At a Fudan University Medical School class about AIDs and Infectious Diseases, a volunteer Doctor shows up with a former female sex worker (hereafter fFSW) to do a presentation on NGO type work going on in Dalian to support the sex worker community, helping them with instruction for HIV prevention and access medical care / some legal recourse if they are, say, beaten by their employer. There are double standards with regards to gender everywhere but they seem more pronounced, for whatever reasons, here in China. [I once swore never to write about titillating topics but there are serious issues here.] At the end of the class, the two presenters split up, the Doctor offers to show the med students what sort of workshops they run for FSWs, which includes instruction for how to use a condom. The fFSW moves off to the side to field questions from the med students.

What happens next is a microcosm of the curious sort of schizophrenia that seems to dictate attitudes towards sex on the mainland. The seven or so people that engage the fFSW proceed to calmly explainproselytize how she can ‘change her life by going to school, and she doesn’t need to feel guilty or ashamed.’ The 40 some other students rush up to the demonstration table, and giggle away with condoms and eggplants (remind, these are 25-30 year old med students. See here for more on this topic).

Sex workers are ubiquitous in China. Most are migrant workers who show up in a city and rapidly discover they aren’t able to earn very much money, which is an issue if there are parental dependencies (medical debts, I am told, are a common reason). Others just want to earn more. Again, I’ve heard varying figures – anywhere from Rmb2,000 to Rmb30,000 per month – with a significant skew towards the lower end of the distribution.

The schizophrenia referred to earlier: near total omission of the topic within public discourse, combined with a tacit acceptance that, for the most part, patronizing FSWs is entirely defensible, a normal recreation activity. Again, I realize this double standard occurs everywhere, but the extent of it is astounding, and it even seems to rub off on expats living here as it’s not uncommon to hear gringos in similar positions to mine relate tales of late-nights spent with a pretty KTV小姐. My sense is that these same individuals would never think of entertaining similar engagements in their home environments, and that local norms are used to justify to oneself otherwise aberrant behavior. Whether this is some form of groupthink, or merely a convenient excuse for previously taboo desires remains unclear. There’s probably some cognitive bait-and-switch that allows internal absolution because it’s accepted (or in some cases, expected) behavior.

The omnipresence of the underlying attitudes necessitate the entire SW complex (with all of its less slightly-less visible support functions as well: neighborhood abortion clinics for avoidable pregnancies; or the downright disgusting ancillary activities: numerous advertisements for hymen replacement surgery so that SWs can charge more). All of this has led to a growing HIV problem among China’s migrants, one of the populations most vulnerable to medical problems given a fractured health insurance system. Even here there are calls to normalize / legalize the trade in order to better monitor these risks, and stop the most egregious violations of human decency.

I’m less convinced now (after having interacted with a Women’s Rights Workshop in Wuhan) that legalization is a general panacea for rights issues that result from prostitution, though it might help mitigate the negative aspects of certain types of coercion. The most extreme stories involve rural mafiasos kidnapping women and raping them, then using that as blackmail to force them into sex work, and legalization might serve as a deterrent if some of these criminals are then able to be prosecuted. As it stands most FSWs are unwilling to come forward, given that they may very well be arrested themselves. Legalization doesn’t seem to do much in the way of mitigating monetary coercion, however, and serves potentially serve to institutionalize the double standards that make the whole enterprise possible?

Regardless, China at present has the worst of both worlds: a staunchly illegal official stance combined with near-total tacit acceptance, legally and socially, leading to things like egregious show-raids that are rights violations in and of themselves. The medical system is largely biased against FSWs; though to their credit numerous municipal governments do offer subsidized medical checks. NGOs like the one in Wuhan are working to help people forced into these situations.

It’s not our system to judge or change, but there is a choice of how to interact with it. Given the amount of attention received when traveling as single white male, it seems reasonable to assume that foreigners (in Shanghai anyway) account for an unrepresentative percentage of the “higher end” market, though are probably miniscule as a portion of the total amount. Relative impact in this context shouldn’t absolve responsibility, though at the margin the most foreigners living here can probably do is to refrain from using such services, helping organizations that are concerned with women’s rights in China, where possible… and ridicule the narcissistic expat parasites who do partake, couched in some sort of rationalization that complex cultural norms legitimize flexible morality.