Rahiri on Mongering: Projections and Half Truths at Best

Rahiri opens his harshly “candid” essay by letting us know that he’s a hypocrite, pure and simple. Okay, and so is everyone at some point in his or her life. But does this then mean that mongers, or others in the sex industry in Southeast Asia, are hypocrites?

Maybe, maybe not. If a monger is telling his wife or girlfriend or others that he wouldn’t stray and then does, as a monger or otherwise, then he’s being a hypocrite. But if he has an open relationship, or he’s not involved with anyone, and he’s not marching about town decrying the evils of prostitution and how he’d never get anywhere near a hooker, then with regard to going with bargirls in Southeast Asia there’s no hypocrisy involved. Or certainly no clear-cut case of hypocrisy.

But what about what mongers are after? Rahiri claims to know what he clearly does not know. He claims that men are not in Southeast Asia just for pussy, a good fuck, or two, or three. No, he thinks he knows, they’re there for something more “meaningful,” the highly touted GFE. Well, some men are there for these “meaningful” reasons, or this is what they have in mind after they have been smitten by a bargirl and gotten kisses and hugs the likes of which they cannot remember experiencing. But there is no doubt whatsoever from my encounters with hundreds of mongers over the years that a great many of them are part of the monger scene because they’re comfortable with being there, and often for the sole purpose of getting one or a couple or several good fucks from young and attractive Thai and Filipina women, period. In fact the proof that this is what so many of them are there for is how many men don’t want to spend all night with a hooker. They want the sex, and then they want the girl gone so they have a good night’s sleep, or return to the bars and find another girl, or get out among friends and chat and drink and do whatever they feel like doing. Further proof of their comfort level, and lack of hypocrisy (not advertising back home what one does in Southeast Asia with hookers is not being hypocritical) is the frequency with which so many men return to the Asian hooker scene—to shag girls they’ve not shagged, again, and again, and again. Many of them—to repeat—just like to fuck or get a blowjob from a woman years, perhaps decades younger than anything they could get in the West. They’ve had enough with marriages, often dry and boring and long dead, marriages they stuck with as often as not for economic reasons, or because they wanted to be with their kids. Or both. These happy mongers—and I’d bet there are one hell of a lot of them-- don’t want to get involved emotionally with a bargirl, or perhaps with any woman. But a good roll for an hour or two with someone young, and with velvety skin and warm lips and a sweet smelling tight pussy—why not? After all, what could be more pleasurable, especially when the pleasure comes so cheaply.

So, how does Rahiri know that these men really want more? That they’re there for the GFE, and emotional need, and if they say this is not so then they’re lying or deceiving themselves. They’re fools. Well, as I said, he just flat out doesn’t know, and it seems that in this essay he’s doing little more than projecting his own thoughts on the matter.

And on related issues too. He claims that any “real intimacy that you hunger for...is ONLY an illusion.” Well, this is how he may feel, but I have no doubt that plenty of men who do find themselves with a GFE don’t think that what they feel and what the girl feels and expresses in a variety of ways is an illusion at all. And if the monger doesn’t feel it’s an illusion, then it is not an illusion. Let me repeat that: if the monger or anyone else does not feel he is living an illusion with regard to anything, then he is not. Does it matter what others feel about the man with “illusions?” Most of the time, not at all. Rahiri is once again just projecting onto others what he feels. He just does not know in any sense whether there are few, some, or a great many mongers who feel or “know” that their GFEs are illusions.

Rahiri, and I’m sure he’s not alone, takes the high ground and claims that “a one night stand with however gifted a courtesan” can never match love making with a woman that one “loves deeply.” More projection, pure and simple. Sure sex with someone you’re “in love with” can be great, but it can also be downright lousy—the woman’s not into it, she doesn’t much enjoy it, she has no interest in “getting into it” in a mutually satisfying way. She behaves the same every time she’s in bed; she’s boring. Rahiri may have discovered that the one and only love of his life is simply great, unbeatable because love and intimacy and sex are intertwined. But for others, Rahiri; let them speak for themselves.

Can you have sex that is simply off-scale and stupendous with a hooker you’ve only known for an hour before you get her naked? You sure can. I’d bet good money that there are tens of thousands of men who have been to Thailand and the Philippines and Cambodia and other countries in Southeast Asia who will tell you that some of the best sex they’ve ever had, and that includes sex with their wives or back home girlfriends during the first months of their “great love affairs,” were with one-night and one-night only hookers. I’ve met all kinds of men who can speak to a night, or dozens of nights in Southeast Asia, with hookers that were among the hottest hour or two of sex they’ve ever had. The idea that you can only have “great sex” when it is coupled with “love” or “great love” is so much romantic hogwash. Some of the best sex I’ve ever had was with women with whom I could exchange three words that could be mutually understood—and I’m damn sure I’m not alone on this score. That I had nothing in common with the young woman and was happy to see her to the door after I got cleaned up and let her get dressed didn’t diminish the great sex with had, not one bit.

Rahiri “feels sad for all the participants.” Okay, fair enough, that’s how he feels. Do scores, hundreds, thousands of mongers and hookers feel sad for what they are doing, or have done, or what others in the monger game are up to? Some do, some don’t. Perhaps many do, perhaps many don’t.

Rahiri again is eager to project his own feelings and attitudes and moral judgments onto others. I have not the slightest doubt that thousands of men coming off bad relationships or marriages in the West have never felt one iota of “sadness” for the bargirls, or for themselves, or for other mongers. What many have felt “sad” about is that they had to go home after a week or ten days and couldn’t continue with their mongering for another week or two. In fact, very large numbers of mongers will talk about how good the bargirl experiences have made them feel—and not just in the groin. Unforgettable experiences, the kind that begets half-awake dreams to pull one through a dark sleepless night, which is one hell of a welcome payoff. The hardly-sad experiences were good, even great, not least because the men were finally getting for a couple of thousand baht what they could no longer get from their long suffering sexually dead wives, or boring and less than adventuresome girlfriends; and of course could never now get in the West because of their age, and because of the out-of-sight cost of going with a hooker at home who is not a needle-injecting disease vector prowling rat-infested streets.

Rahiri is eager to inform us that the “sex industry is fundamentally damaging to all the parties involved.” More projection, and more half-truth. I have no doubt that a great many bargirls are damaged by the experience, particularly if they have spent any time on the game. I also have no doubt that many mongers find it hard to stay away from the bar scene once they’ve tasted its pleasures—an addiction of sorts, but not in the league with alcohol, or even cigarettes. I have no doubt that more than a few have had some hard times dealing with disappointments after getting involved with bargirls—something only seen clearly in retrospect. But the idea that “all”—according to Rahiri, or even the great majority of mongers and bargirls, are “fundamentally damaged” by the experience is an empirical question, and one that neither Rahiri, Stick, myself or anyone else has the answer to. Trying to get a good handle on this one issue from where we all stand is like pissing in a strong shifting wind and being confident that you won’t be pissed on.

To Rahiri it’s pretty much all about “the alternative road of hard work.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the skills the girls don’t have, and the profound poverty from which they come, and the very pressing need to support a child or two because no one else can help them with this very palpable need. Then too there is all that family pressure on a daughter to help the extended family, pressure that gets ramped up because of all those visible and showy models in the village, those “bad” girls who really are doing so much for their families—bargirls returned home, retired, married to a farang, or sending money home.

Sure some of them could, and do, get jobs in Bangkok factories working their asses off for six or seven days a week for maybe $300 a month, if they’re lucky. But how does this compare with what a young and reasonably attractive girl can make hooking? It doesn’t, and you don’t have to have a degree in economics to calculate the enormous difference and what it means. In the Philippines there is that very real possibility, one which many girls from the provinces seek from the moment they get to Angeles City, of finding a husband. It doesn’t matter that he’s thirty or forty years older and has a heart condition and has a full sack of potatoes hanging over his belt buckle. Anything is better than grinding day-to-day poverty in the village in northern Thailand or the distant and forgotten island provinces of the Philippines. But you won’t know this if you can’t find a way to take off your $3,000 designer Western blinders.

As I’ve argued before, and in a fictional piece that was dead serious (“Farang Mongers: The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Thailand”), farang prostitution has been a great if not exactly Buddhist blessing for Thailand. It brings in huge sums of money, and some of it (a lot in the case of some girls) finds its way into the hands of those who need it most—the poor in forgotten Isaan that those in Thailand with money and power driving their Mercedes don’t give a shit about. I’d venture that as an “aid effort,” the money that goes from mongering farang to the poor in Isaan is far greater than anything that these people get from the government, or any combination of foreign NGOs and the Thai government.

“Hard work”—yeah, the patronizing words of someone who either hasn’t seen poverty up close, and what it does to people, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to be able to get enough money for basics—food, shelter, clothing, and of course that cell phone that everyone else has and even the poorest of the poor can’t do without. What good is dignity if you can’t get the money for milk for the kid, or buy a bed to keep the cockroaches off his face at night? I don’t know about Rahiri, but if I were a rice farmer’s daughter with a sixth grade education and twenty baht in my purse if I’m lucky, fucking three ugly and old and smelly farang in one week for six or seven thousand baht is more than just a little tempting. It is the best deal I’ve ever heard about in my whole life. With my young body and face I’ve found out how to win the lottery of lotteries!

But you, Rahiri, want the bargirl, who has never known a concept of planning for the future, or what it means to have whatever you want or more or less need, to think about the long-run consequences for her mental health and social well being? Or care, should she be forewarned, that it might not be all that it might be in an ideal world? Are you for real, Rahiri? (Which reminds me of trying to tell a black lineman in the National Football League who’s got less than a two-digit I.Q. and who’s making five million a year that he’s going to brain-damaged, and noticeably so, by the age of forty. I’d guess he’d say: Big fuckin’ deal, man. You for real tellin’ me to give up this kind of bread?)

Okay, the girls get “scarred and damaged.” They do. Talk to mongers about the two or three marriages they’ve been through in the last twenty or so years, and how they got cleaned out in the courts, and ask them if they got “scarred and damaged.” Incommensurables, you say. Apples and oranges. I don’t think so.

Life is an experience that scars and damages everyone who doesn’t live in a cocoon, or a nunnery—and I’m not even sure about this. Scars are one hell of a lot easier to bear when there is any hope whatsoever of having something significantly greater than what you now don’t have.

Here then is a quick take on Rahiri’s essay. Some of what I’m saying requires more extended arguments, and nuance. But the main message remains. Rahiri doesn‘t know what’s in the minds of other mongers or hookers. He doesn’t know what’s good for mongers or hookers. He’s not lived their lives, had all those rending and determining experiences. He’s just projecting, telling us what’s good for him. He’s arrogant, unable to see or imagine the world through the eyes of others, one of the hardest things for all of us to do. Probably the most difficult thing even for real anthropologists to do.

Rahiri doesn’t seem to be able to appreciate the one thing we all know, or should know, about human behavior—needs, desires, dreams, whatever. Human behavior, when we’re dealing with the kinds of numbers we’re talking about when we’re talking about hookers and mongers in Thailand and the Philippines, is not just variable but highly variable. Not easily captured by a thousand words or so, and particularly loaded words like hypocrisy and scarring and damage. In all, an essay by Rahiri that is a kind of public confession, followed by self-righteous moralizing that reads: I’m a hypocrite and a shit for mongering, and I’m sorry about that, but then so is everyone else a hypocrite and a shit and they ought to be sorry like me. Now would you please follow my enlightened way, where one and all find that all good sex and deep love and a world without illusions are all of a piece. Yeah, sure....