Customer Reviews

Whispers and Moans: Interviews with the Men and Women of Hong Kong's Sex Industry

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

 

 

This book is a very honest portrayal of the lives of people involved in the sex trade in Hong Kong, primarily in the low-rent districts of Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po, based on extensive interviews. The author went to great lengths to befriend sex workers but she remains unsentimental and doesn't shy away from expressing exasperation with the way they run their lives: frittering their earnings away on drugs, gambling, and unreliable boyfriends. It's both a vicarious insight into an underworld economy which few fully understand, and a critique of human folly. The movie was quite good but couldn't delve into the subject in much depth. As usual, the book is better.

Before I start the review let me repeat - this is a serious study of the sex business in Hong Kong. There are no photos, no stories of the X-rated kind, no in-dept studies of positions. This is about the people who work the sex industry, why they joined the industry, and what happens to them. It is sad, sometimes ugly, and also amazing. Women, men, transsexuals, brothel owners and even boyfriends are interviewed. Are they telling the truth? Are they making up lies? Hard to say - how many people would tell the truth about their lives, about the drugs, and the pain, and the gambling and the heartbreak?

This is not a book about facts and figures. This is a book about people, about life and, sometimes, about death. This book will destroy any idea you may have of easy money and happiness coming from being a prostitute. I hear women talking about the freedoms of being a hooker, good time girl, or a spoiled dove in history, and in the modern world, and I am sure some people do great. This book shows us those who fail.

You can wait until this book goes down to about $2-3 before buying it. I bought it about about $8 (plus shipping) and don't feel like I got my money's worth.

A lot of what the author says just DOESN'T SQUARE WITH REALITY.

1. She does a lot of talking about "ducks" (male prostitutes), and how their customers are sex workers who have been abused so much that they feel the need to hire someone to do the same thing to him. Um, I'm sorry, but I am willing to be that men who do "duck" work serve mostly gay clients. Something like over 90%. (I mean, there are always and everywhere more men who want sex than there are women to supply it. Can you imagine any woman with a pulse hiring a male escort?)

2. She spends all her time talking about streetwalkers and girls who work at hostess bars, but she seems to have left out girls who work out of apartments that book customers from the internet. (Tsim Sha Tsui is loaded with such girls off of sex141 and sex161.) I suspect that the reason that she left these girls out is because they are would weaken this already weak attempt to write a sociology book (talking about this or that "social factor" or "patriarchal system"). The honest truth is that most men who want to get a hooker go there to get straight half and half and LEAVE.

3. The author goes on at some length about how men want women who will play this or that role, and how the Mainland hookers are so much harder working than the local Hong Kong girls. Um, Mainland girls can be starfish just like anyone else. Many of them are peasant girls and are doing that job because of desperate financial need.

The author does not interview that many johns. It seems that she puts in 5 or 6 quotes at the *very end* of the book, even though she could have used the space that she spent philosophizing/ trying the turn the book into a colloquium adding the comments of a few johns. I have a feeling that if any long term punters read this book, they will not recognize much of what they see. Or, they will know that it is not representative.

What was the chapter on "Fertiity for Sale" about? And what did it have to do with working girls? The whole thing could have been omitted with no loss. The "Pimps" chapter is not really even about pimps, for that matter.

On the structure of the book/ prose:

1. The book can be read out of order (and that is nice, in case you don't have time to go through the longer chapters), and the prose is very easy to read. That makes this book an appropriate (non-meaty) follow-up to something that has left your brain sore.

2. Index? That might have been nice.

In sum: In spite of attempts to turn this into a sociologial/ anthropological piece, there really just is not that much more to the industry other than women who want money (for whatever reason) and men who want a quick shot of you-know-what.

Until this book gets down to $2, save your money.