The Morality Question Revisited
After reading some of the responses to my initial question, Is it Moral? I am amused by the passion and the delusions that many of the responders have displayed.
So let me put this as plainly as I can.
Many of you seem to be agonizing over the morality of consorting with bar girls. I find this very funny because let's face it, in the eyes of most people outside Thailand, going with a bar girl is a very immoral act. They consider mongers in Thailand to be extremely immoral people. Period.
However, it has been my experience that mongers are a breed apart. Once they enter Thailand they are enveloped in a completely new reality. As has been pointed out many times in these pages, Thailand is quite simply a sexual fantasy world where a man can go looking for, and often find, sex as it is never available in the West.
Because of this, mongers lose sight of standard moral behaviour expected of us in the West. Even though they indulge their appetites in ways they could only dream about before, they still wrestle with the morals they have brought with them into the country. As a result, we have seen some amazing mental contortions performed by various writers lately trying to justify their involvement in the P4P scene.
I say, forget morality boys. Sex is sex. Whether you pay for it directly or not, it is still sex.
Do you agonize over the morality of dating and nailing a girl back home? Of course not. It is a game. You wine 'em, dine 'em, and nail 'em if you are lucky. Sometimes you have to go so far as declaring that you love the girl before you can get into her knickers, knowing full well that it is a lie. But you do it anyway in the quest to hide your salami.
So where is the morality in that?
Experienced mongers learn this and they realize that getting sex in exchange for money is actually a much more honest way to get what they want.
You can try and justify it as much as you like, but what is the point? When you go out and close a business deal, do you agonize over whether it was moral or not?
Of course not. It is just business. <You're joking, right? Good business is moral, surely? – Stick>
When you look at the P4P business like that, you begin to see that there is no moral question to answer to. As The Caveman pointed out, as long as you treat the woman with dignity and respect, you will both get out of the deal what you went looking for.
I, too, have nothing but contempt for the mongers who sponsor women. As Caveman said, they are gullible fools and they deserve everything they get. They are chasing a chimera, and they will never catch it. Whenever I see them crying their eyes out on these pages bemoaning the fact that they have laid out thousands of dollars and been fucked over, I laugh. No. I roar with laughter. They are pitiful.
The other question that seems to cause a lot of concern here is the long term effect whoring has on the women. Stick agonizes over this often. I have known a lot of whores over the years, and have befriended quite a few of them. In almost every case, they have changed from being innocent young things when they entered the business to being very efficient extractors of money from their victims.
But did their chosen business demean them as human beings?
I don't think so. They did become wiser in many ways that their straight sisters never achieve. But they never lost their humanity. They still had feelings. They were still capable of falling in love and having their hearts broken.
I will cite one woman I know who went to work at one of my favorite bars in Cowboy when she was 18. I met her on her second night at work and bar fined her a few days later. She was still innocent and not all that good in bed. But as I talked to her I realized that she was a very level headed and intelligent girl.
We would go months without going out of her bar together, but I met with her often and enjoyed watching how her life progressed. She realized early on (perhaps I had a hand in this) that she had a limited shelf life in the business. So she enroled in university where she studied various subjects, including business and accounting. She also learned to speak, read, and write very good English, Italian, and German; languages that helped her business immensely over the years.
In fact, after a few years I seriously considered hiring her as my personal assistant, she was that good. But she didn't want to leave the night life. She was making far more money than I was prepared to offer her in a 'good' job.
Throughout this time she met a man she fell in love with and lived with him for a few years. But they split after she found out he was cheating on her.
I must admit, I never could get my head around how these girls think. It is alright for them to make a living sleeping with dozens of men each month, but if they are in a relationship with a man they expect complete fidelity from him. It just doesn't make sense, does it?
Of course, that was always the problem when I lived with my bar girl years ago. She was married to a European and went to stay with him for weeks at a time whenever he came to Thailand. At other times, I am sure she went back to her profession, even though she was supposed to be living with me.
But when she was away she would go crazy if I went out and screwed other women. She just couldn't see that what was good for the goose was good for the gander too.
Even if a man only has a 'relationship' with a girl in her bar without actually living with her, the girl will claim that man as their own personal property whenever he walks into the bar. They hate butterflies. This is because of the 'morality' that they have been taught back in their village. And when you point this out to them, they cannot, or will not, see it. To them, if they are in a relationship with a man, any sort of relationship, they expect him to be faithful. It is not only the men who are delusional.
So, after being in the business for more than ten years, has my friend ended up mentally scarred?
Sorry to tell you this Stick, but she has retained her dignity and her humanity. She loves her work and does it very well. But she is also very realistic about it.
Of course, some girls do descend into a moral morass. They drink, gamble, try to kill themselves. But that isn't necessarily because they have entered the sex industry.
You see the same sort of thing in normal society too. Some people are level headed and successful. Others are just victims of their own delusions and end up destroying their lives in a myriad of ways.
My advice, for what it is worth, is to stop agonizing over these questions of morality and how the P4P business affects the girls. They are there because they want to be. They are chasing the money. If you have enough to partake, go out and spend it to get what you want. Stop trying to justify your actions. There is nothing to justify at all. You want sex. She wants to give it to you for a price. That is all there is to it.
Stickman's thoughts:
Sometimes I wish I could just see it all as simply as you (and others) do…but I can't.