How old was your grandfather when he married your grandmother?
How was that marriage arranged?
How did she feel that night?
Of course, this doesn’t apply to all of our grandmothers, maybe your grandfather was one of the ‘ok’ ones, but when you read in horror about the “Epstein files”, those stories of hyper-elite sex trafficking, royal intrigue and billionaire cabals controlling the world, it is essential to make sure we don’t fixate our gaze on the Hollywood stars and miss what’s happening in the soil right in front of us, in our communities, our social circles, sometimes within our own families.
Each Village Its Own Epstein
The revelations of the Epstein Network has provided an insight into how these elite networks of sexual abusers function. While this may come as a shock to the respectable journalist/ commentariat class, the existence and prevalence of such networks have been long known by generations of poor women of Southeast Asia, a people who have been fetishised, captured, trafficked and commodified for centuries. In this sense, The Epstein revelations reveal nothing new to us. These networks are not unique to the international elite, the crimes of class society are synchronous, there is an Epstein in Singapore, there is an Epstein in Bangkok, an Epstein in Kalasin, an Epstein in Surat Thani and they are persistent and entrenched at the hyper local level
We have written extensively this year on the power of local elite networks amid the rise of the Bhumjaithai Party, marking a new mode of fascist organising in Thailand. We described this as a village-cabal model, whereby a patronage network built off of hyper-localised village elite’s stretches upwards right to the prime minister’s office. The mechanisms in organising these patronage networks are based on shared trust, shared complicity and a shared elite class consciousness- as was the case with the Epstein network.
Recently, there has been much debate around whether the Epstein network was based on sexual abuse or whether the sexual abuse was a mechanism of ensuring this in-group loyalty and complicity. Vulgar Marxists would likely argue the latter, however, looking at the history of fascist movements, sexual violence against women is always a recurring cornerstone, this can be seen in the Nazi Eugenics program- the SS Lebensborn, which amounted to little more than a well organised rape network, much like the more unofficial animal-husbandry style proto–eugenics culture of the American antebellum South. These two periods of Western history are likely the most repetitively covered by popular literature and academia, yet the organising principle of patriarchy is often overlooked in, even Marxist, histories, relegating these mass-rape programs to a dark corner of popular memory. We, however, would argue that sexual violence against women is not just a biproduct of fascist organising, but rather a reason to organise a fascistic model: That only through the subjugation of more than half of the global population, through the violent alienation of their body transforming it into a commodity, may the fascist model be as efficiently running as it currently is.
Again, the crimes of class society are synchronous. The great pyramid of this society is built on the backs of the poor and destitute in the Global South. Each tier of exploitation reaches another level, with the peak extending up to the Global North- much like the trail of global supply chains. This is a concept we’ve grappled with for years at DinDeng; coming to terms with the varying nature of class exploitation in the South vs the North: Workers in the Global North are of course exploited, but they functionally live in some form of social democracy, while those in the Global South largely exist within varying forms of a fascist colonial mode of organising. That is to say, while the poor of the Global North are exploited, they themselves are still, willingly or not, participatory in the hyperexploitation of the Global South.
The same pattern is paralleled in the shape of global patriarchy, seen in the case of a Malaysian woman who was stalked at home for 8 years before she went to the UK- her stalker following her there- where he was finally arrested. As one Malaysian DinDeng member, who is currently in the UK recently said “as bad as men are here, compared to back home, if they rape me at least maybe the police might do something”. This is not to praise the global north, much as we would not praise the protections the workers in the labour aristocracy of the global north enjoy. Rather we hope to better understand the vast gulf in how women experience gendered violence between North and South.
Surat
The peaks of this global patriarchal network of sexual violence against women was recently made visible to us via the Epstein releases. Again though, there is an Epstein network in every valley of the Global South. Take for example, the experience of another one of our DinDeng editors, who was working at a hospital in rural Surat Thani province when a local-elite-pedophile ring was exposed after several victims ended up in the doctors care. The hospital staff (including our editor) were under immense pressure to keep quiet, not raise the alarm and just treat the victims symptoms. Victims and perpetrators of organised crime were fairly commonplace at the hospital, where, for example, victims of gangland executions would often end up in the morgue. The ubiquity of organised crime was a barely open secret but when a 14 year old girl is brought in with numerous STI’s and clear signs of sexual violence the hospital staff refused to keep quiet.
Quoting from BBC Thai:
The 79-year-old chairman of a savings cooperative, the vice chairman of a sub-district administrative organization (SAO), a teacher, a doctor, and a soldier, along with the son of a former politician, were among those arrested by Surat Thani police on May 4th for purchasing sexual services. This brings the total number of suspects, including both buyers and those who procured sexual services, to 12. In a police press release, it was stated that girls aged 13-15 in Surat Thani province were victims of the prostitution ring … The court approved arrest warrants for a total of 41 suspects: 12 pimps, 28 clients, and 1 accomplice. Ten children under the age of 15 were also taken into protection.
At the time of writing, as far as are aware, only 3 seemingly lower level members of the network have been prosecuted. The case has also received zero international media coverage and relatively little domestic Thai language coverage. This may be because within the immediate years surrounding the incident there were several similar cases of local-elite pedophile networks in Salaburi, in Kalasin and in Khon Kaen, none of which were prosecuted to the obvious ends. All of these cases revolved around local school administrators, local politicians, community leaders and local capitalists- the lack of prosecutions in all of these cases indicate that there is clearly a general tolerance for these networks.
Such networks have existed within the higher elite classes Kingdom of Thailand for centuries from the royal palace’s famous harems to “modern times” like that of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat who had scouts across the country procuring teenage girls for him. Even today, Sarit’s sexual violence is written about in glowing terms, as something of a paternalistic caregiver; “Field Marshal Sarit not only had numerous concubines, but treated them with great luxury and care.”
To our opening question: How old was your grandfather when he married your grandmother? Was she sixteen? Seventeen? Younger? It’s widely known that large age gap marriages were typical in their generation. Many of us growing up will know of family stories with grandfathers often ten, fifteen, even twenty years older than their brides. The grandmothers themselves rarely talked about it. Nobody asked them how they felt about marrying a man that much older. The assumption was simply that this was how things worked.
Often the marriage was arranged between families, or at least strongly encouraged by parents who saw a good match in practical terms. Maybe your grandparents’ marriage was loving. Maybe your grandfather was one of the kind ones. But the structure itself tells us something: a teenage girl marrying an older man, moving into his house, expected to bear children and keep quiet about whatever she might have felt. Her consent was assumed. Her feelings were beside the point.
These weren’t exactly the monsters of Epstein and Sarit. They were ordinary men doing what ordinary men did in that time and place. But the ordinariness is exactly the point. The same society that allowed a field marshal like Sarit to openly procure teenage girls, the same society that looked away when local elites in Surat Thani preyed on children, also produced countless everyday marriages built on the same fundamental imbalance of power and age. The grandfather who married a teenager in rural Thailand in the 1940s wasn’t running a pedophile ring. But he was participating in the same practice: that young women’s bodies were available to older men, that their consent wasn’t necessary, that their feelings that night simply didn’t matter.
Indeed, it was under Sarit’s tenure post-WWII that Thailand and much of the rest of fascist Asia began selling their women to the West. Singapore, South Korea, The Phillipines, South Vietnam and Thailand, all hotbeds of anti-communism, all hot-spots for sex trafficking of women for the American G.I’s and Commonwealth squaddies in their fight against the region’s peasantry- Also see their imperial station bases in Okinawa, Guam and Hawaii.
Base Women & The Workhouse
Wherever imperial anti-communism programs were launched class immiseration and sexual violence immediately followed. The militarised zones scattered across the region were not only about troop deployments or strategic military doctrine, they were, and remain, sites where patriarchal control is enforced through the commodification of women and sexual violence. Cynthia Enloe’s work in Bananas, Beaches and Bases examines the “base women” as central to the functioning of these imperial outposts.
When imperial militaries arrive they necessitate a specific social order. They require a steady supply of women to perform the roles that sustain the masculine order and patriarchal morale of the soldier: the wives waiting on base, the domestic workers servicing the quarters, and crucially, the prostituted women confined to the bars, massage parlours and brothels that always seem to spring up outside the gates. Rather than the unfortunate side effects of war; they are the deliberate, planned-for infrastructure of a patriarchal military order.
Sarit’s military state, for example, actively engineered this as a matter of national policy. In 1959, even before the major troop buildups, a group of 500 American soldiers were transported from their base in Korat to the small fishing village of Pattaya Chonburi, a trip facilitated by local authorities and effectively marking the village as a designated site for “rest and recreation”. This was formalised in 1964 when the Thai and US governments signed an official agreement to provide R&R facilities for GIs, a pact that transformed Pattaya and other areas into sprawling “entertainment” complexes. Between 1964 and 1976, approximately 700,000 international soldiers arrived annually for week-long stays during the American assault on Indochina.
Thai capitalists and local elites responded to this guaranteed stream of customers by rapidly constructing an extensive network of bars, nightclubs, massage parlors, and brothels around the bases. Thanks to the complete lack of protection for women workers, local “entrepreneurs” recognised that selling sex was extraordinarily profitable compared to other forms of labour.
This was not confined to what the West calls The Cold War. Following the collapse of the USSR and the withdrawal of Vietnamese support for the post-Khmer Rogue Socialist State in Cambodia in 1992 the United Nations sent in UNTAC to govern the country. This was a $3 billion “peacekeeping” mission that became a vector of colonial plunder and social catastrophe. When the mission arrived it immediately imposed neoliberal shock therapy, modelled on Perestroika, as state enterprises were auctioned to foreign investors.
The mission systematically erased the decade of progress in education, healthcare, agriculture and infrastructure achieved under the Cambodian Socialist state, while legitimising the return of exiled elites. Schools and clinics built through collective effort were handed over to private interests, while UN officials encouraged the resurgence of reactionary political factions, such as returning the monarchy to power.
The mission’s 22,000 personnel, overwhelmingly Western, Thai, and Japanese troops, triggered a public health disaster: UN soldiers frequented newly opened Cambodian brothels where HIV/AIDS infection rates soared from an estimated 0.1% in 1991 to 4% by 1995, creating an epidemic that still scars the country to this day. United Nations chief administrator Yasushi Akashi explicitly condoned this at the time when he famously said “Eighteen-year-old hot-blooded soldiers who come in from the field after working hard should be able to chase after young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.”
The state and its capitalist backers, in other words, become pimps. This dynamic extends far beyond the bases themselves. The still existing “hospitality” industry was subsequently built around them; the hotels, the bars, the tourist economies, grafted onto this foundational violence. As Enloe shows; networks of capitalists and government officials from Bangkok to Manila learned to market “exotic” femininity as a national selling point, a policy decision with direct lineage from the base-town brothel to the global sex tourism industry.
Collaborators
Military means were only a relatively small part in the great assault on Asian Communism. During the past century, vast efforts were made to re-shape Asian economies to combat social liberation. Countries like Thailand embarked on its export-oriented industrialisation push from the mid-1960s, it required its workforce to be drawn from a poor of existing dispossession in the rural areas to bring them into the urban core. A workforce which was cheap, disposable, and desperate. It found her in the young women of the villages who migrated by the millions to the factories of Bangkok and the Eastern Seaboard where the U.S bases were located. In the industries that sprung up, not coincidentally, factory owning capitalists typically prefered women.
On the factory floor labour exploitation was the visible mechanism with wages set at bare survival levels, mandatory overtime stretching over twelve hours, bodies treated as mechanical inputs to be used up and discarded. Yet beyond the labour exploitation ran a synchronous current of sexual exploitation. Owners and supervisors (always men) understood that workers could be leveraged into sexual compliance. Promotion was dangled in exchange for sex. Refusal meant termination, destitution and often rape regardless. The threat of sexual violence quite literally built into the disciplinary/incentive apparatus. Factory work often meant sexual harassment as a condition of employment, and wages that barely sustained life. The alternative, for many, was the commercial sex trade which may be different in form but identical in structure: the rape of the body for survival.
It was this race to the bottom that led to one of the biggest single day femicides in history in the 1993 Kader Factory Fire. The factory owners had implemented a regime of hyper-exploited labour by hiring exclusively young domestic migrant women from rural areas, whose perceived docility and disposability made them ideal for a flexible, low-wage workforce making toys for the Disney Corporation. In the factory itself, fire exits drawn in the blueprints were never constructed, and the existing exit doors were locked. When the fire broke out, it killed 188 (174 women and teenage girls).
These women were placed at the precise intersection of capitalist production and patriarchal devaluation: their labour was exploited for profit, and their lives were deemed worthless because, as young poor women, their primary role in this global supply chain was to be expendable. It was a form of femicide, not in the narrow sense of intimate partner murder, but as a systemic, structural femicide bound in economic violence. Femicide here extends beyond the physical act of killing to encompass the social conditions that lead to the decision to lock the exits. It was intentional, to prevent women from leaving the workplace, an institutional mechanism that marked these workers as expendable. The young women working at Kader were placed in the flames by a system that calculated their lives as less valuable than the profits generated from toy production.
The immiseration of the peasantry was ironically the precondition for both the necessity of communist revolution and the development of vast networks of gendered & sexual violence to combat it.
The Threat of Women
Two starkly different paths emerged in the region. One in the socialist revolutions of Laos, China and Vietnam, placed women’s liberation at the centre of national liberation. The other, imposed by Western imperialism and its local compradors, sought to systematically dismantle women’s autonomy and rendered their bodies a resource to be extracted.
In French Hanoi, colonial rule created an “openly predatory sexual culture“. The French community in the 1890s was 90 to 95 percent men, administrators, settlers, merchants- all holding unprecedented power over Vietnamese women. Colonialism’s racial hierarchies combined with French Third Republic misogyny to give white men license that would have been unthinkable in metropolitan France, where sexual violence was a structural feature of colonial life.
When the Vietnamese Communist Party was founded in 1930, its first Political Platform declared “equality between men and women” as a fundamental principle. The leadership understood that liberation could not be partial: In Ho Chi Minh’s book The Revolutionary Path, which laid out the blueprint for the revolution he wrote “women make up the majority of the people’s forces, but they are oppressed and suffer profoundly, so they always keep the fires of the revolutionary spirit burning. The revolutionary cause cannot succeed without the participation of women”. “If we don’t liberate women, we won’t liberate half of the human race”. Ho Chi Minh himself was even demonised by American anti-communists for executing rapists within the ranks of the Vietnamese communist movement, a telling recognition of patriarchal class consciousness.
The “Long-Haired force” during the 1980 General Uprising in Ben Thre province was a name given to the Southern women’s force during the U.S. resistance era. During that period, women were integral to almost all fronts of political and armed struggles. They engaged in direct confrontations, participated in building combat communes and hamlets, took part in guerilla fighting, defended villages, transported the injured ammunition, operated as a communication unit, supplied soldiers with essentials and concealed them from the enemy’s detection, to name a few. Despite facing repression, imprisonment, torture, and even death, the long haired force remained steadfast, unwavering in their will to fight, making a significant contribtion to the overall victory of the nation.
In pre-revolutionary China, during the Qing era, patriarchy was codified into law and custom. The sale of women into concubinage prostitution and servitude was common practice, with daughters treated as property to be bought and sold. Footbinding deliberately crippled women to enforce dependency and chastity, quite literally restricting movement to the home and rendering generations physically incapable of independence. Following the Qing’s collapse much of the country was thrown into a space of warlordism, the lack of central authority left women exceptionally vulnerable to sexual violence as regional armies captured, abused, raped, conscripted and displaced mass civilian populations with absolute impunity.
Immediately after the Communist Party founded the People’s Republic however, the 1950 Marriage Law abolished polygyny, child betrothal, bride-purchasing and footbinding, granting women equal rights to divorce, property, and free choice in marriage. Pimp’s were quite literally executed. Mao’s 1955 declaration that “women hold up half the sky” followed campaigns for equal pay in collective agriculture, which tripled women’s participation when implemented.
Western imperialism needed Asian women’s bodies for the same reason socialist revolutions needed Asian women’s liberation: both understood that the status of women is fundamental to the organisation of society. Imperialism required women to be cheap, available, disposable. Their exploitation was a precondition for the masculine soldier and the profit of the capitalist. Socialist revolution required women educated, organised, conscious. Their liberation was a precondition for national independence and social transformation.
This is why Western powers fought so relentlessly to contain and destroy Asian socialism. Societies that had begun the long process of women’s liberation posed a threat to an imperial order built on their subjugation. With the fundamental violence on which the state and economy was built, it is then no surprise that Thailand today, depending on the methodology, has the world’s largest women’s incarceration rate.
Oftentimes this is painted as a simple story of “local” victims and “foreign” perpetrators, but over the decades we can see the development of a deeper, internationalised collaboration between imperial militaries and local patriarchal networks. Just as systems of capital and labour subjugation were forcibly imposed on the region, so too were these patriarchal systems. This is not to say that there was no labour subjugation or patriarchy before the arrival of Western warships, but, just as how countries like Thailand were forced by Western powers from a Feudal Mode of Production into an Imperial Capitalist Mode so too were the patriarchal systems modernised as a matter of codependence between the capitalist and the patriarchal. This gunship development of capitalism and modernist patriarchy were very much involuntary impositions on Thailand’s women and Thailand’s poor.
Networks
It is through seeing the full breadth and depth of this mass-model of the patriarchal-violence-industrial complex that its form begins to take shape. We can picture it as something of a pyramid, with distinct building blocks- square by square -begining with the base, supporting the structure as it towers upwards to the top. Each square its own network, each dependent on the square next to his, as well as above and below. At the bottom we have the lowly blocks of hyper-local elites in Surat Thani or Kalasin, at the top we have the Epsteins of the world.
The hyper-exploitation of women as a political class serves as a class signifier for many powerful men on the hyper-local level. They’re able to identify themselves within the symbolic order to other individuals higher up the pyramid. As a result, they organise themselves into a patriarchal patronage network where they can easily close “business” deals, neutralise local resistance, and ensure the structure of the pyramid remains cohesive for as long as possible.
It is through this pyramid network model that women are sent up and down the structure. In Epstein’s emails we can see communication between his proxy’s and fixers in Thailand. Referring to the scale of a children’s charity of one Thai Royal Philanthropist; Mom Luang Rajadarasri Jayankura, a redacted sender writes “the one million children is a massive pool to tap into”. Make of that what you will.
These networks can be explicit like that of Epstein and that of Surat, but they can also be more informal, even semi-official/legal. See, as a micro-example, the Faroe Islands (Kingdom of Denmark) where a “gender deficit” has led to Thai and Filipina women making up the largest minority group on the Islands having been exported from their home countries as “wives” via matchmaking services, a form of women trafficking that skirts the legal and social boundaries of acceptability. The same can be seen across the global north, whereby the gender demographics of Thai and Filipino migrants swing massively towards women over men (63% of Thai migrants to the UK were settled as “wives” while only 3% were settled as “husbands”). We can also see, in the available research, the massive age gap prevalence between married Thai and Filipina nations with Swedish men. These are relationships which are seen as voluntary within the eyes of the law. But given the history of coordinated mass-gendered political violence in places like Thailand, like the Epstein networks trafficking of models for work, this can not be seen as anything other than women-trafficking by other means.
Destroy the Base
Our grandfather’s age at marriage, the arrangement of that union, the feelings of that grandmother on her wedding night, these seemingly personal questions become something far more sinister when placed within the global architecture of patriarchal violence we have traced. They are the micro-foundations of the pyramid, the local squares upon which the entire structure rests. For every Epstein whose name appears in unsealed court documents, there are endless numbers of village chiefs, school administrators, and local politicians whose crimes never see international headlines or courtrooms, whose networks function with the quiet tolerance of communities that have forcibly learned that some violence is simply the cost of social order.
What we have attempted to demonstrate is not merely that sexual violence exists at all levels of society, but that it exists as a coordinated system. A synchronous, multi-tiered apparatus of exploitation that mirrors the global supply chains of capital itself. From the GI demanding “rest and recreation” outside his base in Korat, to the global elites in the Epstein network, to the factory supervisor leveraging promotion for sex on the Eastern Seaboard, to the UN official excusing soldiers as “hot-blooded young men” chasing “beautiful beings,” to the local elites of Surat Thani whose victims are treated by hospital staff instructed to keep quiet, these are not disconnected atrocities. They are the coordinated functioning of a world order built on the subjugation of the poor women of the Global South.
The socialist revolutions of Vietnam, China, and Laos understood what the imperial powers and their local compradors also understood: that women’s liberation is inseparable from social transformation. The Long-Haired Force of Ben Tre province, the women who held up half the sky in revolutionary China, the peasant women who joined the Vietnamese Communist Party by the millions—these represented a fundamental threat to an symbolic order that required women to be cheap, available, and disposable. The violence unleashed against Asian women over the past century, from the base towns of the American empire to the locked factory exits of the Kader Fire, was not incidental to the project of containing communism. It was central to it.
Today, as the “Epstein files” generate their predictable cycle of horror and forgetting, we must resist the temptation to treat elite sex trafficking as a spectacular aberration; the crimes of monsters lurking at the peak of the pyramid. The pyramid’s stability depends on every block beneath it. We are left, then, with a choice in how we read these revelations. We can gasp at the names in unsealed documents while ignoring the unnamed perpetrators in our own communities. We can condemn Epstein while excusing the grandfather whose marriage was arranged, whose bride was fourteen, whose violence has been rendered invisible by time and family mythology. Or we can understand that the personal is not merely political, rather it is structural. The pyramid of the patriarchal-violence-industrial complex stands because it is built block by block, square by square, each network supporting the next, each silence ensuring the stability of the whole. To dismantle it requires not to be outraged by its peak, indeed the opposite. To topple a pyramid the blocks must be destroyed from the bottom up: A reckoning with every village, every family, every grandmother whose feelings that night were never asked, never recorded, never mattered to the architects of a world built on her subjugation.
–