[Genders]
Genders 35 2002
How My Dick Spent Its
Summer Vacation
Labor, Leisure, And Masculinity On The Web
by RYAN BISHOP AND LILLIAN S. ROBINSON
"[The] organization of power - that is, the manner in which desire is
already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic - haunts
the exonomic and nourishes political forms of repression . . .Capitalism
was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monetary flux, the
means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all of that is the
flow of desire." - Gilles Deleuze
"Hence, men go on pointless trips and wander about foreign shores;
fickle, never satisfied with the present, they try land one minute, the
sea the next. They go on one trip after another and from one spectacle
to the next . . . This is where disgust with life and the world itself
starts, and in the mad delirium of their own self-indulgence, the
pleasure seeker cries out: when will it ever be just the same old
thing?" - Seneca
"Prostitution can lay claim to being 'work' the moment work becomes
prostitution."-Walter Benjamin
[1] In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the populace has been
conditioned by sleep-teaching "to hate the country, but love all country
sports," so that time away from work is still part of the labor process,
because it "consumes transport" and the worker's job is to consume as
well as produce. At the time Huxley wrote, however, industrialized
leisure belonged to the dystopian future. Since paid vacations were no
more than a dream for most working people, the nightmare of making them
function in the service of global capital had yet to be formulated. The
eventual reality, however, goes much further than Huxley imagined. At
the beginning of the 21st century, industrialized leisure, as
exemplified by sex tourism to Thailand, does not merely recreate the
worker as consumer, but also extends the norms of labor into every
aspect of life, including those conventionally denominated "private."
[2] The Popular Front of 1936 won the French a week's paid leave
annually, in addition to a shorter workweek. In the mid-1930s, CIO
organizing drives--particularly those directed to white males in
American heavy industry--included vacations with pay in its list of
union goals. It was in the wake of the Second World War that Britain's
Labour government instituted paid holidays and, that, even as U.S. trade
unions suffered setbacks in many areas, vacations came increasingly to
be included in blue-collar contracts and figure among the benefits
offered to salaried employees. By the 1960s, four weeks' vacation was
legislated in most of Western Europe and, in subsequent decades, the
time was extended in certain countries to five and even six weeks.
[3] By no means coincidentally, the last third of the twentieth
century also witnessed the development of tourism to its present
position as the world's largest industry. The conversion of the military
aircraft industry to civilian purposes and the subsequent development of
the jumbo jet enabled a larger segment of the First World workforce to
join the "jet set" on charter flights and group tours abroad. Meanwhile,
international rhetoric underscored the role of tourism in promoting
world peace, since, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, "every
tourist (would be) a cultural ambassador." Self-congratulation was the
dominant note of a series of tourism conferences sponsored in this
period by various trans-national agencies, while, at the same time,
developing countries were encouraged to look upon tourism as a route to
economic modernization that would avoid the pitfalls of Western-style
"smokestack" industry.
[4] Sex tourism to Thailand arose in a context doubly informed by the
availability of paid holiday time and the growing affordability of
foreign travel for those with a modest amount of discretionary income.
Unlike the sites in the Caribbean and Africa , however, where sun, sand,
and, in the latter case, safaris preceded sex in the chronology of
seductive sibilants, in Thailand the sex preceded the tourism. Building
upon a vast sex industry serving a local clientele, there emerged during
the Vietnam War period a parallel set of institutions tailored to the
needs and desires of U.S. and other foreign servicemen. These included
men stationed at the enormous American airbases in Thailand itself, as
well as the thousands each week who were rotated in from the combat zone
for R and R, Rest and Recreation. Because providing for the needs of
troops in country and those on leave from the front entailed offering
accommodations, food and drink, souvenirs of all sorts, and non-sexual
entertainment facilities along with sex, these services assumed
significant weight in the Thai economy.
[5] Whether we accept the euphemistic convention of calling this
military tourism R and R or the grunts' more candid alternative, I and
I, for Intercourse and Intoxication, the enactment in 1967 of U.S.
government contracts (with Thailand and several other Asian localities)
to service the leisure time of foreign troops clearly brings together
key notions of labor, masculinity and sexuality. There is, after all, no
job traditionally reserved to men that is more structured around the
body, in its existential dimension, than the military, nor any in whose
performance notions of masculinity and male sexuality are more openly
deployed to manipulate the men doing the job. From the commonplace that
army service will "make a man" of the boy joining up through training by
means of gendered and sexualized insults to the structures of command
and compliance, the military relies upon a definition of the
person-gendered-male. For this reason, when the combat soldier's
perquisites on the job include opportunities for sexual release--in the
form of camp followers, military brothels, sanctioned rape, or leaves
spent in tolerated red-light districts--that release is understood as an
integral part of his functioning on the job.
[6] In Thailand during the Indochina War, a new sexual institution,
the go-go or dance bar, sprang up to supplement traditional bordellos,
massage parlors, and "pickup" bars. These dance bars, which have become
permanent fixtures in the commercial sex zones of Bangkok and the beach
resorts, were modeled, superficially at least, on similar establishments
in North America--featuring the same strobe lights, 30-year old rock
music, dancers on display, and promise of sexual encounters. The chief
difference is that, instead of one or two dancers on platforms suspended
overhead, the Thai bars feature dozens of dancers on a stage with the
crotch at eye level and virtually no female customers. So, instead of
the sexual opportunities being consensual arrangements between
customers, it is the dancers who also offer that form of entertainment.
The Sexual Revolution enacted in late-1960s America is thus parodied--or
exposed--in its Bangkok offshoots.
[7] The girlie bars survived the war that brought them into being
because, like the World War Two airplane factories, they too were
converted to civilian use. In 1971, while the war continued to rage,
Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank and, by no means
incidentally, U.S. Secretary of Defence when the R and R contracts were
signed, led a Bank mission to Thailand. When highly placed officials in
the Kingdom's governmental and financial classes expressed concern about
what would happen to their country's economy once the foreign troops
were gone, McNamara assigned a team of World Bank development experts to
the problem, and their report, issued in 1975 as the last Americans left
Vietnam, recommended that Thailand's path to economic development be
through the establishment of a mass-tourism industry (Truong 162-63).
That mass tourism would necessarily build on the infrastructure set up
to entertain the troops--an infrastructure itself dependent on
commercial sex--went without saying.
As with military service constructed as an "extreme masculine" job
situation, the sexual entertainment offered to foreign civilians is
linked to the male customers' life as workers in the metropolis. This
linkage is most obvious in the case of the corporate R and R contracts
that send planeloads of men working in such all-male environments as
Persian Gulf oilrigs all the way to Thailand for periodic "emotional
release." These flights are written into the job description, since it
is assumed that the worker, conceptually dehumanized--but decidedly not
disembodied--by the employer, is marked heterosexual and, in order to
continue on the job (that is, reproduce his labor power) must be allowed
the somatic experiences of alcohol-ingestion, regurgitation, and
ejaculation, all in a setting designed for him to do so. Otherwise, the
employer's interest in maintaining harmonious relations with--and hence
oil leases from--states where alcohol and fornication are forbidden
would be jeopardized.
[8] Both the military and the corporate models of mass recreation
suggest analogies to other ordinary-life experiences. The question may
boil down to whether governmental and capitalist employers' enabling
interventions in their workers' sexual lives more closely resemble
taking the family dog for a walk so it can relieve itself without
leaving a mess indoors or taking the family car in for an oil change so
it will continue to run efficiently and avoid eventual damage to the
engine. In either case, the approach to male sexual desire reduces it to
its most mechanical dimension.
[9] Travel to Thailand is also promoted to employers as an excellent
employee incentive, presumably at the middle-management level. In the
discourse of campaigns advertising incentive travel, "escape" to
Thailand, a site defined as the ideal opposite of work, equals escape
from labor. But the incentive traveler gets there by virtue of keeping
his nose more firmly to the grindstone than his workmate-competitors.
Although the ads are not addressed to the potential visitor, but to the
individual in a position to judge and reward employee merit, they
represent Thailand as a place where sensuous fulfillment and feminine
service function conjointly to define the hard-earned holiday. It
requires very little imagination to take this a step further, to the
place where sensuous fulfillment is explicitly sexual and provided by
the submissive female in the picture or her less privileged sisters.
[10] More than 70% of tourist arrivals to Thailand are men traveling
on their own and at some of the beach resorts the figure surpasses 90%.
The overwhelming majority of these visitors are not covered by corporate
R and R contracts or bankrolled by grateful employers. Nonetheless, for
these men, as well, the industrialized leisure provided by the Thai sex
industry may be usefully understood as an extension of their work lives.
As one bar girl summed up their condition: "They can't get a girlfriend
in their own country. So it's work, work, work, and come back here."
[11] This essay's title points toward the supposed division between
work and leisure time, with the eponymous "dick" reflecting the fully
rationalized and stratified body of the male worker who must sublimate
libidinal and erotic impulses while "on the clock." Further, it reveals
the power of a system of labor that continues into the equally
rationalized and stratified "leisure time," which allows (demands?)
release and indulgence of these yearnings. The "use value" of masculine
labor converts into the "abuse value" of masculine play (Kroker and
Weinstein).
[12] The bar girl's analysis of her clients' condition presumes not
only a distinction between work time and play time, but also a clear
distinction between work space and leisure space. The blurring of labor
and leisure time--as well as the industrialization of leisure
itself--found in the age of the motor is both reiterated and accelerated
in the age of tele-technologies. "Real time" technologies and demands
have created a work environment dominated by a global present that is
always accessible through the very technologies that have created it.
Technologies that free the worker from physical constraints also serve
to bind the worker to the office-at-a-distance. The naïve belief that
new technologies will prove emancipatory and laborsaving has yielded,
once again, to further enslavement and labor intensification. A new
class of "business tourists" can take their offices with them wherever
they may wander. Armed with mobile telecommunication capabilities, the
new class of worker is always on the job, or potentially so, anywhere
and any time because "here" and "there" distinctions have been subsumed
by the all-the-time of "real time." Our bar girl's analysis of the
labor conditions her clients emerge from--one that delineates work
"there" and leisure "here"--loses some of its spatial demarcation as it
now expands to include the site of her own labor. This acceleration of
all time to "real time" has finished the job of collapsing work time and
leisure time begun in the 19th century.
[13] The fallacy of liberation and empowerment that undergirds
neoliberal discourses about technology manifests itself as well in
telecommunications technologies, which do a great deal of the discursive
production and circulation about the liberating and empowering
capacities of tele-technologies. The "newness" promised by these
emergent technologies is, by and large, an expanded and accelerated form
of earlier technologies and their attendant problems. From the clipboard
to the chat room to the bulletin board, the metalanguage of electronic
communication has adapted, indeed appropriated, its terminology from a
wide range of other media. As rapidity of communication, interactive
capability, and hypertextualization become features of the phenomenon,
use of the molluskular reverse-formation "snail-mail" to specify what
used to be known simply as "mail" suggests a massive and even a
revolutionary shift. At the same time, the content carried by these new
modalities frequently turns out to be all too familiar and conservative,
as technological development outstrips real social change at each stage.
This contradiction is nowhere so apparent as in the various forms of
sexual communication that the Internet makes possible. On the one hand,
both sexual discourse and sexual acts have been redefined by the
institutionalization of virtual sex-talk and virtual sex acts. Not only
can the Net make "writing and "reading" signify different experiences,
but it also has the capacity to create new definitions of every sexual
event from flirtation to intercourse and orgy. Yet, for many users, the
post-modern medium is little more than a means of electronically
globalizing such reactionary sites of sexual discourse as the men's
toilet, the locker room, and the bridegroom's stag party, sometimes
without so much as the most perfunctory recourse to the Net's
interactive potential. The World Sex Guide's rubric "Prostitution by
Country" thus makes it possible for men, mostly white residents of
Europe, North America, and the Antipodes, to share information and
narrative about commercial sex without making use of the new sexual
institutions created by the technology, much less challenging the
traditional ways that these men imagine, experience, and represent
sexuality, starting with their own.
[14] For most of the countries represented on the World Sex Guide, the
entries are rather perfunctory: information, often provided by local
men, about the legal situation of prostitution, the age of consent,
current prices for various acts, and, perhaps, an indication of what sex
workers in that country typically refuse to do for any amount of money.
Indications of red-light districts in the major cities and addresses of
professionals providing specialized services complete the entry. If
there is any interaction, it takes the form of updating, or
"correction," of this information, with personal accounts limited to
remarks like "I went to that street and there was nothing happening (or
the girls were ugly or too expensive), but I got lucky a few blocks over
on...." The very few exceptions we have found to this parsimonious
format (one for East Africa, one for a Vietnamese-run massage parlor in
San Francisco) follow the model of the Prostitution by Country site for
Thailand. (These diaries may be accessed at www.worldsexguide.org
and thence following the cues to the
rubric Prostitution by Country: Thailand. We provide dates for all
postings quoted, but material is periodically removed from the site and
may not still be there for readers to follow up.)
[15] Whereas the listings for most other countries in the world occupy
only A few pages each, "Thailand" goes on for literally hundreds of
pages. These postings do include a few from individuals and
organizations critical of the sex trade, but most of the verbiage, comes
from returning sex tourists who make use of the Net to share their
experiences. In lieu of the customary holiday slides and home movies,
many of these tourists extend and relive their vacations by logging onto
the Net and producing texts.
[16] The texts fall into three categories, echoing familiar genres in
the non-virtual, non- (or not necessarily) sexual world: the travel
guide, the etiquette book, and the diary, all of which emerge during the
rise of the bourgeoisie and reflect its desire for new but not too-new
experience, refined behavior and self-documentation if not exploration.
Although there is an increasing self-reflexiveness about being on the
Net and even about having learned from reading it beforehand what to
expect in Thailand, not to mention the names of specific bar girls in
specific venues, these documents follow certain conventions without
otherwise responding to what anyone else has written. The guidebooks
supplement the ones that talk about temples, palaces, hotels and
restaurants by providing a vade mecum to the brothels, go-bar bars, and
massage parlors. One of them even creates a map of the sex districts
using dots on a grid. Naturally, as with any other guide, these
emphasize the best (literal) bang for the buck and are larded with
cautions about how to avoid being exploited while engaged in the act of
exploitation. In keeping wit the conventions of the genre, they also
largely neglect the existence of similar documents on the Web; but,
whereas there is a commercial motive for one standard published
guidebook to ignore the others, here, where the information is provided
gratis, apparent unawareness of the others is more of a reflection of
the isolation and alienation that characterize these customers' approach
to the sex industry and to sex itself.
[17] The documents we call "etiquette" guides rarely mention specific
names and addresses, confining themselves to descriptions of the way
"you" should negotiate transactions in the different sex venues. "Sex in
Thailand: The Basics," posted 23 August 1994, after explaining how best
to get laid in Thailand and stressing the mutuality of the relationship,
in which each partner has something to give that the other desires,
concludes by revealing the limits of this reciprocity:
[18] Almost without exception in my experience, these girls are very,
very good at what they do. That said, it would be well to remember that
what these girls 'do,' each for their own reasons, is not what they
are...[I]f you never cease to remember that they are, before anything
else, human beings with human feelings, chances are good you'll truly
enjoy yourself, and you will have made her life, for a moment...not as
completely horrible as it might have been.
[19] The most extensive genre in the Thailand section, however, is the
travel diary or journal, with its obsessive orientation toward explicit
descriptions of the conjoined sexual and monetary minutiae of each
transaction. From the amount paid for ground transportation into town
after landing in Thailand, there is a price tag on every experience
described and, since the diaries gloss over any daytime sightseeing with
some terse phrase like "mostly temples," that means a price tag on every
suck, stroke, and fuck, each of them characterized as a great bargain, a
waste of money, or a splurge that paid off big time.
[20] Once the invariable economic framework is established, the
material connections become even more revealing. One correspondent, not
a native speaker of English, complains in his July 1995 posting about a
"dumb" masseuse who didn't know she was supposed to massage muscles, not
bones. When the couple gets into bed, she also proves a dud in the
blowjob department, because he can't get an erection. He observes, "I
thought about helping her with thinking at something REALLY nice, but
then I thought, 'what for do I pay?'" She is supposed to do all the
work, after all, so why should he participate in his own arousal, which
is to say, be part of his own sexuality, even to the extent of conjuring
up an erotic fantasy?
[21] This is a mentality that leads to narrative in which, as in one
posting, dated 27 March 1995, the loss of a credit card and the wait for
its replacement becomes a suspense-enhancing motif, and where romance is
destroyed and "heartbreak" ensues when a prostitute gets "greedy"; that
is, when she tells the customer she has been seeing "steadily" for
several days that, according to her roommate, 1000 baht, not 500 (at the
time $40, instead of the $20 he'd been paying) should be the price for
an all-night session. He whines to the reader than he is really
disappointed because he thought "good will" had been established and
that "she was different."
[22] This narrator shows rather more emotion, although hardly less
self-righteousness, than the author of a long sexual travelogue dated 5
August 1997. Having failed at some half-hearted bargaining his last
night in Chiang Mai, he is "too tired to care," but is pursued by a girl
who wants to go back to his hotel:
[23] Not thinking straight in my fatigue, I bring her back without
agreeing to any terms. We're both naked on my bed, she a darker skinned
one with her pussy shaved, when she brings up wanting an exorbitant
amount with an early hour leave. Not caring for the change in her
personality, I decide to abort this one, dress, and tell her to leave
now. I manage to keep the situation fairly cool, choosing to just
quietly sit in a chair until she gets the message, and am rid of her
without violence and at a cost of only 390 baht. I breathe (sic) a sigh
of relief after closing the door behind her and go to bed. (Emphasis
added).
[24] It is only fitting, in such a context, that a lengthy diary
posting dated 19 September 1996, bears the heading, in lieu of a title,
"The following is a true account of my trip to Thailand; Note: $1 = 25
Baht." It is important for the reader to know the exchange rate to
understand the narrative and its tensions. The ultimate experience,
therefore, is getting something for nothing, as in this passage from
April 1996:
[25] One thing I'll never forget...is my last night. I had
specifically sought out one of the 'Miss Thailands' spotted the previous
evening and spent my last entertainment money on her. Afterwards, I
returned to the bar of my previous night's carnal delights and ran into
my 'Sweetie' from ...last night. Well, she just about insisted about
1:00 a.m. that we return to my hotel. When I explained about no $$$, she
replied, 'No plo-blem, you fl-end, you no pay!' I am sure it's not a
first, but getting a freebie from a beautiful Patpong bar girl ranks way
up there on my list! It also filled the time until my 5 a.m. taxi to
the airport.
[26] The "freebie," however, is the exception, rather than the rule,
and, more often, these accounts provide not only extensive information
about money and quantified descriptions of sexual activity, but also a
sense of never relaxing one's guard against he possibility of being
overcharged or even robbed. Whence the wonderful typo from another
non-native speaker, writing about a December, 1996, trip, who explains
that, not having shared a bed with anyone for a long time, he had
trouble sleeping after his first sexual contact on arrival, and besides,
"I...did not thrust her very much" (Emphasis added).
[27] The World Sex Guide, realizing its own commercial potential and
no longer serving as information source operating solely for "the
collective good," now sports banners of advertisements. Some of these
advertise Viagra at rates "well below market value," as is everything
one can purchase on the Web. The price-per-dose in an age of managed
health care (for profit) in the US also puts a regulated price tag on
male sexuality and sexual performance. The narratives about Thailand, as
we have noted, document in excruciating detail, every contact, every
orifice, every drink and every room. Now, the cost of every erection can
be factored into the bottom-line analysis that tells the consumer
whether or not he's really had a good time. If he's paid "too much" for
any element, the pleasure obviously diminishes.
[28] More recent postings reflect some minimal awareness about the way
the commercial nature of the sex tourist interaction informs the
experience. Thus, while the narrator who helpfully provides the exchange
rate in lieu of an epigraph crows over how many orgasms he gives the
women, making it clear that the illusion of so doing is what arouses
him, the December '96 tourist says things like "I tipped her 200 Baht,
because she made me a lot of compliments about my style of fucking her.
She said she enjoyed it etc. (a lot of lies but who cares)" and "It's
all acting there is no real love in return for money. If you believe in
it you are a fool. All they think of is money." Nonetheless, he tells
us, "This might be the ultimate freedom for some people for the other it
was the ultimate immorality and perversion. I enjoyed it since
everything [sic., he apparently means "everyone"] could have what they
wanted without interfering with others."
[29] More recent correspondents also reflect some consciousness of the
medium itself. Although there is no acknowledgement that his own story
is virtually identical with all the others, this last narrator even
includes the fact of updating his diary in his account of the day-by-day
(not to say blow-by-blow) events, a self-reflexivity that gives new
meaning to Samuel Pepys' recurrent "and so to bed." Indeed, on 25
February 1998, a diary begins:
[30] I owe the WSG for helping lay the groundwork for a great vacation
and lots of help on numerous business trips so I felt that it was time
for my own post. This is an update of information on Thailand. I will
not repeat the volumes of detail already available on the WSG on
Thailand, this is just to provide an update as of February 21, 1998.
This was my first trip to Thailand and because of the WSG I was able to
make the most of every minute.
[31] Although, as promised, this narrator spares us some of the
detail, his entry is still substantial, because it blurs the otherwise
discrete Internet genres of travel guide and etiquette book into that of
diary, deploying, in the process, a certain limited use of the
second-person point of view in acknowledgement of the reader's presence
(albeit both temporary and virtual) within the space of his personal
sexual narration.
[32] Paralleling the economic confessionals that make up the
Prostitution by Countries entries for Thailand is an apparently newer
site called the Banker's World Sex Guide, accessed by substituting dot
com for dot org after "worldsexguide" and following the electronic trail
to Thailand. Here, although each posting, called a "Travel Report," is
brief, most occupying only a single paragraph, it, too, may combine the
functions of diary and guidebook, with recommendations for "you" on
"your" own trip. Thus, a correspondent with the seemingly inappropriate
moniker "Cranky" writes on 8 July 1998 that he went "out back" with a
transsexual prostitute on Ko Samui and was given a fantastic blowjob for
the equivalent of US$5. Another wanted to come back to our hotel with my
wife and I [sic] and we were sorely tempted as this one, though
beautiful, still had a dick and was happy with men or women. It was the
trip of a lifetime and I would recommend it to anyone. I will definitely
be returning there.
[33] "Darklord" introduces an action-packed report on a Pattaya
massage parlor by announcing "I went to Thailand on (sic) June 1998 with
a few of my friends. I had a great time in Pattaya and I wish to share
that wonderful experience with you and hope you get that wonderful
treatment." But on that same day, 22 June, "The Whole Shebang" turns
melancholy at the end of his posting, explaining, "The whole session did
not last the promised one and a half hour. 60 minutes at the most. Which
suited me quite fine. I left the place with the usual mixed feelings:
happy for having been with one more woman, unsettled by her cheat and
her ill-concealed hatred." Meanwhile, "Stranger in the Night" describes
his climax this way:
[34] [W]e arrived in due time at the right thing, a good lengthy
orgasm inside her body. Paun, elf girl of the tropical night, let
me come thoroughly, her fine face turned towards mine, half covered with
streams of thick jet black hair, eyes closed in beautiful imitation of
sensual ecstasy while her belly performed the slow motion pumping moves
that drew out every sparkle of electricity from glowing nerve threads.
[35] Then, in a move not replicated, in our extensive reading,
anywhere in this genre, he apostrophizes the sex worker:
[36] Thank you, Paun! In spite of your ability to extract much more
money than negotiated from this farang ["foreigner"], I do not regret
having met you.
[37] Why do these men feel compelled to write about their
experiences? What drives them to articulate their movements and acts,
the costs and benefits, the frustrations and pleasures? To do so in
such a public but also anonymous forum? To do so in such excruciating
detail? To do so in such a monologic manner? All have assimilated the
conventions of the genre they are also actively engaged in constructing,
but virtually none responds to the others. Perhaps the notion of
totalizing alienation, as discussed in chapter 8 of Night Market, can
help explain these public/private declarations and make sense of their
distinctive discursive traits.
[38] The surrealistic synecdoche of our title, which is closer to
reality than one might think, takes material and discursive shape in the
notion of sending one's genitalia on vacation and then describing its
adventures for public consumption. The commercial sex encounter that
occurs under the purview of international sex tourism is a completely
alienated experience, in both material and psychological senses of the
term. For the sex worker, the work itself is alienated labor in that it
is labor whose value is appropriated, and it is also alienated in the
emotive sense: that is, separated from and causing separation from
authentic feelings, giving rise to isolation and revulsion.
[39] But these postings make clear that the male customers' own
fetishized mentality often causes them also to experience the
transaction as alienated. This alienation is reinforced by the "tele" of
tele-technologies, as well as the bottom-line logic of the global
market, and is becoming increasingly constitutive of masculinity itself.
The constant praise or derision of the purchased product as a product
reveals this point, especially as the quality fluctuates dramatically
according to cost and perceived economic value. Similarly, when the
customer's experience is good, the sex worker is described with a
synecdoche (and a superlative): "the tightest pussy," "the fullest
lips," "the most pert breasts," etc. But when the client's experience is
not satisfactory, then the worker-qua- worker is to blame: her whole
being is conflated with her job performance and is at fault due to
incompetence, inattention, or greed. The slippage, of course, is that
the customer's discourse always already constitutes the worker
metaphorically, either as synecdoche in the first instance or metonymy
in the second. Either way, no fully human sex worker exists for the
client. Marx and Engels neatly articulated this slippage as emerging
from different relations to and comfort levels with alienation itself:
[40] The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the
same human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this
self-alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power; it has in
it a semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels
annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness
and the reality of an inhuman existence (Marx and Engels 51).
[41] Although the most blatant and prevalent characteristic in these
documents is the constant, unsurprising linkage between money and sex,
with the invocation of one being essentially an invocation of the other,
no simple substitution is operative here, nor is there even a clear
analogy of money for sex or vice versa. Instead, a more complicated
connection between the two occurs and is implicated in the discursive
practices of the Web itself, its representation of itself and how it
functions in the techno cusp of our new millennium.
[42] On the Web, talk is ever-abundant, ever-pervasive, and ever-in
process. But despite its democratic and utopian proclamations, discourse
on the web is also ever unidirectional, ever the domain of the
privileged, ever self referential, and ever emanating from the dominant
subject position. The "you" addressed in the various etiquette guides is
really only the "I" entering the piece on his keyboard. No substantial
differences exist between the self who is writing and the other who is
reading. Even if the "I" is showing off for an imagined reader, showing
off in terms of knowledge or experience, the reader is simply a version
of the authorial "I" in homunculus. All of the "I's" assumptions about
the self-in-the-world and how the world works are projected onto any
"other" who might read the posting, which is hardly the self/other or
I/thou relationship envisioned by Buber or Levinas.
[43] That only a very few of these many postings ever refer to any of
the others clearly reflects the self-contained, solipsistic, and
masturbatory (in that it is non-interactive) nature of discourse on the
Web, again contrary to the claims it makes for itself. Although each
author has read the other postings, as the massive repetition in form,
content, and organization among the pieces reveals, the marked lack of
references to the writings of others (especially others so like the
authorial self) is both baffling and enlightening, for it reveals the
deep deception operative in cyberspace's co-optation of the liberal
ideals of democracy, free choice, free will, autonomous actors, free
markets, and self-fulfillment that characterize our current moment of
transnational capital and global marketplaces. Despite being so much
about the self, these postings reveal a profound lack of
self-reflexivity. In this 24-hour a day, convenience-store world of sex
chatter, sex shopping, and private monologue lobbing, the yobs fingering
the keyboard seem unaware of the systems that create the even larger web
that ensnares their comfortable Web. The magnetic pull of the tourist to
the tourist site, of sex worker to client, of supply to meet demand, and
of specific modes of desire to specific types of satiation may be more
programmed all the way around than the side of the ledger espousing
freedom and autonomy would care to admit. The locus of the Internet is
clearly one that emanates from their dominant subject position, which
like all dominant subject positions gets cast as progressive,
liberating, common-sense, unquestioned, natural, logical, and unmarked.
And the Net functions in their world in this way. It has aided and
abetted the reconstitution of the world into what Merleau-Ponty calls
"the Great Object," which incorporates subjective experience into the
"use" and "abuse" value of instrumental logic that manifests itself in
the market triumphant.
[44] Consider, for example, the author who rushes from a plane to a
red-light district at three in the morning to enact immediately what
he'd read on the Web, and having found a girl who wanted 1,000 baht for
the whole night, gave her 750 rather than the 500 she would have taken
because he is "not a cheap bastard." When the sex worker expresses her
disbelief that he has never been in the bars before (a cynical claim
made by sex patrons and just as cynically dismissed by sex workers) he
follows by saying "Of course there was no point in telling her about the
Internet etc." His own sense of being at home in electronic
transactions could be gleaned from his reading of these postings, but
his application of virtual reality to peopled reality is something he
assumes is clearly beyond the prostitute's ken. The electronic world of
openness, free flow of information, democracy, unfettered dialogue, and
so on is one that he is sure the sex worker he hired could not even
begin to conceptualize.
[45] The most recent postings, however, bring the Internet and its
content into the bars themselves, with some clients using the same
laptops that allow them to telecommute to the office from Bangkok to
read narrative snippets to some of the sex workers. Because some entries
provide the names of specific bar girls who work in specific venues, the
continuation of the Internet as the market itself materializes as a
guide to consumerist acquisition. The "democratic" and "free flow" of
information found in Amazon.com's "customer reviews" now operates in sex
tourist sites, where the narratives of sexual journeys, sojourns, and
purchases become a shopper's guide to consumer satisfaction that can be
accessed at the point of purchase. The squeals of delight this evokes
from the bar girls, so some entry-writers claim, added to the overall
experience. But the customer might not always be right, as one author
states that he will not include any "name" brands in his account - not
out of a sense of decorum or human empathy, but because the ones
recommended by previous client-authors did not measure up to his
standards. Buyer beware because there is no accounting for taste.
[46] Not only does the Web allow one to move between sites, it also
allows one to achieve movement without moving, a version of royal
omnipotence past, or, even of divinity. In Paul Virilio's rather
different terms, the various tele-protheses of optoelectronics "make the
super-equipped able-bodied person almost the exact equivalent of the
motorized and wired disabled person" (21). The Internet creates the
omnipresence of everywhere here and now by concealing the various global
economic and labor-driven systems required for all this liberation of
the dominant subject to manifest itself. These authors perch behind
their glowing screens and hurl their missives into the cybervoid without
considering the consequences of their behaviors or language practices.
The act of writing becomes one more in a series of actions whose
consequences and effects occur conveniently and tidily elsewhere. The
global market and technology take care of that, not unlike the video
confirmation of a missile striking a target in our post-Gulf War
military moment. And not unlike any purchase made on the free market,
whether it is a sex worker's time and labor or the oil for the
electricity necessary to keep the Net from vanishing in the click of a
mouse, the causes leading to the purchase, as well as its effects, are
hidden from the consumer/author who readily participates in its
concealment. "What separates a critical interpretation of technology
from that of global technological entrepreneurs and leading
politicians," so John Armitage argues, "is a determination to forge a
radical understanding of technology's consequences"--including its
effects on labor, gender, and noetic world formation.
[47] But there is little room or time for such a critical
interpretation in the breathless, "common-sense," techno-cheerleading of
"real time" stock and labor markets. Thus, the recent financial crisis
in Southeast Asia that wrecked national economies and left hundreds of
thousands starving, with millions more teetering on the brink of abject
poverty, merely translates for the Internet diarists into making
Thailand an even better bargain for the sex shopper. For these diarists,
the devaluation of the baht means only cheaper goods and a greater array
of choice as more and more people are forced into this portion of the
service sector. A posting dated February 1998, makes the point
abundantly clear, as the author discusses his trip's cost as amounting
to only a third of what he'd originally planned:
[48] Because of the devaluation of the baht ($ = baht 45) this turned
out to be a very cheap vacation. I spent half of the money that I
budgeted to spend, and I was not especially trying to save money as I went.
[49] To heighten the all-baffling alienation, the author who calls
himself "The Whole Shebang" seems confused about the "ill-concealed
hatred" of the sex worker who bargained for more money and reduced his
contact time with her. The interactive potential of the Internet may
emerge in a postcolonial moment and institutions, but it is by no means
postimperial in its materialization.
[50] Stephen Tyler has argued that the Internet is the next logical
application of the Cartesian grid: the presumed triumph of mind over
body and space over time, as well as the separation of the knowing
subject from knowledge. In this grid, all thoughts and things can dwell
in a space free of human intervention or contact. The Web likes to
characterize itself as just such a repository, and its admirers like to
invoke these Enlightenment claims of liberation. For all its forward
thinking and claims to staking out whole new frontiers, the tropes and
ideals that drive the Internet's claims to legitimacy and hegemony are
the same ones that have driven manifold Western desires for several
centuries. So the joys of morphing and virtual identity formations can
materialize as sending one's dick on vacation by itself. And the
disembodied pleasures of the grid can, and in fact do, result in fully
bodied violence of the totalizing alienation experienced by workers and
clients alike.
WORKS CITED
Armitage, John. "Resisting the Neoliberal Dioscourse of Technology: The
Politics of Cyberculture in the Age of the Virtual Class,"
www.ctheory.com/a68.html .
Bishop, Ryan and Lillian S. Robinson. Night Market: Sexual Cultures and
the Thai Economic Miracle (New York and London: Routledge, 1998).
Kroker, Arthur and Michael Weinstein. Data Trash: The Theory of the
Virtual Class (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
Marx, K(arl) and F(riedrich) Engels. The Holy Family or Critique of
Cultural Critique (1844; rpt. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1956)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Visible et l'invisible. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
Truong, Thanh-Dam. Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in
Southeast Asia. (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1990).
Tyler, Stephen A. "Vile Bodies: A Mental Machination," presented at the
conference "The Body in Knowledge," University of Amsterdam, June 1993.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997).
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RYAN BISHOP, co-author, with Lillian S. Robinson, of Night Market:
Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, teaches American Studies
at the National University of Singapore. He has published fiction, as
well as scholarship in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, cultural
studies, and literary criticism and theory
LILLIAN S. ROBINSON is Professor and Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, the women's studies teaching and research unit of Concordia
University, Montreal. She is a poet and novelist and, in addition to
Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (co-authored
with Ryan Bishop) has published four books of feminist scholarship and
theory.
Copyright <../download.html> ©2002 Ann Kibbey. All Rights Reserved
Worldwide.
Copyright <../download.html> ©2002 Ann Kibbey.
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