Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle

by Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson

In Thailand, a $4 billion per year tourist industry is the linchpin of the modernization process called the "Thai Economic Miracle". And what is Thailand's main attraction? Sex for hire. Year after year young women are lured to Bangkok to staff the teeming brothels, massage parlors, and sex bars that cater to male tourists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, the Gulf States, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Developed from Lillian...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415914299
• ISBN13: 9780415914291
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Greatly informative

Lillian Robinson has explored the "economic miracle" of Thailand with great detail and care. That she is passionate about her subject and cares for the women and girls who are exploited in the Thai tourist sex market is at once refreshing and needed in our culture which increasingly accepts the commodification of women's bodies.

The book dares to critique Western men as the problem

Co-author Lillian Robinson has been one of the boldest voices in American Studies and in feminist scholarship since the 1970s. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, in tackling the issue of sex tourism in Thailand, she and Ryan Bishop point to the U.S. and to Western constructions of masculinity as largely to blame. In this, they break with the conventional wisdom of American journalism, which has presented the subject of the prostitution industry in Bangkok as a safely distant "Asian" problem, stemming from so-called lax "Asian" attitudes toward sex work.No, say the writers of this book; the blame lies uncomfortably close to home, in the checkbooks of the American consumers--those who go looking for sex on the cheap through the Western arrangers of sex tours,and who then encourage other men to do so, through their contributions to web sites that provide salacious tales and practical consumer advice.Theirs is a brilliant and challenging ana! lysis of how this seemingly extreme example of American men exercising the "right" to buy and use women sexually stems from everyday notions of masculine privilege. They uncover, in the end,not a world of perverts or sickos, but quite ordinary men living out an all-too-common fantasy of sexually possessing young girls who neither can nor will make any demands upon them in return.This book will certainly not please every reader, for its messages demand that Westerners hold up a mirror to themselves and see an unflattering picture of participants in continuing human rights abuses.But the vision is convincingly realized and impeccably documented here.