Inside the Fight for Freedom, Part I: The Sex Industry

*The content that follows is somewhat graphic, and not appropriate for children. You have been properly warned. Now, get ready to get mad and motivated.*

When most people think of the sex industry in America, they usually think of the rampantness of pornography, or the sexualization of women through billboards, the media and the like. We often demonize the television, the computer, or the music we listen to as the source of the problem. It is easy to blame an object. It’s much more difficult to admit the true source: darkness through people and spiritual forces at work together (yeah, I went there).

In Bangkok, to say the sex industry is in your face is an understatement. It plasters itself all over every surface imaginable, in this case, in the form of a semi-nude photo behind a bar in Nana Plaza.

It walks the streets at 9 a.m. in the morning on Soi 4, looking for money to feed her family.

It mascarades openly as an old, Western man holding the hand of a young, Thai girl.

It flaunts itself in the form of scantly dressed women who litter the entrance to the red light districts.

And it provides a main source of income to the countless number of street vendors who display tables and tables of items to enhance and pervert the already twisted sexual experience that men (and even some women) seek in Thailand.

Everywhere you look, the sex industry blankets Bangkok in its sludge, from dusk til dawn. At 8 a.m. on any given day, a Western man like the one below is asking a Thai girl for her number so he can meet up with her later.

At 10 a.m., the girls at the pool bars and massage parlors sit outside, bored and waiting on their first customer to show up. For them, work will not be through until 7 p.m. or later, when the next shift of 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. girls comes in to “relieve” them of their daily duties. (Hey buddy, you are so busted…)

By 6:30 p.m., the dinner crowd is transitioning into the red light crowd. The bars are beginning to fill. The girls are starting to dance. Drinks flow. Clothes become scarce. Men ogle, grope and choose a girl for the night, or at least the next hour, by the number she is wearing. With each suggestive move, a girl is victimized. And it’s almost always against her will.

Notice how this man is not looking at this girl’s eyes…

Listen, it may not seem like it, but I’m being tame here. If I could take you inside the bars, where these girls dance like robots–cold, stiff and emotionless–or force your eyes open by the horror of watching one of them being beckoned off stage by an 80-year-old, tattooed ex-military sleeze looking to relive his glory days, I would take you in a second. That’s the only way to truly get kicked in the gut by the pervasive darkness here, vaguely masked by Vegas lighting and head-throbbing music. It hangs heavy as the humidity here, always oppressive, never relenting, even when it’s soaked by torrential rain or sprayed down with a water hose, like the streets of the red lights districts are by day.

As if to give galactic confirmation to everything we were seeing and experiencing last night, even the moon fell dark. The sight of this lunar eclipse seemed appropriate amidst the red light district of Soi Cowboy–one of the darkest, yet most brightly lit places I’ve ever seen.

If all of this makes you uncomfortable (minus the moon), good–that’s the point. And we are just getting started. Next up–Part II: The Girls of the Red Light Districts.