prostitution – Pickpocket Bob Arno

Pattaya’s sex tourism

Pattaya, Thailand’s got to be the seediest, one-track party-town in the world. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Huge signs advertising the Fcuk Inn Bar and Kiss Food and Drink make the theme obvious. Couples like this one are ubiquitous.

Hot, sweaty days are for advertising the possibilities of hot, sweaty nights. Bored “massage” girls pose on plastic chairs in front of their shops, long bare legs ending in spike-heeled evening shoes dangling in the trash-filled gutters.

Just across the narrow lanes, clusters of old, fat, ugly, white men slouch and slump over beers, gathering confidence from one another. They all look the same. They all wear floppy shorts and t-shirts and sandals. Some wear socks with their sandals. These are the tunnel-vision men those pretty Thai girls are dreaming of.

The local specialty, called ladyboys, also ogle these men. Look at the 23-year-old ladyboy pictured at left, who just had her bag snatched while riding on the back of her Italian boyfriend’s motorcycle. (A reversal of the classic Italian scippatori theft, in which the thief—not the victim—is the backseat rider.) The Italian “boyfriend” may or may not have known what was under the coy ladyboy’s skirt.

After dark the lanes explode with open-air billiards bars, tiny beer bars, bars named for your country, pole-dancing bars, and enormous “pussy bars” offering “pussy menus” and buckets of ping pong balls. Establishments large and small feature alluring girls.

The city’s other passion is food. I love the street food culture in Pattaya. Entire restaurants zip through the streets on the backs of tricycles and on motorcycle sidecars, their sauce buckets sloshing and condiments precarious. In grubby plastic baskets they carry the myriad fresh and fermented ingredients that their specialties comprise. Seductive food is cooked to order on smoky charcoal grills or stirred over car-battery-operated stoves.

Hot, ready-to-eat curries are peddled from wooden trays on the backs of bikes, single servings tied up in clear plastic baggies. Mysterious delicacies are baked in bamboo canes—the ultimate environmentally-friendly fast-food container. Longons, lychees, mangosteens, jackfruit, dragonfruit, durian—the tropical fruit displays are mouthwatering.

Whatever your pleasure, Pattaya is to drool for. Western men tend to visit for three week stays. Many or most have met their exotic girls online and come specifically to see them. They pay the girls about US$100 a night to stay with them in their hotels. They might visit their girls two or three times a year. Sometimes the couples marry and the men take the girls away to live in their Western countries.

For a beach resort town, Pattaya’s remarkably unattractive. Where trees should be, tangled electrical wires form a shadeless canopy over streets, the thick cords nearly obscuring the mosaic of signs for Cialis, Viagra, pharmacy, clinic, laundry, and rooms-for-rent. There’s nothing for the eye here—just hard-driven business: that is, the business of the sexual drive. It’s a lewd town, but an honest one, advertising what it’s about in every way it can.

Dutch prostitute raves about Bob Arno

Amsterdam: bridges and bikes in the red light district.

Walking through Amsterdam’s red light district, we reminisced about the three months we lived at the Krasnapolsky, around the corner. As we wandered, Bob wondered if some of the prostitutes on display behind windows and glass doors actually liked their work. Maybe they felt desired and good about themselves.

I said that that was a totally male fantasy view, and that the women must feel demoralized and dehumanized, having to be intimate with drunken, stinky strangers for pittance, and worse. And on top of that, most of them were slaves to pimps and could barely pay off their “expenses.”

We were both surprised at how great looking some of the girls were. I decided to try to talk to one, a perfect Barbie doll in a white micro-bikini with long blonde hair, freckles, and a friendly smile. When I approached her glass door, she opened it and said sure, we could talk. She invited me in, but I just stayed in the doorway. She was Dutch, 28ish, and spoke perfect and smart English, like most Dutch. She said she did this work because she liked it, and the others who didn’t like it were just stupid. She said there’s always a way out, people to help, safe places to go.

So Bob was right. At least one of these women liked her job.

After I left, Barbie stuck her head out of her door to call to a good looking man in a group: “I want you, pretty boy.” The man went to her door and talked for a while, then left. We meandered. A block away, Bob stopped the man and asked (in German) why he didn’t go in. He said she was too expensive. It was 50 euros ($65) to go in, then extra. I imagine that means a 50-euro cover charge, then a menu depending on what you want, which could get expensive. But as I was completely wrong about the woman’s attitude about her job, I’m probably just as wrong about the pricing.

During dinner (Malaysian) Bob wondered if Barbie would allow him to take a picture of me next to her. I didn’t want a picture like that, but finally agreed to do it if she’d allow it. I felt safe in that, thinking that she wouldn’t. After dinner, we went back to her doorway but her curtain was closed. We waited for a while, then I finally went up to the dark-haired girl behind the next glass door of the same house. I asked if the thin blonde was still around or if she’d left. Sure, the other one said, and called “Sabrina, a frau for you!”

A man left through the Barbie doll’s door and the doll herself appeared in her white micro-bikini with a spray bottle of disinfectant in her hand. I beckoned Bob over to make the request for his photo, because I didn’t really want it. He started to introduce himself when she suddenly lit up and said she’s seen him on television. “You’re great!” she said. But no! No photos. She had allowed a woman to film her once from the neck down, but the woman filmed her face and it was shown on ABC. Her American regulars told her about it. Bob asked, isn’t that good for business? No, she said, she has family. She doesn’t want to be filmed.

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Las Vegas’ most prolific prostitutes

52-Pickup—Las Vegas police are suddenly, aggressively, picking up prostitutes in the “resort corridor” of the city. Armed with a deck—or a list, anyway—of our “50 most prolific prostitutes,” vice cops nabbed almost half of them in the first two weeks of the initiative.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas promotes sex, women, and “anything goes” in its siren call to visitors.

Meanwhile, the talks go on about legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, prostitution in Vegas, as in 10 out of our 16 counties.

What is Vegas if not one big hypocritical contradiction? Prostitution creates a “bad image for Las Vegas,” says Metro Vice Lt. Karen Hughes. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, beckon the ads. Barbara Brents, a sociology professor at UNLV, said it best: “It seems pretty hypocritical to me to have an economy based on sexualizing women and then to come down on the women when police want to make it seem like they’re enforcing the law.”

Aren’t there better things for Las Vegas Metropolitan Police to do? Eastern Europeans have invaded and are having a heyday with fraud and id theft. Home invasions are on the rise, too, and are non-consensual, unlike prostitution.

In the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Sunday cover story this past weekend, Hughes said “it’s time to stop the revolving door of prostitution-related arrests, especially when those arrests involve ‘trick rolls.'” Well of course, arrest thieves! Whether it’s a pickpocket, or a prostitute who empties her sleeping client’s wallet, book ’em.

Hughes goes on to say they “want to minimize opportunities for prostitutes to be aggressive with the tourists and with men who aren’t interested in that.” Aggressive sales tactics are annoying, I agree. I particularly detest the loud recorded radio-style ads blasted through hotel speakers onto the Strip. I’m not fond of the hundreds (it seems) of Mexican men and women (they are all Mexican, and they all wear earphones) who shove escort ads at passers-by, whether they’re interested or not. They create an awful lot of litter, too. And I’m especially irked by the saleskids in the malls who accost passers-by with questions meant to engage, meant to stop a person to create an opportunity for a sales pitch.

Oh, and it’s okay to aggressively solicit porn stars on huge, well-lit billboards.

I haven’t done a survey, but I bet a large proportion of our visitors enjoy temporarily flirting with the naughtiness Vegas cooked up. They can be momentary voyeurs, or daring participants, wannabes, or shrinking lurkers, aghast but rapt. We know one thing: trying to appeal to the family crowd didn’t work, and isn’t what Vegas wants.

Why not legalize prostitution? No one need buy the product unless it’s wanted. Legalize brothels, and no one need see the product unless they want it. It would end trick-rolls. It would be safe for the working girl and safe for the customer. Our mayor, who won’t publicly “advocate it,” says a Little Amsterdam red-light district in Vegas would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city.

Otherwise, I’ve got an idea for the pimps. Leave the girls at home. Keep them off the streets, where they’ll just be arrested. Put them in front of a web cam, and show your iPod or iPhone to potential clients. Call her on your cellphone and introduce her to the john. Let them speak. Let her stay safe (and warm, or cool), while you do the soliciting. Just until prostitution is legalized.

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