Jaelyn: A Brief History and a Look at the Economics of an Angeles City Go-Go Dancer

Jaelyn: A Brief History and a Look at the Economics of an Angeles City Go-Go Dancer
By Korski

A great choice of discount hotels in Japan:
• Kyoto Hotels • Nagoya Hotels • Osaka Hotels	• Nagasaki Hotels • Okinawa-Naha Hotels

Jaelyn, like her somewhat older sister, quit school after the tenth grade, and the reason in both cases was that the parents did not have enough money for school expenses. They did, however, find the money for their three sons, all of whom completed high school, and then headed into a workforce that when you do get a job it usually pays dog wages. Two of the brothers are unemployed, and the third one works in construction—when he can find something. It is imperative that this one brother try hard to find work, for at twenty-six his wife is currently expecting their sixth child.

After leaving high school, Jaelyn, like her mother and father, worked the streets selling prepared foods. This did not add much to the family income, or even meet her own needs. Her father, like one of his sons, works construction when he can find a job. The rest of the year, if he’s not trying to make a small handful of pesos a day humping the streets with what his wife prepares, stays at home and does nothing.

When Jaelyn was eighteen she wanted to try something different. She turned to showing her body on a cybersex site. She has a pretty face and an engaging smile, but her biggest asset is very large breasts. She didn’t like the job, and she didn’t make much money via commissions, and so after one month she quit.

It was not long after the cybersex job that she had an “accident” (her word) with her twenty-four- year-old Jeepney-driving boyfriend of one month. He loved her until she was five months pregnant. He then said goodbye, took up with another young Filipina, and neither saw the birth of his daughter nor has he seen her since. He has never given Jaelyn a peso for the child’s support. Jaelyn has not seen him since he said bye-bye and has no idea where the father of her daughter lives.

Three months after her daughter arrived, and now nineteen, Jaelyn took a job in one of the more upscale go-go bars in Angeles City. She is one of forty or fifty girls who nightly dance or shuffle their feet, try to look sexy, and occasionally smile. If they’re lucky or “show well,” they may get a customer or two to buy a lady’s drink. If they get real lucky, they get barfined, and that means that rather than working until three in the morning when the go-go bar closes they’re either asleep in a foreigner’s bed or do what they must to meet sexual demands.

With Jaelyn’s age and figure and face working in her favor, one might think that in the five weeks she has worked as a go-go dancer at the time I met her, she would have gotten numerous bar fines. Perhaps upwards of ten and even fifteen, one might’ve guessed. In fact, during this period of time she has had only three bar fines, which means she has averaged one approximately every eleven days. On the one hand, this is not too surprising given that there are some 9,000 registered dancers in Angeles City, and perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 are working at any one time. Thus there is an enormous amount of competition for a very limited supply of men, not unlike what one finds in Pattaya. On the other hand, such a meager number of bar fines is surprising, because Jaelyn is not only young and quite attractive but has breasts like few of the girls in Angeles City have.

The principal reason that Jaelyn went to work in the go-go venue was because once she had a child and soon after the child’s birth there was considerable pressure from Jaelyn’s family for her to bring in money. Jaelyn and her family live in Balibago, literally a piece of Angeles City and figuratively a stone’s throw from all the go-go bars. Jaelyn was aware of all this whoring activity before she gave birth, but when the need for a “decent” income arose, and combined with pressure from her older sister who had been a dancer in a go-go bar, working in one seemed a logical choice. Jaelyn’s sister, three years older, had been a dancer for over a year in one of the clubs, until she hit the “jackpot” and got herself an American boyfriend who regularly sends her money. Whether or not this relationship will result in marriage is uncertain, but it is firm enough that the American boyfriend living in the States regularly sends her money. It is money that went, in part, to help Jaelyn not only in the months after she delivered her child but also to pay the hospital bill for the delivery.

It is worth looking at the income of a go-go dancer like Jaelyn to get a small window onto how much girls like her make. What this exercise illustrates is how pitifully little girls like Jaelyn get for their effort, which is due not only to exploitation by the go-go bar owners but also to the cheap cost to a foreigner of taking an Angeles City hooker for the night. The going barfine rate in the spring of 2008 was 1300 to 1350 pesos (approximately 43 pesos to the U.S. dollar at this time). Unlike the barfine that one pays in Thailand, this is theoretically all that a customer is required to pay the girl for going short-time (two to three hours) or long-time or all night (which of the two depends on how she feels and what the customer can negotiate). Many prefer to go all night with a customer because they get to sleep in a big bed and an air conditioned room rather than on a mat and under a fan alongside half a dozen other girls (not all to be sure). Many customers, if pleased with the girl’s performance and attitude, will “tip” her in the morning, a figure that ranges from about 300 to 500 pesos.

Jaelyn gets paid 130 pesos a night for eight hours of dancing and sitting with customers and trying to get barfined. This amounts to less than $.40 an hour. Assuming that a dancer like Jaelyn can get two lady’s drinks a night, this would mean that she is making, because of her commissions on the drinks, approximately $.80 or thereabouts an hour (a figure that includes her salary). Now if she gets barfined once every ten or eleven days, as happened to Jaelyn early in her “career,” her cut from each barfine is going to be 600 pesos, or a little less than fifteen dollars—forty-five dollars in total for five weeks. If it be assumed that Jaelyn performed well in bed, and she went long-time, perhaps she got five to ten dollars added in tips to each of her three barfines. If it be assumed that she spent an average of ten hours on the “date” and in bed with each of her three customers, and each customer tipped her ten dollars, this would mean that she was being paid an average of $2.50 an hour for her company and for hugs and for kisses and for groping and for however much fucking and sucking she was asked to do and agreed to. Now if this income of $75 is spread over the average length of time it took Jaelyn to get barfined, this means—from one perspective--that approximately two dollars and fifty cents could be added to Jaelyn’s average nightly income. So, this gives us a little more than a dollar an hour (to make the calculation simple) that someone like Jaelyn is making, and this is for doing the following: dancing or hanging around in the bar eight hours a night (a little less than forty cents an hour), getting a couple of lady’s drinks and being hugged and groped and kissed for the commissions she’s getting on the drinks (again, a little less than forty cents an hour), and then the occasional barfine where she finds herself in bed with a complete stranger for eight or ten or twelve hours and being fucked and sucking once or twice or three times during the night, depending on the customer (somewhat more than twenty cents an hour averaged out in Jaelyn’s case).

Any sane and reasonable person can only conclude the following: in the twenty-first century a young Filipina in this predicament is flat-out slave labor; she has to be either the cheapest or one of the cheapest (outside of some African countries where a shag might go for a can of sardines) “sex workers” around; and any man from the West who would complain about what he is paying one of these young Filipinas is either grossly insensitive, unable to do the most basic math, or an insane turd about what he is paying to fuck an attractive woman who may be anywhere from ten to fifty years his junior.

Now, for arguments sake, let’s assume that a go-go dancer in Angeles City is getting the same salary that Jaelyn gets. But rather than getting commissions on two lady drinks a night, she is getting commissions on five or six of them. And instead of getting barfined once every ten days, she is getting barfined one every three days, and in each case getting a quite “generous” tip of ten dollars on each barfine (about 400 pesos), in addition to the 600 peso cut of the barfine. Add all this together and she is still only making about seventeen or eighteen dollars a night (the barfines and tips averaged over three days and added to the salary and commissions on five or six drinks). By this calculation, instead of making an average of a dollar and a bit more an hour, she would be making somewhat less than two-fifty an hour. And for this, she is going to be subjected to a lot more groping and kissing and hugging and fucking and sucking; and the emotional toll on her for a mere increase of about a dollar and a half an hour or less an hour on average has probably increased substantially. Furthermore, because of the reputation of Angeles City as a place where a fair number of the young girls go bareback with little or no resistance, there is not only going to be more instances where she is pressured to have sex without a condom, but one can almost be certain she will cave in--or the customer will simply “forget” and she will find herself going bareback. And with all the possibilities for getting an STD, and following this the emotional and financial expenses that must be deducted from the average per hour ‘wage” of less than two dollars and fifty cents an hour that she’s getting.

I suppose if one wanted to be a bit of an optimist or look at the bright side of all this, one could focus on the “bet” or the hope or the wish that many of these young girls entertain. They do want out of their lives of poverty where their “dumb” fathers (principally it’s the man who decides) were little more than breeding machines; and the great majority of them would be happy beyond words to move to another country (much more so than Thai hookers); and it would seem that the great majority of Angeles City hookers care not at all that that the “noble” men from the West who rescued them are well into their fifties or even sixties, and fat and unattractive, and with numerous medical problems, and are simply in need of someone to care for them physically and emotionally, and occasionally sexually, in the winter of their lives.

Is it hard to hear stories where a young girl, or one not so young, has “lucked out” and found a foreign “gold mine” for herself, her child or children, and her family too? No, it is not. One of several stories I have heard concerned a fairly attractive and reasonably charming (I met her) twenty-seven year old woman from the Visayas with three children, the oldest of whom was twelve years old. She found (or he found her?) an American in his early sixties who wanted someone to take care of him. The woman is now back in the “province” with her children and family receiving money from the man and waiting for the paperwork that will result in marriage and the good life in the U.S. for the woman, her children and with a spillover to her entire family. Just as this woman returned to the province, her twenty-one year old childless sister—there are nine children in the family—began working in the very same go-go bar where her older sister struck gold. Poor Filipino families, not unlike many poor Thai families, are not averse—eyes and minds allegedly half closed—to sending more than one daughter into prostitution if it means more pesos or more baht for a family on the margin in a third world country.