U.S. colonial rule seeded the Philippines’ massive sex industry

Evidence

It sadly makes perfect sense that Filipina women fill most of the bars and clubs in South Korea. The sex industry boomed in the Philippines after U.S. troops colonized the country in 1898. By the time the Filipino government evicted the U.S. military, in 1992, the country’s sex industry had become one of the world’s largest, with as many as twenty thousand sex workers around Subic Bay Naval Base alone. Given how impoverished the Philippines was under U.S. colonial rule, and the persistence of poverty after the country declared independence in 1946 and the U.S. shifted to less overt forms of control, it’s easy to understand why prostitution remains a huge industry for many Filipina migrant laborers. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 525

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter themes about base economies and extends the base-networks causation thread of this book.