Posted by gaucho on March 30, 2001 at 06:18:12:
In Reply to: Flaca/Gordita final test #2 visual web site included.... posted by raiders on March 30, 2001 at 00:18:29:
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On March 26 the budding Yale anthropologist who is doing her Ph.D. fieldwork on Tijuana's "sex industry" put together her "last post." Before saying a few words about what this says about her toughness and naivete as a researcher, it's worth noting a few more details about TJResearcher. All of this information was posted by her. She is twenty-nine, married, often does her fieldwork with a Mexican gay male of about fifty (for protection as much as anything apparently), and that her husband lives 3,000 miles away (presumably in New Haven). Other facts include the following. She has been living with her husband for nearly fourteen years, since the age of fifteen. She's happily heterosexual and enjoys sex with her husband, though she seems to enjoy "cuddles" more. She has two cats and no children, though she wants the latter at some future date. She describes herself as happy with her body even if she does love tacos and, by her own admission, is a "gordita" (a little fat). She's an insomniac. She talks with her husband every day (either by phone or e-mail–mostly the latter, I presume). Without her husband, she goes for walks on the beach, has gay friends that she enjoys, goes to bars where she dances and has fun, and, more and more to gay bars to see what's going; she's "doing anthropology" for a paper, I guess. She never goes to gay bars with her husband. She sees herself as free and "liberated," but unfailingly loyal to her husband. The last, of course, has been of considerable interest to mongers, who are never afraid of saying they're not merely interested in "looking" when there are greater pleasures to be had by paying for it the cheapest way possible. TJResearcher has further noted that she sees herself as "honest," and on this latter score she is certainly to be believed given what she has written. Her messages have been candid (even to the point of detailing how someone grabbed her in the crotch coming out of a gay bar with her Mexican friend–which she described as "sampling") and there has not been, from my perspective, much doubt about her willingness to answer directly just about any question put forth by a monger. There are three other things she noted about her husband that must be noted. He does not, she claims, read the website monger board where she has been an active participant for the last couple of months. He had no interest whatsoever in accompanying her on her fieldwork stint when she proposed the idea to him. And while he apparently knows exactly nothing at all first hand about prostitutes and their lifestyles and their clients, he has told his wife that he sees the mongers she has been communicating with--and mongers in general--as ""perverts" and "chauvinists." She posted this information in the interest of being candid and honest. I don't know what to make of most of these personal and family facts that TJResearcher has seen fit to post in response to various monger questions. But I do know what to make–roughly but candidly speaking–of her husband's comments about "perverts" and "chauvinists," as do the mongers. This man is not only ignorant about mongers and badly in need of education by his wife, but it makes all mongers, and others, wonder if his wife, at heart, feels as he does. Most certainly, she should make another strenuous effort to get him to spend some time in Tijuana in Zona Norte. Here he'd have plenty of opportunity to get to know mongers of many stripes personally, and if he is at all open-minded he would discover that they are no different than his boss or employees and very good friends. Perhaps, with a little luck, he could be liberated from the debilitating personal and moralistic chains wrapped around his mind and his neck and... Perhaps his wife should not only insist that he come to Tijuana but that he assist with her fieldwork. It would make her feel relatively at ease sitting in places like the Adelita Bar, the Chicago Club, the Hong Kong and the Tropical to observe how mongers behave. She might also discover how he will behave, if he were as honest with her as she claims to be with him and she gave him the same freedoms she claims she has with him–genuine love between them notwithstanding. While one certainly has to admire the anthropologist's honesty with the Tijuana mongers, it is highly questionable what value could be served by candidly revealing how her husband feels about them. If he's a narrow-minded bigot, so be it. She's the one who has to live with him. But revealing what he is to mongers could only have the effect of not only portraying him as a fundamentally ignorant nitwit, but it makes mongers wonder more than they have already wondered about the anthropologist's honesty–or good sense. If she's married to a moral nematode then maybe she too, all disclaimers to the contrary, is a moralizing sort beneath the patina of seemingly well-intentioned missionizing anthropologist. This, in a word, was bad fieldwork strategy on her part; only a fool or a novice (and she must be given this much) is one-hundred percent honest in the field about what he or she is up to, unless the aim is to corrupt and make inaccessible the very information that is central to a first-rate ethnography or any good research. It all begins to sound and smell like TJResearcher was subjected to too many high-falutin classroom fairy tales about how to hug and kiss and have love-ins while also doing first-rate research in this postmodern tell-everything-world when dealing with the much maligned Other. TJResearcher in her final post got the hackles of mongers up for other reasons. She claims that her primary goal in the research is to "have a positive impact on the working conditions and health and well-being of women in the sex industry." She also wants to recommend "sound decisions to local policy makers." Now as some of the mongers are quick to note, this is pretty amazing stuff when you think about it for a long minute or so. For openers, it's clear from TJResearcher's own admissions and sign offs that her command of Spanish still leaves a lot to be desired, and how good she'll be at communicating and hearing the nuances of what she's hearing before she's through is an open question at best. But this is a minor problem alongside others. If she really wants to know how to improve the health and working conditions and well-being of Tijuana's red-light chicas, then there's a fairly easy way to begin seriously working on this task. Get a job in the Adelita Bar or the Chicago Club or one of the other clubs and go to the bedroom with mongers; at five-ten and only twenty-nine, even if a gordita, there will be plenty of takers, and plenty of opportunities to not only find out how to improve working conditions and the well-being of prostitutes vis-a-vis putaneros, but she'll also have first-hand information to report back to her husband on whether or not the men who are paying her for a good time with her clothes off are in fact perverts and chauvinists, and who knows what else. My guess is that she would quickly discover two things: the men are every bit as careful about how they have sex as they are in how they treat these women they have sex with. Many of these mongers are after what they refer to as gf or "girlfriend sex" and relationships that extend well beyond one or two thirty minute sessions at forty or fifty dollars each. Another guess is that she will find no more than the normal range of variation among men when it comes to what mongers want in bed: a sense of warmth (and cuddling), a great blowjob, good sex on top and from behind and stretched out back down watching the chica ride high and low; and for many a desire to satisfy the woman as much as is possible. After all, this is not just difficult with a woman who's taking on six or eight mongers a night and with whom you're only spending thirty minutes or maybe an hour, but it seems to be a problem for most women period. All kinds of women don't know what they want, or don't know how to ask, and guys don't know how to divine what they need. But TJResearcher–and I don't mean any criticism here–has made it clear that unlike a few other anthropologists who have gotten deeply involved in amazing ways in a culture or cultural phenomenon to find out exactly what was going on, she has no intention of being a prostitute for a year or whatever to really get inside the world not only of the women themselves but the men who go to them. TJResearcher's last post was, by all measures, respectful. She calmly thanked those who "made an effort to be constructive," those who gave her "interesting stories to tell [her] students" (anything to entertain students–after all, how else can you get their attention?), those who were suspicious of her, those who thought she was wasting her time and talent investigating the phenomenon, and even those who were "real jerks about everything and anything." But then she goes on to reveal that when her husband said he wouldn't go into the field with her, she would just be the "stubborn feminist" she is; that is, she would always and to everyone be honest and straightforward about what she was up to, not posing, for example, under a male handle as one of the boys on an all monger website. Now she thinks that maybe she made a "fatal flaw" mistake as a researcher, that more acting is required than she "ever imagined." (I don't think this is going to go over all that well with her politically and socially sensitive colleagues at the next meeting of the Association of American Anthropologists–but then who knows? I wouldn't dream of getting around these purebred theoretical high-fliers given the things I do to get information "in the field.") This said, she then returns to the mongers and her regret that they didn't provide her with more "themes" that they would have liked to see addressed. The assumption here is, I guess, that an anthropologist, unlike a mere journalist or a psychologist or a monger who had slept with upwards of fifty of the Tijuana women (probably not that uncommon), and one who's never been a hooker and only been with a single man since the age of fifteen, is going to "seriously address" what men want and why they go with so many different women and why some men like heavy and boisterous women whie others prefer small and thin women with tiny breasts who will grind a guy riding cowgirl style until he screams, Goddammit, Stop before you fucking kill me and decapitate my one -and-only very precious Mr. Johnson! (Or "wood," as unimaginative Republicans might have it.) To mongers, and anyone else who's sane, this kind of presumptuousness could only come from someone who had spent far too much time imbibing all that nonsense that largely defines the warped academy and all its pretenders. TJResearcher ends what she calls her "last post" with an invitation: "If someone wants to meet up and let me tag along on their own escapade, or participate in some other way, please feel free to contact me anytime in the future." She provides an e-mail address. I have no doubt that many mongers read this as a daring invitation, one that one and all mongers would hope would be intellectual only in the narrow sense that all good meals demand a good appetizer. Among the many things she would discover is that mongers have at least one universal thing in common: they believe that neither fantasy nor masturbation is fulfilling. The first monger to reply to TJResearcher's alleged last post goes by the name of HornyMike; he's both blunt and fairly articulate in what he has to say. He thinks that TJResearcher is wasting her talents on this kind of research, wasting tax money (hers and Mike's and everyone else's), and he can't believe that anyone would be interested in what a bunch of dedicated mongers are doing in Tijuana with gaily obliging chicas. He also doesn't much care for the idea that the anthropologist is going to dress up whatever she finds in "fancy language," all of it for the of benefit of "relevant stakeholders." HornyMike and his buddies, I dare say, were not pleased with this pretentious bit of academic nonsense called "relevant stakeholders," and HM could not resist asking: "Are those the hookers?" Implying, dammit, don't forget the mongers; we're the business and the bank and without us there aren't going to be any hookers! So HM concludes–not unfairly, I think–"See, this is why too much college can be a bad thing." Right-on, Mike, I said on reading this, particularly if you understand just how bad college can be at a place like Yale–the best university in the world TJResearcher informs. Yale, as we all know, is still very much a hot bed of befuddled deconstructionists, pin-striped postmodernists wearing bifocals, short-legged postcolonialists, and all kinds of other bow-and-arrow G-string kinsmen. HorneyMike has other words of wisdom he's freely giving to TJResearcher. One good piece of advise is that the Mexican government doesn't want to hear about what it's only tolerating (because it's good foreign debt reduction business, HM might have added), and least of all from a "gringa from Yale." HornyMike may own a demolition company in San Diego or Chula Vista for all I know, and he may not have gotten a high school diploma, but he understands perfectly well what's in store for Tijuana's chicas and all the spoiled mongers down the line. "When [the Tijuana government] gets other plans for that area of the city, they will run the hookers out quick enough." Indeed they will. There's more on the mind of HM in, I forget to mention, this e-mail he titled: "You're kinda nuts, submitted on behalf of all mongers." He notes that there are already hookers' unions in Tijuana, and they have already pleaded, and unsuccessfully, for improved working conditions. Not only are these union workers a lot more versed in the issues than a one-shot interloping anthropologist still learning Spanish, but they understand what an outsider, and an American outsider at that, doesn't: how to move or change the system. Mike the horny monger has other advice. He favors the idea of educating the girls so they'll be more adept at spotting STDs and parasites that give them infections (picked up when giving or receiving oral sex without a condom), but he rightly thinks it laughable when TJResearcher talks about providing cheaper condoms for the women. Horny Mike is, without doubt, a man of fact and logic: "But condoms too expensive?" he writes to her, in regard to one of her earth-shattering proposals for change. "That's really silly, isn't it? If she's getting paid $30 to $50 for sex, is 50 cents for a condom too much?" A little further on, Mike adds: "Do Mexican hookers need a yuppie from Yale coming out to tell them about condoms, or anything else? I think they already know these things. I think the local government will resent the apparent arrogance of someone from a foreign country trying to lecture them about things they don't want to hear about, and the girls will likely regard you as a strange but unnecessary curiosity." (But at least not competition, and that would be their real worry.) HornyMike is no mere one-sided critic; in fact, he's got some mighty good suggestions for the Yale anthropologist. He notes that Mexico City has a real problem with hookers, and their clients aren't Americans with lots of money. And there are plenty of other places in Mexico that have more severe problems–health and otherwise–with prostitutes. As HB also rightly notes, if she's into helping these women then "why not go to Guatemala and help those hookers? They might need some advice and condoms. But the TJ hooker is really the cream of the crop in MX and is the least in need of help." (These are many well-traveled mongers who will attest to the fact that HornyMike knows exactly what he's talking about.) HornyMike is one monger that TJResearcher might hope would not only be willing to meet up with her and show her around but would be willing to turn an appetizer into a full intellectual meal, perhaps at the Monte Carlo Restaurant next door to the Adelita Bar, a place where in one hour the TJResearcher will see and can overhear the conversations of a score of chicas eating dinner or getting back some much needed energy after a long-neck whiskey dick score or two. It's quite possible that TJResearcher could get more insightful information about chicas and their Mos and their needs in one hour from HM in the Monte Carlo than she could get on her own in several months. But this isn't likely, I suspect, for HM closes his pointed message by letting TJResearcher know that he sees her as a naive person with good intentions who's living off the university system. And, worse, who's patting herself on the back for how smart she is because she "cares about poor stupid ignorant Mexican hookers, who (thank God!) finally have a Yalie coming down to help." & Who knows what use the Yale anthropologist will make of what she has already learned from a valuable if biased source, this Tijuana monger website. I'd be surprised if a lot of what she reads doesn't find its way into her ethnography, and I'd also be a bit surprised if she gave the kind of credit deserved to people like HornyMike, a monger who, if nothing else, has a lot of good common sense and a pretty good idea about how a crusading outsider is just as likely to cause mischief as fix what probably doesn't need fixing.
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