Walkabout: You Want Massage?

Friday, August 31, 2001

Taking a nighttime taxi into Bangkok from the airport as a lone white male, the conversation invariably goes something like this:

"Massage, you want Thai massage?"
"No thanks."
"Special massage?"
"No really, thanks."
"Ah, you want man."
"No thanks. I'm married, see?"
"But wife not here. You want boy, I think? Or lady boy?"

And so on. This conversation takes place almost any time one has a driver that speaks rudimentary English. Sometimes you also get onto drugs. But even if you're spared it inside the car, it's impossible to avoid the vice outside as bar after karaoke club after restaurant offer lines of prostitutes under cheap pink fairy lights. In fact, from the scores of Western men -- young, middle aged and old -- wandering arm in arm with a stunning escort and the dreamy look of someone who can't believe his luck, your taxi driver's questions make a lot of sense. Bangkok looks like 21st century man's favorite fleshpot. Why else, your cabbie is saying, are you in town?

So in many ways the Thai government's new anti-vice drive, enforcing a long forgotten law requiring last orders at midnight, a 2 a.m. close, and new random drug tests on customers, is welcome. Cleaning up the world's brothel was always going to take harsh measures. Overnight, Bangkok has become a dead zone in the early hours as tourists are turfed out and resident foreigners stay at home rather than risk the indignity of a Thai police drugs test, whatever their narcotic predilections. But if this is what it takes to save some of the thousands of women and children sold into sexual slavery each year in the Thai capital alone, then so be it.

Naturally, the government's move has provoked uproar among bar owners, some economists, and (you guessed it) taxi drivers, who say it will undercut the vital tourism industry. Interior Minister Purachai Piumsombun is unrepentant. But his response is nevertheless worrying. "Tourists are here because they want to see natural beauty," he said. "They don't want to see exotic dancers or take drugs. The nightlife is secondary."

This has to go down as one of the more ludicrous statements ever made by a government minister. And while we may laugh, his comments also suggest the crackdown is less than serious. Purachai is playing to the three quarters of Bangkok that want to see action taken against the sex industry and the related AIDS and drugs problem in the capital. He has been sure to invite reporters and TV crews along for the more dramatic raids. But his decision to ignore other dens of iniquity -- Pattaya, the Burmese border, to say nothing of Bangkok's "closed" brothels in which prostitutes are confined night and day -- shows quite how all-conquering Purachai's "social order crusade" is likely to be. Not!

Bangkok will resume its historic role as a sex tourist's paradise as soon as the minister has garnered enough law-and-order headlines. Let's hope the countless victims of the Thai sex trade don't believe all they read.

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