“Man, I really hope this place isn’t a strip club,” I repeated to Chandler and Laura as we stepped off the street, past a group of barely clothed women flashing us friendly smiles, and pushed open the blacked out double-doors, bracing ourselves against the unknown and against the all too familiar. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we each breathed an inward sigh of relief and helped ourselves to a corner booth — This place wasn’t a strip club…it was just a brothel, and we had spent most of our night looking for places exactly like this.
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For the first ten days of December, I was doing bar ministry in the red light district of Chiang Mai, Thailand through an organization called Lighthouse in Action. My time was pretty evenly divided between prayer walking throughout the day and visiting bars during the night to befriend and talk with the prostitutes who worked there. Over those ten days I got to peel back a few of the shadows and cliches surrounding the prostitution industry, learning about some of the systemic factors in Thailand pushing women to prostitution, and men to prostitutes. In addition, I was able to meet some of the women who work as prostitutes and to see firsthand the destruction that this lifestyle has had upon their identities and self-images.
These experiences have led me to think and reflect quite a bit in the past few days, and here are two different mental rabbit trails which I have been sent down:
1) A Kierkegaardian Rant:
(Disclaimer: This paragraph is pretty boring/pretentious.) Things like prostitution are all too easy to hate in the abstract, yet such hatred is always cheap and counterfeit, for its object does not truly exist. If prostitution existed only in the manner in which we hate it — that is, in the abstract — then it would never be worth hating to begin with, for, again, it could not be said to truly exist. In order to hate prostitution, we must hate it for what it is, not for what it is not, and thus we can never hate it in the abstract. If we are to hate, we must hate it within the concrete reality within which it exists; we must hate it because of the look on a girl’s face, or the bruise on her arm, or the way she sees herself in a mirror — and again, it is not enough to hate it for the sake of just “any girl.” If it is to be hated it must be for “a girl,” — a particular girl, and a particular bruise or look. (Told you…)
This is, after all, the same as it is in love, for loving something in the abstract is the same as to love abstractly, to love counterfeitedly, to love with a species of love which has no body nor soul, and thus can love nothing which has body or soul.
We can go to war for such abstract loves and hatreds; we can change the world, and write books about them; we can collect followers and champion causes for them; yet the one thing which we will never achieve, despite all our passions and concerns, despite all our most strenuous efforts — yes, despite even all our status updates and retweets and coffee shop conversations — is to truly love and hate for them. We can give them everything except a body and soul, everything except existence.
2) Prostitution As Reduction:
One of the most destructive aspects of prostitution and its sister industry, pornography, is that they are reductionist. Their essence is to simplify, to label, and to deconstruct beings into bodies, reality into fantasy, good into evil, embodying in every step that most wretched of words: “Disredemption.” Over the past few weeks, I have witnessed Thai women, standing in a row, being hand-picked by their male clients, participants in some twisted lineup where the victims are identified instead of the criminals. I cannot begin to imagine what emotional and physical damage these girls undergo, having their very lives and livelihoods placed in the hands of men who conceive of them only as objects, who value them only as bodies.
What happens to a girl’s self-identity when, daily paraded before men, she is told that she is only as valuable as she is found beautiful, only as desired as she is found desirable? The answer: She is disredeemed, becoming in reality what she was to these men in fantasy. What are her passions in life? What is her favorite smell? How does she give and receive love? All such questions fade and disappear into the backdrop of a one-dimensional girl with a one-dimensional smile. This multi-faceted human being, who, under love’s redemptive care, has all the infinite potential summed up in the word, “woman,” is instead collapsed into that caricature of womanhood which we call a “prostitute," and made, not by way of manipulation but — and oh how much worse — by way of affirmation, to amputate, abort, and ignore all that makes her special, and in the name of beauty to abandon wholeness, that is, her true beauty. Before our eyes, a person has been reduced to a personification, and a character to a characteristic; a part has been made to be the whole, and the whole is soon forgotten.
I have seen these women be bought, handled, and sold, in this self-image shattering industry. I have seem them reduced to labels and bodies in the minds of others, and eventually, in their own minds as well. Their wholeness is taken from them, and it should be grieved.
Yet in me these experiences have prompted more than grief. When I see how these girls’ identities are stolen from them, and how they are reduced to labels, I am profoundly convicted over the abdication of identity in my own life. These girls are victimized by others, and it is a terrible thing; yet how often do I victimize myself, choosing to adopt a label or caricature of who I truly am instead of fighting to remain a whole human being? How quick am I to be affirmed by the reflection I see in a mirror, or the way others laugh at one of my jokes? How desperately do I try to justify my existence by adopting the labels of “smart” or “athletic” or “cool”? Why am I, who have so few outer pressures on me to conform or pretend to be something I am not, constantly drawn towards the abdication of my personality or character, solely by my desire to be accepted or acceptable? Do I really consider wholeness so petty of a thing?
Yes, in the end I have come to realize that I am just as much of a prostitute as these women — though perhaps worse, for they have chosen to be one against their will, whereas I have chosen to do it freely.
(Disclaimer: This paragraph is pretty preachy.) I also want to take the opportunity to encourage you guys as well to see every decision you make throughout the day as a choice between prostitution and integrity, between brokenness and wholeness, between abdication and responsibility. Why do you put so much work into reducing yourself into a caricature which you hope will be found acceptable by those around you? Why are you so quick to run to a label which simplifies you into a one-dimensional person merely in order to justify your existence?
God created you and me, just as he created these prostitutes, to be multi-dimensional, unique, and fascinating human beings, who illustrate his nature to one another and to ourselves. It may often feel as though God created you as less than you may desire, as less beautiful, less intelligent, less likable, less human — but here tread carefully! Are you truly so proud and self-loathing as to imagine that you could strive to be greater than God created you? Not even the angels, though one once thought otherwise, are immune to the consequences of such hubris.
