In Kimberly Kay Hoang’s Dealing In Desire, various bars are examined for their involvement in sex work. The ethnography explores the way in which the hostesses or sex workers market their bodies and, beyond that, their emotional intimacy to achieve the best outcome from their career. The four bars in Hoang’s paper are differentiated along a hierarchy of purchasing power, with Vietnamese businessmen attending the most elite of these bars, Viet Kieu or US-based Vietnamese descendants attending the next tier, Western businessmen at more public less restrictive locations, and ‘Western’ backpackers frequenting the most unregulated and cheapest of the establishments. In each bar, the rules of interaction between customers and sex workers were different, as were the ways in which the women marketed their bodies, some transforming their appearance through cosmetic surgery and tanning (or an avoidance of). Different projections of gender were thus performed, negotiated and exchanged with money. In the high-end bar, Khong Sao, hostesses underwent plastic surgery to achieve an ideal of Asian beauty that corresponded to the image of a new global elite that Vietnamese and Asian businessmen aspire to embody. Some women took on more long-term positions as escorts and accompanied businessmen on vacations. In Lavender, the bar for Viet Kieu men, women embody a submissive and traditionalist imaginary of Vietnamese femininity to allow men to assert their masculinity. This is not dissimilar to Secrets and Naughty Girls where women try to assert an image of poverty and dependence, allowing men to embody masculinity as saviors and beneficiaries of the foreign women and to reaffirm the idea of Western supremacy. The women do this with a level of skill and cunning, considering themselves shrewd entrepreneurs conning their customers to gain unseen benefits of their career path such as regular money transfers or men looking for more long-term company. While many women seek to take advantage of the emotions that come with intimacy, many women end up believing their own artifice and thus make the choice to leave sex work for a man, only to be left within months.