The vast economic disparities between Thai locals and Thailand's tourists have long enabled affluent foreigners to request massages with "happy ending specials" or "rent a girlfriend/boyfriend" for a holiday. Now, the global economic crisis has spawned a more twisted form of entertainment.
Ping-Pong Hell
Published August 5, 2010
Tiew, a 47-year-old migrant with bleached hair and mahogany skin, remembers the night when razor blades lacerated her vaginal walls. After amusing a largely Western audience with bizarre tricks - using her vagina to extinguish a candle and her pelvic muscles to shoot out ping-pong balls - Tiew prepared for her grand finale. Offstage, she implanted a wire tightly coiled with steel razor blades into her vaginal cavity. Tiew planned to extricate the wire as she gyrated around a pole in front of her inebriated audience.
But suddenly, the Royal Thai Police flooded the stage with light. Alarmed women groped for their clothes, customers proclaimed their innocence, and the brothel's manager escaped through a rear exit. Completely naked, Tiew raced down three flights of stairs into Bangkok's notorious Patpong District. The blades sliced her open like a gutted fish. "I didn't know a person could feel so much pain," she remembers.
The full article is only available in print in the August 2010 issue of Ms. Magazine.
BANGKOK, Thailand — Narisaraporn Asipong, a matronly social worker at the "Mercy Center" shelter met 8-year-old Niran (a pseudonym) five years ago in Klong Toey, Bangkok's largest concentration of
In this broadcast of Bread and Roses, Gabriele Ross interviews Deena Guzder on Sexual Exploitation and Human Trafficking, particularly in Thailand.
Grantee
Deena Guzder is a freelance journalist based in New York City who has reported on human rights issues across the world. Guzder is represented by the William Clark Associates literary agency and...
