US Professor Examines the Idea of ‘Professional Girlfriends’ in Cambodia
“Sex, Love, and
Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional
Relationships” looks at the social morals of Cambodian women and the
idea of “transactional relationships.”
VOA | 12 November 2015
WASHINGTON DC—[Editor’s note: A
new book from a US professor looks at the world of “professional
girlfriends,” Cambodian women who have commercial relationships with
foreign men. In her book “Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia: Professional
Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships,” professor Heidi
Hoefinger, who teaches in the science department of Berkeley College, in
New York, looks at the social morals of Cambodian women and the idea of
“transactional relationships.” Women are often praised for these
relationships, which bring in money to support their families. In an
interview with VOA Khmer Hoefinger said the women are often seeking
respect and recognition for their choices, something they don’t always
get.]
What motivated you to write this book?
The first time I went to Cambodia was back in 2003. I was just a backpacker who just finished teaching in India and just wanted to tour Southeast Asia among many peers around my age during that time. It was at that point that I first entered one of the hostess bars in Cambodia and became friends with a lot of female bar workers there. We could identify with a lot of things there like music, dance, pop culture, and boyfriends and things like that. I was drawn to the stories of their lives, the frenetic energy of Phnom Penh. At that time I decided that I wanted to come back and research and spend time talking to women that were basically at the heart of all of it. I have been going back and forth to Cambodia from 2003 until 2015.
How was your experience talking to female bar workers in Western-oriented restaurants and bars in Phnom Penh?
The book is ultimately about the strength and resiliency and challenges of female bar workers in Cambodia, who are employed in the Western-oriented hosted bar sector, which is one sector within the larger entertainment industry in Cambodia. I write about how in the myth of gender constraints, which include strict moral and social codes, sexual violence, corruption, domestic abuse, how young women are using the tools surrounding them, which in this case are sex and intimacy, to form relationships with foreign men as a means to improve their lives, and make socioeconomic gains from these advantages, and ultimately find enjoyment in their life. The book also sheds light on the relationships themselves that develop between Cambodian women and foreign men, which is multi-layer and complex, but often stigmatized only as commercial or only as exploitive. Spending 10 years to talk to people, I found that often that is not the case, and that people are genuinely seeking true love and intimacy, and that intimacy and economics mingle in complex ways, as it does in any relationship, in Cambodia and beyond. Ultimately, I am trying to humanize and destigmatize the women themselves and the relationship that develops with their Western partners.
How do female bar workers you talked to justify their actions in seeking intimacy with Westerners, either for love or socioeconomic gain?
Most of the women I spoke to at the bars migrate to the cities from the countryside, where their options are very limited, especially in gender disparity in education and society in general. Not many of these women have an education beyond the sixth grade. But they do feel a tremendous obligation to support and contribute to their family, as well. So a lot of them make the decision, a brave decision, to leave the countryside and leave the security of living with their family to move to the cities to seek out labor. So there is a feminization of labor in Cambodia.
The problem is when they get to the city, their options are very limited, as well. They can either work in a garment factory for low wages and with very long hours and poor working conditions. They can work in a home, doing domestic work, cleaning and caring for large families. Or they can do street trade, trading food or selling fruit, or have small size businesses that are street-based.
A lot of women have tried all of those options and ended up in the bar because they find them the most lucrative. They have more freedom, in terms of their working hours. The bars are often the places where they can work for a little while, and then quit, and then either raise children or go back to. So there is a sense of security on those, especially when they have good working relationship with the owners and managers.
But doing this kind of work and even leaving their homes goes against a lot of the gender cultures that are laid out, in particular the chbap srey, the women’s code of conduct, which was written historically. Although they are not really recited and memorized in the same way they had been in the past, their values are still passed on and reinforced. Even to leave one’s home is a challenge to the women’s code of conduct. In many ways, they defy the chbap srey and the gender code for women in every aspect because they are working late at night.
They are working in the environment where people are drinking alcohol and consuming drugs. Of course, they are having premarital sex and relationships. So they are absolutely defying the social code for women in many ways. However, I found that if they can earn enough capital and provide support to their family and buy homes for their family, which many of them do from their romances, pay for their siblings’ school tuition—sometimes they savage and tarnish their images. In the book, I am talking about how they experience this double value system, where they are heavily stigmatized as “broken women” and as “criminal,” but at the same time are highly praised in their family if they can contribute to their family’s economic wellbeing. So it’s complex terrain for the women to negotiate.
By writing this book about gender and money in Cambodia, what have you learned about the country, especially the issues of your interest?
When I first went to Cambodia as a naïve backpacker and eventually a graduate student, I reinforced a lot of my own naïve assumptions, preconceptions, and biases. I assumed that a lot of women that I met at the bars were negotiable for a particular price, and that they were controlled by bosses and managers, and that they have very little decision-making power, and that they were trapped in the bars—which is very powerful discourse that circulates in Cambodia and beyond, especially when you talk about female bar workers. I assumed that every inter-ethnic couple, Cambodian women and their western partners, were all commercially based. So I had to confront all of my own biases and preconceptions quite quickly when I started to get to know the women and spend time with them in their bars, in their homes with their family, helping them care for their children, doing deeply in depth-intimate ethnographic research, it was through that that I realized most of my assumptions were faulty, that women themselves were making a clear decision to do this work among limited options.
But they are definitely active decisions being made to participate in this work and in this lifestyle. Most of the women were not controlled heavily by bosses and managers. They could make their own choices as to whether or not they would go with clients and what they would or would not do with clients. One of the main findings of the book was that most of them were doing this kind of pre-negotiated sex for cash transaction, which we understand to be commercial sex work. It was more ambiguous than that. It was based in a grey area where sex, love and money were all coming together, but it wasn’t framed as commercial sex work – the women didn’t view themselves as sex workers, and the men didn’t view themselves as clients.
They framed each other as real boyfriend and girlfriend. Yes, of course, there were material expectations. The women understood and knew that these foreigners had more economic capital and social capital than they had. Then the women themselves want to capitalize on that. So that was an important finding. All of the relationships really make me reflect on my own relationship with my peers and friends outside Cambodia, and how all of us have relationship that mingle intimacy, economic and pragmatic reality, and that we really stop thinking about how our sex here is fundamentally different from sex and relationship in Cambodia, between Cambodian women and their foreign partners. Clearly, there is difference in class and nationality, and access to resources. They have to negotiate it, but really try to normalize this stigmatized relationship that develops and the choices that the women make.
How do you feel about Cambodian women seeking socioeconomic empowerment by becoming bar workers, girlfriends to foreigners, or sex workers?
What I am trying to do is destigmatize these choices. Often what happens in Cambodia is this very powerful discourse that these women are either social deviants who are breaking all the social codes, or they are victims that are in need of rescue. The work that they do in the bars is often conflated as being trafficking, that they are exploited victims that have not made a decision to do this, and that they are exploited by this Western patriarchy. These are the narratives that circulate among a very powerful abolitionist lobby in Cambodia that wants to put an end to all forms of sex and entertainment work as a means to addressing trafficking issues, which is, to me, problematic.
But for the sex and entertainment workers themselves – many of them, but not all of them – some of them are involved in a sex worker union in Cambodia that has about 6,000 members, called the Women’s Network for Unity, where they’re mobilizing, demanding rights and recognition for the choices they make. Their argument is: “We don’t want to be rescued by people who think they necessarily know better than us.” What happens when they are rescued, often they are put into this reintegration program and they are taught to learn to sew and handle a sewing machine, and placed back in a garment factory. This is not the socioeconomic decision they are making. It’s one that is being forced upon them by people who believe this is a more dignified form of work. What the sex and entertainment workers are demanding is respect for the decision they made under very constrained circumstances. This is a viable means of labor and employment for some of them, that they choose, a form of labor, and that is what they are calling for—recognition and respect—for those decisions they make with every socioeconomic choice they can and need to do, within the environment that they are in and among the limited options that they have.
The first time I went to Cambodia was back in 2003. I was just a backpacker who just finished teaching in India and just wanted to tour Southeast Asia among many peers around my age during that time. It was at that point that I first entered one of the hostess bars in Cambodia and became friends with a lot of female bar workers there. We could identify with a lot of things there like music, dance, pop culture, and boyfriends and things like that. I was drawn to the stories of their lives, the frenetic energy of Phnom Penh. At that time I decided that I wanted to come back and research and spend time talking to women that were basically at the heart of all of it. I have been going back and forth to Cambodia from 2003 until 2015.
How was your experience talking to female bar workers in Western-oriented restaurants and bars in Phnom Penh?
The book is ultimately about the strength and resiliency and challenges of female bar workers in Cambodia, who are employed in the Western-oriented hosted bar sector, which is one sector within the larger entertainment industry in Cambodia. I write about how in the myth of gender constraints, which include strict moral and social codes, sexual violence, corruption, domestic abuse, how young women are using the tools surrounding them, which in this case are sex and intimacy, to form relationships with foreign men as a means to improve their lives, and make socioeconomic gains from these advantages, and ultimately find enjoyment in their life. The book also sheds light on the relationships themselves that develop between Cambodian women and foreign men, which is multi-layer and complex, but often stigmatized only as commercial or only as exploitive. Spending 10 years to talk to people, I found that often that is not the case, and that people are genuinely seeking true love and intimacy, and that intimacy and economics mingle in complex ways, as it does in any relationship, in Cambodia and beyond. Ultimately, I am trying to humanize and destigmatize the women themselves and the relationship that develops with their Western partners.
How do female bar workers you talked to justify their actions in seeking intimacy with Westerners, either for love or socioeconomic gain?
Most of the women I spoke to at the bars migrate to the cities from the countryside, where their options are very limited, especially in gender disparity in education and society in general. Not many of these women have an education beyond the sixth grade. But they do feel a tremendous obligation to support and contribute to their family, as well. So a lot of them make the decision, a brave decision, to leave the countryside and leave the security of living with their family to move to the cities to seek out labor. So there is a feminization of labor in Cambodia.
The problem is when they get to the city, their options are very limited, as well. They can either work in a garment factory for low wages and with very long hours and poor working conditions. They can work in a home, doing domestic work, cleaning and caring for large families. Or they can do street trade, trading food or selling fruit, or have small size businesses that are street-based.
A lot of women have tried all of those options and ended up in the bar because they find them the most lucrative. They have more freedom, in terms of their working hours. The bars are often the places where they can work for a little while, and then quit, and then either raise children or go back to. So there is a sense of security on those, especially when they have good working relationship with the owners and managers.
But doing this kind of work and even leaving their homes goes against a lot of the gender cultures that are laid out, in particular the chbap srey, the women’s code of conduct, which was written historically. Although they are not really recited and memorized in the same way they had been in the past, their values are still passed on and reinforced. Even to leave one’s home is a challenge to the women’s code of conduct. In many ways, they defy the chbap srey and the gender code for women in every aspect because they are working late at night.
They are working in the environment where people are drinking alcohol and consuming drugs. Of course, they are having premarital sex and relationships. So they are absolutely defying the social code for women in many ways. However, I found that if they can earn enough capital and provide support to their family and buy homes for their family, which many of them do from their romances, pay for their siblings’ school tuition—sometimes they savage and tarnish their images. In the book, I am talking about how they experience this double value system, where they are heavily stigmatized as “broken women” and as “criminal,” but at the same time are highly praised in their family if they can contribute to their family’s economic wellbeing. So it’s complex terrain for the women to negotiate.
By writing this book about gender and money in Cambodia, what have you learned about the country, especially the issues of your interest?
When I first went to Cambodia as a naïve backpacker and eventually a graduate student, I reinforced a lot of my own naïve assumptions, preconceptions, and biases. I assumed that a lot of women that I met at the bars were negotiable for a particular price, and that they were controlled by bosses and managers, and that they have very little decision-making power, and that they were trapped in the bars—which is very powerful discourse that circulates in Cambodia and beyond, especially when you talk about female bar workers. I assumed that every inter-ethnic couple, Cambodian women and their western partners, were all commercially based. So I had to confront all of my own biases and preconceptions quite quickly when I started to get to know the women and spend time with them in their bars, in their homes with their family, helping them care for their children, doing deeply in depth-intimate ethnographic research, it was through that that I realized most of my assumptions were faulty, that women themselves were making a clear decision to do this work among limited options.
But they are definitely active decisions being made to participate in this work and in this lifestyle. Most of the women were not controlled heavily by bosses and managers. They could make their own choices as to whether or not they would go with clients and what they would or would not do with clients. One of the main findings of the book was that most of them were doing this kind of pre-negotiated sex for cash transaction, which we understand to be commercial sex work. It was more ambiguous than that. It was based in a grey area where sex, love and money were all coming together, but it wasn’t framed as commercial sex work – the women didn’t view themselves as sex workers, and the men didn’t view themselves as clients.
They framed each other as real boyfriend and girlfriend. Yes, of course, there were material expectations. The women understood and knew that these foreigners had more economic capital and social capital than they had. Then the women themselves want to capitalize on that. So that was an important finding. All of the relationships really make me reflect on my own relationship with my peers and friends outside Cambodia, and how all of us have relationship that mingle intimacy, economic and pragmatic reality, and that we really stop thinking about how our sex here is fundamentally different from sex and relationship in Cambodia, between Cambodian women and their foreign partners. Clearly, there is difference in class and nationality, and access to resources. They have to negotiate it, but really try to normalize this stigmatized relationship that develops and the choices that the women make.
How do you feel about Cambodian women seeking socioeconomic empowerment by becoming bar workers, girlfriends to foreigners, or sex workers?
What I am trying to do is destigmatize these choices. Often what happens in Cambodia is this very powerful discourse that these women are either social deviants who are breaking all the social codes, or they are victims that are in need of rescue. The work that they do in the bars is often conflated as being trafficking, that they are exploited victims that have not made a decision to do this, and that they are exploited by this Western patriarchy. These are the narratives that circulate among a very powerful abolitionist lobby in Cambodia that wants to put an end to all forms of sex and entertainment work as a means to addressing trafficking issues, which is, to me, problematic.
But for the sex and entertainment workers themselves – many of them, but not all of them – some of them are involved in a sex worker union in Cambodia that has about 6,000 members, called the Women’s Network for Unity, where they’re mobilizing, demanding rights and recognition for the choices they make. Their argument is: “We don’t want to be rescued by people who think they necessarily know better than us.” What happens when they are rescued, often they are put into this reintegration program and they are taught to learn to sew and handle a sewing machine, and placed back in a garment factory. This is not the socioeconomic decision they are making. It’s one that is being forced upon them by people who believe this is a more dignified form of work. What the sex and entertainment workers are demanding is respect for the decision they made under very constrained circumstances. This is a viable means of labor and employment for some of them, that they choose, a form of labor, and that is what they are calling for—recognition and respect—for those decisions they make with every socioeconomic choice they can and need to do, within the environment that they are in and among the limited options that they have.
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