Last month, I sat in a dimly lit, sour-smelling brothel and watched a group of men grabbing and pawing and touching teenagers dressed as half-naked school girls. Some of them wore pigtails to enhance the appearance of childishness, and they all rocked back and forth, with blank faces, to no beat in particular on an up-lit stage.
Just rock step, rock step, rock step, forward and back, in tiny pleated skirts and towering heals, until some guy on the outskirts of the bar would pick them by number and they would be called down to sit on his lap for a while, or maybe leave with him for the hour. I watched a timid girl, repeatedly pulling her long hair forward to cover her exposed breasts, getting pointers from one of the veterans. “Rock step, rock step, rock step. You got it.”
Anyone you know?
That would be awkward.
I was supposed to be looking at the girls. I was supposed to be looking for the things The Exodus Road’s undercover investigators told us they look for when they do “level one surveillance,” the little clues that can identify brothels with underage girls, and brothels who hold and sell women against their will, and brothels who traffic kids in from other countries.
But I was staring at the men. I couldn’t help it. In the Red Light districts of Southeast Asia, the brothel’s guests hail from all over the world; white, black, asian, latino, American, European, African, Australian, Indian, Russian. You name it. You’ll find sharply dressed business men and dirty hippies, muscle bound bros and scrawny geeks, old creepy pedophile looking dudes and young hot good looking guys—all there for the same thing.
Some of them don’t even bother to take off their wedding rings.
I want to tell you that when I looked around at the faces of all those men, I saw evil. And maybe I did in some of them, but mostly I saw broken … I saw lonely … I saw addicted … I saw injured …
I saw men who believe the lie that wanting to have sex with a really young girl is normal. I saw groups of guys who believe the lie that “boys will be boys” and this is what boys do on a work trip. I saw men who could barely contain their shame, and I saw men doing shameless things. I saw them trying to drown their own brokenness in beer and bury it in boobs. I saw them pretending that paying for an intended act of love is the same as being loved. I saw the fear of rejection that lives in every man’s heart made manifest. I watched it spill out and come to life in an eager willingness to degrade and abuse another human being, to devalue a soul, in exchange for a brief moment of pleasure—one minute to forget the pain of being fragile.
And maybe this sounds weird, but I can actually get my head around that. I’m not kidding. I can understand what drives it, for I, too, am broken, and I, too, am guilty of letting the shards of my shattered spirit cut their way to the surface of my life and hurt people. That kind of darkness isn’t foreign to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong; sitting across from a greasy 63-year-old who’s groping a 17-year-old who looks like a 13-year-old still fills me with a special kind of rage (and it does make me wish I knew how to braid a legit, for real, Jesus-style bullwhip for some legit, for real, Jesus-style table flippin’ and ass kickin’).
