You have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don’t find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people, who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left except to sell their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand. It is an ideal trading opportunity.

-- Michel Houellebecq in Platform


I had not heard about this film before. I saw its trailer while waiting for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (1993) to start screening. The trailer announced that it was a Spanish film with English subtitles. The film, part fiction, part documentary, was on the lives of prostitutes and was appropriately called Whore (Yo Puta in Spanish). Yo Puta should have correctly translated into I, Whore. It is based on Isabel Pisano’s eponymous book.

I could especially connect with the film as the media was full of news about the sex trade and prostitutes at that point in time: Singapore police arresting illegal sex workers, mostly young Chinese girls, in many parts of the city; the Indian media screaming murder about the call girl racket in Delhi; the release of Deepak Shivdasani’s Julie, a film on the life of a prostitute and the subsequent debate it aroused about skin films taking over Bollywood; and the Madhur Bhandarkar case that once again brought the existence of the infamous casting couch to the notice of a sensation hungry media.

Whore promised to answer to many questions. Why do people enter the world of flesh trade? What motives and circumstances lead thousands of women and men to exchange sexual favours for money? Who are the drivers of this business? Basically, it looked like ‘Everything You Wanted to Know about Prostitution But Were Afraid To Ask!’ Above all, I was interested in the moral argument of the film.

Watching the trailer, which was rather tastefully done to whet the prospective viewer’s appetite, I made up my mind to see this quasi-documentary film. I was not attracted by the theme of the film alone. The film boasted of a tantalizingly germane start cast too: Daryl Hannah and Denise Richards. I wondered what actors like Daryl and Denise were doing in a Spanish soft porn documentary.

When I actually saw the film, I came out of the theatre squirming with the uncomfortable point the film was trying to make. However, I cannot discuss this unless I have given you a brief idea about the story first.

The film starts with Rebecca (Denise Richards), an anthropology student, who is researching on the lives of prostitutes for her doctoral programme. She lives all alone in an apartment, most of the time bored and waiting for sex workers to answer her interview ads. Her neighbour, Adriana (Daryl Hannah) is a struggling actress and lives by prostituting herself. In fact, in one of her scenes with Rebecca, she justifies her situation quoting Marilyn Munroe: “From now on, I won’t have to suck a cock that I don’t want to.” Apparently, Munroe had said this when she got her first acting deal. One day, a broke Rebecca (she has exhausted her research grant and her parents too have refused to help her financially) seeks Adraiana’s help. Adriana takes her to a place where she can earn money for sex. Initially, she develops cold feet and runs away from the hotel room where a young Arab tries to have sex with her. However, finally she gives in to the oldest profession of the world. All this drama happens in between Rebecca’s research work where she interviews a bunch of whores. The film is directed by Spanish actress-turned-director Maria Lidon, also known as Luna.

After watching the film, I was wondering what point it was trying to make? As a piece of fiction, it was easy to understand the plight of Rebecca. She became a part of the system that she despised. Yet, by the end of the film, Rebecca’s moral compromise seemed to be condoned and celebrated. That’s where I found this film problematic. It did not have a moral kernel. Or if it did have one, it was destroyed brazenly.

I had many reasons.

The film barely touched the dark side of the trade. It showed the interview of one Romanian girl who had been pushed into this trade with the false promise of a proper job. She was actually kept under house arrest, beaten up, and raped, over and over again, till she gave in. She also said in her interview that thousands were suffering a similar fate in the hands of human traffickers. In a related interview, a young Slavic human trafficker talked about his business with surprising élan. Also, there was the interview of a plump middle-aged hooker who broke down talking about her little daughter. She thought of giving up her business. She wanted to settle down to a normal life with a loving husband. Most other interviewees, about a dozen of them including real gigolos and Sado-Masochists, expressed happiness about their work. They rather seemed to be proud of what they were doing. Prominent among them was a black prostitute who desired to retire as the madam of a brothel. There was this petite Chinese prostitute who kept giggling all the time. She said she would keep making her clients happy and satisfied. And there was this stunning French prostitute who called herself a high society girl. Only she talked about legalizing the profession (among the European countries, prostitution is legalized in Germany and Holland only).


The film also missed the Asian part of the story.

I needed to do some reality check. I was in Singapore, close to Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan—hotspots on the sex tourism trail. These countries earn billions of dollars in foreign exchange thanks to a thriving sex tourism industry. With increased demand for travel and recreation in industrialized countries, these Asian countries compete with one another to market sex and sexual services to the developed world.

The reasons are not far to seek.

Many Westerners find life cold in their countries. Prostitution is of poor quality there. They find Asian women attractive and cheap. Not only that, they find a rare warmth in them. No wonder, millions of Westerners hit the Asian holiday spots every year. And this has been going on for the past several decades.

Sex tourism in the world today is partially a legacy of war and foreign occupation. The idea of creating designated areas for sex tourism in Asia emerged in pre-Communist China. Brothel trains, euphemistically called ’comfort wagons’ were very much part of the Chinese social life. Europeans could buy erotic pleasure on some chartered trains starting out of Shanghai. However, the Japanese set up the most comprehensive network of "comfort wagons" staffed by forced prostitutes. The women drawn from the Asian countries conquered by Japan were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers. These included Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.

The Asian sex tourism industry in its new avatar began as “rest and recreation” centers for American soldiers during the Vietnam War. There were 20,000 prostitutes in Thailand in 1957; by 1964, after the United States established seven bases in the country, that number had skyrocketed to 400,000. Prostitution increased even after the wars ended.

Globalization has also played its part. Due to globalization, more and more women are displaced from traditional formal employment. Such displaced women find themselves in situations where prostitution appears to be the best economic solution. On the one hand, the female work force is unskilled and low wage paying. On the other, the sex service industry earns women a sustainable life At the same time, it enables them to send money to their poor families. For example, Thai women can earn two or three times as much in the sex service industry as she can in unskilled industrial or agricultural work. Professor Elaine Kim of the University of California calls it “part of a system of neocolonial industrialization of the Asian Third World.”

There is one more vicious angle to this scenario: Child sex tourism. According to the international campaign group, End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), one million children in Asia are involved in prostitution. These include 300,000 in India, 200,000 in Thailand, 100,000 in the Philippines and 40,000 in Vietnam. According to UNICEF, studies by Thammasat University in Bangkok claimed the sex industry in Thailand generates US$1.5 billion a year. Indonesia’s ministry of social affairs said 60 per cent of 71,281 registered prostitutes are aged 15-20.

The way things stand, commercialization of sexuality in the East has become unstoppable. The East has become a euphemism for sex tourism. All this and much more was left out of the ambit of Whore. So, what point the film was trying to make? The last scenes of the film left little room for doubt. As the credits rolled, the hookers threw beseeching glances and inviting smiles at the viewers, as if the members of the audience were supposed to get out of the multiplex and rush to the nearest available brothel as a token of empathy.