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.