begin to believe it to be true, even if the original did not start out as truth. If Robinson is an anthropologist (See p. 15 ...Bishop is by training a cultural anthropologist.... Robinson holds degrees in the humanities.... But by p. 227 Robinson alludes to herself as an anthropologist. Okay, you can become one by experience after a fashion, like Mark Twain, but she still seems not to know what ethnocentrism is, or chooses not to see it in her writing. At least Mark Twain knew it well - read The Innocence Abroad), anthropologists are theoretically not supposed to write with so much ethnocentrism. Yet every section Lillian Robinson authors seems filled to the brim with heavy western value judgements that tell more about the author than the point she is trying to make.

In many parts of anthropology, context is everything. Carefully hidden in several areas of the book are references to the traditional Thai view of the necessity of prostitution and the frequency with which Thai males use these services. Before Robinson & Bishop can insinuate that foreign males are the driving force for this market, they should more openly recognize the overwhelming market dominance of Thai male use of prostitution. With this in mind, the CIA, FBI, military, politicians, press, and good ole' benign advertisers routinely practice this sort of "disinformation", in rather sophisticated ways on occasion, with the purpose of bending a targets perception towards a desired goal, and this book emulates those techniques, but under the guise of "academic research". It scares me to think that any analytical folks could draw any conclusions from this opus ad nauseum.

It is a book that seems to have been put together by coupling emailed sections over a year or two and no one ever bothered to sit down with a whole copy and read it straight through. It seems surprising that it got by reviewers, let alone publisher Routledge's editors. The writing style and vocabulary is sometimes academic haute cuisine and uses about a dozen words that most academics don't understand let alone use in their own writing. Words like "elide", "synechdote", "emended", etc., are hardly intended for most student audiences.

This anthropologist did learn a lot from the book, but unfortunately those items learned had nothing to do with why the book was written in the first place. I missed a lot in Thailand 25 years ago! The synechdoche elides the whole of this seraglio-filled book and prevents much discursive discussion. Darn.

Unlike the Washington reviewer, I found nothing particularly new about Bishop & Roboinson's conclusions. Those familiar with the feminist critique of prostitution or prostitution in SE Asia will probably agree. The book is long on polemics, but sadly the womern themselves are given rather little voice and little concrete advise is given for changing the situation. Readers who want to know about the social dynamics of prostitution in Thailand are advised to read the work of people like Marjorie Meueke or read recent books such as The Traffic in Women or War in the Blood (both available from Amazon). It's sad that someone of Professor Robinson's reputation has produced something that is long on Western commentary, but ultimately so unempowering to Asian women.

Much has changed in Thailand since the early 1990s when the problems of prostitution and HIV/AIDS made international headlines and prompted a rash of books analysing social conditions there -- the pro-democracy movement, Black May and the ousting of the military dictators. Under civilian democracy, most Thais no longer react to social problems as bad publicity, but as serious wounds in their national character which need to be healed. So it was with great anticipation that I read Robinson's and Bishop's new book. Unfortunately, all of that anticipation was in vain.

What the two authors try to pass off as insightful social analysis and viewing prostitution in the context of global economics, has already been covered before, with greater skill and depth, by other authors and, more importantly, by researchers and social critics in Thailand itself. In fact, the most obvious failing of this work is its refusal to give a voice to the Thais who have fought these problems first hand over the years, or even give a voice to the women victimized themselves by the sex industry. There is no discussion of solutions, or acknowledgement that the Thai sex industry is a small percentage of its former size and the dreaded AIDS crisis has been halted dead in its tracks -- all the result of the efforts and sacrifice of Thais, not of a couple of foreign academics who drop into a country for a few weeks then write a "tsk-tsk" report on troubling social conditions there.

Apart from the economic and social analysis found in the book, (much of which sounds suspiciously like word-for-word translations of reports and journals written by Thai authors on these topics), a substantial amount of material is drawn from international press reporting, which many engaged in social work in Thailand feel is part of the problem. Two articles frequently cited by Bishop and Robinson as "proof" -- "reports" by Time and the New York Times from several years ago -- were revealed to be fradulent long ago, a fact which seems to have been ignored by the two authors. Many other sources used in the book are either out-dated or so questionable in nature few serious researchers would have used them in the first place.

Perhaps Bishop and Robinson thought this would be a quick and easy way to make some money. Whatever their motivation, the result is a book which presents nothing new, muddles facts and questionable sources to fortify their conclusions, and gives us a pair of American mounting their "high horses" to damn social problems in a foreign country which we are far from solving in our own.

While the subject of this book is very interesting and deserves further study, the authors were very pretensious. The book did offer some new insights into Thai economics and how the tourism and prostituion industries interact, but one gets the feeling the authors wanted to rail against the "Farangs" that travel to the kingdom. Two items particularly irritated me. The first was how the authors referenced documents from a navigator on Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America to describe how foreigners feel about Thai prostitues. How a document written about a voyage before there was a Thailand (or U.S.A. for that matter) pertains to Bangkok massage parlors, I'll never know. The second "documentation" concerned a Thai Air advertisement. The ad featured a stewardess smiling at a white airline traveler. The authors try to convince the reader that this is proof that Thai industries are actively promoting the sex trade. If this is true, nearly every commercial on American television is an active promotion of prostitution in the U.S. There is a need for a serious study of the socio-economic impact of the sex trade in Thailand, but this is not it. This is nothing more than a tirade against prostitution and the foreign travelers who venture to Thailand. How prostitution destroys young Thais is truly a sad story, but the authors should devote a little more effort in researching their subject, rather than blindly grasping at obtuse concepts to prove a predjudicial viewpoint.

The turgid, confused prose is a dead give away. So is the overblown praise for this poorly written book. The 5 star review from "the United States of America" has to be one of the authors. If so, then the call for "objective" reviews from a postmodernist is ironic, as well as amusing. Also ironic is the book's theme of exploitation---by relying on a dated, superficial review of scholarly research, as well as sleazy pop culture, the book itself appears to be a work of Western exploitation. Except this time, it's the arrogant academics exploiting prostitutes, rather than their male customers. This harsh, intensely narcisistic diatribe may be good vita fodder, but it is not worthwhile reading.

1. Travel is by nature exploitative of the environments and indigenous cultures of the places visited. Best just to stay home.

2. It's irresponsibly hedonistic to desire a good meal, a glass of fine wine or a swim on a tropical beach. Again, it's best to stay home. And at home you should stick to steamed vegetables from your garden, filtered tap water and cold showers.

3. It's possible to write and publish a book that is ostensibly about the anthropology and political economy of Thailand when you are unfamiliar with either discipline (both authors have doctorates in literature) and know little about the country or its language. All you need is a pile of travel guides, vacation brochures and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. If you can spout meaningless pap like "the bar-girl subjectivity" to uncomprehending interview subjects, so much the better. (A better title for this book would have been: "Sexy Thailand: The View from an MLA Convention." In fact how this book ever got published in the first place is beyond me; I guess someone at Routledge thought sex would sell, but that's a matter between the Routledge editors and their own personal deities.)

4. Both that the personal is political and the political is personal. (See work cited by authors: "Riflessioni liguistiche sul personale e sul politico," which, by the way, is one of several works in European languages listed in a bibliography that does not mention even one article in Thai or any other Asian language.)

5. Although western culture has irredeemably objectified, exoticized and fetishized Asian women, it's o.k. for a White American Male (WAM) to marry a "LBFM," but only if she's from a "good" (i.e., wealthy) family, as co-author Bishop says in the book that he has done. Bishop makes his reason for writing the book explicit on page 1, where he says that when he traveled around Thailand with his Thai wife everyone assumed she was a prostitute. At restaurants, Thai men at neighboring tables would make disparaging remarks, and "not even my rebukes in Thai could silence their tongues." He might have tried being diplomatic or even improving his Thai, which the rest of the book proves is a language that he knows barely at all. Instead he co-wrote this book, so much as to say, look, I wrote a book published by a fancy academic press that shows what idiots you all are, so shut up! (If you think this comment is too personal, see number 4, above. And also note that Bishop--who at the time the book was published was "Visiting Assistant Professor" at SMU--now works at a university in Singapore, a city whose expat residents enjoy a lifestyle that more closely approximates that of high colonialism than any other place on earth. At least we can be thankful that he's not writing articles about the "subjectivity" of his domestic help. Although "Night Market" is on his c.v., his list of current research interests does not mention anthropology, economics, sex, or even Thailand.)

Night market is an amateurish attempt at applying a neo-Marxist cultural analysis to commercial sex work in Thailand. Economic forces of varied kinds have been implicated in other analyses of the problem, but so have values, traditions, etc. which the authors ignore. Indeed, they ignore most of the scholary social science research on sex work in Thailand (including work that is sympathetic to their viewpoint) and seem to misread much of what they do cite. Much space is given to analyzing sleazy novels about expats' affairs with working girls and old magazine articles about Thailand. Still, voyeurs titilated by the title and lurid cover art will be disappointed by the often turgid polemical, stream of conciousness prose. Readers familiar with Thailand will recognize the amateurish attempt at scholarship. It's amazing that a serious publisher has decided to put out this swill.

A lot of hype and nonsense showing how feminists extremists view the night life scene in Bangkok. From their fanatical point of view only. And of course when one of their own disagrees with them, such as, Cleo Oldzer, rather than question themselves, they dump on her. These people remind me of the academics in the play Equus, who had no hope of enjoying life. A very boring book in which they love to babble about "tropes." Well, sweetiepies, trope THIS.

Lillian Robinson has explored the "economic miracle" of Thailand with great detail and care. That she is passionate about her subject and cares for the women and girls who are exploited in the Thai tourist sex market is at once refreshing and needed in our culture which increasingly accepts the commodification of women's bodies.

Co-author Lillian Robinson has been one of the boldest voices in American Studies and in feminist scholarship since the 1970s. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, in tackling the issue of sex tourism in Thailand, she and Ryan Bishop point to the U.S. and to Western constructions of masculinity as largely to blame. In this, they break with the conventional wisdom of American journalism, which has presented the subject of the prostitution industry in Bangkok as a safely distant "Asian" problem, stemming from so-called lax "Asian" attitudes toward sex work.No, say the writers of this book; the blame lies uncomfortably close to home, in the checkbooks of the American consumers--those who go looking for sex on the cheap through the Western arrangers of sex tours,and who then encourage other men to do so, through their contributions to web sites that provide salacious tales and practical consumer advice.Theirs is a brilliant and challenging ana! lysis of how this seemingly extreme example of American men exercising the "right" to buy and use women sexually stems from everyday notions of masculine privilege. They uncover, in the end,not a world of perverts or sickos, but quite ordinary men living out an all-too-common fantasy of sexually possessing young girls who neither can nor will make any demands upon them in return.This book will certainly not please every reader, for its messages demand that Westerners hold up a mirror to themselves and see an unflattering picture of participants in continuing human rights abuses.But the vision is convincingly realized and impeccably documented here.