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Betel nut brouhaha exposes
disagreement
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan's "betel-nut beauties" are being
told to cover up. And they aren't happy about it.
The girls are a key part of a business worth by
some estimates US$1 billion a year. And the way they go
about their business is bringing Taiwan into disrepute
and possibly corrupting society, some local politicians
have started to argue.
It certainly can be a
disconcerting sight. Along major highways and on the off
and on ramps of the main north-south freeway, the
transport backbone that connects Taiwan's industry in
the north of the island to its major port on the
southern tip, there are a profusion of cheaply
constructed glass booths. In them sit scantily clad
girls, few of them beyond their early 20s. Their task is
to take a betel nut, wrap it with some paste in a leaf
and pack half a dozen nuts into a boxes. Drivers,
especially truck drivers - many of whom are addicted to
the mild stimulation the nut provides - will stop to buy
the nuts. When they do the girls totter out of their
booth on the highest of heels in the shortest of
micro-minis and a bikini top to conduct the transaction.
Or at least they used to. Because such is the
competition to sell the nuts among what is estimated to
be 100,000 vending outlets around the island that some
of the girls have all but dispensed with clothes
altogether.
First it was flesh-colored
see-through tops with no bras. Then the microskirts went
see-through too. Then briefs started to be replaced by
thongs, and now among the keener vendors even the thongs
have gone. Seeing a for-all-intents-naked 17-year-old
standing by the roadside holding out boxes of betel nut
can rattle the most urbane observer, especially when
Taiwan still tries to present itself to the rest of the
world as a relatively conservative Confucian society.
And this, it seems, has prompted an attempt to make the
betel-nut girls cover up, which in its turn has prompted
a storm of protest over such issues as the environment,
the island's civil liberties, women's rights and the
patriarchal legacy of Confucianism.
The move to
make the betel-nut sellers wear less-revealing apparel
started in Taoyuan county. Taoyuan is in the north of
the island and the real excesses of betel-nut
couture, or rather lack of it, are far more
prevalent in the south, so it might seem a strange place
for a cleanup campaign to start. It is no accident,
however, that Taoyuan also happens to be the site of the
island's main airport.
As a result, Liao
Cheng-ching, the deputy head of the Taoyuan county
government, feels embarrassed. Every time he goes to the
airport to pick up guests from overseas, taking them
from the airport to their final destination seems to
involve running a gauntlet on the county's highways of
young girls wearing startlingly revealing clothes. Liao
has been embarrassed enough, he says, and
betel-nut-beauty dishabille, which he called "a disgrace
to Taiwan", has to be reined in. "It's embarrassing that
there are so many betel-nut stands along the roads
carrying foreign visitors from CKS [Chiang Kai Shek]
Airport in Taoyuan county to Taipei city," he told a
local paper late last month.
Hence the issuance
in mid-September of an order for police to start
ticketing betel-nut sellers, starting next Tuesday, for
the exposure of breasts, buttocks or bellies, which was
very quickly nicknamed, in imitation of weightier
matters, Taoyuan's "Three No's policy."
No
sooner was this announced than other counties,
particularly neighboring Hsinchu - interestingly the
location of the country's main science park, which also
receives a lot of foreign visitors - said they were
going to take similar measures. Minister of the Interior
Yu Cheng-hsien was also quick to support the dress code,
if only because some girls were so strikingly un-attired
that there was a risk of traffic accidents.
Almost certainly, neither Liao nor those who
supported his idea expected the backlash that followed.
After all, ever since the betel-nut-beauty phenomenon
first surfaced in Taipei in the mid-1990s - from where
the current president, Chen Shui-bian, expelled it
during his time as mayor, making the capital the only
place on the island betel-nut-beauty-free - Taiwan's
media, which rival Britain's notorious tabloid press for
obsessive prurience, have reveled in stories of the
immorality that, they claim, pervades the industry, with
its overtones of vice and the sexual exploitation of
young women. Of course hypocrisy abounds; newspapers
love to run stories about how shocking it is that girls
should be exposing their bodies while running big
pictures of the bodies so exposed. Nevertheless, the
overall tone among Taiwan's commentariat had previously
been condemnatory of the betel-nut-beauty
phenomenon.
So it was perhaps surprising that the
media, especially the newspapers, became the source of
the most vociferous attacks on the new policy.
Editorialists had little to say about Taoyuan's policy
either way, but there was commentary in plenty, a
surprising amount of which condemned Taoyuan's Three
No's.
The critics have fallen into at least
three camps, with agendas that have found themselves in
conflict. One sees the betel-nut-beauty phenomenon as a
symptom of the wider disease that constitutes the
betel-nut industry, which it wants to see banned.
Another deplores the exploitation of young women, which
it blames on a patriarchal society that devalues women,
and believes that the girls need to be rescued from
their lives, not just told to wear more. Meanwhile a
third swath of opinion has focused on civil-liberty
issues, asking by what right government at any level
thinks it can decide what people can and cannot wear. To
an observer, all the arguments are interesting for what
they reveal about contemporary Taiwan.
First
there is the abolitionist lobby. To them the question of
what vendors wear is a diversion from the real issue,
which is betel and the damage that it does. This is, in
part, associated with the general collapse of Taiwan's
once heavily protected agricultural sector.
Small rural communities in the mountainous areas
that cover two-thirds of Taiwan island used to live by
growing cold-weather fruit, apples, pears and the like,
or vegetables. As the island has opened up to cheap
imports, the favored cash crop has shifted to betel nut.
The problem is that betel-nut trees are an ecological
disaster for Taiwan's mountainous areas. Their shallow
root systems make surface soil unstable, leading to
potentially devastating land slips during the summer
typhoon season. In both 1996 and 2001 such was the
damage left in typhoons' wake that the government vowed
to uproot the betel industry. On both occasions little
was done, simply because many mountain communities are
totally financially dependent on betel cultivation.
Alternative crop schemes have been tried and have as
often failed - they simply don't generate the same
amount of income.
And the damage is not just
ecological; betel is a health hazard. Taiwan's
oral-cancer rates are four times those of Japan, and 80
percent of sufferers are or have been betel-nut chewers.
Yet there is surprisingly little information about this.
Local governments such as Taipei city's are more
concerned with the unsightly red splashes on sidewalks
from the spat-out remains of the chewed nut - you do not
actually swallow the nut, only the juice - than they are
about betel chewing's health aspects.
There is
also the question of betel turning Taiwanese into a
nation of scofflaws. Most betel is grown illegally, on
theoretically protected slopeland, and it is
overwhelmingly sold illegally - none of those booths in
which the beauties sit have permits for their erection.
Legally they are simple obstructions. Yet nobody has
been prosecuted for growing betel nut and vendors are
seldom fined for their booths.
These critics of
the entire betel-nut industry find a measure of common
ground with some in the women's-rights movement in that
they see the position of betel-nut beauties as a form of
sexual exploitation that may lead to other forms of
vice, such as prostitution.
One prominent
women's-rights organization, the Garden of Hope
Foundation, which in the mid-1990s spearheaded a
successful movement to criminalize patronizing teenage
prostitutes, sees the betel-nut girls as victims of a
society only too willing to market young female
sexuality.
"Taiwan has a collective case of
'infatuation' with the vivaciousness and alluring bodies
of young women," said Chi Hui-jung, the Garden of Hope's
chief executive officer. "Adult society, however, feels
helpless in the face of the steadily growing number of
degrading jobs for young women - pole dancers, teahouse
girls, hostess-bar princesses, escort girls, betel-nut
beauties, liquor girls and phone-sex operators. So
society simply condemns women for succumbing to
temptation and 'willingly becoming degenerate'."
Chi thinks such women are being exploited, that
they are catering to patriarchal notions of beauty,
pandering to male fantasies and turning themselves into
mere products.
What is needed, says Chi, is a
government strategy to protect the rights of young
girls, raise their level of values and strengthen their
ability to resist exploitation.
If one talks to
any of the girls themselves, however, one soon finds
that Chi's idea of exploitation differs from that of the
average betel-nut beauty. Where Chi thinks that it's
exploitative to expose your body as part of your job,
many of the girls seem to think that it is an acceptable
price to pay for earning as much as they do. Many of
them are school dropouts with no qualifications who
otherwise would be doing low-grade factory work for a
paltry NT$20,000 (about US$570) a month. Vending betel
nut puts twice as much money in their pockets. The girls
also claim that nobody actually forces them to dress the
way they do, though they admit that competition from
other stands raises the ante.
One girl this
writer talked to, who called herself Ah-mei, said: "I'm
certainly not going to show everything. If I did I could
earn more, but I might get trouble as well. But I don't
see why its OK for a singer or a model to make money
showing her body but it's not right to do it selling
betel nut."
And that is a good point. Taiwan is
awash in the vicarious sexual sell. Girls in
eye-poppingly brief attire are used to sell everything
from computers to yogurt. Given that few exhibition
venues tolerate outright nudity, body paint has become
the cover-up of choice. This writer recently saw a
product launch - for a new iced dessert on a stick -
featuring girls covered only in body paint. Nipples are
no longer taboo in mainstream advertising as long as
they aren't flesh-colored.
Then there is the
entertainment industry, which thrives on young women
wearing next to nothing. Another girl I questioned said:
"It's OK for [Hong Kong singer] Karen Mok to make
millions of dollars stripping down to her underwear on
stage, but not for me to make what I make by wearing a
miniskirt; is that right?"
The girls also deny
that betel-nut selling is the beginning of a slippery
slope. Ah-mei again: "If I wanted to be a hooker I could
sit in a comfortable club and chat to men; I wouldn't be
here sitting in this booth like an oven, choking on the
pollution."
The girls' views closely resemble
those of a third kind of commentator, the civil
libertarian who thinks that it is none of the
government's business what the girls should or should
not wear. Whereas Chi claims that the girls are being
exploited by a society dominated by patriarchal
fetishism of the young female body, the civil
libertarians argue that in fact the girls are going from
a disadvantageous position - young, poorly educated,
often with a dysfunctional family - to economic
independence and the personal autonomy that goes with
it.
Josephine Ho, coordinator of the Center for
the Study of Sexuality at Taiwan's National Central
University, wrote in the Liberty Times newspaper of the
Three No's: "It is not only the right to dress freely,
not only the room for women to affirm the attractiveness
of their own bodies that is being frustrated here. What
is really suffering is the chance for women to actively
strive for economic gain and the opportunity for young
women to make an honest and hard-earned living."
Ho sees nothing wrong in girls showing as much
as they like and finds the idea that an administrative
body has the right to tell people how to dress
"ridiculous".
The betel-nut beauties themselves
have not been quiet about the Three No's, organizing a
demonstration in front of the Taoyuan county government
headquarters with slogans such as "my body, my job, my
own business". This had the immediate result of turning
the three no's into two no's, getting the prohibition on
bare bellies lifted, as even the county government
realized it could not forbid betel-nut vendors to wear
attire that was perfectly legal among ordinary citizens
on the street. But there is also more legal confusion.
Exposing breasts in public is an offense against morals
in the criminal code, but the law says nothing about
buttocks.
What will be implemented next week,
and how, is almost anyone's guess. The girls' reaction
is, however, utterly predictable: the more daringly
exposing of them will simply do what they do now when a
police patrol car hoves into site or business is slack -
wrap a sarong around themselves.
At least most
of them will. One Taoyuan betel-nut beauty was fined
last week. When she asked why, she was told it was
because the see-through skirt she wore showed her pubic
hair. Determined not to let this happen again, she went
home, shaved the offending hair off and went back to
work in the same skirt. She was outraged and protested
vehemently when she was fined for indecency a second
time.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co,
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