An Old Profession Meets Modern China

For all the Western men who are looking to Asia for a woman, check out this feature article from the Los Angeles Times on prostitution in China. Looks like the women in China are catching up to Western women. Megan K. Stack reports on college girls who are essentially call girls.

The girls from the drama academy cost the most. Actresses are pretty, after all, and pretty is the point. Steady access to their sexual favors could cost a man more than $25,000 a year, not to mention the perks and gifts they would expect.

This is a good deal for a man who is just looking for sex, in comparison to marriage. At least, it is if he is earning, say, $60,000 a year or more. Because as the sole income earner, in many places in America, a man would be paying a wife $30,000 a year if he was earning $60,000. At least, by law. Practically, wives make most of the spending decisions.

The gentleman on a budget had better browse through students at the tourism institute, or perhaps the business school. Women there can be had for as low as $5,000 a year.

I wonder if Leykis 101-style game works in places like China? Because here, a man can spend very little by following certain rules. Getting a new woman to have sex with should cost no more than $120 (3 dates x $40 limit), and then not long after that she should be fine with him coming over to her place with a cheap bottle of wine, if that. (This is not all women, just the kind of women 101 students go after.)

The article cites a pimp:

He is nonchalant about the work, even vaguely proud. He insists that he is doing a service to the men who don't want to hire streetwalkers, and to his middle-class, ambitious and frostily pragmatic college friends.

"Most of the girls are financially comfortable, but they see their classmates carrying Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags, and they're jealous," he said on the phone from Shanghai. "These girls want to have better lives."

Ah, materialism and envy.

Just a few decades back, premarital sex was looked down upon by respectable families. Now, some members of those families are not just having premarital sex; they're selling it.

That's "progress" for you.

But even if that's true, few women want to admit it. And, perhaps, sex and love aren't quite so simply parsed.

Yup.

She can't imagine getting married anymore, because she has lost faith in male monogamy and hates the idea of playing the role of the wife, sitting at home while her husband steps out with a young woman like her.

Isn't this typical of prostitutes and mistresses? Human nature is human nature, regardless of nationality.

In the past, some presumed prostitution existed because most women were more reluctant to have sex without a wedding ring on their finger. In a time and place (anywhere, not just China) where casual sex is plentiful, prostitution survives for four main reasons:

1. The rich, powerful, and famous can easily get sex, but some don't want hangers-on; so they're not really paying prostitutes for the sex - they are paying them to leave.

2. Some people have a fetish and have trouble finding a partner who will satisfy it (although the Internet has made this a lot easier).

3. Some men either don't know how to approach women, or haven't been finding the right women to approach and simply want a woman who will listen to them and at least pretend to admire and enjoy them – and sometimes no sex is involved.

And I suspect the biggest reason...

4. Men as a group want sex more than women as a group. This is why the vast majority of prostitution customers are male, whether gay ot straight. Supply and demand. This can include a married man whose wife is either a complete refuser or refuses to do certain things that the husband enjoys. In China, the supply and demand thing is becoming a bigger factor because of the "one child" policy and parents preferring boys, thus having their daughters slaughtered before or as they're born.