Parsing East-Meets-West Sex
Travel Blog • Julia Ross • 06.08.09 | 1:33 PM ET
Well, well. The Asian sex trade seems to be a popular literary theme this summer. While Lawrence Osborne’s latest book, Bangkok Days, examines the issue of loneliness among Western men prowling the streets of Thailand, another new book, The East, The West and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, takes a more academic approach to what author Richard Bernstein calls “an old and enduring story.”
A former China correspondent for TIME whose experience in Asia dates to the 70s, Bernstein says he was reluctant to broach the subject—thinking that it wouldn’t yield enough for a book—but instead found “a rich, pungent, morally complex, and sometimes even moving history.” He interviews a swath of Western men and Asian women from Beijing to Malacca and unearths a few real-life versions of Madame Butterfly, concluding that “what has been taken to be fantasy was actually real experience.”
Hmm. I haven’t read either book yet, but I hope the authors aren’t rehashing what many of us who have traveled or lived in Asia can see for ourselves on any given evening in Hong Kong or Manila. Here’s what would interest me: a few insights from Western women and Asian men, who (bafflingly) never seem to figure when this topic comes up.