Spare Me The Misogyny

I recently asked to be removed from a forum which deals mainly with male visitors to Pattaya. I am sure I don’t need to explain further. If the truth be known, I would probably have been thrown off in any case regarding the last post that I made, which related to a member of the forum who had displayed classic symptoms of Munchausen’s Syndrome in a thread he started. Amazingly, after I made my post, someone forwarded the responses to my post to me. I was expecting a lynching. Instead, with the exception of the member I was challenging, and the moderator who I would describe as reasonably neutral, all the posts in response to what I had written, were positive. As I said, I had already decided I was going to leave the forum, and this was my parting shot. A bit naughty you might think, but to be honest, I had become very disillusioned with a significant minority of the other members of the forum.

I like to think of myself as an optimist, who has a grasp on reality. What I mean is I am always impressed when someone does something truly altruistic, but I am not overly surprised. I think most of us are capable of such behaviour. On the other hand, I think the overwhelming number of people who do bad things, are not inherently bad, but do bad things because they feel bad about themselves. In spite of what I have just written, I try not to be too judgmental. For all that, when you read a post on the Internet, you can’t avoid forming an impression about the anonymous poster.

On one occasion, there was a thread about “What sort of woman do you prefer”. There were the usual responses covering most of the shapes and sizes that are available in Thailand. A lot of the posters confessed that they particularly liked the 5ft/90lb model. For those of you who are on the metric system, this is approx 1.52 metres and 40 kg. I was surprised at the number of men who claimed to be 6’4” (1.93 metres) who stated this preference as if one height depended on the other. Of course they could be lying about their size, but unless you suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome, there is no point in lying to anonymous strangers on the net.

When I thought about this, I wondered if reading between the lines, what I was reading here, was “I am a big man, but it is only when I am with a small woman that I feel I have power”. We all know “If the bitch is enjoying it…”, she is supposed to make plenty of noise in bed. Of course, I can imagine the screams might actually be or pain when you place a 100 kg man on top of a 40 kg woman.

One particular member wrote he preferred the 4ft 6in 70lb, “skinny girls”. I have to say that when I read this, I was a bit disturbed, because to my mind, he was describing the body of a 10 year old girl. I thought what I was reading was the secret desires of a closet paedophile. When someone added to the thread by saying they knew a couple of sisters like this, the other poster wanted to know if they would do the lesbian bit?

Hmmmmm…?

I started to think about this. I know as far as UK law is concerned, this is not defined as incest. For it to be incest, it has to involve a male and a female. Thinking about it a bit further, suppose we were aware of a brother who worked in Boyztown in Pattaya who had a sister who worked in a bar, how many of us would pay to watch them perform with each other? I don’t even begin to think of these numbers. All I would say is most civilised people consider incest amongst the grossest of crimes and I would hope nobody would try to procure this. Of course, I know it would be too much to expect that nobody would try to procure this. So legally, two sisters do not make incest, but I can’t avoid thinking of it as incestuous. That being the case, notwithstanding the desires of closetman, why if we despise incest so much, would we want to involve two sisters in such an act?

There is an act known as “ATM”. I am sorry if any reader needs an explanation. I will leave it to Stickman as to whether he feels an explanation is needed. For those of you who know what this is, I recall reading on another thread how some men favoured this, and some even went so far as to say they preferred to do this “bareback”. It is probably one of the easiest ways to pick up HIV, and a man who is doing this with more than woman is going to be a conduit for this. And of course, I’m inclined to think if a girl “barebacks” under these circumstances, she has probably “barebacked” under more congenial circumstances. Anyone for the STD clinic? Even a simple infection such as gonorrhoea can cause sterility.

Another of the areas I think about is gogo bars. The first time I ever went into one, I felt pretty uncomfortable. There were nine girls on the stage doing a choreographed strip, and at the end of it, they came off stage, nude, and mingled with the crowd, many of whom had a quick grope. Hopefully, they would get a bar-fine through this. What made me uncomfortable was that most of the girls themselves looked uncomfortable. There was something coercive, and therefore degrading about the whole show, and for me personally, I don’t want to degrade anyone as far as sex is concerned.

I rarely go into gogo bars, but occasionally, you get dragged in as part of the company you are with. On the last occasion I was in one, it was a knickerless table top bar in Nana. The girls would dance inches away from the face of a potential customer. Once they finished their number, they would then get off stage and pair up with the face they had just been flashing too. On that occasion, I saw one girl with a potential customer, who had his arm draped over her shoulder, and he was lifting her skirt and winking at me, no doubt to show his prowess as a “hansum” wallet. I wasn’t impressed.

So what does this have to do with my departure from another forum? Well, amongst the members of that particular board, there was a significant minority who were only too happy to indulge in some of the acts I have described, but in addition, there were also members who took the attitude that all Thai women were lying untrustworthy ya ba sluts that were supporting lazy Thai boyfriends, and who deserved everything bad that had happened to them to date as well as in the future.

How does that fit with my experience of these girls? Well for a start, I have never had a satang go missing whenever I have picked up a girl, and I generally object if the hotel asks for the girl’s ID, unless she is a freelancer.

Many years ago, I worked in Queensway in London which was then a red light district. I don’t know if it still is. After a little while, it became easy to recognise those working girls with pimps. The pimps were never far away, and would wait impatiently for the girl to return once she got a punter so they could take the money from them. Just my observation, but I don’t think Thai boyfriends who are living off their girlfriend would be much different from English ponces, and once they had drunk and gambled away their girlfriend’s money, I would imagine they would then be hanging around looking for a refill from her.

I know very little about ya ba other than it is an amphetamine. However, I have seen plenty of amphetamine induced behaviour in my time to be able to recognise the symptoms. I can’t say I have ever been with a girl that was showing the effects of ya ba.

What I find most incongruous of all, is the use of the word “slut”. There is of course the old joke “What’s the difference between a slut and a bitch? A slut will sleep with anyone, but a bitch will sleep with anyone but me”. Seriously though, why is it a man who will sleep with anyone, including “sluts”, is someone to be admired, but a woman is to be despised? When you think about, when has a man ever been stoned to death for not being a virgin?

As I said earlier, I am an optimist with a grasp on reality. So my experience with the ladies of Thailand is the ones I met have generally been working in BKK or Pattaya to support their families. They frequently have a child that has been abandoned by the father. I had a long term girlfriend that was university educated and was bringing up her son in the absence of the father, while working as a personnel manager in BKK. Her brother was involved in a fatal road accident for which he had to pay 2,000,000 baht in compensation. The baby ended up with the grandmother, and my girlfriend ended up in Pattaya. A friend of mine once said, “I would fight for my friends, but I would kill for my family”. When you put it into perspective, I find it difficult to think badly about these girls. They probably have a better family ethic than we do, and unsurprisingly, they are prepared to utilise what assets they have in what can be a pretty degrading trade, for the sake of their family.

I hope I won’t be misunderstood here, but I do accept that some of us can be a bit delusional, and though we have no significant redeeming features, we willingly accept it when we tell a bargirl we love her and are going to sponsor her, that when she says “I love you too”, she must mean it.

I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the girls that I have met were victims of circumstances and the impoverished nature of Isaan. Forever, the optimist, but with grasp on reality, I know working as a bargirl can change you. I have connections with the Dublin taxi trade, and as part of the interview process with bargirls (“What you do for job”), I mentioned this. On one trip, I met five girls who had “boyfriends” that were Irish taxi drivers. All of them were coming back to buy them a bar. When I came back a few months later, I met three of these again. All were still working in bars. One had since discovered the boyfriend was married with kids, and couldn’t get a divorce for fear of being cleaned out by the wife, and the other two had heard nothing for months from Paddy cabby.

To many Thais, saving face is everything. So there you are, telling all your friends about Prince Paddy and how he is going to take you away from this life, and eventually it dawns on you, this man has made you lose face in front of your peer group. Worse still, because you thought he was a boyfriend, you didn’t ask him for any money for those last three nights you were together. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. You are not going to fall for that one again are you?

The older Brits who read this will remember Barbara Woodhouse, a somewhat eccentric lady who became a nationwide celebrity as a dog trainer. Her catchphrase was, “There are no bad dogs, just bad owners”. Excuse the crude analogy, but the question that I always ask is how many of the girls that do behave cynically and betray our trust have been conditioned into this by a previous “bad owner(s)”?

Back to my former forum, I realised the time to quit had arrived when I started getting cynical as I read the title of a thread. There was one with a title like “The true cost of loving a Thai girl”. I knew it was going to be a “Private Dancer” type thread. It was actually about the legal costs etc, involved in getting an entry visa for a Thai fiancée to the UK. The original poster had since married and love appears to have triumphed. What surprised me was the number of members who wrote, saying they thought, like me, it was going to be a Private Dancer story, and how delighted they were both for the poster, and they were wrong. I plead guilty to the same offence myself. There were one or two curmudgeons who were dropping hints it wouldn’t last. I have this image in 25 years time, the original poster will revisit the thread, saying his Thai wife has just become a grandmother, and the cynics will be still be saying, “It won’t last”.

I think the truth is many of these people you might consider to be cynics, are really misogynists. They hate these women, and that is why they are so eager to abuse, vilify and degrade them. I’d like to think myself, rather than sympathising with these girls, I empathise with them. I can think what I might do if I was in their place, and I don’t think I would be any different. When you think about it, mentally, that makes me a slut.

Yet another group I think about are those who say, unless you treat the girls rough, you are “spoiling it for the rest of us”. By ‘rough’, I mean as miserly as possible. I find there is a great deal of irony with these groups, because they tend to be mainly Americans, and I don’t mean all Americans. The irony is during WW2, Britain paid host to millions of American servicemen, and as far as the women of Britain were concerned after three years of rationing, the Americans with their nylons, chocolate, cigarettes and dollars, effectively monopolised nearly every British female. The locals couldn’t get a look in. A popular quote about the American servicemen was, “Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here”. Reverting to my earlier question about “bad owners”, is it possible “Cheap Charlies” have spoiled it for the rest of us, and made these girls the hard bitten bitches they are sometimes portrayed as.

A little while ago, I came to the conclusion there is a “love-hate” relationship between Thailand and us farangs. They love our money, but they hate us. Somehow or other, it’s possible to see that we might have brought this upon ourselves. There are a significant minority of us who basically come here to abuse, degrade and vilify the natives. It may seem contradictory to describe men who come to Thailand to get laid, as “misogynists”, but it is like comparing “love” to “sex”. You can hate someone, but still enjoy getting your “jollys” using their bodies. Let’s face it, we only refer to women as “sluts” if we despise them. So there you have it, if you are having sex with someone you despise, you are a probably a misogynist.

As you will have seen, I can’t find too much fault with these women. I can’t help thinking that without the misogyny, these ladies would be better than they are now.