Working at the Bar: Sex Work and Health Communication in Thailand

Author: Thomas M. Steinfatt
List Price: $32.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1567505678
Publisher: Ablex Publishing (30 January, 2002)
Sales Rank: 835,739
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
Excellent Coverage of Thai Sexwork with Many Interviews
I just finished reading Steinfatt's Working at the Bar. An impressive book. I've spent considerable time in Thailand and what he says rings true. What's impressive is both the breadth and depth of coverage. There are whole chapters on why men do, and do not, go to sex workers, and how pimps and management of these places function, how AIDS does and does not relate to sex work, and sections on why women get into the game, or choose not to, and how they talk to and size up customers. Even the error rates for HIV tests are covered, and I have never seen that in print anywhere. This book is not based on opinion. Several thousand interviews were conducted with prostitutes, pimps, customers of prostitutes, and the great landowners of the prostitution areas. The morality of sex work is covered from both Christian and Buddhist perspectives. The author is quite correct about the way Buddhism functions in sex work. Anyone who understands Buddhism knows that the precept against "sexual immorality" historically meant sex outside of marriage by a woman. This is an excellent book, but do not plan on reading it all at once. There is just too much there. If you want to really understand this topic (and not just read someone's opinions who has only read about Thailand but never been there, or someone's opinions who dumps on other people's books but has not studied enough to write about it on his own) this is the book. Steinfatt has obviously been there and done an amazing amount of scholarly work on the topic. The best I have ever seen on prostitution in Southeast Asia.

Rating: 2 out of 5
many shortcomings, but better than other books on this topic
Steinfatt's book is one of several recent volumes on sex work in Thailand. The base for the book was a two-wave cross-sectional questionnaire study he did with sex workers in venues where the customers were foreigners (i.e., non-Thai). The findings are woven through topical chapters, rather than being presented in summary form. As a result, it's difficult to find "take home messages" here. Using this format, Steinfatt attempts to place sex work in Thailand into a broader cultural context. While he has done more homework than others on this topic, much of what he says comes up short. He confuses the lack of obvious sanctions for entering the sex trade with "acceptance". He ignores the fact that one can go a short distance from the villages that regularly send their daughters into the sex trade and find other villages where this practice rarely or never occurs (this phenomenon was the basis for work by the Thai Red Cross & the Population and Development Association). His understanding of Buddhism is similarly flawed and he fails to see how "merit making" has been perverted by local elites to foster sex work. Steinfatt begnis by clearly distinguishing his population from the much larger world of Thai sex workers whose clientele is Thai, however, this distinction blurs as the book proceeds. Unfortunately, the distinction is important because of the differences in how women enter sex work, their financial prospects, etc. Steinfatt also goes into a lengthy and not very useful aside regarding estimates of the sex work sector in Thailand---rehashing outdated data which have limited relevance to his population of interest. The book also relies too much on dated references and provides little consideration of how the HIV epidemic and Thailand's 100% condom campaign have effected sex work in the country. The effort to view sex work in Thailand as less "black & white" than in other countries misses the obvious presence of grey areas of sex work elsewhere (e.g., the phenomenon of "survival sex" among low income women in the US) and the tendency of sex workers in many cultures to decommercialize the description of clients to whom they are more affectively bonded. Erik Cohen's famous statements about open-ended prostitution are mentioned, but not Cohen's observation that this was becoming less common as long ago as the late 80s. There are more similarities with other countries than Steinfatt acknowledges, and the differences are more nuanced and require more depth in the culture.

This book shows more scholarly activity than the many slapdash efforts on Thai sexwork that have been published in recent years. Still, it's clear that Steinfatt's actual understanding is rather superficial. The book also would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand, wherein more effort was taken to integrate findings and other text.



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