Choke on your beers arseholes

This article is headlining the SMH website right now. It’s about the sex trade in Thailand.

Author manages to keep a foot in both camps without writing much of any substance and certainly bugger all in the way of originality. Orientalism/fetishism goes utterly unchallenged and unquestioned – he discusses “the way” *Asian women* perform in the bedroom/act in relationships (essentialising and homogenising in ways that reduce The Asian Woman to subservient sex-robot doesn’t appear to bother him at all, apparently he’s never bothered to read Said or later critical/cultural theorists discussing the impact of Western attitudes to *Asian women*) as *the* reason so many Western men travel to Thailand for sex.

I would hazard that this is certainly part of it, and a fucked up part – but linked and intermingled is the knowledge that here, away from home they can buy whatever degradation/power trip they want, because the poverty is so bad that sex slavery is rampant and unimaginably poor women are easy to exploit. Oh yeah, and it’s a way to fuck kids. But let’s not discuss this *ugly* reality, let’s make it sound more palatable than that.

Yeah, he does start to discuss the poverty, sex slavery etc, and the issue of most girls being between 12 and 16, the average age being 14; in a fairly cursory way (one para in two pages). But you know, I wanted to read this in a charitable way – I had been hoping that finally here was a Dude prepared to tell the other Dudes that they aren’t just entitled to the shit they put girls/women through. But in the end, after discussing the extreme poverty that ends up with so many girls sold into sex slavery (establishing that the average age is fourteen) he starts to feel angry at his friend…and then decides to buy his mate a beer instead of challenging his attitude towards women, prostitutes and the sex trade in Asia. Cos you know…it’s a systemic exploitation of at risk and poor girls who are below the age of consent by Australia’s standards, an exploitation that leads to violence, illness, rape, disease and murder, but fuck! He’s a mate! Let’s have a beer and a smile and shut the fuck up. Cos he’s not the first…so clearly me challenging him would be poor form.

Choke. On. Your. Beers.

And before we all congratulate ourselves on not fucking desperately poor 14 year old sex slaves, let’s have a look at the fetishisation of Asian women that underlies it. This shit is all through culture, and people think it’s perfectly acceptable.

I’m too fucked off and I have essays to write.

I just found a blog called Angry Asian Girl Against “Orientalism”: this post seems a good place to start for any fucker who can’t see what the issue is.