2 Sep 2003

The sprawling sex trade shelters under a simple and creative hypocrisy. Peddling prostitution is technically illegal, but everyone knows that the big glitzy buildings alongside the office towers, hospitals, and government agencies are selling the world’s oldest product.

The law makes this possible. Prostitution can be charged only if the guilty are caught in the act. Police would have to burst through the door of the massage parlour and find the client busily engaged while simultaneously handing payment to the parlour owner with a spare hand. Surveys have shown that the police consider prostitution an unimportant matter and make no effort to enforce the laws. To salvage some semblance of moral authority, they claim to crackdown on the nastier margins of the sex trade – under-age girls, use of force to coerce girls against their will, and the horrified discovery that girls undergoing the blessing of education are tempted to earn money this way.

For some time, this seemed to be a stable situation. Mum and dad drove the kids past all these huge, strangely blind buildings to school where they were taught in social ethics class that the family is the sacrosanct core of Thai society. Authorities, without irony, cracked down on bare nipples, spaghetti straps, and songs about flabby buttocks on grounds such things are too sexy for “social order” and “Thai culture”. The minister enforcing “social order” confessed he used to visit massage parlours, but gave it up before taking up his new job. The blank walls of the massage parlours were enough to divide reality from imagination.

Chuwit Kamolvisit is a sex bomb that has blown up this stable state. He began doing so long before his current reincarnation as a political satirist and public clown. He went to business school and then applied the principles of integration, scale, advertising and promotion. The pimp’s role in the sex trade is simply to bring the demand to meet the supply. But what differentiates suppliers is the packaging of the foreplay. Three varieties were popular: dalliance in a cocktail lounge, crooning karaoke, or a soapy pummeling in a bathtub. Following the principles of modern mega-retail, Chuwit integrated these three in a single outlet with sufficient scale to cater for a range of consumer tastes. He replaced the somewhat subdued promotional strategies of older outlets (flashing lights, slightly risqu้ names) with giant blow-ups of gorgeous, realistic, and enticing girls. The parlour walls were no longer much of a barrier, because Chuwit invited the passer-by to imagine the inside.

From that point, his rise to notoriety was only a matter of time. But taking the walls off the massage parlours is revealing a lot more than bath tubs.

First, Chuwit is using the television channels, owned by this government committed to social order and Thai culture, to offer public education on the economics of sex commerce. In a TV interview, he described how he single-mindedly wasted his time in educational institutions, and then made a million baht a day once he entered the sex business. Ambitious students were presumably taking detailed notes. He has encouraged his workers to tells us they retain 1200 baht a session, and might manage three to five sessions a day. Any village girl with elementary school maths can work out that in a few months she can make her parents’ lifetime earnings from hardscrabble paddy farming. That should boost the supply of workers.

The press has done its bit for demand. One weekly news magazine launched a series of personal memoirs of the parlour, written as over-the-top war stories. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, they claim the parlours have become a necessary balm for the stress of living in Bangkok. Chuwit is already claiming he is a “social welfarist” for providing employment to destitute girls. These articles make him a “social therapist” for providing recuperative services to devastated men. This should boost the customer demand.

Second, the ambiguous position of the sex trade as illegal-but-allowed, allows the police to levy huge amounts of informal tax. A parlour pays an initial fee for its “licence” to do business, and then monthly taxes roughly computed on turnover. Payments are both in cash and kind. There are extra fees for security services. What happened in the destruction of the Sukumwit Soi 10 is no longer in dispute. The bars were smashed. Various uniformed groups were involved. According to one version, Chuwit ordered the services and paid for them. According to the other version, the groups carried out the operation in the spirit of private enterprise and then blackmailed Chuwit to pay for it. The difference between the two versions is only a little detail over the invoicing.

Third, how come this Chuwit show is playing on our TV screens and newspaper pages for week after week? Credit is due to Chuwit for the continuous creativity he has brought to the performance. But it seems likely that a show of this kind needs a special licence to continue so long. Speculation has been rife. Many are convinced that Chuwit is godfathered from high up. The prime minister may get the chance to replace a police chief he has never seemed happy with. He may put his police classmates and friends in positions vacated after Chuwit’s revelations. He may be happy for us to be distracted by the Chuwit show, rather than worrying about the terrorism decree, or the stock market being entrusted to someone deeply entwined in Thailand’s worst-ever bank crash, or the crumbling of the public health system, or whatever.

Bangkok mums and dads can still drive the kids to school past those funny buildings. But now they have to squeeze their eyes tighter shut to avoid seeing the pimp entrepreneurs, crooked cops, mafia enforcers, and opportunistic politicians behind their walls.