Tell Cal State Professors Shouldn't Promote Thai Sex Tourism

By day, Kenneth Ng is an economics professor at California State University Northridge. But by afternoons, evenings, and weekends, he's the man behind a website that teaches men how to navigate the "Thailand Girl Scene," as Ng calls the rampant sex tourism which takes place in tourist areas of Thailand. But despite complaints from at least one large group of international businessmen, the University has refused to take any action against Ng, including asking him to take the site down. You can tell California State University administrators about the overwhelming human trafficking in the Thai sex industry and ask them to stop protecting Kenneth Ng and his misogynist website.

I'm not going to link to the sex tourism site in question since I don't want to drive traffic to it, but the main focus of the site is commercial sex in Thailand. And even more specific than that, the level of desperation, poverty, lack of social safety nets, etc. in Thailand. In other words, Ng paints Thailand as a place full of hot, desperate women willing to do anything for the chance to get some money from their rich white saviors.

In fact, he describes the country thus, "Thailand is a girl hill (similar to an anthill) crawling with hordes of young people, half of whom are female," and follows up with, "the naysayers will say its creepy to be hanging around the Muariti Shrine, hitting on the emotionally vulnerable girls desperately praying ... but I beg to differ."

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. It sounds like Ng knows that the women who are in prostitution in tourist areas are not all there because they want to be. But what he and the administration at Cal State don't know is that they also aren't there for the reasons Ng thinks — that Thailand is a terribly, impoverished place and they're searching for a pudgy, 40-something white knight from Akron, Ohio. Women and children are trafficked into the sex industry in Thailand because Kenneth Ng flies overseas to buy them. And because all the men who visit his website do too. And because all the men in the world who visit all the other sex tourism websites in the world do. Ng is an economics professor, so he should know that sex trafficking is an industry driven by demand. And as long as there are men like Kenneth demanding sex, there will be pimps and traffickers kidnapping and coercing women into supplying it.

The University states that as long as there is nothing illegal on the site (i.e., no one has found any of the girls depicted to be underage) and Ng wasn't using publicly-funded computers to keep up the site, they can't do anything about it. Some have claimed that Ng was exercising his free speech as a citizen in posting on the website. Others have claimed that as a teacher of young minds, Ng should be held to some standard of scruples in his personal life — a standard which does not involve encouraging men to prey on emotionally or economically vulnerable women for sex. It's obviously a standard to which Ng isn't holding himself.

I would like to remind the administration of the California State University Northridge that the students you graduate are the most important part of your jobs. You want them to learn English and engineering and economics. But what if they are also getting a lesson in misogyny? What if they are also learning that it's okay to have sex with a woman, even if she doesn't want to? What if they come away from their education believing they have no duty to the world, or the people in it, and can just take and use whatever they see fit? If that happens, will you really have mold the sort of people you want to leave this world to?

Please, take a minute to ask California State University Northridge to stop protecting Kenneth Ng and tolerating his promotion of the objectification of women and an industry where human trafficking and exploitation are rampant.

Photo credit: madaboutasia