To travelers, Thailand is known for its sex tourism. As missionaries, Thailand is known for the ministries that operate in response to sex tourism. Many of the women on my team came on the World Race with a huge heart for these ministries. Even though our assigned work in Thailand was not in this area, we still wanted to go out and minister to this population.
So we did it. The six of us girls went over to Bangla Road, the red light “walking street” in Phuket, booked a room in a hostel on a nearby street, and waited for night to fall and demons to come. We went out in shifts of three women for about two hours at once. The group that remained in the hostel would pray and worship, while the group who was on the streets would do whatever the Lord called them to do, whether it was talking, praying, standing, or sitting. When my group went out, we decided to walk up and down the street seven times, à la Jericho in the book of Joshua. At the end of the street, we would pray and do it again. In an interesting way, we ended up making more of an impact than I had anticipated. After being solicited by so many people to see sex shows or go into bars, and then refusing them, people began to wonder why we were here. Some of the men advertising sex shows were confused as to why we weren’t going in anywhere, and they asked questions. Granted, most of the questions were about whether or not we were lesbians or whether we wanted to have sex with Thai men (the guy who said this to me even flexed his arm and declared that he was powerful). But we still took every opportunity to tell them about Jesus before we left.
There were a couple of things I did not expect to see and experience, but did. The first was the number of tourists with their children running around the red light district. I had thought to see mostly men, and I was shocked to see families pushing toddlers in strollers walking on the street as if it were any other shopping district. I saw fathers with little girls and boys pointing to various “roadside attractions” that were meant for the sole purpose of sexual arousal. Of course, I also saw fathers with sons in their early teens using the arena as an “initiation into manhood” with a solid pat on the back. Seeing kids so young being intentionally exposed to the kind of sex being offered was heartbreaking, as I could only imagine the damage that would do to their definition and experience of sex later on. The second thing was this. Before I walked down the street, I had braced myself for seduction. When I actually started walking, there was nothing remotely seductive about what was being offered. Everything was artificial, from the lights to the smiles to the flirting, and I would argue even down to the sex. It was like someone took something immaterial and pumped a lot of steroids in it to make it appear substantial.
As the saying is true, yes, sex sells. At the same time, it also doesn’t, which is something I think people in the industry realize the moment they start selling sex. They have to actually try to sell sex, and usually they have to try pretty hard. On the streets we walked, they wrapped it up in short skirts, long legs, perfect makeup, ribbons, and bows. They paraded it in costumes, through cages, on poles, and under sprinklers. They offered it in ones, twos, or threes. They presented young, old, men, women, and everything in between. They even sold it with ping pong balls and turtles coming out. If sex sells, why does it need so much advertising, and to such extremes?
My only conclusion is that they’re trying to offer something that is fake or not complete, and end up having to compensate for it with bells and whistles. At the heart of it, “real sex” (sex as it was meant to be experienced as laid out by our Creator) by nature can’t be sold. It’s priceless because putting a price on it would negate the intimacy that is inherent in its definition. Sex is a sacred act intended for practice within the sacred union of marriage bound by love and law. As we are created with flesh and spirit, it is the union of the flesh and union of the spirit that makes up real, good sex. Perhaps we need to return to this definition and remember that real sex has both the fleshly and the spiritual components. People can all agree that a union of spirit is not sex. It’s friendship. It’s only one side of the equation. So the fact that people around me were buying into the idea (excuse the pun here) that a union of flesh is sex when it’s also only one side of the equation, intrigued me. Perhaps feelings associated with the cultural terms “morning after” and “walk of shame” reveal some truth about “half-equation sex” that we’re not willing to admit. Like any good fairytale will tell you, the magic that’s too good to be true, isn’t. It ends after the ball when the dress becomes rags, and the carriage becomes a pumpkin. At that point, to wear a dress and get into a carriage again would require pursuing change in the hard reality of the morning after where there’s a relentless hunt for a woman who lost a slipper, and an effort on her part to speak up, fight, and reveal herself. Real “whole equation sex” that unites both spirit and flesh takes work and a commitment to find and be found.
The morning after for my team was as harsh as the sunlight that shot through our windows. The night before, a foreign, bald, middle-aged man staying in the room next door to ours brought home a prostitute who looked like she was in her teens. Danielle, one of my teammates, had been praying for God to soften her heart for the men who paid for sex. As she saw the woman leave, she looked and saw emptiness on this man’s face. There was nothing in his expression that said, “Look at me, I got lucky last night with a woman less than half my age!” The look on his face was one of shattered desires and broken dreams. He paid for sex and received exactly what he paid for, but not was he was looking for. He was looking for intimacy within sex, and had received sex without intimacy. He had sex with a ghost and was left alone with less than he had before – less wealth, less dignity, less humanity. His desires were birthed stillborn: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15). My heart hurts for these men who were paying for sex, because sin took their desire, brought only death from it, and in doing so robbed them of what that desire was meant to bring – life. Without sin, desire was supposed to give birth to life, which is literally the case when we talk about “whole equation sex” within the confines of love and law in marriage. It always carries the potential of life spiritually and physically, while “half equation sex” at its worst brings shame and death (which is also spiritual and physical).
As we walked down the same street the following morning, we prayed for life – that out of all that shame, despair, and death, people would look to the Author of Life who did away with all those things on the cross.
“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe in this?” John 11:25
