Hong Kong Women Use Date-Rape Drugs On Men

According to a story in January’s Marie Claire (posted online yesterday), Hong Kong prostitutes are slipping roofies to businessmen in order to rob them. Some say it’s a way to turn the tables on men.

Marie Claire‘s Abigail Haworth treats the issue in classic women’s magazine style, presenting it as a semi-titillating cautionary tale of risky sex in an exotic locale. It’s set in Hong Kong’s “pulsating red-light district of Wan Chai,” “a riot of neon-lit sleaze” which “heaves with easily available female flesh.” Much of this heaving flesh belongs to “bar girls,” legal prostitutes who flirt with Western men and later sell them sex. Haworth visits one nightclub, Neptune II, where “there are no Asian men (rich Hong Kongers have their own red-light area) and not a single Western woman.”

Dragon-lady stereotyping aside (horrors! A bar where Asian women prey on white men with not a white girl in sight!), the specifics of the cases are pretty disturbing. Executive Simon Garcia says he didn’t intend to leave Neptune II with a strange woman, but the last thing he remembers is dizzily exiting the bar with her on Friday night. He woke up at 2 a.m. on Sunday, minus his cell phone, wallet, and watch. Police found Rohypnol in his urine. And some men, including Finland’s former police chief, have died after being dosed with Rohypnol by prostitutes.

But bar girl Juli gives the unsettling flip side to the old “she asked for it” excuse: “of course it’s bad news if a guy dies or loses his marriage because his wife finds out, but nobody forces them to come to Wan Chai.” She adds, “we’ve always had to protect ourselves from men. Maybe now it’s their turn to start protecting themselves from us.”