Ibrahim wrote:
I've never been one for the sex trade myself, but the desperate or coercive aspects one encounters in certain places make it downright evil IMHO.
Agreed. My closest encounter with the sex trade was at the girly bars in Wan Chai. I was in HK alone for 3 nights and while out carousing and making friends in Lan Kwai Fong, I met a Scottish banker who insisted I had to see them before I left -- not to solicit, mind you, but for the shear novelty factor. We popped our heads into a couple of these places and found a very sorry scene. We hung out for 10 minutes in each, bought the girls overpriced juice shots, and left. All the girls I spoke with were Filipina. I felt sorry for them. They didn't look like they really wanted to be there and I don't think they were allowed to ever leave the bar (they lived somewhere in the back). Their attempts at selling themselves to us were pathetic. Meanwhile the whole time we were in there, the pushy and rude Chinese mama-sans wouldn't stop nagging us to buy a girl.
We ended the night at a place called "Neptune II" at 5 in the morning, a place crawling with sex workers from Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, the Mainland, and even further abroad. It's a regular bar that just happens to be the den of prostitutes who fly in on short-term tourist visas and turn as many tricks as they can before leaving. I later found out that the place was famous for incidents of Western men being drugged by thieving prostitutes (sometimes with lethal results). Didn't surprise me. My Scottish banker friend had thousands of dollars skimmed off of his Deutsche Bank company card after being foolish enough to use it there, he told me.
If the girly bars in Wan Chai represent the side of the sex trade that is evil for its exploitation of women, Neptune II only one street over is the other side: conniving, immoral, and unscrupulous women selling themselves to make a quick buck. These girls weren't trafficked in, were much prettier than the ones in the bars, and although they probably came from humble origins, chose a path that most women in their circumstances still would not.