Gender in the City

Friday. Two very different exchanges. Two different experiences of the struggles people face regarding gender. At the fairly frustrating check-in in the morning we tried and kind of failed to prepare for SWING exchange. SWING -- or Service Workers' IN Group -- is a group of male sex workers in Bangkok bonding together to provide support and education about sex work. After the exchange with the volunteers and workers, we were to tour the sex clubs, and many of us were nervous. Some worried about seeing things they didn't want to, that they would feel really uncomfortable. Whitney, I remember, at breakfast told me she worried that she would get visibly uncomfortable, possibly offending someone. Others were fascinated by the subject matter -- studying this was the primary reason Shayne and others even came here to Thailand -- but were afraid that when faced with everything they had only studied in theory, all their beliefs would be proven wrong. My feelings were kind of mixed. I was most worried that it would turn into a voyeuristic show on my part; that I would just want to see the "worst they got" just to see how much I could take, and lose sight of the actual issues and people behind those issues.

With that weighing on our heads we loaded up into the vans in the cramped parking garage of the Viengtai Hotel. During the hour drive to the next exchange we chatted and tried to clear strip shows and sex workers from our minds. This exchange was to be something, um... rather in a different vein.

We met and spoke with Dhammananda, Thailand's first fully-ordained female monk at her home in a monastary in the Bangkok suburbs. The monastary is called Songdhammakalyani Monastary and houses not only herself, but three other female monks, several novices, a small school, and devoted laypeople. It's a beautiful wat complex, more subdued artistically than other monastaries we've seen.

The issue of female monkhood in Thailand is such an issue for several reasons, but most importantly because of the sangha (or monk-clergy)'s tie to the state. The monks that you see in Thailand, all decked out in bright orange robes, are under the control (at least somewhat) of the government. Buddha declared that both women and men could become monks, but the ordination of women monks has to be overseen by women monks. Before the venerable Dhammananda, Thailand had no lineage of female monks, so it could not ordain women. In the 1920s, a progressive monk tried to ordain his two daughters, but the supreme patriarch of Buddhism here declared that illegal under Thai Buddhist faith (Thammayut and Mahanikaya sects), disrobing and jailing the monks. Since then, women have only been allowed to be "nuns" who don't get as much support. While it gets you karma points if you feed monks, feeding nuns gets you jack.

Until Dhammananda came around.

She's this reallly awesome lady. When she enters the room, she eminates an aura of cheerful peace. Before ordination in 2003, she was a professor at Thammasat University (Bangkok's second most-popular University) and had her own talk show. As a Buddhist scholar, she is well-versed in the faith and speaks fluent English. She talks about her former life, and it's difficult to imagine that less than ten years ago, Dhammananda was another Thai woman. As she tells it, one day as she was putting on her make-up in the morning, she stopped, looked in the mirror, and asked herself what she was doing? From that day on, she started on the path to monkhood. Now her head is shaved and she wears the orange robes of monkhood -- albeit a darker orange color than the men we've seen.

We talked about much during the three-hour exchange. One thing that struck me was her talk about forming a support group. Dhammananda likened it to washing potatos. You gather potatos of all shapes, put them in a bucket with water, and stir. As you stir faster, the motion gets faster, sometimes too faster for individual potatos. The motion gets too much for one, and pop! Out of the bucket it flies! "If a potato jumps out of the bucket, it rots away," she said. So communities really need to watch out for their own, I guess. This is a hard thing to hear now, seeing as our own group often is pulling away, wanting to jump out of that bucket. We can't just let those lost potatos rot; we're all here together, whether we like it or not.

I'm enjoying learning more about interpretations of the Buddhist faith -- both in its social activism and its downfalls. Such cool ideas are worth hearing about, even if you don't subscribe to the beliefs. "Talk about today. Talk about now."

I left feeling much better, cheerful, relaxed. Ajaan Dii took a Flat Stanley picture with us all (I'm cursing myself for not having my camera handy!) that his friend's small son in North Carolina sent him. That kid will win the coolness contest at his school's show and tell for sure.

Coming to the monastary, the van ride took about thirty minutes. Leaving several hours later, it took at least two hours. Bangkok's traffic is brutal, snail-slow gridlock. At one point, stuck in an unmoving caravan for fifteen minutes, Ajaan Dii walked out of his van to ours and told us we would be late for the SWING exchange. "This is once in a lifetime traffic!" he exclaimed proudly. Indeed.

Several hours later we arrived in Patpong, the seedy red-light district. Well, one of the seedy red-light districts of Bangkok. The main one at least. With bar names like "Ball Club" and "Pussy Galore", these clubs don't beat around the bush. SWING's headquarters is a tiny office, up five flights of a seedy office building in the heart of the bar scene. The elevator didn't go all the way up to the fifth floor, so as we climbed the last flight of stairs, we walked by a group of women sex workers putting on their make-up for the evening and chatting. The office is cheerfully decorated -- bright posters about safe sex practices and simple English posters adorn the walls.

The staff was smiley and eager to meet us. P'Thon, the only woman, is the project's coordinator. She graduated with a drama degree and wanted to get involved with drama work. She got interested in the annual show that EMPOWER puts on. EMPOWER works with female sex workers, as opposed to SWING. Thon helped start SWING when male sex workers kept wanting to come to the programs offered for women. They follow the same basic model. SWING is a community-based organization, which means that it's run almost entirely by former sex-workers. It offers a cocktail of activities, counseling, English classes, sex-education, "edutainment", and outreach work, as well as being on of the few place to reliably collect sex worker demographic data.

They specified the term "service workers" in the organization's title, because that's what they want to be seen as -- offering a service. If they can get sex work categorized under the labor law, this will allow sex workers to get the same rights under the government as factory workers. For a job that docks you pay if you skip a day, having things like paid vacation and health care is damn essential.

We heard some of the staff's stories of how they came to be involved in SWING. All the men had worked as sex workers in the bars. One thing that was suprising was how many of them had higher education. P'Tiem, a graduate of Thammasaat University in Bangkok in information technology, had a job in the IT sector, but was fired because his boss wasn't comfortable with Tiem's homosexuality. While sending out his resume, Tiem started working as a waiter, then tried out sex work when the pay wasn't sustainable. He did that for a few years until, like something out of an O Henry story, he accidentally left his resume in the disc drive at SWING's office. He's been working there ever since. Small and impecably-dressed, it's not hard to imagine him in classes.

Another staff members have faced discrimination against transgender. After a botched Botox injection to the face, she was left with a sagging face and money drained because of multiple attempts to fix it. Patpong is always there for those who know how to knock.

One thing that struck me was the intensity of community felt there. Sometimes the support group takes a break from the English lessons, or safe-sex workshops and just goes out to a movie or to dinner together. It becomes, in the truest sense, a support group because it's built upon genuine relationships. As P'Thon said, "we are all human. This is our family."

We broke into smaller groups of students, accompanied by a translater (Ajaan DIi for us), and a SWING staff member. They took us to a male and a female bar. It was nice to have someone experienced with the ways of Patpong to guide us down the close, garishly-lit streets. With all the loud touts around, promising exciting shows of all kinds, it becomes kind of necessary to know where you're going.

The male bar was up a narrow,red-lit, carpeted stairwell. The bar owner seemed to know our guide and friendly greeted him while we were lead to our seats in the front row. I couldn't help catching a glimpse of the men in the audience. Mostly older men, about 60-40 farang vs Asian. Some already had much younger men as companions. Some just sat alone in the dimly-lit room. Earlier as a group, we had discussed non-judgement -- not only of the sex-workers, but of their clientelle. Still, when faced with it, it's hard to really digest.

The show started. Off to the side, a red light came on a shower scene, with two naked men lathering up. Their routine (because that's what it was) was a highly-choreographed dance of intimacy. It was like someone going through the motions. This show was pretty hard-core with not only strippers, but full-nudity and intercourse. Watching made me feel really uncomfortable, not only because this isn't something I encounter everyday, but because it really makes me reexamine love and sex in a whole new way. To have something we think of as so personal, so tied to romance, just acted out like a play felt... strange. I don't know still exactly how I feel about it. Having our guide there was incredibly helpful. We got to ask questions throughout the show. For example, the two men having sex with each other a few feet away from us we learned are active members of SWING and nothing more than good friends and collegues outside of work. In fact, a majority of the men who work at such bars are straight. It really is just a job for them.

The part of the evening that brought home the business side of the industry was right before we left. All the "available companions" stood onstage, wearing tight, white briefs with a number pinned onto it. There they stood, showing off their goods, slowly rotating their formation so potential customers could check them out. It reminded me of a car showroom. That's what really disturbed me the most because of its dehumanizing aspects. To their customers, these boys are products. Ah, capitalism, shine your light down on us.

Moving onto the women's bar, there was a marked difference. Whereas the men's show had felt more serious about its work, the women's bar has a sense of lightheartedness. When they aren't dancing or doing tricks (no, not turning tricks) onstage, the girls walk around among the spectators. Some men -- once again a lot of creepy farang -- buy them drinks (how you make a deal here), but if they don't, the girls seem fine joking among themselves. One who sat within earshot kept calling up to her collegues onstage, while they responded with giggles or retorts of their own. The girls' set-up is a rotation of stripper show and "tricks" like ping-pong show, or blowing out candles, or smoking cigarettes, or writing with a permanant marker -- all done with a vagina.

Tang, a worker, sat down next to Christie and me. We bought her a drink so we could talk. It turns out, most of the girls who worked their come from Isaan, traditionally the poorest region of Thailand. Unlike the guys, who we found were more likely to have higher education, the girls will work more likely for survival or to send money back home. Tang pointed to one girl, sitting by the bar heckling her friend. "She's from Khon Kaen too," Tang said. The Khon Kaen woman stopped talking to her friend as the music ended, and climbed up onstage, removing her bathrobe. She was totally naked, except for a pair of socks she wore under her heels. Walking around in heels all day is tough no matter what profession you do. Holding a marker in her vagina, she squatted over a paper and wrote the word "Hello" in English.

Tang left about ten minutes later, after we shot the breeze about her family; she had to go dance. Later, I saw her flirting with a farang couple. I found her to say goodbye. Going to these clubs is expensive. You are required to buy at least one drink, but when they're 200 Baht ($7ish) for the least expensive ones, it adds up really fast.

I'm really glad I've gotten this experience. Sex work isn't pretty, and I still don't exactly know how I feel about the industry. Thon says, "everyone has sex. It just depends on sex for free or sex for sale." While I see the truth that, I can't really support an industry so essentially dehumanizing. In the end, I feel it is most important to see the humans behind the machine, the people who fuel the industry's very existence.

It was a very interesting day of gender difference, indeed.