Name: Wong Sze Kei

Student ID:20509337
Course code: SOSC1850

The PTGF phenomenon in Hong Kong

Recently, there is an upsurge in the number of part-time girlfriends, also known
as PTGFs. Most of them are students and office ladies at a young age, and they
usually attract customers by posting their photos, often in sexy posts, with
introduction of themselves and price lists on social media platforms like Instagram
and Facebook. A wide variety of services are provided, ranging from dining to having
sex. The higher the intimacy, the higher the price. We can conclude from some
research about PTGFs that two main reasons for girls becoming a PTGF are high
money returns in a relatively short period of time and their hope to meet
heterosexual friends. Yet, the topic of PTGF sparked off a heated controversy about
whether it is a crime or moral, etc. This essay is going to discuss the PTGF
phenomenon from a sociological perspective, in the topics of Crime and Deviance,
and Gender.

In response to people’s confusion about whether PTGFs are breaching the law, I
would say it depends on how they promote their services. According to an interview
with a PTGF conducted by the South China Morning Post (SCMP, 2017), she said that
some part-time girlfriends are providing sexual services with price up to $2000, and
they usually post tempting and sexy photos on social media so as to attract clients.
As for herself, she refused any sex requests due to her moral bottom line. In this
case, those PTGFs providing sexual services may have committed a crime, not
because of sexual services but those juicy photos. As stated in the Crime Ordinance
section 147, soliciting publicly for an immoral purpose is an offence, for instance
advertising on the Internet and offering sexual services in return for payment. There
were real cases that PTGFs are arrested due to this offence, take, for example, in
April of 2018, some PTGFs were arrested during an undercover sting operation by
the police. Therefore, it is apparent that some PTGFs are actually committing crime.

Though the other services provided by PTGFs are not crime, they are actually
deviance, as they are activities that violate social norms of the community. In Hong
Kong, the social norm is that people should only be intimate with their spouses.
However, PTGFs are having intimacy with strangers. You may have a question in your
mind that is deviance of PTGFs abnormal or affecting the community?
 From the structural-functionalist approach, the answers is no. Indeed, a certain
amount of deviance is necessary and functional for society, as it helps societies to
maintain social control over the behaviors of citizens by serving as a safety-valve,
reinforcing the boundary of morality and promoting social solidarity.

On the issue of PTGFs, we first need to know the causes for both the PTGFs and
their clients to overstep social norms. Most of the PTGFs are college dropouts or
from working class family, being limited to perform low-skilled jobs and earning little
salary, so they are desperate to earn some fast money to improve their living
standard, and have some fun at the same time. As for their clients, according the
interview conducted by the South China Morning Post (SCMP, 2017), some of them
are introverted, and they find PTGFs because of loneliness; while some of them are
looking for a temporary substitute companion after breaking up with girlfriend. The
existence of PTGF actually acts as a safety-valve to both PTGFs and their clients, as it
allows them to have a relatively harmless release of pressure from work and love
without further increasing the tension which may lead to irremediable
consequences. For instance, preventing some crimes like pickpockets and raping that
would probably happen if their stress from work and love increase to a critical point.
As a result, deviance of PTGFs is beneficial to society even though it transgresses
social norms.

The phenomenon of PTGF reflects the social construction of gender roles.

Looking at comments related to PTGFs on a popular online forum, LIHKG, it is not
difficult to discover some humiliated comments with foul language involved, while
those foul language contains sexualization of women. That’s how language demean
the status of women. Also, a lot of users on the forum regard PTGFs as a beautified
name of prostitutes and call PTGFs as ‘chickens’, which means prostitutes in Chinese
in an impolite way. All of these reflect that how agents of socialization construct the
roles of gender and trivialize the position of women. Take, for example, mass media
promotes calling prostitutes as ‘chickens’ and regarding women as a sex object of
men.

In short, the PTGF phenomenon is debatable in sociological perspective which we

should not neglect, which Crime and deviance and Gender is discussed in this essay.

(785 Words)
References:

SCMP (2017). Hong Kong’s part-time girlfriends (and a boyfriend) tell their stories
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2100125/hong-kong-part-time-girlfriends-
and-boyfriend-tell-their-stories-why-they