Love for Profit: Women in Colombia

 Monday, 12 October 2009


Prostitution in Medellin is rife, and cheap. My boss is friends with many prostitutes, and so for his birthday we take him to his favourite strip joint. It is seedy in the extreme. The tables and chairs are metal, the lighting is obnoxious, and the music is pounding. It's a rainy Monday night so the place is almost empty. There is a raised stage with a circular bar running around it with three poles. I have never been to a strip club, and I'm curious. It's disappointing. You know that you're in a sub-par joint when the eighties wedding night home video porn being played across one wall is more interesting that the strippers themselves. Ron Jeremy is a disgusting man.

Every fifteen minutes or so a girl hits the stage, circling the loop, occasionally half-heartedly thrusting on the poles, and removing her clothes with no finesse or drawn-out tease. This is not quite the Vegas showgirl-style extravaganza that I was expecting. It's sad, and it's not sexy.

Everyone at our table except my boss and me says that they don't like places like this and never come here. They're too scared to look around in case someone catches them seeming interested. "This isn't my scene," they say. "Do you know how ordinary all the guys are who come here?" asks my boss. "They are totally average. All of them tell their families and friends that this isn't their scene, and they come here on a weekly basis."

After their 5 minutes, the girls come round to the tables naked and blank-faced to ask for money. Each man gives them 1000 or 2000 pesos. That roughly amounts to about 60c - $1.30. There might be ten men in the room tonight. Still, an average girl might make 50,000 in a night and in Colombia that is good money - the average wage here is 15,000 pesos, or $8. A day. If a customer takes a fancy to one of the girls they can go upstairs for a more thorough service. We see a tubby middle-aged man follow scantily-clad girl who can't be older than twenty through the private door and I cringe for her.

I want to get a good look at their faces, I want to hear their stories, but their empty eyes scare me. I am ashamed, and I look away. Back to eighties wedding night porn, which is safer.

"It's like this," my boss says. "Girls get paid one thousand pesos per drink that they convince the customers to buy. So it's in their interests to drink a lot. In order to sustain their drinking, they need to take drugs. They work all night, go home to their kids and then need tranquilisers to sleep. Six months of that and these beautiful young girls are strung out and wrung out. They work in places like this for a while but the more addicted they become the lower the standard of work becomes until they end up on the street somewhere."

I've seen the street hookers. In the middle of the day we took a stroll through the dirtier parts of central Medellin. The youngest ones might be thirteen or fourteen, faces painted like dolls. They chew gum and lean up against the side of buildings like cartoon prostitutes. The older ones are in their late sixties and have no time to be coy. "Hey baby, what do you need?" demand some, while others hang out of balconies with gravity assisting the display of their considerable breasts.

Like in all third world countries, the women in Colombia - especially those of the lower classes - have it tough. From an early age they are taught that their ability to get a man is what will keep them afloat. They grow up playing the coquette. I visited a high school in one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods to chat with the kids. The girls were 14 or 15 years old and looked 19 at least. One of them said to me, "the men here are dogs. I don't know a single one who's faithful." From childhood, they accept that men have the power. If a girl doesn't have sex with her boyfriend, he'll find someone else who will. To keep him she does, inevitably gets pregnant, and more often than not he leaves. That age-old anti-fairytale.

Without a completed education and mouths to feed, Colombian women become even more desperate to find a man. The country is reputed to have some of the best-looking women in the world, and wholeheartedly lives up to it. Walking down the street can be intimidating; the girls get made up, take care of themselves, and look askance at foreigners who dress scruffily. They don't understand why a woman wouldn't want to look her best at all times. They wear tight, brightly-coloured clothes like plumage, and strut down the street confident that all eyes are on them. They need them to be.

Plastic surgery here is a thriving industry, and relatively cheap, and in order to stay competitive, many women have procedures to augment their natural good looks; boob and butt implants are among the most popular elective surgeries. I studied Spanish at a private university in Medellín and saw first-hand evidence of girls being given boob jobs by their parents for their quinceañera (Latino girls come of age at fifteen). They need to look good to attract a mate, and they need to outplay, outwit and outlast their competition, Survivor-style.

Prostitution is not limited to the lower classes in Colombia. A study conducted by a university recently revealed that 2% of female students in the Caribbean city of Cartagena consider prostitution to support their studies. "The girls appeared to be predominantly beautiful women between the ages of 18 and 25, from upper-middle class backgrounds. They target wealthy men who will provide them with money required for luxuries such as clothes, cosmetic surgery, cars and apartments." However, the study asserted that the girls had been "spoiled but not loved" and were frequently victims of child abuse and neglect.

Although adultery in ultra-Catholic Colombia is considered a sin, in Colombian culture it has been socially accepted for men because of a belief in men's "inherently libidinous" nature. In June 2001 the Colombian government gave bigamy legal status because it was simply impossible to punish bigamous men. They are protected not only by society but by the women who share them, and the lawful acceptance of the practice serves only to promote further infidelity and negatively affect families, especially children, who look to their parents for models of behaviour. At home, women transmit social and cultural codes to their children, thus becoming 'gatekeepers' of Colombian patriarchy.

In 2007 the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt held the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In their declaration, they denounced machismo as such: "Machismo reduces women to the state of sexual objects, condemns lesbians and promotes sexism, prostitution and trafficking of women and girls, and violence against women [and children]."

The Dictionary of Mexican Cultural Code Words defines machismo thusly: "... machismo meant the repudiation of all 'feminine' virtues such as unselfishness, kindness, frankness and truthfulness. It meant being willing to lie without compunction, to be suspicious, envious, jealous, malicious, vindictive, brutal and finally, to be willing to fight and kill without hesitation to protect one's manly image. Machismo meant that a man could not let anything detract from his image of himself as a man's man, regardless of the suffering it brought on himself and the women around him. ... The proof of every man's manliness was his ability to completely dominate his wife and children, to have sexual relations with any woman he wanted, to never let anyone question, deprecate or attempt to thwart his manhood, and never to reveal his true feelings to anyone lest they somehow take advantage of him."

Admittedly, this becomes a multidimensional concept covering multiple personality traits and behaviors. It is difficult to classify someone as 'macho' or not without administering a full battery of reliable and valid personality tests. Lacking an objective definition, the term becomes an irresponsible way of associating negative character traits with an entire continent of Latin American men.

However, machismo exists and the physical manifestations of it in Colombia are obvious. Gender roles are being played out in such a way as to reinforce the stereotype. To compound the issue, machismo becomes even more pronounced in a country at war, like Colombia currently is, and has been for half a century. The abuse of women becomes a weapon of war, with rape being used to shame other men and bring 'dishonour' upon them by 'soiling' their women.

The prevailing perception on Colombia is that sex crimes are a second-rate violation of human rights. Over the past few years pressure from womens' rights organisations has led to the investigation of 183 cases of sexual violence against women during the Colombian conflict. However, this number is very low when considered that of an estimated two million displaced women in Colombia, one in five has been forced to leave her home due to sexual violence - which could mean as many as 400,000 potential cases of sex crimes in the country.

The situation is not hopeless. There are countless aid organisations working within Colombia to try to raise the profile of womens' issues, and educational campaigns for teenage sexual health. But until Colombian society can take a step back and analyse itself, and until Colombian women teach their children appropriate behaviour and respect, the situation of women will remain the same. Colombia is fighting a civil war, a war on drugs, deeply ingrained corruption, widespread gang violence, a foreign debt of billions and bilions of dollars, and poverty and hunger that is increasing by the day. The country has been teetering on the brink for so long that once again, like everywhere, women have fallen by the wayside. Other things, it would seem, outrank half the population's rights in importance.

"Do you have children?" one of those students asks me. They all listen carefully for my reply. I have already bewildered them with stories of travel and foreign cultures that they could only dream of.

No, I say, I'm only twenty-three. I have to explain that in Australia that is very young to have a family, and many people don't start a family until their late twenties or early thirties. My group of students stares at me, wide-eyed. "Here we start at thirteen," a girl says, looking at me ruefully. "Almost all my friends have kids," adds another.

I am at a loss. I want to give them a pep talk about staying strong, finishing their education, being masters of their own destinies, but coming from a privileged white woman that would sound preposterous. What do I know? I have options. As a foreign woman in Colombia I have control. I am able to choose who I want and in a relationship I can lay down the law, because I have money - or at least, that's the perception. Is that something that many local girls can identify with?

The situation for foreign men is, of course, ideal. Visitors to Colombia find themselves with a bevvy of beautiful women throwing themselves at every gringo they see. A gringo boyfriend is a ticket out. The men are flattered, but they shouldn't be. When your opportunities and options are limited, love is a business - a profitable one.