Selling sex and seafarer wellbeing in ports, Sept 2026

 

Today (Saturday 5 Sept) is seemingly the final day of the USS aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Thailand’s main sex destination Pattaya. Then it's back to San Diego.

This is a ship visit remarkable only for all the media interest in what didn’t happen: a newsworthy explosion of fizzing by disaffected US Navy and Marines when uncorked from a floating ‘prison’ that has infamously been kept at sea for 264 days, largely by the US-Iran war.

There had been rumours about people on board being suicidal, loss of faith in the mission, and supplies running out  A break was indeed needed.

Onlookers’ interest was not in seafaring workers’ mental illhealth caused by unfairly long deployments, (which is a matter of huge concern in the maritime welfare world today, not least because it impacts safety and retention.)

Instead the question was whether this part of the military oversea would mutiny against the Trump regime.

TIGHT CONTROLS - DAMP SQUIB

An Abraham Lincoln rising hasn’t happened in Sin City so far, largely because US Navy restrictions on permissible recreation are so tight. Or so I gather from YouTube and social media, reading as someone who’s previously researched 20^th century usage of ports for seafarer sex.

Everyone on board the Abraham Lincoln was issued with a Liberty Brief, which told them that yes, there could be shopping in the air-conditioned mall; there could be cruising down Walking Street, a key site of salacious hyper-commercial neon display, but not in the dodgy red-light area, especially Soi 6. 

No, there was to be no buying of cannabis (legal in Thailand since 2022, but not in the US Navy). Nor could there even be a bit of jet-skiing (too dangerous). Ladyboy hookers have certainly not been mentioned in all the heteronormative footage. So much ‘liberty’ hasn’t been allowed.

ILLEGAL BUT...

If I was a sailor in Pattaya this week I’d be confused and frustrated. What’s with these puzzling fuzzy reminders that prostitution is illegal in Thailand – when actually it’s ubiquitous and blatant?

The Abraham Lincoln’s personnel seem to have got round this by digitally booking up massages, facials and pedicures, via parlours, clinics and spas.

This distanced approach is a substitute for the traditional, more direct sex-buying practices, such as engaging with the many solo street hookers who wait on Beach Road (essentially the promenade) rather as ‘Maggie May’ did in the song, ‘cruising up and down old Canning Place’ in Liverpool.

It’s not clear how much the buyers drink in bars then utilise hired rooms upstairs, as US sailors did in the classic foreign hooking novel “The World of Suzy Wong.”

Local traders in Pattaya, including the estimated 60,000 resident sex suppliers, must have expected a bonanza. A very large container full of customers from global north had appeared: 5,000 potentially desirous people with nine-months’ worth of wages stashed on their debit cards.

The average tourist spend was expected to be 30-90 dollars a day.  You can see what that means in practice if you understand that a sex session is 1,000 baht, or 30 dollars a time; the Hard Rock Hotel would have charged you 83 dollars for a room last night; if you want to buy a can of Coke at the 7-Eleven it’ll cost you just under a dollar.

OTHER PORTS, OTHER TIMES

One of the fascinating things about this situation, for people interested in maritime culture, is that it’s revealed the current state of a key aspect of ports: sex-related work. The subject is strongly linked to alcohol retailing, but also gender-based violence, sexual health and above all conservative attempts to control and deny what some see as disorderly, marginal and shameful.
Events in Pattaya this week – invisibilized and euphemized though they are – augment earlier information. In researching several countries I’ve found that four historical (and related) situations can be seen:
~ The 19th and 20th century waterfront communities where sex was sold, most famously in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Pattaya’s Soi 6 had its predecessors in the Reeperbahn and de Wallen respectively, but its 25k away from the dock. Suppliers sometimes had sex (as part of a kind of hospitality extended to men in the same occupation as their seafaring brothers and fathers. Participants in the exchange were ‘us’, accustomed to the international seafaring community’s rhythms.

~ Post-1920s very young women travelled in from the suburbs and partied on moored ships with seafarers. Less interested in money-earning than adventure, these ‘delinquents’ were temporarily attracted to ‘exotic’ mariners from afar and to liminal itinerant living. They sometimes made short voyages, especially round the Australia coast 1950s to 1960s, and often later settled into paid sex work.

~ In the late twentieth century UK there was now-forgotten diplomatic discussion about what happened to locals’ morals and to decent neighbourhoods when the US Navy was stationed there, not just visiting. Dunoon and Glasgow, in Polaris times, 1969-96, was the main example. So was that earlier ‘Sin City’, at Yokosuka, near Tokyo. Moral anxiety led to trying to binarily separate areas of ‘family life’ and military operations.

 ~ The most telling developments are the consciously created sex campuses in the global south, post-WW2. They were erected outside of town, to maintain a geographical as well as social distance from ‘vice’s pollution’. Women were trafficked there or trafficked themselves, sometimes from thousands of miles away. Like a no-frills holiday camp devoted entirely to sex and drinking, such alienated mass facilities were used mainly by seafarers, the military and posses of foreign sub-contractors. Camp Alegre on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and Olongapo,near Subic Bay in the Philippines, are the main ones.

DISCONNECTS.

Today women selling their bodies in places such as Pattaya are not doing so as part of an ‘all the nice girls love a sailor’ culture. 

They work with sex-seeking visitors simply because all service suppliers need customers, whatever the customer’s occupation. 

Not many port cities today are what you might call briny, when it comes to the sale of sexual services; docks are usually physically, as well as metaphorically, far from recreation areas. Healing? Well, this is commerce.

Women and gender change at London's Baltic Exchange

 

Women. Sea. Authority & Belonging. As a historian of the gendered seas I gossip with a lot of maritime people and then write up accounts of change. 

They tell me shocking stories off the record. ‘You can’t print this, but honestly, Jo, the sexism was indeed that bad. And it was seen as that normal! Listen!’

One of the groups of stories I haven’t yet been able to use is of the Baltic Exchange’s shocking exclusion of women since the founding in 1744, and the attempts to change that since the 1980s. 

The segregation in this crucial international trading and maritime centre has gone on and on, for 280 years, despite many men at the top supporting women’s rights: brokers, traders, shipowners and charterers. Few gentlemen's clubs have held out as long.

But on 12 August 2026 the Exchange announced that maritime executive Sigrid Teig (pictured above) will become its first female leader. The profile of this Norwegian-educated key leader in Singapore business is just starting to appear on social media this week. https://www.balticexchange.com/en/news-and-events/news/member-news/2026/Baltic-Exchange-welcomes-Sigrid-Teig-as-Deputy-CEO.html

This is no sudden initiative, as Rachel Morgan from recruitment firm Spinnaker Global reported earlier. Change-makers have been making moves for decades. As early as the 1960s one pioneering woman, Inge Mitchell, was “‘allowed’ in … even then, they only let her in through the kitchen. (See pic, right).

"She is now in her 90s, and still working hard to promote the maritime industry as one of the first female faces of shipping …. [Inge] was recently named Woman of the Year by the Women’s International Shipping and Trading Association (WISTA).” (https://splash247.com/maritime-missing-skills-talents-outstanding-women/)

In researching women's maritime history I’ve met people who worked with Inge in the 1970s. See pic. And the Exchange feted her on her 90^th birthday:  https://www.balticexchange.com/en/news-and-events/news/member-news/2017/inge-mitchell-90thbirthdaylunch.html

Who was this pioneer?

Inge Vibeke Asboe Mitchell, nee Jorgensen, (1928-95) was from Aarhus, Denmark. Her many initiatives in international linking included for 17 years working as a lecturer at the Baltic Exchange.  

The Anglo-Danish Society recorded her life in a 2025 memorial post on Facebook Facebook Inge memorial

“Inge [L] Mitchell arrived in the UK in … [1955]. She worked at the Danish Consulate in Birmingham for a few years. She also worked as the PA to HRH Prince Georg of Denmark, who was the Defence Attaché at the Royal Danish Embassy for several years in the mid-1960s. Later on, she held a PR position for the Baltic Exchange.

“She was the Honorary Secretary to the Anglo-Danish Society for many years and …  [from 1966] was married to the first BBC News Presenter Leslie Mitchell (1905-1985).”

One colleague said he remembered her “as a very glamorous, elegant lady, immaculately dressed and charming; I think we were all a bit in awe of her.” Inge was famous for her lively stories.'

See the history of the organisation at https://www.balticexchange.com/en/who-we-are/history.html and in the very illustrated book, “The Baltic story: Baltick Coffee House to Baltic Exchange 1744-1994” by Hugh Barty-King, Quiller Press, 1994. (Pics show1918 image and 1990s facade).

I hope WISTA and Sigrid will be organising a party in Inge’s honour when Sigrid finally becomes CEO this Autumn.

Timeline
1744. Baltic Exchange begins
196? Inge Mitchell arrives
2026. Sigrid Teig becomes CEO.

Seafaring women through history: my book just published

 

If you want to know the history of women at sea in both Britain's navies over the last 250 years, then my book, Seafaring Women Through History, may be what you need.

My favourite thing about it? The micro-biographies set as panels, so that you can skip-read easily.

The thing that most surprised me? That although women  pioneers in some other countries are blazing through, UK women aren't making the progress I optimistically expected, ten years ago. 

History Press published the book in February 2026 . It's the much revised edition of From Cabin "Boys" to Captains: 250 years of women at sea (2016).

You can get it from all the usual outlets. If you'd like to help a maritime charity, order it from https://www.marinesocietyshop.org/seafaring-women-through-history_9781837050734.  

LGBT+ History Month 2026: seafarers in Bristol and other ports

 As LGBT+ History Month comes to an end I’d like to say how much I enjoyed publicising to the story of Mick Belsten. 

He was a P&O seafarer who became a key media activist in the Gay Liberation Front and in the new queer publications starting up in London in the 1970s.

 I spoke about him to OutStories Bristol on Valentine’s Day.

It was a delight to know that over 80 Bristolians were there at MShed, including members of Mick’s Shirehampton family (who generously helped me with the research).

The queer history of the port of Avonmouth (where Mick's dad was a foreman on the docks) is less visible than that of Antwerp, Marseille, Southampton, Liverpool and London. That of New York is just starting to emerge via South Street Maritime Museum.   

Mick’s world was swinging London, but it seems that, remotely, he had a role in  Bristol’s 1977 Gay Festival (pictured). It was a fundraiser for Gay News, where Mick worked and whose finances had been hit by the 1976 Dennis Lemon blasphemy trial. 

Anyone who can help add a regional story of a seafarer, however fragmentary, will be important in helping build up a picure of how much the the 1960s culture of 'floating gay heavens' contributed to later Proud maritime culture on land.

For Mick's story see https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2021/01/from-ships-steward-to-lgbt-media.html