After seven years of medical school in Myanmar, May finally achieved her goal of becoming a doctor. But a month after she graduated and found a job, her dreams started unraveling.
In February 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup, and the country’s economy, already hammered by the pandemic, started to buckle. Prices soared and May’s paycheck, the equivalent of $415 a month, evaporated even faster. With her father suffering from kidney disease, she grew more and more desperate.
Then she met “date girls,” who were making twice as much as her. The money was enticing — even if it involved sex with men.
“It’s difficult to accept that, despite all my years of study to become a doctor, I’m now doing this kind of work just to make ends meet,” said May, 26, who has been working as a prostitute for over a year in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. She, like others who spoke for this article, asked not be identified by her full name because her family does not know how she earns money and prostitution is illegal in Myanmar.
The coup and ensuing civil war have ravaged Myanmar’s economy. Inflation soared to 26 percent this year as power shortages crippled factories, unseasonal rain flooded farms and fighting in areas near China and Thailand decimated cross-border trade. The currency, the kyat, has lost two-fifths of its value against the dollar this year. Nearly half of Myanmar’s people now live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
This calamity has forced a new cadre of women in Myanmar into sex work: doctors, teachers, nurses and other educated professionals.
It is hard to track how many women are involved in the trade, but women plying the streets have become much more apparent. In interviews, half a dozen women — four white-collar workers who have turned to prostitution and two rights activists — said that more educated women are now having sex with men to make a living.
Following the coup, women were at the forefront of protests. They marched on the streets and hung up their sarongs as a hex against soldiers. There was a flicker of hope over dismantling Myanmar’s deep-rooted patriarchy. But the rise in prostitution is another blow to the status of women, who have been sexually abused by the military for decades.
There is no end in sight to this misery — the junta has lost a lot of ground to the rebels but still controls Myanmar’s cities, where prostitution has increased in brothels, karaoke bars, nightclubs and hotels.
Zar was a nurse at a private hospital in Mandalay, which was shut down by the military government because its doctors had joined the protest movement.
Then a friend pitched her a way to make money. Just be a date girl, her friend said.
Before her first day on the job, Zar, 25, said she watched some pornography to try to figure out what to do. She said her first client was a Chinese man who looked around 40 and spoke little Burmese and no English. At one point, he tried to have sex without a condom, but she insisted that he had to use one.
“It lasted about 20 minutes, but to me, it felt like an eternity,” she said. “It was pure hell.”
On a recent Tuesday, her phone buzzed with a terse message on the Telegram app with details of her next encounter. A name, contact number, venue and time.
She put on a pink dress and checked that her purse had condoms. That night, she earned $80, the equivalent of what she made in a month previously.
“I feel a bit ashamed doing this job,” she said. “It’s not that I enjoy this work, it’s just a necessity.”
This desperation is forcing women to break the law by selling sex. Those detained by the police often have to pay bribes to secure their release, adding another layer of jeopardy.
Myanmar, with a population of about 55 million, has a long history of military rule. But when civilian rule took hold in 2011, a middle class started to thrive. Now that group has shrunk by 50 percent, according to the United Nations Development Program.
In Mandalay, Su, who was a doctor, said she used to be part of that community. She tells of vacations to Singapore, India and Nepal, and dining in malls with her friends.
But after the coup, prices of goods like eggs and toothpaste tripled. She had to deplete her savings and skip meals.
Her daily trials are well known in Myanmar, where the cost of a typical meal has surged 160 percent, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
In 2023, Su, 28, said she decided to send naked pictures of herself to a madam who connected her with clients. When she has an appointment with a client, her parents think that she is heading to a night shift at a hospital.
“I wanted to be a pediatrician and help children, but the coup and my family’s financial situation left me with no other options,” she said. “It’s far from the life I dreamed of.”
Women have borne the brunt of the economic crisis. They already earn less compared with their male counterparts — a study from April to June 2024 showed female daily-wage workers make an average of about $5, while men could earn as much as 40 percent more doing the same job. And the unemployment rate for women remains far higher than that for men.
Garment factories were once a lifeline for women from Myanmar’s villages and were projected to employ 1.6 million workers by 2026. Many of these are now shut and their companies have pulled out of Myanmar after the coup.
Mya, 25, a single mother, said she tried to find a job in a garment factory after her husband was shot and killed by soldiers during a protest in 2021. But no one was hiring. She said she sold everything of value and finally turned to prostitution to provide for her 3-year-old daughter.
“People might judge me, but they don’t understand what it’s like to be hungry, to watch your child go hungry, and to have nothing,” she said. “Every day, I pray for a way out.”
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