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| Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ryan Bishop, Lillian S. Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $43.95
Buy New: $2.75
You Save: $41.20 (94%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (11 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1027888
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0415914299
Dewey Decimal Number: 380.1453067409593
EAN: 9780415914291
ASIN: 0415914299
Publication Date: November 6, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In Thailand, a $4 billion per year tourist industry is the linchpin of the modernization process called the "Thai Economic Miracle". And what is Thailand's main attraction? Sex for hire. Year after year young women are lured to Bangkok to staff the teeming brothels, massage parlors, and sex bars that cater to male tourists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, the Gulf States, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Developed from Lillian S. Robinson's article in The Nation, Night Market traces the historical, cultural, material, and textual traditions that have combined in unique ways to establish sex tourism as an integral part of the developing Thai economy. It explores international sex tourism from the perspectives of economic-development planning, forced labor market choices, international sexual alienation, and textual traditions that have constructed sexual "Other" cultures in Western imagination.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Five Things I Learned from Reading This Book December 9, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
1.Travel is by nature exploitative of the environments and indigenous cultures of the places visited. Best just to stay home.
2.It's irresponsibly hedonistic to desire a good meal, a glass of fine wine or a swim on a tropical beach. Again, it's best to stay home. And at home you should stick to steamed vegetables from your garden, filtered tap water and cold showers.
3.It's possible to write and publish a book that is ostensibly about the anthropology and political economy of Thailand when you are unfamiliar with either discipline (both authors have doctorates in literature) and know little about the country or its language. All you need is a pile of travel guides, vacation brochures and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. If you can spout meaningless pap like "the bar-girl subjectivity" to uncomprehending interview subjects, so much the better. (A better title for this book would have been: "Sexy Thailand: The View from an MLA Convention." In fact how this book ever got published in the first place is beyond me; I guess someone at Routledge thought sex would sell, but that's a matter between the Routledge editors and their own personal deities.)
4.Both that the personal is political and the political is personal. (See work cited by authors: "Riflessioni liguistiche sul personale e sul politico," which, by the way, is one of several works in European languages listed in a bibliography that does not mention even one article in Thai or any other Asian language.)
5.Although western culture has irredeemably objectified, exoticized and fetishized Asian women, it's o.k. for a White American Male (WAM) to marry a "LBFM," but only if she's from a "good" (i.e., wealthy) family, as co-author Bishop says in the book that he has done. Bishop makes his reason for writing the book explicit on page 1, where he says that when he traveled around Thailand with his Thai wife everyone assumed she was a prostitute. At restaurants, Thai men at neighboring tables would make disparaging remarks, and "not even my rebukes in Thai could silence their tongues." He might have tried being diplomatic or even improving his Thai, which the rest of the book proves is a language that he knows barely at all. Instead he co-wrote this book, so much as to say, look, I wrote a book published by a fancy academic press that shows what idiots you all are, so shut up! (If you think this comment is too personal, see number 4, above. And also note that Bishop--who at the time the book was published was "Visiting Assistant Professor" at SMU--now works at a university in Singapore, a city whose expat residents enjoy a lifestyle that more closely approximates that of high colonialism than any other place on earth. At least we can be thankful that he's not writing articles about the "subjectivity" of his domestic help. Although "Night Market" is on his c.v., his list of current research interests does not mention anthropology, economics, sex, or even Thailand.)
 Greatly informative March 30, 2003
1 out of 10 found this review helpful
Lillian Robinson has explored the "economic miracle" of Thailand with great detail and care. That she is passionate about her subject and cares for the women and girls who are exploited in the Thai tourist sex market is at once refreshing and needed in our culture which increasingly accepts the commodification of women's bodies.
Pseudo-intellectual garbage September 2, 2002
15 out of 24 found this review helpful
A lot of hype and nonsense showing how feminists extremists view the night life scene in Bangkok. From their fanatical point of view only. And of course when one of their own disagrees with them, such as, Cleo Oldzer, rather than question themselves, they dump on her. These people remind me of the academics in the play Equus, who had no hope of enjoying life. A very boring book in which they love to babble about "tropes." Well, sweetiepies, trope THIS.
An overblown effort December 2, 1999
28 out of 35 found this review helpful
While the subject of this book is very interesting and deserves further study, the authors were very pretensious. The book did offer some new insights into Thai economics and how the tourism and prostituion industries interact, but one gets the feeling the authors wanted to rail against the "Farangs" that travel to the kingdom. Two items particularly irritated me. The first was how the authors referenced documents from a navigator on Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America to describe how foreigners feel about Thai prostitues. How a document written about a voyage before there was a Thailand (or U.S.A. for that matter) pertains to Bangkok massage parlors, I'll never know. The second "documentation" concerned a Thai Air advertisement. The ad featured a stewardess smiling at a white airline traveler. The authors try to convince the reader that this is proof that Thai industries are actively promoting the sex trade. If this is true, nearly every commercial on American television is an active promotion of prostitution in the U.S. There is a need for a serious study of the socio-economic impact of the sex trade in Thailand, but this is not it. This is nothing more than a tirade against prostitution and the foreign travelers who venture to Thailand. How prostitution destroys young Thais is truly a sad story, but the authors should devote a little more effort in researching their subject, rather than blindly grasping at obtuse concepts to prove a predjudicial viewpoint.
At least one 5-star review is an author March 5, 1999
19 out of 24 found this review helpful
The turgid, confused prose is a dead give away. So is the overblown praise for this poorly written book. The 5 star review from "the United States of America" has to be one of the authors. If so, then the call for "objective" reviews from a postmodernist is ironic, as well as amusing. Also ironic is the book's theme of exploitation---by relying on a dated, superficial review of scholarly research, as well as sleazy pop culture, the book itself appears to be a work of Western exploitation. Except this time, it's the arrogant academics exploiting prostitutes, rather than their male customers. This harsh, intensely narcisistic diatribe may be good vita fodder, but it is not worthwhile reading.
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