"Brucker surmises that Israeli sex tourism, like domestic violence and sexist attitudes towards women, is directly connected to service in the IDF."
Portion below; original story here (via Angry Arab Newservice): http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1041970.html
Moshe, a 24-year-old Jerusalem resident, added "Here, it is the most natural thing there is, that's how they are. They don't know any other way. It is the way they see things, they think that this is the way it should be. When you bring a girl to your hotel room nobody looks at you as if you're doing something wrong, because it is the most normal thing that could be."
These descriptions ignore the pain and the humiliation that define prostitution, like the physical and psychological violence prostitutes endure. Pattaya sees a very high incidence of murder and violence, Brucker said. Some of the interviewees even told him about bullying the women as though it were a natural part of the relationship between a tourist and a prostitute. "You feel that you can do anything," said Eli. "You come and you do everything, all the things you don't do with your wife out of respect, you let yourself do here. Because here they are like a rag for you. If one doesn't want to do something she can go home. There will be another one within seconds, so you can do whatever you want."
"We are our head, we have fantasy," said David. "We want to realize our fantasies, and we can't make them happen at home. With the Thai women you can do anything. You can bang her in the ass, she sucks you off, you can put your penis in her ear, her mouth, her nostril. You can do everything and everything alright. And why is that? Because with my employees, when I tell them to do something, they better do it. So even if she's a really good employee, she has to get up in the morning and go to work and she has to make my fantasies a reality because I am paying her money."
Against this background, it is easy to understand what Pattaya brings out in men. Brucker explains that more than anything, he was embarrassed by the treatment the hotel waitresses received. "These are 17-year-old girls from Laos. I felt the most shame over the way they were treated, more than other things, because I sat with men that they gave service to, I was part of them. You see them smack the waitresses on the back side, people telling the waitress she's stupid or ugly. I sat with them at the table and didn't tell anyone to stop, so I felt much more complicit in it than in other things."
Giving them Zionism
Despite the distance from Israel, tourists in Pattaya bring much of home with them. It's not only the Israeli hotels, with menus in Hebrew. "There was a group of paratroopers who came straight from reserves duty to the island," Brucker related. "One of them said that one day he didn't feel like leaving the hotel so he ordered a girl by telephone. He said 'I called the enlistment officer' referring to the woman who sends prostitutes to men."
Another interviewee, 26, went even further when he explained to Brucker about the ideological messages he insists on relaying to the prostitutes. "I give them a lot of Zionism, lots of Zionism. I talk about Israel constantly, about the army, how much I don't like Arabs and that they shouldn't go with Arabs? I tell them I was a paratrooper and that I fought the Arabs who killed my commander. I tell them that in Israel, radical Muslims carry out terror attacks. Somehow it isn't easy to explain it to them, but I try."
Brucker surmises that Israeli sex tourism, like domestic violence and sexist attitudes towards women, is directly connected to service in the IDF. As a combat fighter who was wounded during his service in the Israel Air Force's elite Shaldag commando unit, and through his work at a facility researching behavior of IDF troops, Brucker sees a clear connection between IDF service and sex tourism.
"You see how we have a culture of personal glorification, of saying that who you are is related to the occupation of the other. This is how people grow, through the subjugation of others. It's possible to see this in the way we don't acknowledge what is happening in Gaza or the failures of the Second Lebanon War. We see these as the result of us not finishing the job, because the resistance of the prostitute was too strong. She said there was a limit to how much you can trample on her."
One of Brucker's surprising revelations in his research was the way sex tourists in Pattaya would avoid or ignore the concept of prostitution, often crafting elaborate fantasies of romantic relationships with the women whose services they had purchased. Many of these men don't pay for the women's services outright, instead buying them gifts, inviting them to restaurants, and sending money to their families. Brucker sees this as a form of denial and personal fraud carried out by the men.
"This allows them to be present physically, while at the same time detached from the act," Brucker says.
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