This is going to be a short one, about an experience that got me thinking.
Just the other weekend, my relatives came to Singapore from abroad to visit us and we had to take them around. And needless to say, the geylang food and walk experience was essential. Despite geylang having a protocol of being a “red light” district, the food there is just amazing. Okay, but the focus isn’t on the food.
As we walked along the streets of geylang, spilling with the young China girls and the “mama-sans” calling out to the men, I shuddered at the thought of being in their shoes. There’s this terminology of these young China girls being “hookers”, a name that I feel sounds terrible and degrading. But for many of these girls, it will just be another legitimate job. Some of these girls may not even have chosen this job willingly, doing it out of desperation and other possible reasons. But, as we blessed people do not have to worry so much about the financial issues, we do not realise the pain and difficulties that they have to go through. And this got me thinking. Lets say we were in their position, desperate for money just for survival. Would you even bother thinking so much about your reputation and how other people would look at you? This would be a typical tendency in perception to have self-serving bias. We will judge ourselves more tolerantly than we judge others by over-emphasizing situational explanations for our own negative actions. I believe that until we are really in that situation itself, we will never know how the other party is actually feeling and we should never be too quick to judge.
“No matter what situation I’d be in, I’d still never consider prostitution as an option to earn money.”
Isnt this statement just so relatable and something almost everybody would say? Like I said earlier, I really believe that until you are in that desperate situation, I really would think that prostitution will come into your mind. This is where we, as humans, always make this fundamental attribution error, to assume the cause for behaviour is the person, not the situation. We would think that it is really up to the girls’ decision to choose a proper job to earn money for survival, to not choose to sell your body in a way. But we have to bear in mind the situation the person may be in afterall. It is really not nice as to how we’d prototype these girls as just people with no dignity. I wonder, if I were to ever be in that situation, would I ever consider it?
