{no disclaimers :) but a class essay rushed off in the last weeks of school }
[ Zachary Powell | Sex Tourism, Bangkok, and the Internet | May 6, 2002 | Prof. Felicity Scott ]
“Bangkok: The
capital city of Thailand. It is famous for its temples and other beautiful buildings,
and is also often mentioned as a place where there are a lot of prostitutes.”
– Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1993 ed.
In 1971, the World Bank sent a mission to Thailand to assess ways of restructuring its loans to the country’s agricultural sector. Led by Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank, the mission met with governmental officials who expressed concerns about the future of the Thai economy after the Vietnam War. The war was a key source of income for Thailand, due to military bases and the ‘R’ and ‘R’ contract that McNamara had facilitated (then as Secretary of Defence) in 1967. A group of the World Bank’s development experts were assigned to the problem, and in 1975 they proposed that Thailand’s road to economic development should shift from agriculture to mass tourism. As it has been emphasized by many writing about this plan, the bank’s belief in tourism as a viable industry for Thailand was no doubt based on Thailand’s success as an ‘R’ and ‘R’ site for GIs during the war.[1]
While one could not expect the sleazy image that U.S. bases in Pattaya and Phuket had created in the 1960s to evaporate overnight, the efforts of the Tourist Authority of Thailand (TAT) to alter the country’s image over the last quarter of the century has made little headway. By the mid 1980s, the ‘Land of Smiles’ had become synonymous with exotic, eager to please women and its capital had been immortalized in popular culture with the song “One Night In Bangkok,” which established the image of the city as a “stinking, polluted town” capable of making “a hard man humble.” Although based as much on a form of self-reflective parody that poked fun at men who “get their kicks [below] the waistline,” the song helped solidify Bangkok’s reputation as the ‘sex capital of the world.’
This reputation became a more urgent dilemma with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as focus shifted away from Cold War politics to an awareness of human rights as a central concern of the international community. Although this new focus on human rights is seen most prominently in relation to war and genocide in Rwanda, Congo, and the Balkans, it is also visible in the growing awareness of issues such as child prostitution and sex trafficking. By 1993 these issues had become “caught [in] the public imagination” and were often presented in a way that emphasized “sensationalism at the expense of understanding.”[2] The results of this shift for Thailand were most clearly seen in Longman Dictionary’s definition of Bangkok (cited above) and a photograph of a Thai prostitute that made the cover of Time magazine for an issue on world prostitution.[3] Both events resulted in heavy protest by Thailand’s middle-class public, who had “no direct contact with the farang [foreigner]-oriented flesh trade and no idea of what goes on in the farang bars.”[4] In short, they objected to forefronting Thailand in the representation of a global problem based on a small and reasonably isolated aspect of their society.
The appearance of these kinds of slips in mainstream publishing clearly reveals how the earlier narratives established during 1970s and 1980s were “informing people’s expectations of place and interactions with the Other” in their perceptions of Bangkok.[5] This can be seen as a general symptom of the mainstream media, and for the most part it remains the job various groups to monitor the representations created and generate awareness of where they go astray. However, while episodes like these may be seen in the most lenient way as lapses in good judgement by the mass media, the period of 1989-1993 also marked the development of the World Wide Web as new form of media that made the problem much more complicated for those attempting to counter it.[6] As argued in the introduction of Race In Cyberspace, (a volume that addresses the already dystopic gaps forming for minorities online) the “virtual reality that is cyberspace has often been construed as something that exists in binary opposition to ‘the real world,’ but when it comes to questions of power, politics, and structural relations, cyberspace is as real as it gets.”[7] As I shall attempt to outline, the decentralized nature of discourse on the Internet serves not only to reinforce the narratives brought back by GIs during the war, but to establish an interface between Westerners and Bangkok that facilitates a continual recreation of those narratives, gradually erasing the boundaries between fiction and truth.
Unlike traditional media that maybe pressured into some form of acknowledgement of error by the fear of a damaged public image, the web established an arena for a new form of media that was not easily targetable by the “shaming” or boycotting techniques used on large organizations. This can not only be seen in the abundance of White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi homepages established by individual users,[8] but also more relevantly to this topic by the rise of sites such as WorldSexGuide.org (WSG), which since 1994 has accumulated close to 1000 accounts from users soliciting prostitutes in 99 countries, as well as a discussion forum and image gallery.[9] Rather than be influenced by public opinion, the publisher of the WSG has created a “media sightings” page that proudly lists any mention of the site in the news. This lack of hierarchical structure presents a problem for organizations such as TAT, who in 1995 released a statement that said they would contact the Internet’s “decision makers” to have the Prostitution FAQ (first version of the WSG, focusing on the publisher’s experiences in Thailand) removed.[10] While the “dictionary affair” resulted in a ban on Longman’s publications in Thailand until corrections had been made,[11] there was of course no way for the Thai government to control the publication of the article (which first circulated USENET) due to the Internets decentralized structure.
It can be seen then, that as the Internet is heralded as the future of free speech one of the critical issues that remains how to address the ease with which almost anyone can publish to a wide audience. Lacking the traditions of the publishing industry, in which writers are restrained by formal requirements such as citations and screened by editorial review, web publishers have free reign over their writing and are able to reach global audiences without established backing. This is not, of course, a call for regulation but the attempt to raise the question of how the vastness of the Internet is presented to users as they attempt to sort through its various texts.
The solution to this mammoth amount of information (in the cybernetic sense), has become the word search engine, and what one becomes aware of when researching specific topics through this system is that there are a great number of sites and articles dealing with a relatively small amount of (real) information. As one text rehashes another, a web of multiple viewpoints on a subject is created that is based on very little “first hand” experience (i.e. knowledge gained from sources outside of the discourse). Often when one reaches the text that is the most likely origin of the discussion (sometimes difficult given the surprising lack of hyperlinking between articles) one finds that it represents a generalized opinion, lacking in verifiable citations, and falling neatly in line with the biases of the author. In fact after using Google long enough, my mental image of the Internet no longer seems like a interconnected web, but closer to clusters of stars in the night sky in which one may form imaginary constellations through unconnected sites. The questions that arise out of this chaotic space are which texts gain prominence? How are they presented, and how does one create forums for criticism and review that are likely to occupy the same space as the first, in a way that would allow for a dialogue to be created between texts? [12]
Google has devised a “PageRank”
system that relies on “the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using
its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.”[13]
Another words, the more a site is linked to the higher its rank becomes, and
the higher its rank becomes the more influence its links have on the rank of
other sites (a link from CNN.com to your site would presumably boost your PageRank
considerably). This prestige system is designed to reinforce the notion of linking
on the web, but when researching obscure or unarticulated topics (such as sex
tourism) long enough, it can be found that the effectiveness of this system
to mediate discourse becomes problematic. For example, if one searches for “sex
tourism” Google.com predominantly returns academic, NGO, or critical news
articles sprinkled with a few of representative texts from the large sex tour
sites (such as WSG which is a prime example in academic writing and presumably
linked to quite often). This relationship almost reverses completely when searching
for “sex tours,” however, which returns a slew of tour guides and
personal accounts mixed with the occasional news reports from the larger news
networks. While the large gap between the language of critical or academic writings
and popular works has always distanced the physicality of their publications
(whether it be differing bookstores, reviews, or best sellers lists), what is
so startling is how close these two searches come in virtual space without actually
meeting. Evidently, no actual sex tour sites link to academic or news sites
that are critical of their practices, and the minor difference in the language
used by the two parties creates a segregation of space between the two search
results.
This symptom of search engine technology as a whole closely echoes the diagnosis
made by Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson when defining sex tour narratives found
in the WSG:
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.[14]
As discourses are shaped by self-contained, unilateral dialogues that make no attempt to engage with other parties, how will the Internet (as an increasingly important medium for all forms of cultural discourse) shape our knowledge of the Other and provide methods for power to be mobilized by different parties? While issues such as the aforementioned white supremacist sites must contend with the pre-established criticism of society offline - which only tolerates with them within the ideals of free speech - sites surrounding the sex industry in Bangkok exist in an intellectual space that is shrouded in mystery, often far from the average users sphere of knowledge. This can often be seen both online and offline in the way narratives “rationalize the sex trade business in Asia” through narratives that are “couched in reality, and often speak of the poor economic condition that these women are escaping.”[15] At varying levels of complicity, sites promoting the sex trade all mediate the moral or ethical issues raised by the unknowing viewer through the use of FAQ’s, rationalizing personal accounts, and (often un-cited) statistical reports that aim to calm the user’s hesitancy. Thus, the Internet acts as the “Orientalizing apparatus by allowing the narratives of men who have gone abroad to inform others of ‘Asia’.”[16]
What makes this effective, of course,
is the narcissistic allure that the web provides both users and publishers.
Paralleling Bishop and Robinson’s articulation of the web discourse as
self-contained and masturbatory, William Liu notes that the auto-centric nature
of the narratives help establish them as “objects of narcissistic satisfaction
because they provide the idealized mirror to counter the man’s own failing
sense of self.”[17] Liu finds that while the users “do
recognize that these narratives could further ostracize them from society”
the web creates a public space that allows “libidinal exercise without
the guilt and shame of the observing ego.” With this narcissistic drive
in place, the ease with which one may publish on the web spawns countless homepages
devoted to pictures and stories of users travels, each mirroring the last but
fulfilling the creators desire for wholeness.
With all of these elements in place, what remains is the question of how the
driving force of these web sites interact directly with shaping perceptions
of Bangkok, and to articulate one possibility I would like to draw on Elizabeth
Grosz’s writings on the relationship between bodies and cities. In reading
her work with this project in mind, it came to light that much of her descriptions
of these interactions recall the relationships found between the Internet and
the city:
The city provides an order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced … By “city,” I understand a complex and interactive network that links together, often in an unintergrated and ad hoc way, a number of disparate social activities, process, relations with a number of architectural, geographic, civic, and public relations.
While it may not be as simple as the analogy of body : city :: city : internet, Grosz’s understanding of the city closely resembles my previous understanding of how Google organizes the web. Grosz notes the relationship between cities and bodies is neither causal nor representational, and uses elements from each to describe how the two-way linkage between them could be defined as an interface. When transposing this relationship from city to Internet, however, it can be seen that breaks and miscommunications between bodies in the ‘city of text’ reveal how the idea of the interface as a surface that mediates interaction between two bodies may falter. In looking at sex tourism sites on the web and their interaction with city, the interface no longer seems to facilitate intellectual communication between the two, but more directly (or perhaps more physically) the way in which the user may plug-in to the city.
Through the analyses of sex tour narratives that I have cited so far, two key examples of offer examples of this altered conception of the interface. One is the often-noted system in which tourists (or computer users?) may pick a woman in the massage parlor; “a large glass window area perhaps 50 feet long with floor to ceiling glass. Behind the glass sits 50 to 100 or more beautiful Thai ladies … wearing little numbers on their prom dresses! All these women are there for your choosing … Just like in an old Chinese restaurant, you order by number.”[18] Without attempting to breach the endless comparisons to commodities (not to mention the association between food and the ‘orient’!) this description immediately recalls the experience of viewing go go bar and massage parlor workers online. Links, in this case worn as buttons on their hips, allow the user to choose his object through the mediating interface of the glass screen, which is often a one way mirror. The second instance of the transference between the Internet and the city reveals the more complex problems at hand, and may be quoted in full:
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.[19]
The ‘adventurous male’ traveler desires an experience that is new, but not too new, and the use of the Internet stabilizes that experience by providing the user with the knowledge to exercise power safely, without tainting the chance of adventure. Liu notes that consistency plays a central role in fantasizing the fetish object, and that the “narratives Orientalizing work is to essentialize and create consistency where none existed.” What is more, the knowledge gained by user online establishes an uneven relationship with the sex worker, removing what little leverage she has in the bargaining process. The WSG thus acts as a one-way global exchange with which the buyer may establish values of commodities, while cutting the seller out of the loop. To reread Grosz’s conclusion on bodies and cities with the Internet in mind may reveal how this Orientalizing apparatus may further the establishment of a colonial system:
As a hinge between the population and the individual, the body, its distribution, habits, alignments, pleasures, norms, and ideals are the ostensive object of governmental regulation, and the city is both a mode for the regulation and administration of subjects but also an urban space in turn reinscribed by the particularities of its occupation and use.[20]
The use of the Internet as another form of ‘colonization at a distance’ shows how the unregulated flows which the Internet is championed for within liberal self empowered communities may just as easily be appropriated to exploit those who are left outside of the system. Grosz outlines four general effects of the interface relationship, which in this case further describe the process of marginalization. The Internet may (1) “orient sensory and perceptual information” as it produces conceptions of space to guide the user. It may also (2) “organize familial, sexual, and social relations” as the Internet “divides cultural life into public and private,” facilitating the user to plug-in to the marginalized space without the consent or full understanding of the locally empowered populous (remember the outrage and disbelief of the Thai government and middle class). In doing so, the Internet (3) “organizes the circulation of information and structures of social and regional access to goods and services,” and (4) “provide the context in which social rules and expectations” may be erased in the users local society and established in their understanding and control of the remote society. The way that these expectations are “internalized or habituated” ensures “social conformity or, failing this, position social marginality at a safe distance (ghettoization)” (seen both in human rights groups that attack the Thai government, and the governments own efforts to contain the contradictions of the sex industry).
In establishing these effects in relation to the city, Grosz positions it as the “most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power.” As a system of interfacing with the city of Bangkok, the decentralized nature of the Internet has made it the primary method with which the sex industry has expanded during the 1990s, leading some to characterize its networking structure less along the lines of Deleuzian deterritorialization and flows but through Foucault’s ideas of power as a “net-like structure that is everywhere.”[21] As many like to forefront the Internet’s secret history as product of the Cold War military-industrial complex when theorizing the future of net society, it should be remembered that the community of military and academic users that made up the network until its explosion in the early 1990s was a largely homogeneous group that utilized the decentralized structure strategically. Rather than open and chaotic space, decisions about network traffic and infrastructure were made largely through the mutual cooperation of a small community of systems administrators, whose interest in online communities such as MUDs and MOOs highlights their conscious attempts to foster experimental or utopian social environments. As the Internet’s decentralized structure truly begins to deterritorialize in the 1990s, it can be seen that the social fabric of the network is yielding to a more diverse and yet potentially all the more homogenizing population, positioning the Internet as a central medium in which social relations are produced. An awareness of this process is required by both by users and programmers, as even within the open-ended flows hierarchical formations may appear.