Philippines History and Politics

[Soapy Smith]

Many field researchers advise doing the field observation first, and using these observations to identify "key informants" to interview, that is, individuals who seem to be most knowledgeable or most experienced in the setting under observation. But I think we might have a built in sampling bias, in that, anticipating the actual soul-baring interview situation, many of us might employ criteria other than most knowledgeable and most experienced in choosing key informants for interviewing.

[Soapy Smith]

i'll sign up to be a field investigator ;)

there are several types of field research that will be needed. one is to put in long hours in the bars counting mongers and women coming and going. this would need to be done at various days of the week, times of day, and different types of bars in order to create representative sampling. this is needed to establish a baseline of the volume of trade. the budget for the grant would need to allow for a few drinks so that you pass as a covert participant observer who, in passing up so many women, looks to others like a guy whose libido is shot.

the other major kind of field work is interviewing. one school of thought is to interview them in their natural environment; and for most of them being in the bar takes up more of their time in natural environment than does lying on their backs. the other school of thought is that peer pressure will inhibit honest answers if their girlfriends are all hanging around, and of course loud music will cause the interviewer to misunderstand a lot of what the woman says. so the second school of thought would be to get them alone into an environment that encourages them to bare their souls.

counting trade volume will probably require at least twice as many hours of field work as the interviewing, so the typical field assignment would put you in field observation for two hours for every hour spent interviewing.

[GoodEnough]

If you can believe even a small percentage of the endless stories you hear, at least some percentage of the money goes back to the family where presumably, it's spent within the local mercantile community. It can't all go for cell phones, but I digress. We need a name for the movie. I could see Al Pacino playing the world weary, cynical monger who has intermittent outbursts of kindness. Lea Salonga is too old for the female lead so we will need a fresh face or faces.

GE

[Soapy Smith]

Or maybe it just buys the girl a new cell phone LOL.

So this is either redistribution thwarted and funneled back to local well-to-do merchants and the Chinese who manufactured the phone, or it's a reinvestment in tools of the trade.

[Soapy Smith]

There are some female prostitution activists who could probably get away with this. You can find them in places like Vancouver (Canada) or around San Francisco. I'd have to do some more googling to find names, but I've heard some of them speak in snippets from court cases, etc. And they were very articulate, well educated, etc. All they would need is some funding. Maybe we need to institute a voluntary monger sales tax :).

Amazon has a book listed from about 2006 that is written from this perspective. Their argument is that they do exercise choice and that to depict them always as powerless victims misrepresents them and has the effect of denying their very real empowerment. It would be interesting to know if there is any such movement in the Phils.

[Jambo]

Hmm. An interesting film would trace the path of a 1000 pesos a monger paid a girl in Angeles. Where the money traveled from there, who it fed, clothed.

Or maybe it just buys the girl a new cell phone LOL.

[Devils 1]

Skip / GE, well written and fascinating stuff to ponder. It really makes me think about some of these girls I have come to know well. I think if you generalize it, and you have to in order to make sense of the huge numbers we are talking about here. The typical profile of the girl is definitely of the young, uneducated, neglected by the family variety. This is the only person the media wants to hear about because it makes mongers into evil men and makes for a sensational story to sell.

To me the far more interesting profile is of the woman who has far more going for her and still chooses to be in this business. When I think of the number of women I have known who have other jobs making very good money, that are well educated and have some serious money in the bank. It puts all of these stereotypes to shame. I once knew a girl with a masters degree who was the high level manager of a call center. She made in the neighborhood of 60, 000 php per month. I also knew a girl who was 21, no education, had been on the game for 3 yrs and had a bank account just from p4p with some thing like 500, 000 php in it.

A good example that most Americans will know is the girl that brought down Elliot Spitzer. She had a masters degree, was extremely beautiful and was a p4p girl in new york. Granted she was very high end, but clearly she could of had a decent job making a nice living.

I guess my point is there is something very sexy to these women about getting paid to have sex by men that a lot of them would screw for free. It just goes back to Frank Sinatras saying, you don't pay them to screw, you pay them to leave afterwards!

[Irony Monger]

Perfect! All we need now is a snazzy acronym, registration as a non-profit research institute and we can start applying for grants! Who wants to design the web page?

GE

MONGER: Ministry of naughty girl employment & research

I'll sign up to be a field investigator ;)

[GoodEnough]

There are some female prostitution activists who could probably get away with this. You can find them in places like Vancouver (Canada) or around San Francisco. I'd have to do some more googling to find names, but I've heard some of them speak in snippets from court cases, etc. And they were very articulate, well educated, etc. All they would need is some funding. Maybe we need to institute a voluntary monger sales tax :).

Perfect! All we need now is a snazzy acronym, registration as a non-profit research institute and we can start applying for grants! Who wants to design the web page?

GE

[Irony Monger]

The difficulty in doing this kind of research, aside from being time consuming and costly, is that it would probably be stigmatizing for the career of anybody who took it on, especially for men. Possibly a team, particularly if some women were involved, could safely pull it off. Or possibly some members of the team could be protected by using pseudonyms. I've got too much on my plate to get into this, and I can't even believe I just spent this much time laying this out. But if I ever run dry, I'll get back in touch and recruit you all as co-investigators.

There are some female prostitution activists who could probably get away with this. You can find them in places like Vancouver (Canada) or around San Francisco. I'd have to do some more googling to find names, but I've heard some of them speak in snippets from court cases, etc. And they were very articulate, well educated, etc. All they would need is some funding. Maybe we need to institute a voluntary monger sales tax :).

[GoodEnough]

You have done an excellent job of outlining the basic approach. I'm more interested in the direct and indirect impacts of the income redustrubution that is the nexus of the monger / povider relationship and I'm not sure if any extant econometric models would yield accurate conclusions. As you say, it's all in the assumptions and we could start by collecting some preliminary data on the validity of our initial assumptions.

There's a female sociiologist at Ateneo in Manila-I forget her name-who did some prelminiary work on a related topic and published a journal article about it several years ago. She was looking then at primary cause or causes prompting the entry of women into the P4P market, and her sample was restricted to women working in bars. Her conslusion, unsurprisingly, was that most had done so reluctantly, either because the father of their babies had deserted them and / or because they had siblings and parents to support. Our study would look less at cause and would focus more on the effects of the money that changes hands-on the women, their families, their overall quality of life, their communities, etc.

If we ever got funding for this, I know several decent local social anthropologists and sociologists who would help with the research. Of course, I have no idea who would fund it-maybe Hugh Hefner has a foundation that would be interested. I'd be happy to do the study as I'm nearing the end of my career anyway and care less about the implications for reputations. It sounds to me though like a perfectly acceptable subject of inquiry.

Well done Skip! If I can ever find a funding source, you're the first one I'll call.

GE

[Soapy Smith]

I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the efficacy of mongering as a grassroots income redistribution scheme. If not, perhaps someone should. GE

It's a great idea. Without doing a search I'd guess there might be people who have attempted to do some sort of extrapolation of the economics of sex tourism, but I don't trust that kind of "clean models" research. It's all so removed from what actually happens on the ground. Models can be hugely inaccurate if the assumptions that are built in are not correct. And the only results are likely to be about the macro-level consequences, like extrapolating from hotel and bar revenues in red light districts to estimate the total infusion of money into Thailand's economy.

There's also a study that came out a couple years ago about prostitution in Angeles. It was done by two people from a small university in the Canadian Maritimes. Apparently there's also a short film made about it also. From what I've seen I think it's very shoddy research. They were committed to the cause of stamping out all those gross Western mongers exploiting poor Filipinas, and they ended up telling a story about trafficking. I've gotten to know a few women well enough, and read enough stories in this forum, including lies and distortions, to know that there's a wide variety of dynamics in the lives of Pinays who do pfp. Most that I have known chose to start doing pfp because they had mouths to feed and they did not have economic alternatives. Some of the women I've been with were never married, never pregnant; but most had children and had been dumped by the Pinoys that impregnated them. Some on the forum suggest that some of the women actually have steady Pinoy boyfriends who spend up all the money the women bring home from tricks. I haven't seen it, but it may be so. I tend to believe it. Some steadfastly hide it from their families; others do not. Many are ashamed they have to do it, but some take it in stride, and some admit to enjoying the sex. But that story doesn't sell because it contains a lot of inconvenient truths.

And of course sex trafficking as a theme does sell, because people want to believe it, even if the research behind it is sloppy and dishonest. What is sloppy and dishonest in that study is that they found a salacious story, just like investigative journalists do, and they sought it out exclusively, at the expense of stories that do not fit the mold. And then when some Angeles woman tells them she's turned tricks for 200 pesos (with Pinoys maybe, but doubtful with Westerners) , that then becomes the going price in their story. Unfortunately, nobody can call them on it. I know it's bullshit, but I can't afford to put my credentials on the line to go public in confronting them without giving away my own pastime, which I never practice in my own zipcode.

What's needed is "dirty hands" research where investigators talk to pfp women and to mongers about the nitty gritty of their interactions, I. E, the money, where it comes from, and where and how it gets spent.

You could fairly easily build a sample of women by snowballing. Gain the confidence of one or two, interview them to see what they will tell you, and then get them to introduce you to others they know, and so on. You would also have to get them to tell you about the nooks and crannies of p4p that we don't often think about, like the casas, the bars that Westerners don't dare go into, street hustlers, and so on. In terms of what men are paying, I would much sooner trust the women than to hope to get truthful answers from the men.

In terms of the redistribution it would be important to consider multiplier effects as the women take the money back home and spread it out to family members, neighbors, sari-sari stores, and so on. I suspect the women would fairly honestly tell you what they do with the money. You could then probably find some thoughtful Filipino economists to suggest typical multiplier rates for the kinds of communities in which the women live. That means you'd have to get the women to tell you about the communities they're living in. I've spent some time in squatter settlements in Metro Manila, which is where I suspect a lot of these women live, but I don't think I have a real sense of the economics of those places.

You'd also probably need to interview the men to figure out where the money is coming from. Problem is, if you ask them straight up about their income, they will lie. So you'd have to put it together by asking them more indirectly, like finding out where they live, what they do professionally, how long they've been doing it, and so on. Then you could refer to secondary data that show how much people in particular professions in particular countries, states, provinces get paid. You could ask them, and then compare their lies to your estimates derived from secondary data. That way you could begin to build up some typical assessments of income. I suspect you could get more honest answers to questions about how much the men spend for hotels, meals, taxis, incidentals, and so on. Or you could intentionally bound the inquiry so that you're only looking at the redistribution that occurs in the direct exchange between monger and prostitute. Perhaps the redistribution through hotels and so on is essentially the same as what's already well known for tourism in general in the Philippines.

The difficulty in doing this kind of research, aside from being time consuming and costly, is that it would probably be stigmatizing for the career of anybody who took it on, especially for men. Possibly a team, particularly if some women were involved, could safely pull it off. Or possibly some members of the team could be protected by using pseudonyms. I've got too much on my plate to get into this, and I can't even believe I just spent this much time laying this out. But if I ever run dry, I'll get back in touch and recruit you all as co-investigators.

One other little problem: who the hell would pay you to do such a study? Lilly pharmaceuticals? Trojan condoms? K-Y? Owners of favorite mongering haunts?

BTW, a great illustration of doing this sort of research is Elisabeth Pisani's **The Wisdom of Wh---s**. She does a very thoughtful study, focused mostly in Indonesia, on the actual incidences of HIV / AIDS. It's excellent dirty hands research in which she snowballed her way into prostitution circles, male and female, drug users, and so on. She is not judgmental in the least, and she shows why the typical demographic studies of HIV / AIDS are wildly inaccurate. She's also very crusty in her language and depictions. An interesting read and a good illustration of this kind of study.

[GoodEnough]

Some of these individual intersections are not so surprising when you consider how many Westerners come to the Philippines specifically for development-related work. But I confess I get into some hilarious conversations in airports in the Phils and on the way to the Phils with evangelicals bent on saving the Philippines from their Catholicism. I'm always polite while carefully withholding a belly laugh. If they only knew my other pastime in the Philippines. (I say this assuming GE is not, in fact, Bob Tebow. I'm pretty sure RK is not.)

I presume I sometimes advocate for treating Filipinas gently because I can only justify my mongering if I regard it as a form of economics in which people matter. I also admit to being hopelessly addicted to brown-skinned women. I've been exercising more and even given up coffee and alcohol in order to make my end of the experience hold up better.

Skip, I can assure you that I am not Bob Tebow, and I can give you further assurance that RK has no evangelical predispositions. I had a drink with RK tonight and both of us commented on how much we enjoy this discussion. I think you make an excellent point about the number of people-mostly men-who come here for development work. However most of those whom I know are not members of this forum, at least I'm reasonably sure they're not. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the efficacy of mongering as a grassroots income redistribution scheme. If not, perhaps someone should.

GE

[Soapy Smith]

However, working with the right local organizations (carefully chosen) and defining a relatively circumscribed area (geographical and technical) on which to focus assistance, I do believe that donor programs can make the lives of a small number of people better. GE

This reinforces my conviction. I also occasionally meet a handful of leaders in local initiatives who know the real situation in the community and have the ability to articulate their concerns to get local government leaders and occasionally national leaders to make some modest changes. So community development that pushes upward is sometimes doable; real system change is a different story.

[Soapy Smith]

I'm trained as public policy analyst, and thoroughly enjoying this thread. Nice to have something on ISG besides t-back questions and arguments over tipping practices. (You know, just for a change.)

Thanks to all.

Some of these individual intersections are not so surprising when you consider how many Westerners come to the Philippines specifically for development-related work. But I confess I get into some hilarious conversations in airports in the Phils and on the way to the Phils with evangelicals bent on saving the Philippines from their Catholicism. I'm always polite while carefully withholding a belly laugh. If they only knew my other pastime in the Philippines. (I say this assuming GE is not, in fact, Bob Tebow. I'm pretty sure RK is not.)

I presume I sometimes advocate for treating Filipinas gently because I can only justify my mongering if I regard it as a form of economics in which people matter. I also admit to being hopelessly addicted to brown-skinned women. I've been exercising more and even given up coffee and alcohol in order to make my end of the experience hold up better.