Working at the Bar: Sex Work and Health Communication in Thailand (Civic Discourse for the Third Millennium) ebook

by Thomas M. Steinfatt

Thomas M. Steinfatt Social Sciences English

This book provides a comprehensive study on bar work and bar workers and helps to demystify misleading assumptions on sex work and sex workers in Thailand. I just finished reading Steinfatt's Working at the Bar. An impressive book.

This book provides a comprehensive study on bar work and bar workers and helps to demystify misleading assumptions on sex work and sex workers in Thailand. Readers can hope that other works in the series are as revealing as this on. -Journal of Third World Studies. I've spent considerable time in Thailand and what he says rings true. What's impressive is both the breadth and depth of coverage.

Working at the Bar is the first-ever, long-term, longitudinal, in-depth study of a large sex work industry-and Thailand, the . THOMAS M. STEINFATT is Professor of Communications at the University of Miami, where he served as Director of Communication Studies for twelve years.

While previous works have provided brief glimpses of one group of workers studied from a particular point of view, author Thomas Steinfatt examines considerations of health, behavior, economics, morality, religion, and worker safety.

Working at the Bar is the first-ever, long-term, longitudinal, in-depth study of a large sex work industry-and . In 1988, I began a long-term study of bars oriented toward Western foreigners in Thailand and their female sex workers.

Civic Discourse for the Third Millennium.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. Qty: Get In-Stock Alert. Provides a detailed empirical study of sex work in Thailand, and considers its effect on sex workers, the economy, and Thai society. Civic Discourse for the Third Millennium.

Working at the Bar book. Commercial sex is the occupation of a significant portion of the women.

Working at the Bar book. Working at the Bar: Sex Work and Health Communication in Thailand. by. Steinfatt. Commercial sex is the occupation of a significant portion of the women of the world, providing economic support for millions of people and their families. Abstract: Commercial sex-prostitution-is the occupation of a significant portion of the women of the world, providing economic support for millions of people and their families. The result of data gathered from thousands of workers and customers in Thailand over a period of twelve years, Working at the Bar covers all aspects of an industry that, although it does not conform to various Western ideals, is nevertheless enormously significant. Subject Term: Sex-oriented businesses - Thailand. Communication in medicine - Thailand.

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Commercial sex is the occupation of a significant portion of the women of the world, providing economic support for millions of people and their families. Working at the Bar is the first-ever, long-term, longitudinal, in-depth study of a large sex work industry―and Thailand, the most prominent nation in the rapidly growing sex tourism industry, makes for an excellent case study. While previous works have provided brief glimpses of one group of workers studied from a particular point of view, author Thomas Steinfatt examines considerations of health, behavior, economics, morality, religion, and worker safety. The result of data gathered from thousands of workers and customers in Thailand over a period of twelve years, Working at the Bar covers all aspects of an industry that, although it does not conform to various Western ideals, is nevertheless enormously significant.

Among the most provocative of Steinfatt's arguments is that sex work is not itself immoral, and that far from being the exploitation industry we might imagine, sex work in Thailand is beneficial to everyone involved―especially given that education in this nation has proven not to be a viable alternative. Providing an opportunity for economic progress unavailable through other means, and providing working conditions far safer than those of the average Thai factory, sex work is ripe for a study that explores all aspects and perceptions associated with it. Working at the Bar is that long overdue study.

Garr

If you want counterpoint to a lot of deliberate misinformation this is a great book.

This issue of trafficking and prostitution is split down the middle between extreme ideological posturing and quality academic understanding of an emotional issue. Unfortunately there is a lot more of the first than the second. If you are a reasonably neutral person this is one of the books that is a must read to get a full picture of this issue. Dr. Steinfatt's book is about his 8 years of research in the 90s. He makes almost no mention of violence, for example, because there is almost none. Violence was a non-issue until George W Bush declared war on trafficking, which is really a war on all prostitution even when it is legal. People took license from that to say crazy things possibly following the example of the stories about abuse of women to justify the war in Afghanistan. Now there is crazy exaggeration about children (every prostitute is child or so it seems), violence (it's a huge problem, except it isn't) and slavery (going into debt and working it off after being smuggled to a place where a sex worker can make more money is sometimes the only way poor people can get anything including farmers to finance their crops. It ain't slavery but you are supposed to take an emotional reaction to those claims of slavery.) So much baloney, so little truth! This is a must buy.

Felolv

If some one need to be introduced to human traffic in Thailand, that is the book to buy. Concise and straight to the point. The book is comprehensive and interesting to read.

Joni_Dep

Professor Steinfatt was my freshman Speech teacher at Cleveland State University in 1969. Wonderful professor, I there learned something which helped me in debate and in my career as a lawyer.....every person in an audience "hears" the spoken word differently, because he filters it though his own experience and viewpoints. That is pretty basic, but i had never been taught that before. That concept was taken even further by my next Speech professor, Jess Yoder, who---may God bless him !---required us to read Aristotle's Rhetoric----in which the Greek genius explained how to best direct a speech to every age group and type of person, based upon that group's and type's psychology. Thanks, Professor Steinfatt---he also penned a piece some years back on how college Debate has declined in recent decades...very true.

Phain

Steinfatt's book is one of several recent volumes on sex work in Thailand. The base for the book was a two-wave cross-sectional questionnaire study he did with sex workers in venues where the customers were foreigners (i.e., non-Thai). The findings are woven through topical chapters, rather than being presented in summary form. As a result, it's difficult to find "take home messages" here. Using this format, Steinfatt attempts to place sex work in Thailand into a broader cultural context. While he has done more homework than others on this topic, much of what he says comes up short. He confuses the lack of obvious sanctions for entering the sex trade with "acceptance". He ignores the fact that one can go a short distance from the villages that regularly send their daughters into the sex trade and find other villages where this practice rarely or never occurs (this phenomenon was the basis for work by the Thai Red Cross & the Population and Development Association). His understanding of Buddhism is similarly flawed and he fails to see how "merit making" has been perverted by local elites to foster sex work. Steinfatt begnis by clearly distinguishing his population from the much larger world of Thai sex workers whose clientele is Thai, however, this distinction blurs as the book proceeds. Unfortunately, the distinction is important because of the differences in how women enter sex work, their financial prospects, etc. Steinfatt also goes into a lengthy and not very useful aside regarding estimates of the sex work sector in Thailand---rehashing outdated data which have limited relevance to his population of interest. The book also relies too much on dated references and provides little consideration of how the HIV epidemic and Thailand's 100% condom campaign have effected sex work in the country. The effort to view sex work in Thailand as less "black & white" than in other countries misses the obvious presence of grey areas of sex work elsewhere (e.g., the phenomenon of "survival sex" among low income women in the US) and the tendency of sex workers in many cultures to decommercialize the description of clients to whom they are more affectively bonded. Erik Cohen's famous statements about open-ended prostitution are mentioned, but not Cohen's observation that this was becoming less common as long ago as the late 80s. There are more similarities with other countries than Steinfatt acknowledges, and the differences are more nuanced and require more depth in the culture.
This book shows more scholarly activity than the many slapdash efforts on Thai sexwork that have been published in recent years. Still, it's clear that Steinfatt's actual understanding is rather superficial. The book also would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand, wherein more effort was taken to integrate findings and other text.

Budar

I just finished reading Steinfatt's Working at the Bar. An impressive book. I've spent considerable time in Thailand and what he says rings true. What's impressive is both the breadth and depth of coverage. There are whole chapters on why men do, and do not, go to sex workers, and how pimps and management of these places function, how AIDS does and does not relate to sex work, and sections on why women get into the game, or choose not to, and how they talk to and size up customers. Even the error rates for HIV tests are covered, and I have never seen that in print anywhere. This book is not based on opinion. Several thousand interviews were conducted with prostitutes, pimps, customers of prostitutes, and the great landowners of the prostitution areas. The morality of sex work is covered from both Christian and Buddhist perspectives. The author is quite correct about the way Buddhism functions in sex work. Anyone who understands Buddhism knows that the precept against "sexual immorality" historically meant sex outside of marriage by a woman. This is an excellent book, but do not plan on reading it all at once. There is just too much there. If you want to really understand this topic (and not just read someone's opinions who has only read about Thailand but never been there, or someone's opinions who dumps on other people's books but has not studied enough to write about it on his own) this is the book. Steinfatt has obviously been there and done an amazing amount of scholarly work on the topic. The best I have ever seen on prostitution in Southeast Asia.