Taiwan’s Growth Industry: Prostitution

If you step off the plane needing a trim and shave, don’t go into that neon-lit barbershop with a facade resembling the Great Pyramid.

Hundreds of such gaudy establishments line the streets of Taipei. They deal primarily in sex, not the tonsorial arts.

Prostitution is flourishing in Taiwan, like the economy.

“Taipei is a city of lust,” City Councilman Yen Chin-fu said. “Girlie restaurants and bars are everywhere, even in residential and school areas. Some are next to police stations.”

Several feminist groups are fighting back, but with little success.

“As our society gets richer, it is also getting more corrupt,” said Chen Yi-chen of the Women Rescue Foundation.

A decade ago, prostitution was centered in the suburb of Peitou, then both the economy and sex industry grew dramatically in the 1980s. Yen estimated that at least 5,000 restaurants, bars, “barbershops” and other establishments were selling sex in Taipei.

Procuring women for clients has become part of the business culture. It helps explain the success of such restaurants as “Flower of Flowers,” a vast expanse of 100 intimate dining rooms, where 250 hostesses sing, flirt with customers and often leave with them.

In the barbershops, behind exteriors depicting pyramids, Chinese palaces or Hawaiian beaches, are masseuses in chipaos , the tight, traditional Chinese dresses with high slits at the thigh.

Because Taipei has few barbershops that do not offer sex, many men go to beauty salons for haircuts.

Every street has a small hotel offering short-time rates for xiuxi , or resting.

They cater to men who do not want to be seen with prostitutes or their mistresses. Many offer “completely automatic service,” which enables customers to choose rooms and pay bills without seeing anyone.

In some neighborhoods, pimps stand at street corners and often try to drag men into their brothels by physical force.

Lee Ting-yu, who owns a noodle shop in the Hsimentien commercial and theater district, said he planned to close because aggressive pimps keep people away from the street.

Taipei has only 40 licensed brothels, all in the Wanhua district. Red lights line alleys behind a main thoroughfare noted for small shops that sell snake and turtle soups said to enhance virility.

All the prostitution outside Wanhau is illegal, but critics of the government say police are paid to do nothing.

A city official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “There is nothing we can do unless we catch the girls undressed or scarcely clad.”

Newspapers say that many housewives and women college students work in the sex industry either part time or full time, but that only a few hundred are licensed and receive periodic medical checks.

Chen of the Women Rescue Foundation and other activists say girls 9 to 16 account for about half of the estimated 200,000 prostitutes. She claimed that many teen-agers were forced to take hormone injections or undergo plastic surgery to make them appear older.

“Taiwanese men have the misconception that the minors are cleaner and more innocent,” Chen said. She added that many girls have up to 40 clients a day and take no precautions against sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS.

Some families in the countryside sell their young girls to brothels, she said, and gave this example: “A worker in the central highland sold his first daughter to a brothel out of poverty, but later sold his five other daughters so he could live a comfortable life without work.”

The Rescue Foundation and several other women’s groups have held public demonstrations against the use of minors as prostitutes.

Last year, they publicized the names of newspapers that print the most classified ads for brothels and sex services, hoping to shame the papers into refusing the ads. It didn’t work.

Feminist groups have placed large posters outside department stores that read, “Don’t let us become a society with sex and without love.”