The Sexual Warfare of Saigon's Bar Girls 1968
Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2020 11:46 am
Interesting insights into those times. The author Goffredo Parise was an Italian journalist there at the time.
Extracts:
PROSTITUTION IN SAIGON has its own special characteristics. The most obvious is xenophobia. Thirty thousand girls work in the 1,429 bars in Saigon, Gia Dinh and Bien Hoa, but very few of them will spend the night with a foreigner. There are 14,000 brothels in Saigon, but most of the women, girls and children who work in them will refuse a customer who is not Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese women are among the most beautiful women in the world. To describe a Vietnamese woman one must describe the way she moves: she has the natural elegance, the litheness and the authority of a fox headed toward some prey. This prey is the United States.
The Americans, to find a girl, go to the thousands of bars that are lined up, like booths at a fair, along the main streets of Saigon. Every evening they wander around the streets where the asphalt is warm and soft and studded with beer-bottle caps and where the air is a white and poisonous cloud of exhaust fumes. Their faces are lit by the neon signs of the bars — “Eldorado,” “Miami,” “Tahiti,” “California,” “Diamond” — while a crowd of cunning little black men drive round and round them in small cars, circling and manoeuvring closer and closer with a deafening uproar until their victims have been hemmed in so closely that they are forced to climb in. The drivers repeating the same few phrases in English: “Nice girl, very young girl, girl number one, foki foki, exciting movie.” Finally they enter one of the bars.
This is the moment when tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls begin their fraudulent, parasitic work, clinging to the body of a GI like smiling and very delicate little spiders; and every evening, in the darkness of the private rooms, there begins once again a colossal practical joke at the expense of the conventional, industrial and puritan ethics of American civilization. The bars, in fact, are a masterpiece of Vietnamese cunning, a sort of erotic guerrilla warfare which, in its methods and results, can be compared with the tactics of the Viet Cong.
Full article: https://archive.macleans.ca/article/196 ... -bar-girls
Extracts:
PROSTITUTION IN SAIGON has its own special characteristics. The most obvious is xenophobia. Thirty thousand girls work in the 1,429 bars in Saigon, Gia Dinh and Bien Hoa, but very few of them will spend the night with a foreigner. There are 14,000 brothels in Saigon, but most of the women, girls and children who work in them will refuse a customer who is not Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese women are among the most beautiful women in the world. To describe a Vietnamese woman one must describe the way she moves: she has the natural elegance, the litheness and the authority of a fox headed toward some prey. This prey is the United States.
The Americans, to find a girl, go to the thousands of bars that are lined up, like booths at a fair, along the main streets of Saigon. Every evening they wander around the streets where the asphalt is warm and soft and studded with beer-bottle caps and where the air is a white and poisonous cloud of exhaust fumes. Their faces are lit by the neon signs of the bars — “Eldorado,” “Miami,” “Tahiti,” “California,” “Diamond” — while a crowd of cunning little black men drive round and round them in small cars, circling and manoeuvring closer and closer with a deafening uproar until their victims have been hemmed in so closely that they are forced to climb in. The drivers repeating the same few phrases in English: “Nice girl, very young girl, girl number one, foki foki, exciting movie.” Finally they enter one of the bars.
This is the moment when tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls begin their fraudulent, parasitic work, clinging to the body of a GI like smiling and very delicate little spiders; and every evening, in the darkness of the private rooms, there begins once again a colossal practical joke at the expense of the conventional, industrial and puritan ethics of American civilization. The bars, in fact, are a masterpiece of Vietnamese cunning, a sort of erotic guerrilla warfare which, in its methods and results, can be compared with the tactics of the Viet Cong.
Full article: https://archive.macleans.ca/article/196 ... -bar-girls