Patpong: Bangkok's Twilight Zone

Rating:
Summary: Patpong After Dark: And Dark It Is
Review: Nick Nostitz in PATPONG: BANGKOK'S TWILIGHT ZONE has written a photo-essay volume that casts some much needed light on a city that paradoxically trumps its myriad sins in a much lighted way but the city itself, its non-sex worker population, and its sustaining ethos and culture needs the very sort of attention that books like this one too often skimp on. The result, therefore, is a re-examination of a city that is probably the most sex-driven in the world. Many of the photos are of good looking Thai prostitutes in mini-skirts, but the cumulative impact grows progessively more saddened and less erotic. The photos are accompanied by small commentaries that shed some minor light as to why these sex trade women peddle themselves. Nostitz indicates that Bangkok had learned that since the end of the second world war its primary coin had to be its women. The corruption of the various regimes since then and the ubiquitousness of rapacious American servicemen and Japanese male tourists fueled the demand for the very women whose salacious pictures form the book. As I took in one picture after another, I could see both the surface allure and the less obvious repellence of the sex trade. Clearly, easy and cheap sex with bar girls, hookers, strippers, and transsexuals are the upside of what a male vistor with liberal spending habits can expect. The downside is the less obvious flirtation with HIV and the general slimy feeling that one gets when one uses money to obtain cheaply what one cannot get more honestly in one's home country. PATPONG: BANKOK'S TWILIGHT ZONE manages to explore both pictorially and verbally the allure that sleaze has for the decent if ignorant male tourist with excessive dollars in his pocket.