Title: Sexy schoolgirls and other images of disdain.

POPLINE Document Number: 195367

Author(s):

Hunter S

Source citation:

Global AIDSLink, 2004 Apr-May;(85):12, 19.

Abstract:

"See that hotel with the green sign?" My colleague, a Lao expert in HIV/AIDS and migration, gestured across the river. If the Mekong had dried up, the Thai hotel with its huge bank of beckoning neon would have been an easy walk from the Savannakhet café where we sat. "Chinese businessmen on sex junkets call across the river and, in two hours, pimps on this side deliver a fresh bunch of Lao schoolgirls to their hotel room doors. In their uniforms. And they have to be virgins, or the Chinese won't pay." The pigtailed, flirtatiously "knock- kneed" schoolgirl, whose short plaid skirt barely conceals her buttocks, is not just an old pornographic cliché; these days the literature of women and AIDS is also rife with stories of molested innocents who were introduced to the school of hard knocks at the same time as they were learning their ABCs. Adopting the schoolgirl as an icon of the predicament of women in the world of AIDS might not be a bad idea, expressing as it does the deep sense of "gender conflict" - the outright misogyny - underlying the rapid spread of HIV in all corners of the world. (excerpt)

Keywords:

Thailand
Women
Youth
Adolescents, Female
AIDS
Microbicides
Contraception Research
Developing Countries
Asia, Southeastern
Asia
Demographic Factors
Population
Age Factors
Population Characteristics
Adolescents
HIV Infections
Viral Diseases
Diseases
Drugs
Treatment
Contraception
Family Planning