Book: The Wisdom of whores, bureaucrats, brothels, and the business of AIDS

Title                 : The Wisdom of whores, bureaucrats, brothels, and the business of AIDS

Writer             : Elizabeth Pisani

Year                 : 2007

 

Important Quotations:

Sex in boxes

a lot of epidemiologist are snobby about qualitative research: it’s sociologist and other ‘soft’ scientist. If you do it by book it is time-consuming and expensive, and it produces information that can be dismissed with a wave of the hand: interesting, perhaps , but not statistically significant. Epidemiologist would much rather get stuck straight into the serious work of counting things.

Sexploitation pp 59-

HIV is very good at exploting the diversity of human nature. It uses people like Fuad, who have lots of risks, as a vehicle to get from groups with one type of risk to groups with some other risk. Let’s suppose for a moment that Fuad is infected with HIV. anal sex is a good way of passing on the virus, so it is quite likely that Fuad would infect some of the men who buy sex from him in the shadow of the Finance Ministry. The person he has sex with most frequently is his girlfriends, and she’s also the one he’s least likely to use a condom with. So if Fuad is infected, it is quite possible that his girlfriend is, too. And she’s a prostitute who walks the streets; in the landscape of most of Asia’s HIV epidemic, street-based sex workers report the lowest condom use.  So if she gets infected, she may well pass the virus (pp.59-60)

Like much o f Asia, Indonesia has a schizophrenic relationship with its sex industry. There’s no law against selling sex, though pimping is illegal. From the early 1960s, the government took a very pragmatic approach, concluding that men wanted to buy, women would want to sell. Since the public frowned on ‘women without morals’. It seemed easiest to squash them together more or less out of sight in red light districts. Health officials were glad of this because it made it easy to round people up for health checks. It allowed the more conscientious to provide treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and the less conscientious to make money out of giving the girls injections of antibiotics, vitamins, sometimes even saline solutions, in the name of ‘STI prevention’. Distributors of condoms and stout beer, believed to increase virility, were glad because it reduced the scatter for their sales force and shopping’- a huge choice of girls, music, cuisines all in a very small area. Pp 60

We asked  almost 4,000 clients  of sex workers in different parts of Indonesia if they were married; over half of them were.  We see this pattern repeated in country after country around Asia: men tend to be slightly more likely to buy sex when that are single, but the majority of prostitutes’ clients are married, simply because more adult men are married than unmarried. Those men who can afford to will often buy sex even when they can have it for free at home. Pp 61