Stickman's Guide
to Bangkok
Why Farang Whoremongers Don’t Like and Won’t Use Condoms
By Korski
A great choice of discount Bangkok hotels:
• Silom Hotels
• Siam Square Hotels
• Sukhumvit Hotels• Pratunam Hotels
• Bangkok Airport Hotels
• Khao San HotelsThree of us were sitting at a bar on Soi Six in Pattaya. Collectively, I would guess that we knew more than fifty or sixty middle-aged whoremongers, all of whom had made at least two trips to Thailand. By middle-aged I mean guys who ran from their mid-to late thirties into their sixties; in other words, it was a pretty expansive category as we used the term.
One question that arose in our conversation was that of why so many guys that we knew didn’t wear condoms or did so but only reluctantly and then perhaps sporadically. The list of reasons proved to be a rather long one, and probably would have been even longer had there been another three or four experienced mongers present at our table with their own first- or second-hand tales.
A keep-it-simple kind of reasoning with regard to condom use for many guys seems to go something like this: Wearing one doesn’t seem “natural” and if it’s not natural I can’t enjoy it. They might further add: If I stop to put one on I get distracted and take forever to come, and sometimes I just don’t come at all.
Getting off is important to most guys, it would seem, not least for the psychological feeling that ‘coming through’ means that one’s sexual sense of self is still intact. Some bargirls will also feel uncomfortable if a guy does not come, and may say so quite explicitly. A few grouse that they—the girls--have not come through on their part of the bargain, while others wonder—one can be sure—what’s wrong with the guy. Climaxing, then, is important, and it feeds into a number of other common complaints by whoremongers, especially those who are taking (or want to take) at least one and perhaps two girls a day for several days running. Or shag frequently with the same girl.
Get enough alcohol in your blood and it may be hard to get an erection or maintain one, as every man knows. More often, though, the real problem is that it’s either a lot of work to climax with too much alcohol in your blood, or it’s seemingly impossible, which has led prostitutes in some parts of the world to complain about their dislike for “whiskey dicks.” If one is also wearing a condom in addition to having had too much to drink, then it is that much more difficult to get off. Or so it is commonly claimed.
The problem of climaxing is made yet more difficult if one has been shagging too often in too short a period of time. Without a break of sufficient duration, there simply doesn’t seem to be anything to shoot, and thus no climax.
Then there is the well known age issue, and though many older guys don’t have a problem getting and maintaining a good erection, climaxing on a regular basis is not that easy. When the previously mentioned factors are thrown into the mix, there can only be one conclusion: forego the damn condom because, obviously, that’s the problem. Simplistic and unicausal reasoning, to be sure; but such is the way the mind works for most people.
No one to my knowledge has any data on how much more frequent the use of Viagra or
Cialis use is among guys who are above forty as opposed to those in their twenties or early to mid thirties; or on how much more frequent still usage of these drugs is among those above fifty. But one can bet that these drugs and their various Asian equivalents are widely used by a great many middle-aged whoremongers who come to Thailand for the bargirls. The reasons for heavy usage vary from simply wanting to shag three or four times a day (among the youngest lot) to getting one good guaranteed shag a night and not having to worry about losing the hard-on. A widely recognized problem among those who use these drugs, however, is that with or without a condom and with or without a good deal of alcohol in the blood, they generally make it harder to come. While the erection never dies, it can become a hell of a lot of work to get off. Some guys even complain of not only having the urge to pee rather than climax but fear that this might in fact happen. The solution sought to these problems by many mongers is the highly desirable bareback blowjob, a preference compounded by the fact that men generally just can’t get enough of a woman’s mouth on their dicks. My suspicion is that irrespective of the strong desire for a blowjob by most men, its desirability among middle-aged whoremongers is greater because it is seen as a way around the problem of not being able to climax via vaginal sex.
There are, then, a number of factors that singularly or together, and in various combinations, and not just as matters of psychology but also of biology, are implicated in keeping a middle-aged monger from climaxing: the natural feeling of skin on skin; the psychological feeling that it’s not natural to wear a condom and putting one on interrupts the “natural” flow of shagging; alcohol use and abuse; the amount that one is shagging per unit of time; the simple fact of age; and then the use of Viagra or its various imitations.
This list of reasons for not wearing a condom is not exhaustive, and another reason brought to the table this day on Soi Six in Pattaya (in addition to personal beliefs about HIV transmission—often half-baked or naïve) is that in some cases the girl doesn’t want a condom to be used. But this reason, I venture, probably reflects more often than not what a monger wants to believe, and it is often the result of a kind of coercion on the part of the whoremonger who either says or implies to a bargirl, I won’t go with you or see you again if I can’t go bareback. Some go so far as to tell a girl that they’ll pay her more to go without a condom, which is easy enough for the girl to buy into if needy or generally ignorant about getting the HIV or other STDs. Once the girlfriend experience kicks into high gear—monger and bargirl have seen each other a couple of times and there have been some mutually reinforcing assurances that both are clean and free of STDs—the farang lets the bargirl know that barebacking will make the growing love bond even stronger. In the mind of the whoremonger and behind this reasoning, of course, there are all those memories of the times he simply could not get off.
In addition to all of the above psychological and biological reasons for not wanting to wear a condom, several features of prostitution in Thailand (and the Philippines) further increase the likelihood that mongers at one time or another will go bareback, and then slip into the practice of doing so more or less all the time. The fact that there are so many desirable girls to choose from. The fact that the young women are so cheap for the amount of time they will spend with a man shagging compared to anything in the West. The fact that so many mongers in Thailand are only there for a week or two and want to make the most of the experience. The fact that there are so many like-minded men in one’s environment who are only interested in drinking and shagging. The fact that it so easy to slip into the girlfriend experience, something quite rare outside Thailand and the Philippines in the world of prostitution. The fact that the vast majority of Thai hookers seem so clean and innocent compared to hookers in the West. And, not least, the fact that whoremongers only hear or believe what serves their best interest when the issue of STD transmission arises. In other words, it is not just the facts of being middle-aged and shagging a lot and using drugs and drinking a lot of alcohol that turn men away from using condoms; it is also the very nature of Thai (and Filipino) prostitution itself that promotes risky behavior, both for mongers and bargirls alike.
There are several consequences of not using condoms in Thailand and the Philippines. The most obvious one is that both whoremongers and bargirls are getting more STDs than in many prostitution venues around the world where play-for-pay sex is virtually all short time (very short time by Thai or Filipino standards) and emotional involvements, and the girlfriend experience, are virtually nonexistent. To mongers with a global perspective, this conclusion seems so obvious as to hardly be worth stating. What may be more interesting and provocative—and cannot be easily tested—are the following hypotheses. One is that in spite of the number of whoremongers who are not using condoms for vaginal or anal sex with Thai bargirls, the amount of STD transmission is surprisingly low given the huge volume of heterosexual sex engaged in by farang in Thailand. Or, put differently, there is no hard evidence I have seen that there is anything like large or alarming numbers of STDs in the bargirl and farang whoremongering populations in Thailand. Furthermore, few of the STDS that one hears about are of the “deadly’ variety (HIV transmission); and by and large anecdotal evidence and a case here and a case there are hard to interpret. (Because the number of sexual couplings for money is so large, a certain number of infections are virtually guaranteed—the Law of Large Numbers.) At any rate, the claim, the assertion, or the hypothesis that the HIV infection rate is low in the farang whoremongering environment of Thailand—at least as it affects farang--is precisely what every monger who goes bareback “hears” and wants to believe, all the while reminding himself that should he get the clap from a girl it’s no big deal getting cured.
What is not known is just how many of the bargirl HIV infections have come about because of the sex they have had with their Thai boyfriends. Thai men, with very rare exceptions, just do not use condoms <I would have to say that this is changing a lot. This may have been true many year ago, but really is not necessarily the case now – Stick>. Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that this may be the major way in which Thai bargirls are being infected. What adds fuel to this line of reasoning is that the kind of Thai men who consort with bargirls are among those most likely to use drugs and intravenously, and intravenous drug use is one of the better and easier ways to get infected with the HIV. Furthermore, one can bet that some portion of this population of bargirl Thai boyfriends engage in homosexual sex with other Thai men or with farang for money. Gay sex, as is well known—particularly where one is the receptive anal partner—is one of surest ways of getting infected with the HIV if the partner is HIV positive. The Thai boyfriends of bargirls (and the great majority seem to have Thai boyfriends) are, one must conclude, prime candidates for infecting the bargirls that farang regularly have sex with. They are also the indirect but major source of HIV infections in heterosexual farang who go bareback, especially when they do so consistently with the same girl. For oddly enough, it is in so-called monogamous relationships where so much HIV infection results.
Although it is much more difficult for a man to get infected with the HIV from a woman than vice versa (about ten times more difficult), prolonged unprotected sex with a woman greatly increases the probability that the man will become infected. Herein lies the huge negative side to what makes Thai and Filipino prostitution so compellingly attractive, namely, the girlfriend experience and how quickly it mutates into a very familiar boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and talk of love and a future together. And herein lies, too, yet one more reason (beyond, for example, being financially and emotionally drained by a scheming Thai hooker when one falls in love) why smart whoremongers find ways to discipline themselves to only butterfly. Spend at most two or possibly three sessions with the same bargirl and then never see her again.
Of course, it could be that a significant number of the Thai girls infected with HIV got the virus from farangs. For this to be case, however, it would seem that one and perhaps both of two conditions would have to hold. A number of the farang who insist on going bareback or get into the girlfriend experience enough to do so brought the virus to Thailand. Or, a number of farang who are going bareback with the bargirls are bisexual; they were moving back and forth between men and women before they came to Thailand, and they do so easily enough in the Thai environment where there are plenty of male prostitutes in the same areas where the bargirls work. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of farang who are going bareback are clean upon arriving in Thailand; they are not carrying the HIV or other STDs. As for gay farang who come to Thailand for sex they are, I would venture, a group largely apart from heterosexual farang whoremongers.
Whatever the facts relevant to these hypotheses—and that’s just what they are, there is no doubt that two factors in particular promote barebacking (vaginal or anal), or rather make it so much more common in Thailand and the Philippines than in so many other whoring venues around the world: the length of time that one spends with a Thai prostitute in bed for so little money, and the widespread nature of the seductive girlfriend experience. The first contributes to rapid sexual and emotional familiarity, and the second reinforces and magnifies this familiarity. Both of these features are quite uncommon in most prostitution venues around the world. But then, as I have noted, there are all of these other reasons for not using a condom, and if you have a middle-aged Westerner with
a good deal of money in his pocket, and an increasingly clear-headed sense of his mortality and reasons for taking risks with great consequences, and with twenty or more years of verbal and other skills beyond those possessed by a needy, and sometimes quite greedy, young Thai girl, then the conditions are nearly ideal for not only persuading oneself, and the bargirl, that it is perfectly okay (meaning safe) to go bareback but that it is the only way to go.
Stickman's thoughts:I know a number of people who go, or used to go, bareback. One friend once told me that the STD rate used to be one in ten, i.e. he would sleep with about ten girls before he got an STD. Other guys used to go months without catching anything. These guys would always treat the problems themselves by buying antibiotics over the counter. I wonder if the ease of buying drugs in Thailand over the counter is therefore also an contributing factor?
The author can be reached at Korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
