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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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