Angel City, Philippines The girls on the stage are like prisoners with numbers but no names
Tall white men with young girls can be seen everywhere in the bar streets of Angel City.An "entertainer" shows off her body on a street in Angeles City, Philippines, as the pressure to find clients grows as the night wears on. “I don’t want to go home without money to buy food for my kids,” she said. "When I was in my 20s, this didn't happen at all. Men didn't just want to sleep with me - they wanted to support me and my whole family, and I didn't have to work every night. Now I'm 38 "I'm really too old to do this." She later said that most of the men looking for her are over 60 years old.
Girls around the age of 20 don't have to be like their older and sexier counterparts who are "showing off" and showing off on the street. Countless underground stages and bars are their domain. On weekends, they appear at crowded pool parties.
Most of the time, they twirled silently around the display in the underground ballroom; arms crossed on their bare bellies, eyes staring at the scuffed metal floor.
Behind the stage, a 14-year-old girl wearing black high-heeled shoes shrugged and tried to shrink into the shadows. It's been a year since she was trafficked to a dingy nightclub about 80 kilometers north of Manila.
She is one of tens of thousands of girls in Angel City. Countless foreigners go to underground dance halls to buy sex - the largest number of them are Americans and Koreans.
The bell rang and a tourist entered the bar. Under the gaze of the madam, the girl stepped forward and forced a smile. Her knees shook in the spotlight.
Angeles City in the Philippines—a former U.S. military base—has long been known as the "Sex City" of the Philippines, and has a much longer history than Dongguan, which had the same reputation a few years ago. Here, youth or young age is the biggest selling point and hard currency. Girls around the age of 10 abound, with girls aged 14 to 18 being the main force. Those who are over 30 have not found a foreigner to work in. The most likely reason is that they have been abandoned by countless foreigners.
Prostitution is illegal in the Philippines, and sexual intercourse between an adult and a child under the age of 18 can be directly considered rape. But bar managers have countless ways to get around the law. Girls are seen as "pleasers" rather than sex workers, and prostitution is packaged as "fines" paid to the bar by customers on behalf of girls who leave work early.
In early 2018, the always loud-mouthed Philippine President Lao Du joked that tourists would find "42 virgins sunbathing on the beach" waiting for their arrival when they arrived in the Philippines. Lao Du is using Arab terrorists to carry out suicide attacks here, but he got the number wrong - the Islamic Quran says, "Whoever fights for the cause of Allah will be rewarded with death, or he will be rewarded with death by killing the enemy." "Whom will I reward with a great reward?" "The smallest reward for those who go to heaven is a house with 80,000 slaves and 72 virgins..."
Therefore, it is almost common knowledge that a considerable number of foreigners come to the Philippines for sex. Even the Philippine ruling class like Lao Du did not shy away from this.
Statistics show that there are more than 9,000 bar girls (Bargirl, a word with rich connotations in English, almost the same as "Miss" in Chinese) in Angel City who are licensed "Entertainers". The local government requires them to undergo STI testing every week, and some bars even publicly display these physical examination reports. Well, this has become a marketing strategy, which is equivalent to saying that the cleanliness, health, hygiene and safety of our bar girls have been officially certified.
Meanwhile, bar owners often pretend to adhere to the 18-year-old minimum age requirement. But there are even more girls who have not registered with relevant institutions, and the youngest is only 10 years old.
Back in the dark bar, an American man waved the 14-year-old girl off the stage. She told him her name was Rose and she had just turned 18. We all know that both sentences are lies. Only then could she apply for false documents that would secure her a job at the bar.
At this time, a manager came over and told the tourist that taking the rose back to his hotel "short time" would cost 3,000 Philippine pesos or 60 US dollars. Without much haggling, the tourist quickly handed over three crumpled blue banknotes (should be three banknotes with a face value of 1,000 pesos).
"They reminded me of my grandpa," Rose later said.
Of the 30 girls in the bar that night, Rose thought she was the youngest, but she wasn't entirely sure.
"This is normal," said another Angel, who was also only 14 years old. She was abducted by an American man and brought to Angeles City when she was 12 years old. After the American got tired of playing, he introduced her to a bar. He also received a hefty referral fee. Now she is "freelance" with nine friends. All were underage, she said.
“It happens to all of us without exception,” she concluded.
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