'Kuta Cowboys' strutting their stuff for lovelorn visitors
'Kuta Cowboys' strutting their stuff for lovelorn visitors
Claire Harvey, Contributor, Denpasar
When night falls over Bali, the bule-hunters come out in
search of prey.
Flicking their long hair and displaying their pumped-up
chests, the handsome young men swagger along the crowded streets
and lean with studied nonchalance against the bars of Kuta's
seedy dusk.
"Do you like me?" one says suggestively to a young Western
woman walking past. "Hello darling," leers another, "want
gigolo?"
These glossy-skinned boys of the Balinese night take pride in
the name.
Their seduction routines might not be particularly
sophisticated, and most look like they have just stepped out of a
early 1980s soft-porn flick, but they take their work -- and
their paypackets -- seriously.
"Kuta cowboys", they are called by the tourists. The gigolos
call themselves Pemburu-Bule or "whitey-hunters", but in fact the
key targets, and the biggest spenders, are wealthy Japanese
women.
"The Japanese ladies, they love Balinese men," says "Donny",
a 25-year-old man who has worked the streets of Kuta for six
months.
"The first woman who took me back to her hotel, she said
Japanese men were not sensitive, not caring. She comes to Bali
every year for the Balinese boys."
Donny, who spoke to The Jakarta Post on the condition of
anonymity, works three or four nights a week and earns enough to
live comfortably. He has bought his own motorcycle and his neck
sparkles with expensive-looking jewellery, although he still
lives with his parents in a village two hours from Denpasar.
Donny divides his time between the Kuta beach-front and the
ritzy bars which cater to big-spending tourists. Sometimes women
approach him, but he says more often he has to do the asking.
"If I see a Japanese woman come in by herself, or two Japanese
women, and they are looking around, you know, at the men, I will
go and sit with them and start talking," Donny says.
"It's very quick to tell if they are interested."
Sex tourism is nothing new in Southeast Asia. Bored-looking
bar girls, some very young, perch on stools in every flashy
establishment in Bali and clamor for the attention of Western and
Japanese men. They strike up conversations with any man who
approaches, laughing flirtatiously at every remark and leading
their prey to the dance floor for a seductive shimmy.
The male sex workers employ a different routine.
Instead of coy giggling and flirting, their manner is
cocksure, even arrogant. Chests flung forward and shirts
unbuttoned to display their rippling pectorals, they stroll up to
a likely customer and give a knowing smile.
American writer Denise Dowling, who has researched the "Kuta
cowboy" phenomenon, says it is no mystery why western women like
Bali boys. The tourists are in a alcohol-lubricated holiday
euphoria, and the constant offers of no-strings-attached sex with
handsome young men are hard to refuse.
"The combination of heat and anonymity is a powerful
aphrodisiac," she says, adding the atmosphere in Kuta is not so
much sleazy prostitution as "humid hedonism".
"Agung," 33, has been doing this for years, but it's more of a
hobby than a job, he says.
"It's fun, you know," he says on a quiet night at the Hard
Rock Cafe, sipping a Jack Daniels' and Coke. "I meet a nice lady,
she takes me home, I get a night in a five-star hotel room and
then I get paid."
Agung is married with a young baby, and works at a tourist
agency in Denpasar during the day. He earns between Rp 600,000
and Rp 800,000 for each night he sleeps with a woman, but now it
is a rare event, he says. "Maybe once a month. My wife doesn't
like it."
Some gigolos charge as much as Rp 2 million for a night with a
tourist, and some cater exclusively to gay tourists. Agung sneers
at that. "I don't sleep with men," he says. "Sometimes men
approach me, but I wouldn't do it -- not even for money."
At another of Kuta's expensive bars, single Japanese
businesswoman "Naoko", 39 and her friend "Kanako", 42, are
clinking the ice in their gin-and-tonics.
The women, both from Okinawa, have been in Bali for a week. "I
come here maybe every three years," Naoko says. "In the past,
when I was younger, I slept with gigolos, but not any more. It's
too dangerous."
Kanako, who is married, nods. "Even if I wasn't married, I
wouldn't do it. I'm worried about AIDS."
Both women say there are vast numbers of Japanese women who
come to Bali solely for sex.
"It's so common that when I tell my friends at home I'm going
to Bali, they laugh at me," Naoko says. "And when I walk down the
street here or sit at a bar, gigolos approach me all the time --
everyone thinks, if you are a Japanese woman, you are here for
the boys. If I was going to take a Balinese man back to my hotel,
I'd want to be sure he wasn't doing this all the time. I'd only
want someone who was really interested in me, you know?"
The Japanese government is also concerned about its women in
Bali. Last month, following reports that several Japanese women
had been raped or sexually harassed on the island, the Japanese
consulate in Denpasar issued a travel warning and banned
organized tour groups coming to Bali.
The ban doesn't seem to have dented the market, however.
Kuta taxi driver "Hendro" says every night he takes Japanese
women back to their five-star hotels with men whom he suspects of
being gigolos.
"Hendro" should know -- he is a former gigolo who gave up the
scene when he was married six years ago.
"I never told my wife. It was never a serious thing for me,
just a way to earn some money. It started when I was young, I
would go out in Kuta to meet foreign girls, and one night I slept
with a Japanese woman. In the morning she paid me -- I was
surprised but I didn't tell her that!"
Hendro says most of the men who have sex for money are happy
with the term "gigolo".
"No, they're not embarrassed. They earn a lot of money, why
should they be embarrassed about it?"
-- Claire Harvey is an Australian journalist working at The
Jakarta Post as part of a Medialink fellowship, sponsored by the
Australia-Indonesia institute.