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Not new to most but i think its good to keep a perspective on how thin the vernier of decency can be not far away from our shinny towers and clean safe streets lies...... Singapore's forest brothels by Erika Fry Singapore is a choice destination for many Thai 'working girls', but an unknown number are trafficked to remote locations on the edge of the city where they are essentially held as sex slaves Not far outside central Singapore, across from one of the city-state's foreign worker dormitories, is a small forest. It appears ordinary enough - just trees, separated from the pavement by a steep embankment. If one looks closely, there is a trail; and if one is curious enough, it leads to a clearing that even at first glance, appears - part-dump, part-deserted camp - not quite right. There's a spirit house at the base of a ribbon-wrapped tree, and just beyond that a cache of futons that have been flung in the brush. Tree branches are knotted with plastic bags. The site is strewn with beer cans, water bottles, planks of cardboard and a tremendous number of condom wrappers. Yet what looks abandoned and random by day is reassembled and ready for business by night. The futons are brought out of the brush and laid on the cardboard mats, and a group of Thai ladies are brought in - either from forest hideouts or cheap hotels in Singapore's red light district - and lined up on a log bench. There, they'll wait for their customers - Bangladeshis, Thais, Indians, an international coterie of foreign workers, almost all of whom will wander over from the dormitory across the road. During the course of the night, a woman might service 20 men. She'll dispose of the condoms in the hanging plastic bags and wash herself using the water bottles provided. The air will be thick with mosquitoes, and she'll have sex, with ambiance and privacy provided by a tarpaulin, for S$10 or S$20 a session. However un-Singaporean this may sound, such sites - also known as "forest brothels" - are long-established and relatively common in the tightly-regulated city-state. Usually located in wooded areas surrounding Singapore's foreign worker dormitories (these tend to be zoned in areas on the outskirts of the city), the sites serve as one of the few - also the cheapest - sexual outlets available to the hundreds of thousands of men that migrate to Singapore on annual construction contracts (there are an estimated 43,800 from Thailand). A handful of Thai workers who lived at a variety of Singapore's worker sites, and were well-connected with the Thai community there, estimated that several hundred women work in Singapore's forest brothels at any one time. The sites are also the destination for a number of Thai women - by almost all standards (though not Singapore's) trafficking victims - whose migration stories have usually taken an unanticipated and sinister twist. Though the story comes in countless variations, the women working in the forest camps are almost invariably doing so against their will, says Bridget Lew, founder and president of Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME), an NGO in Singapore that runs a shelter to assist foreign workers. "No one wants to be there," she says, explaining that the women have been drawn through deception, and are then held captive in a "circle of fear". "They don't know where to run," she says. "They are in the middle of the forest in a country they don't know. They are scared of the authorities because they are foreigners." While anecdotal evidence suggests many of these operations exist, and persist largely due to Singaporean policy - what many call its "blind eye" approach to trafficking and the strict sexual code that governs its migrant workers (see sidebar) - little is being done to stop them or amend policy. "It's quite complicated," says Dr Pattana Kitiarsa, a Thai anthropologist who teaches at National University Singapore and who has studied the issue extensively. "These women know what job they are on, but can't accept the conditions. It becomes a trafficking problem because the women can't stand, and were not prepared for the conditions. They expect to work for clients, but were not expecting to sleep on the ground with mosquitoes and no toilets." He adds that in many cases, the women are held in debt bondage to the agents who brought them to Singapore. Pattana explained that the nuances of the situation, that sometimes the women intended to work both illegally and in the sex industry, are at the heart of Singapore's argument that this is not trafficking and that such women are criminals, and not victims. Those interviewed for this story (a Singaporean police officer among them) speculated that policing of forest brothels is rare because they are silent, out-of-sight operations that don't cause trouble for Singapore or its citizen

http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/only-in-...e-bustling.html Some people tend to compare Japanese Love Dolls with regular western sex dolls, but in reality, they are on a whole other level. Believe it or not, people actually pay big money to sleep with a doll, at the bustling love doll brothels across Japan. The first Japanese love dolls were created 30 years ago, so that people with disabilities could enjoy some female companionship, but they quickly became an alternative for healthy men simply to shy to enjoy sleeping with real women. A lot of Japanese men are obsessed with anime and manga girls, and these realistic love dolls gave them the chance to actually fulfill their fantasies of spending some time with their favorite characters. Some have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying dozens of high-end love dolls, made of silicon, and feel much more comfortable in their presence than they would in that of a real woman. They don