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Monday, April 23, 2007

Sexerati: Cambodia > Arrival, Going It Alone

filed under: Sexerati: Cambodia by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Back from two weeks in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Melissa reports in on the state of sex culture in one of the world’s most significant and significantly maligned political and sexual economies: Cambodia’s sex industry.

US Embassy, Outside My Hotel, Phnom Penh, Election Day

It was well en route from Taipei to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, that I first spoke with other young women traveling without men. On the flight from San Francisco, I had quickly become — as one of the youngest women on the plane without an older companion, and likely (it was a 747, I can’t say for certain) the only white woman by herself — an object of attention for any man my age, being offered a vacation on the beach in Vietnam by a businessman, and a few days at a hotel in Hong Kong with a competitive kickboxer. In the small, spare moments between pushback from the gate and takeoff, the two Khmer women seated with me shared their makeup mirror and, without us knowing more than a few words in common, compared the contents of our tiny travel vanities with one another. Lip gloss, the great equalizer: I am sure 1970’s feminists would approve.

I hadn’t planned to, but after having been so fixated upon by single men, I started to scope out the other passengers for some pure amateur ethnography: how many 40something white men, for example, had 20something female companions? How many of those female companions were of Asian descent? Of those, how many were Khmer, Korean, or Thai? How many were dressed in designer labels? Even as a mover in sex worker NGO circles, I found myself caught up in a fruitless game of Spot the Sex Tourist, completely aware that there’s no way to know for sure, that sex tourism is more complicated than Oprah and Lifetime would have us believe. I know better, and yet, I knew there was no way not to sit with these questions wherever I went.

Landing — again, by myself — in Phnom Penh, I handed US$25 and my passport to Customs, nearly missing that they’d processed me for entry as I argued in good humor with a Dutch entrepreneur about the role of NGO’s in Cambodia (he had had enough, clearly, of public health types trying to hold onto the one shred of civic life without privatizing it, and I had no sympathy for his “I can live here for a year what it would cost me to live in Amsterdam for…” frame of reference). “Don’t pay more than $2 for a ride to town,” he warned, and I sassed him back that my organization had sent a driver, and so with that, and a quick pose for Immigrations’ webcam, I was winding my way through cab and tuk-tuk drivers more aggressive than anything I’d seen stateside (even at JFK at 4am, preying on the red eye passengers) and somehow, far more relaxed. Standing ten deep, friends and loved ones of travelers waved flowers and signs, but my driver was, of course, not among them. I let myself get talked into the equivalent of a gypsy cab by a man claiming that he was the president of the Khmer Midwife Association.

In the cab’s front seat, I tried not to pull anything Hepburnesque as I wiped sweat from my brow with my scarf, as we crossed the dustier, signal-free streets out by the airport, past women at roadside stands with small children selling petrol from old glass Pepsi and liquor bottles, rumbling along by crumbling French deco and nouveau buildings, all fleur de lys and colonial flash. Motos and boys and girls in facemasks riding them two and three at a time wove around the car, even as we turned about the rotary bordering Wat Phnom, the temple for which Phnom Penh is named. The Western tourist hotels are a few minutes from there, as well as the US Embassy, much larger and more fortified than I would have imagined. White Toyota pickups circled lazily, some bearing People’s Party banners or men on megaphones. Election Day was in two days, and later that evening, all SMS service in Cambodia would be turned off by the govenment. At that moment, though, I was still Twittering and marveling at that.

I don’t know why I was so surprised: at the edge of the park surrounding Wat Phnom, there were internet cafes, and cell phone stands, and even:

And no, not a single white guy, let alone a sex tourist in sight.

It would be so much easier to be here and be an extremist, to think I was here to save someone, rather than just admit that I’m a foreigner who is going to need a few days to learn how not to get ripped off by drivers before she even imagines getting on to the bigger questions.