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Prostitution and AIDS

Suki Falconberg

November 4, 2006

AIDS coverage in the media pays little or no attention to the prostituted women, girls, and children who suffer greatly from this disease’s impact. Frontline’s two-part series, The Age of AIDS (May 2006), is a good example. The show’s point of view is relentlessly male, even though one of the co-producers and writers is a woman, Renata Simone. The show praises “the condom king” of Thailand for slowing the spread of AIDS, but fails to note that the policy of putting 100 condoms by every brothel bed continues to enslave women, girls, and children in that country’s multi-billion-dollar sex industry. (The selling of young bodies generates 25% of that country’s income, according to the PBS series, The New Heroes.) Frontline also fails to note that the Thai military are heavy consumers of trafficked girls and that the soldiers’ high AIDS rate spurred the campaign, not any concern for the prostitutes themselves. Frontline totally overlooked the fact that handing out condoms will not relieve these victims of the misery of prostitution and the ongoing rape of their bodies, not just by their own military, but by local men, by sex tourists, and by militaries from around the world who continue a precedent set by US servicemen during Vietnam with their sex junkets to Bangkok. (Our boys are still banging away with every shore leave: roughly 1/3 of the girls who serve them are under age 15, and half of them have AIDS--Stats from PBS’s New Heroes.)

Although Frontline is often to be commended for its thoroughness, its gender attitude is usually as patriarchal and narrow as that of the mainstream media: the world only exists from the male point of view. Its women writers and producers are no different from men.

The episode gives us a few glimpses of Patpong bargirls, all looking about twelve years old, pathetically thin, scantily clad and painted up like sextoys. But why no interview with one of these girls? Why no mention that these are, sadly, the ‘lucky ones’ in the Thai sex trade—free to move around, with some choice of customers. Why didn’t the camera crew go into the brothels, where, hidden from view, are the trafficked, the ones sold by their parents who went through harsh training—beatings, rape--to make them compliant. As if the twenty or thirty men they must service a night are not rape enough. Some of these girls are never allowed outside. Why didn’t Ms. Simone even bother to interview a brothelized Thai prostitute? Well, I have seen them and their eyes are full of desperate sadness. No condom will protect them from the serial rape that is their lives.

Simone does not mention the Rwandan mass rape in the mid-1990’s which led to roughly a quarter of a million women now finding themselves HIV-positive. As co-writer/producer, why would she leave out such an enormous event?

Maybe because she and her cohorts chose to endlessly interview older gay males from the San Francisco bathhouse culture that initially spread the disease among that community, I suppose in reparation for so heavily stigmatizing them before AIDS became ‘acceptable,’ a fashionable cause, via Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. (As an ex-prostitute, I can tell you that gay males don’t even rate on the stigmatization meter when it comes to the opprobrium, scorn, disgust, hatred that is heaped upon us. We are regarded as ‘filth,’ disposable bodies.)

And why didn’t the Frontline crew interview the prostitute in the Bombay brothel who said she was forced to be there? Why didn’t they take her out of that sex hellhole? As privileged Westerners, they have enough money to do so. They could have bought her out of her debt bondage. I wonder, would Renata Simone want to be left in that brothel, forced to service dozens of brutal men every night? (As an ex-prostitute, and I know that customers are not careful with our bodies.) Wouldn’t she beg for someone to help her? If she were in a Bombay brothel bed, she wouldn’t be making any more documentaries. She would be too rape traumatized to do much beyond barely survive.

In the filthy sweatshop stew of this brothel, there was a child beside one of the prostituted women. She, too, will likely end up in the ‘trade.’ When her mother is too sick to work, she will be forced to sell her. It’s called ‘intergenerational prostitution.’ (You see it in Thailand as well—grandchildren of girls forced to serve our military during the Vietnam era are now themselves prostituted.) I wonder why the camera crew did not take the child out of there?

The episode also left out trafficking, and the connection with AIDS. Trafficked girls--broken through beatings, burning, starvation, and collective rape--are often forced to have unprotected anal sex (a prime recipe for contracting AIDS) with customers because they have no choice and because ‘independent’ prostitutes won’t. Trafficked girls cannot negotiate condom use because they are slaves.

Also ignored was child prostitution and the inevitable connection with AIDS. Part of the explosion in this trade worldwide is the result of the mistaken idea that a child will not have AIDS because she is ‘fresh.’ Mistaken because girl children have more fragile vaginal membranes than do adult women. And they are smaller—for these two reasons they tear more easily and become infected more easily. Also, the myth that having sex with a child virgin will cure AIDS has increased the procuring of girl child bodies. All this female misery and not one whisper about it from Frontline and its woman co-writer/producer.

Outside of South Africa ’s goldmine barracks, prostitutes ply their sad trade on pieces of cardboard in the surrounding woods. Many are women with children, and no husbands, forced into this degradation. Frontline’s camera followed a few shy ones into their ‘retreat,’ carrying their pieces of cardboard. Such sadness and hope in those shy faces, knowing they were being filmed. But no effort to help them on the part of these privileged Westerners with their cameras. Or to talk to them. Apparently, these women are not ‘high’ enough on the scale of AIDS sufferers to merit a voice. (There is something despicably ‘unethical’ about the ‘ethics of objectivity’ in filming the suffering of others—and not helping.)

Frontline, instead, asks us to feel sorry for the miner, the man who buys the prostituted body, and then spreads the AIDS. Frontline shows us a specimen of this rapist, with his ‘important’ AIDS case, filming him as if he were some victim. Victim of what? His own raping lust?

It is a terrible truth, and almost completely unacknowledged by AIDS media coverage: Men spread AIDS through rape and the use of prostituted bodies. Consider: If there were never any women or girls or children forced into prostitution due to hunger, poverty, parental coercion, grasping procurers and greedy pimps, not to mention the biggest 'force,' customer demand for flesh, there would be no AIDS explosion. In Africa and India and Southeast Asia, men spread the disease among the sexually enslaved, since transmission usually goes from male to female. Then other men use these infected bodies and carry AIDS out into the general population--taking it home to their wives and girlfriends.

Interestingly, the pattern seems to be the same as it was with syphilis: destitute camp followers infected by soldiers during all those endless wars raging across Europe in the Middle Ages; diseased soldiers taking the 'pox' home to their wives. Even the male rhetoric was the same: the whore is blamed for her filthy ways; the man is the victim, like those poor South African goldminers away from their homes, lonely, having to buy a whore body to keep them company. Poor guys. And, of course, it’s all those dirty little Thai girls, more-than-willing to sell their bodies for Yankee dollars, who are the real ‘demons’ in the AIDS scourge—not the tourists and sailors and soldiers who purchase them. Never mind that the young Thai prostitute is sold by her parents, seasoned by her procurers and pimps, raped every day by her customers, and sees little of the money herself. She is still the archetypal brown submissive femme fatale, the little willing ‘brown sex machine,’ as the US Marines call her. (The men substitute a less-polite word for the ‘sex’ part.)

Even the origins of syphilis and AIDS are similar: transmission from animal to human. There is strong evidence that AIDS was passed from chimps to humans. Some accounts of syphilis I’ve read say it was likely that human males acquired it from sex with animals. The role of the military is the same: Sailors spread syphilis worldwide by using women forced into prostitution in foreign ports. It may have entered Japan , for example, as the result of infected European sailors using girls sold into the sex trade. (These girls didn’t leap into the chance to have sex with thousands of rough, large, terrifying foreign sailors on their own—unlike all those mythical accounts of the willing, subservient Asian female.)

Soldiers and sailors taking AIDS from infected prostitutes back to their families has a scary sound when you consider the way American servicemen frequent prostitutes all over the world. And there is strong evidence that US servicemen carried AIDS from infected prostitutes in the port city of Mombasa to the women forced to sexually serve them in the Philippines (and perhaps into Thailand and other Asian countries where they use prostituted bodies). How much have they brought home with them?

No notice taken by Frontline of any of this military connection. And nothing about the role of UN Peacekeepers raping sexually enslaved prostitutes and spreading the disease. The presence of 100,000 of these men in Cambodia in the early 1990’s caused a massive explosion in the sex trade, and in AIDS. Wherever they go, these Peace Keepers are Violence-Bringers to the bodies of women: they have money, pimps cultivate them, young girls serve them.

So, how do we solve this problem? It’s simple, really. We eliminate, completely, customer demand? No men anywhere ever buy prostituted bodies ever again? As if that would ever happen. And, it’s too late, boys. You’ve already given the women of the world AIDS.

A Newsweek issue (May 15, 2006) devoted to AIDS is not quite as remorselessly sexist as the above Frontline show. It at least carries some small sympathy for the prostitute in an article about African ones refused medical treatment for gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and AIDS, due to their being considered such ‘filth.’

Melinda Gates actually mentions ‘sex workers’ in this Newsweek issue, acknowledges they are part of the AIDS picture, although it is in the context of focusing on the ‘decent’ women of Africa, the ones she apparently thinks are worth saving from AIDS.

During the recent AIDS conference in Toronto , Melinda Gates pointed out that “the ABC approach— which stands for Abstinence, Be faithful and use Condoms — does not always work.

"’Abstinence is often not an option for poor women and girls who have no choice but to marry at an early age,’ she said.

"’Being faithful will not protect a woman whose partner is not faithful. And using condoms is not a decision that a woman can make by herself; it depends on a man.’

“Melinda Gates said condoms do not encourage promiscuity, and she said people have to get over their embarrassment about helping sex workers, who are key to fighting the pandemic.” (Quoted material from Reuters News Service, 2006, and ABC News Internet Ventures, 2006.)

For all that she and her husband, Bill, are trying to help in the war on AIDS, note that Melinda Gates promotes the very attitudes that have allowed heterosexual men to widely infect hetero women. “Promiscuity” is based on that most pernicious of sexual notions, the virgin/whore split: some of us on the side of damaged goods, the sluts, the others all sweet and pure with that strip of pink tissue intact. (Damaged by whom? Men make ‘sluts’ by screwing women, and then blaming them for being screwed? ) And she uses that equally damaging phrase, ‘sex worker.’ I shudder every time I hear it. I shuddered when I saw a Western woman reporter for Frontline applying it to a tiny painted-harlot four-year-old in a Bombay brothel. How what that little girl does could be considered ‘work,’ by any stretch of the word, is beyond me. Is a pension plan in the ‘works’ for her, that trusty 401K, and maybe she’s lined up a plush job as a Starbuck’s barista after she gets done with her fun ‘sex work’ stint. (When I write, I use ‘prostituted woman, girl, or child,’ as most accurately reflecting the sale of bodies; I use ‘whore,’ unabashedly, in an attempt to defuse the male-derived negativity it carries---scorn, hatred of us, etc.)

In her tour of Africa , Gates focused on the ‘normal,’ non-whore women as being important. Did she even visit a brothel? Did she talk to the open-air rape-camp whores on their strips of cardboard?

Why does Gates see the ‘sex workers’ as key to fighting the pandemic, when it is the millions of men who rape them who are the true key, blind as we may be to this?

Even though she mentions the helplessness of the adolescent girl forced into marriage, why does she not mention the far worse enslavement and rape of the prostituted one?

Blindness. As if whore bodies, needs, lives, are invisible, totally marginal to the concerns of ‘respectable’ women.

Another practice, ‘dry sex,’ also receives no coverage anywhere. Turning the vagina into parchment with hot peppers, so the male will have a tight fit, is widely practiced in Africa And, of course, the more the vagina bleeds, the more likely the male is likely to inflict his STD’s on the woman. Both wives and whores practice ‘dry sex’ because of the demands of the male. (I cannot even imagine one act of dry intercourse forced into me, let alone the thousands the whores must endure. When I whored, I used lube—lots of it. Even at my lowly rung of existence, no customer dared tell me to dry out my vagina for his pleasure. He took his pleasure in a lubed tunnel, or not at all. Those poor African whores really make me see how fortunate I was to have mildly enlightened, only semi-barbaric American male soldiers for customers.)

In the eyes of the world, it would seem, the ‘normal/decent’ women, the good wives and good mothers, those upholding family values, have merit, and we abject whore outcasts are lesser beings. Are the whores of Africa receiving any AIDS drugs, I would ask. Frontline only spotlighted ‘decent’ non-whore women taking the drugs.

In my eyes, I find the whore has far more value than the decent woman since she has suffered the lowest degradation men can inflict on her, and somehow survived. But where is her monument? All our magazines (Cosmo, Time, Essence, etc.) carry stories about the 25 Strongest Women, all those business corporate types, all those ‘successful’ tough, independent sorts, as if they were the heroines of our civilization. No, the 15-year-old whore, still alive despite the torture of her vagina, and the death of her spirit, she is the only heroine I recognize. But I stand little chance of anyone listening to my own whore voice. Even worse, I may be labeled a ‘sex worker,’ consigned to the same tier of labor as the little painted four-year-old harlot. Her AIDS body will not make a ripple in anyone’s mind.

Original link: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=15980

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