Encountering the large numbers of working girls in Bali in the various bars and clubs is quite confronting. Some bars you go into are wall to wall with Bali prostitutes reaching out to you with their eyes, giving every Western guy the look.
Leave your comment at the bottom of this page. I guess in a way it is like a beautiful woman walking into a bar, feeling sexually objectified, eyes on every pointy and curvy bit of her body.
I wonder if that also applies to men when ogled like that? Certainly I see lots of men making dumb decisions when faced with a bevy of beautiful girls vying for their attention! Once in Bali they must make money to support their child and parents who are looking after him or her. Or they got divorced, and being solely responsible for their child ren must find a way to earn enough money to support their family. One woman I talked to for some time one night had been raped by a guy in her village, got pregnant and her father made her marry him.
His behaviour only got worse so she ran away, and as wages from a normal job are too low to provide necessary funds to support her kids and herself, she became a Bali prostitute. Of course she would rather do some other job, but nothing pays nearly as well, and mostly the decent guys she goes home with outweigh the few unpleasant customers she has to deal with each month.
Others of course are shipped in from Java by pimps who may have found them in villages and given the family some money, and the girls are pretty much bonded labour until they pay off their debt. It is easy to judge these people, but life in Indonesia is hard for a single woman, especially if she had kids. There is no safety net, no government support available, no enforced requirement for fathers to pay child support, so there are not a lot of options for these girls.
