Heidi Hoefinger, a professor in Science Department at Berkeley College in New York City, with her book, “Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional relationships,” about the strength and resiliency and challenges of female bar workers in Cambodia. (Courtesy Photo)
Relationships between ordinary Cambodian women and foreign men often are stigmatized as commercial or exploitative. But the truth is in fact multi-layered and complex, as in any relationship where intimacy and material benefit are in play, according to one researcher.
Heidi Hoefinger is a professor at Berkeley College, New York, and the
author of “Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and
Transactional Relationships.” Her unique book examines very closely the lives
of Cambodian women who have foreign partners to understand how these women use
intimacy to seek socio-economic empowerment.
In an ironic twist in a conservative society like Cambodia, these women are
often praised for having “transactional relationship” with foreign men, which bring
in money to support their families. But they are also stigmatized for breaking
social norms.
In a recent interview with VOA Khmer, Hoefinger explained in depth the
interaction between intimacy and economic pragmatism in these relationships.
“In this context of transactional relationships…Cambodian women use
intimacy as a tool to initiate and maintain long-term relationships with
foreign men, not only to maintain their love, but also to secure material
benefits,” she said.
Hoefinger travelled to Cambodia as a backpacker in 2003, fell in love with
the country and befriended many Cambodian women who worked in Phnom Penh’s
bars.
That turned into an extended period of research, during which she found
that some women from rural Cambodia end up working at Western bars and night
clubs in Phnom Penh because bar work gives more security, better pay and more
freedom in terms of working hours. But the environment in the bars tends to
encourage female bar workers to negotiate between their obligation to obey
social norms and the decision to seek intimacy and material benefits from
foreign partners, which means having premarital sex.
While it is considered taboo in Cambodia, pre-marital sex is widespread.
Surveys of schoolchildren have found that 15 percent of boys and 11.2 percent
of girls aged between 13 and 15 years old have already had sex, according to
the U.N. Population Fund. Rates are predicted to be higher among those not
enrolled in school.
For Cambodian women with foreign partners, Hoefinger said that love and
material needs are inevitably intertwined. “For the women, emotionality and
love are attached to material needs and economic pragmatism,” she said, noting
that Cambodian culture has its own ideas about reciprocal exchange linked to
marriage.
The colloquial term “milk money” is used to refer to a payment from the
groom’s to the bride’s family, in effect paying for the price of the
upbringing—or the mother’s milk—of the bride, Hoefinger explained.
“It’s still pretty much culturally expected that when a daughter is
married, it brings the material back to the rest of the family,” she said. “So
the idea of these Cambodian women desiring a man to help support her and her
family should not be attributed to some forms of greed—but sometime it
is—rather it is deeply rooted cultural expectation.”
In Cambodia, the line between marriage, transactional sex and prostitution
can be ambiguous, she argued. Therefore, all relationships between Cambodian
women and foreign men are often labeled as commodified and commercial, inappropriate
and inauthentic.
Among Western men there may be a cultural expectation that a woman’s
demands for material goods—jewelry and gifts, for example—represent insincere
love or intimacy. “This is something that leads to mistrust and uncertainty, which
leads to framing the women as ‘greedy whore,’ ‘thief’ and ‘liar,’” said
Hoefinger.
Her research also found that, in some cases, “the cultural
misunderstanding, the confusion and the mistrust, lead to a lot of different
psycho-behavioral consequences,” including emotional and physical violence.
This is even more problematic since mental health care provision is so lacking
in Cambodia.
“One of my goals is that the research can be used to help facilitate the
development of a local and international intervention program that focuses on
cultural orientation for couples, relationship counseling, mental health
services, depression and gender-based violence,” she said, adding that
attention should also be paid to the risks of self-harm, abuse and even suicide
among those in cross-cultural relationships.
By Ten Soksreinith, VOA Khmer, February 29, 2016
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