Misguided

Travelers love to bitch about their guidebooks, despite the fact that most of us would be lost without them. That said, I can't resist commenting on a couple of things that have really bothered me in both the guidebooks we've used so far.

In the Lonely Planet guide to India, readers are well warned about the "hassle" that traveling in India inevitably entails (in a country with so much desperate poverty it's hardly surprising that a lot of people make their living hustling the comparatively rich tourists) but it's not until the patronizing section on "Women Travelers" at the back of the book that the writers even touch on the elevated levels of "hassle" - aka harassment - that women can expect to face. Even then, they start out with this incendiary sentence: "India is a largely conservative country, and the skimpy clothing and culturally inappropriate behavior of a minority of foreign women seems to have had a ripple effect on the perception of foreign women in general."

Having traveled in India for all of seven weeks I'm not claiming to be any kind of an expert on gender relations in the country, but I can say that when being spat on in the street my instinct is not to blame some anonymous foreign woman who once dared to bear her shoulders in a tank top. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that the sentence "Just be thick skinned and don't let it get to you" was not written by a woman, or at least not one who had spent much time in India. It seems to me that Lonely Planet needs to hire some writers who are willing to take into account gender issues as well as the cultural, religious, and colonial histories that inform social interactions in India instead of casually laying all the blame on foreign women, especially since harassment is clearly not something that only happens to foreigners.

My second issue is with the Rough Guide to South East Asia's stuck up attitude towards the sex industry in Thailand, which seems to be based on the assumption that nobody capable of reading a guidebook could possibly have any interest in hiring a sex worker.

In the section on Bangkok nightlife, the writers display a thinly veiled attitude of disdain, referring to sex businesses as "seedy" and sex shows as "degradations." They then go on to reassure the demure reader that "fortunately Bangkok's nightlife has become more sophisticated and stylish in the last few years." Way to backstab a group of workers whose international reputation brings more tourists into the country than anyone else! Sex workers should be given the credit they deserve for their vital role in Thailand's booming tourist industry, not patronized and insulted by a bunch of snooty travel writers who are supposed to be experts on said industry. Considering the disproportionate number of single men hanging out in the city's backpacker district, I somehow doubt that the distinction between "sex tourist" and plain old tourist is as black and white as the Rough Guide would have you believe.

For an excellent analysis of many otherwise-liberal Westerners' prejudices against Asian sex workers and their farang clients and boyfriends, this article is well worth a read. (Yes, it's also a shameless $pread plug!)