On a Thursday night in Lan Kwai Fong (Hong Kong’s center of expat drinking) women can drink for free. To boost numbers on a traditionally quiet night, bars offer women, sorry “ladies”, free alcohol, while men pay. Men who are caught sneaking a sip of a woman’s free drink are ejected.
Presumably, the bars can afford to give away the free alcohol because the men that pay make up for the deficit and more.
Call me bitter, but I think it’s a desperate and discriminatory way for the bars to make a quick buck that in the long run reinforces Hong Kong’s patriarchal society. The people behind it are unimaginative marketeers who would do anything (including pissing on their own humanity) for cash.
The implicit law behind this - fill the bars with drunk women and the paying men will come – suggests the following, depressing binary:
- Men have the money
- Women will go where there is free alcohol
- Men want to be where drunk women are
It may seem harmless to the women who drink the free booze, but they’re effectively offering themselves up as bait for the bars who wish to attract wealthy men who come to prey on them. They become the free gift in a bizarre offering to Hong Kong’s men: buy a drink and enjoy the company of drunk women.
Women become the commodity in a capitalist exchange that boils humanity down to genitals.
To be fair, not all Hong Kong bars offer this kind of incentive, but why some still do is beyond me. It stands to show how far Hong Kong has to come in its cultural development.
Am I reading too much into it? Missing the point? Let me know your thoughts...
#PFHK
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