Most of us have encountered them. Beauty salons that are somehow still open past midnight. Late night phone calls when you’re staying at a hotel in a strange city. Massage parlors where the massages are not the most exciting thing on the menu. Women who show up at karaoke sessions to drink with men they don’t know, and girls who come home with you, only later revealing their price – a couple hundred RMB, or maybe, if the arrangement is less official, a new phone or, if things get serious, an apartment. Of course I’m talking about prostitutes, and most of us who have lived in China for more than say, a week, have probably had a run-in of some kind with the sex industry, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

Photo: MajoraCarterGroup

Prostitution is officially illegal in China, and has been since the founding of the Republic. It is considered one of those old feudal evils, something that keeps women down and degrades society in general. And yet, despite its illegality, and the public stance against prostitution, it persists here, if not to a greater degree, than certain to a more public degree than it does in countries like America, where underlying conservative values keep prostitution underground. In China, however, the general tolerance levels for the sex trade seem, at least on the surface, to be higher. I, a woman with no need or desire to ever visit a prostitute, nonetheless know where I could likely find one should the need arise. In America I don’t think I ever met a real life sex worker, but here in China, male roommates have unknowingly brought home prostitutes on several occasions, and I have been the recipient of those late night phone calls propositioning me – or the presumed male occupant of the room.

Foreigners in China are often targeted by prostitutes, and it is a sad fact that there are many foreign expats here who are no more than sex tourists. Many men find, when arriving in China, that sex comes cheap. These women are generally beautiful, and eager to bed a foreigner, who is considered a possible ticket to a better life. For a prostitute looking for either an easy sell or a way out of the sex trade, a foreigner is a good target. One only has to look as far as Thailand to see copious examples of bar girls who have made a habit of dating, and in some cases marrying, foreigners. While China’s sex trade is not nearly as huge as that of Thailand, and the number of true sex tourists here are definitely much fewer, the same principles do, at times, apply. The girls are pretty and charming; many have sad – and true – stories of families back home, of poverty-filled childhoods, of genuine need. It is easy to fall for such a girl, even if she is up front about her line of work. That said, many a foreign guy has been surprised to learn that the girl he’s brought home from the disco is actually a sex worker, and many more remain perhaps deliberately in the dark about what it means to be a woman and work in certain professions in China.

For, unlike perhaps other countries, where the line between prostitutes and non-prostitutes is clearly defined, in China there is a large grey area between being an actual working girl, and a girl who, well, sometimes does some work on the side. A girl working at a karaoke club, for instance, is not technically a prostitute. Her job is not to have sex with her clients, but to entertain them, to entice them to order another round, to make them into satisfied customers who will come back again at another time. The catch is that sometimes sex is what it takes to satisfy these drunken men who are used to being able to use money to get what they want. While the girls are technically not obligated to have sex with these men, if they do they may find themselves the recipients of extra favors, gifts, tips, and will most certainly earn the favor of their boss, who, after all, is concerned only with making sure these drunken men are repeat customers. So while a girl might say she works in a KTV, make no bones about it, if she is a successful KTV worker, there’s strong reason to believe she does more than just sing songs and carry fruit platters.

Then there are the girls who will come home with a man they’ve picked up in a club and later demand money from him. My ex-roommates, a trio of Italians, once brought home several ladies from a club with a certain reputation for being rowdy and raunchy. These girls had apparently agreed to an orgy with my roommates, which they (rather stupidly) assumed was something these girls would do out of the goodness of their hearts. I was awoken rather crudely at about 4am to yelling and screaming when the girls demanded 5000RMB from my roommates, and got rather belligerent when they wouldn’t cough up the cash. A huge scene ensued, with the prostitutes being kicked out of the house into the night, the racket of which surely didn’t curry any favor with the neighbors. Another time one of the same Italian roommates blundered with a girl he had just finished having sex with by offering her cab fare. She mistook his gesture as an attempt to “pay” for her services and threw a fit, saying she was no whore, and how dare he! It seems like, if my ex-roommates are any indication, sometimes foreign men in China are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. How is one supposed to know who is a prostitute and who isn’t? And to what end?

The vast majority of foreign men in China, in my experience, are not sex tourists. They’re neither interested in paying for casual sex, nor are they interested in a long term sugar-daddy type relationship. Most guys are looking for girls who they can have a good time with, and, if they meet the right girl, they’d date her seriously, if not marry her. Many men are not opposed to casual sex, but they certainly don’t want to pay for it. The problem is that casual sex in China is, unlike in the West, not usually something that “nice girls” have. The chances of a random sexual encounter in China leading to a nice steady relationship are fairly slim. While a girl who will go home from a bar with a foreigner she’s just met might not be an outright prostitute, chances are she’s also not a nice traditional Chinese girl either. She might be on the prowl specifically for a foreign boyfriend, or she might simply be the kind of girl who gives favors in order to get them. Chinese men understand that these kinds of girls are not the girls you’d bring home to your mother. You might see them regularly, you might even make one of them your mistress, buying her new clothes, cars, or even a house for her troubles, but you don’t marry her. Bar girls make poor wives. But foreigners, perhaps used to a culture where casual sex does not always come with fees attached, don’t always abide by these unwritten societal rules which decide who is a “bad girl,” and if not an outright prostitute then dangerously close, and who is a “good girl,” the kind of girl you meet in university or who grandma introduces you to.

And that’s not always a bad thing. Some “bad girls” are certainly not all that bad. However, it is important for anyone, and men in particular, who enter the dating scene in China to be aware of certain social norms, and to understand that bringing home a bar girl is probably not a no strings attached proposition. In a country where, despite the best efforts of the government to change things, a woman’s place is still precarious, many Chinese women still depend heavily on men for their day to day survival, whether they are housewives, receptionists, actresses, or prostitutes. Both women and men must decide for themselves their own role in certain relationships between sex and power, and be careful about wielding either in an unfamiliar environment.
 

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