Why the exodus to South-East Asia? In my view, it is simply a matter of taste. Some men - a lot of men - prefer Asians. What lies at the heart of Thailand's sex tourism industry is the way we sexually stereotype Asians; about the way Asian women perform in the bedroom and act in a relationship. When I told my squash partner I was going to Thailand, he said: "You lucky bugger. Sure you don't want company?" He then told me about the good times he'd spent with "tight-bodied Asians".

Maybe I'm just ridiculously naive - I have yet to set foot in a strip joint - but I was shocked to learn three people I knew had been to Thailand, paid for sex, and thought their actions were sufficiently ordinary to talk openly about it without fear of recrimination. I asked my ex-girlfriend, Viv - brought up in England by parents from Hong Kong - about it. Her words detonated off the screen:"Oh my God, I have so much to say about this." In her opinion, there is "a hell of a lot" of sexual stereotyping. She told me: "We call it 'yellow fever', which I find hilarious, or 'Asian fetish', which is more common. I get it all the time at certain clubs, and you know that guys are only talking to you because you look Asian. Viv had a number of theories about why Caucasian men are attracted to Asian females. First, there is the physical difference. "Perhaps it's the hairlessness of our bodies and the different feel of our skin due to the extremely healthy diet and the blackness and straightness of the hair," she said. "Everything is completely different."

Cultural differences serve to heighten the attraction. "Girls are taught to bring up a family and to know their place; to take all sorts of shit and still be courteous and long-suffering without a word of complaint. "Western guys who look ugly as hell and don't stand a chance with strong-minded, selfish, feminist, materialistic, status-driven Western girls can have beautiful Asian girls falling over themselves to be with them."

The trouble is, the No. 1 dish served up by the sex industry is young girls. The 2001 World Health Organisation report Sex Work In Asia revealed the premium age for sex workers in the region to be 12 to 16. According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the average age of girls entering the sex industry is 14. The poorest villages in Vietnam, Burma, Laos and Thailand are ideal recruiting stations for traffickers supplying children for sex. This practice results in children being either kidnapped or sold into the trade, either knowingly or unwittingly, by their families. It happens because their poverty is extreme and the economic incentives are too good to ignore. The high sums paid by foreigners have made the industry lucrative. A bar girl servicing foreigners can expect to charge anywhere between 500 baht ($22) and 2000 baht for either a short time (one to two hours) or a long time (all night). Hence the phrase, "Love you long time." On top of this, the punter usually has to buy the girl, or girls, a designated number of drinks - usually two - and pay her "bar fine" for taking her out of the establishment. When I asked my squash buddy whether he slept with prostitutes in Australia, he laughed and said of course he didn't. So why did he do it in Thailand? "Because that's just the way it is over there." As he said this, I felt something in me starting to burn. I wanted to tell him what a lame excuse that was for behaviour he wouldn't accept on his own turf. I wanted to know if it mattered to him what circumstances had delivered these women to his bedside, made them strip off seductively and lick him all over.

But my fire went out in silence and I ordered us another beer. He's my mate. Who am I to tell him what to do? He isn't the first Australian to go to Asia for sex, and he definitely won't be the last. He's merely part of a groundswell of men, and now women, who believe they have the right to exploit the sons and daughters of neighbouring nations. Craig Scutt is an author and freelance journalist. This is an edited extract from his essay in Griffith Review 22: MoneySexPower.