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©New Straits Times (Used by permission)
by Azmi Anshar

DEWAN RAKYAT Nov 26, 2008: INTERRED underneath Anwar Ibrahim’s latent power grab, Gobind Singh Deo’s sophomore expulsion and a mishmash of potent skirmishes in the Dewan Rakyat, this little slice of life enjoyed 20 minutes of debating notoriety yesterday before burrowing back into the vast data hoard of the Hansard – between 2003 and 2008, a grand total of 6,357 foreign and 1,004 local prostitutes were detained during 8,893 anti-vice operations known collectively as Ops Noda. The outlier piece of information was that 442 of these prostitutes were minors while a handsome portion made up of transvestites.

Assuming that these figures are of separate individuals and not of repeat offenders, that’s a lot of prostitutes, presumably all women and all male in drag. Actual male prostitutes servicing women (or men) in Malaysia seemed to be a negligible blip in the radar of national consciousness if one were to make an intelligent conjecture on the statistics disclosed to the House.

Bored nonchalance is the attitude ascribed to people if they were told that prostitution in Malaysia is 100 per cent illegal, from the socio-cultural and religious standings, and yet, like all illicit pursuits, it thrives underground in the red light alleys of Kuala Lumpur, across the Thai border into its seedy towns famed for commoditising the female flesh under budget constraints and in the black market of high end call girls sporting Prada handbags and Gucci shoes at pricey high-rise apartments. There’s a girl for every fetish, it can be said.

This is unlike the United States where male (and female) clients can be charged for soliciting. You should have viewed enough American cop movies/TV series (Miami Vice is the preferred example) to understand how female police detectives go undercover in hideously tight-fitting outfits and made up in even more hideous over-the-top cosmetics while hilariously advancing slutty passes to entrap men searching for the convenient quickie.

The oldest profession in the world has had a quirky narrative over the ages. In the Middle Ages from the 5th century onwards to the time Alfonso Albuquerque launched his invasion of Malacca in 1511, prostitution was tolerated because the authorities’ sentiment towards such courtesans was pragmatic, only on the assumption that it shielded chaste female citizens from rape and sexual abuse. But the working girl was subjected to strict taboos: they cannot marry and can only court single men. Jewish men were barred from hiring them but if history and Freudian examination of the male psyche is any indication, married men might have engaged the working girls, taboo or no taboo.

Still, prostitution didn’t get the respect it didn’t really want, only because if it was respectable, then there would be no thrill in the chase. The hookers were simply on their own for no law could defend or protect them. It’s still the same story today as the law clamps down on the flesh trade while the seekers, as long as their needs are indefatigable, will still clamour for it.

In some countries, the uptight masses entrenched laws and rules to keep the prostitutes outside city walls, literally forcing them to the ply their metier on the streets and in the alleys, hence the nickname streetwalkers. But the more enlightened, or should we say, permissive of Governments, decided in the modern day that keeping prostitution legal was far more effective in putting the lid on sexual transmitted diseases – first syphilis, and then gonorrhoea and now, AIDS. You can find these ho haven in, among others, the American city of Reno, Nevada, and all over Amsterdam.

Being legal meant that the prostitutes, oh, sorry, the “sex workers” are defined and catagorised like the average working stiff – they are unionised, they have access to a social security system and they have to pay income taxes. In the months of the looming global recession, watch out for prostitution as the most inventive of lucrative extra income, especially from female students needing to pay their college fees, desperate housewives trying to feed put food on the table and babes needing to feed their insatiable desire for luxury accessories.

The quest for the flesh is not limited to working class heroes. The seemingly inscrutable are also susceptible – witness how Eliot Spitzer, former crime buster turned New York Governor, was caught partaking with high-priced escort girls and forever being the butt of slimy jokes by late night show host Jay Leno.

So, what do these revealing statistics that Chor divulged say about the robust sexual appetite of Malaysians and the male foreign tourists (presumably also all men) for the illicit and the kinky? An intriguing aspect of the local flesh trade is that the law does not require male clients to be indicted. Deputy Home Minister Datuk Chor Chee Heung said so.

"As Malaysia is a country favoured by tourists all around the world, foreign and local women take the opportunity to make money from prostitution," he mused in a response to the backbenchers’ and Opposition’s spirited inquiries. Rather then the ignominy of being charged for soliciting, the Malaysia male clients would instead be ordered to act as a hostile witness against the prostitutes in court.

That’s right. The female prostitute risks jail, limb, health and life for what is the price of good hardback per client, deducting of course the pimp’s cut, but the men who traverse the sleazy inner workings of the working girl’s domain are beyond reproach and seemingly above the law. It seems unfair but that’s the way it has always been. Joan Rivers, she of the wickedly comedic wit, surmised it best: “A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes, she's a tramp…”

Chor acknowledged the inanity of the law that protectively cocoons prostitute-seeking men, suggesting that the most effective way to eradicate prostitution was not only to charge the hookers but also the male clients under existing laws, the Penal Code in particular, where new provisions could be enacted.

As for the idea of rehabilitating the local sex worker, which includes the transvestite, the Government has conceived programmes with NGOs to help these people from the fringes and integrate them back into society by making them learn a trade like sewing, making handicrafts and cosmetics make-up to allow them a leeway from their sub-culture lifestyle.

"Although the numbers are small, there are cases of transvestites who were successfully rehabilitated," Deputy Women, Family and Community Development Minister Noriah Kasnon stated but she postulated that many transvestites revert to old habits after rehabilitation because of low self-esteem.

But no such low esteem can be attributed to Sufiah Yusof, the lass with the Malaysian mother who graduated from a 13-year old Oxford math prodigy to a ravishing 23-year-old "Asian escort", the term she favours, as she charges £130 an hour for her beguiling tricks in the outskirts of Manchester. She adamantly insisted that prostitution was merely the way out of her humdrum life stifled by an allegedly abusive father. Besides, she claimed the sex was good and no amount of persuasion by the political meddlers in Malaysia who tried to round up a posse to “save” her may change that.

Back to the foreign and Malaysian Sufiahs: Chor also acknowledged that police and the respective State Islamic Religious Department have tried various means to eradicate prostitution. That may be so but if the high numbers of these trollops caught in Ops Noda are of any indication, the seductive lure of the flesh that our men and foreign male tourists single-mindedly pursue is a whole lot more stirring and excitingly exertive than the regular romp with the spouse, pretensions of celibacy or the most deceptive excuse of them all, feigning abstention.

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