Whoring East and Whoring West: An Enormous Difference
The difference between whoring, or going with prostitutes, in the East and the West is by all measures simply enormous. It has been enormous historically, it is still enormous despite considerable change in the last decade, and I see no reason
to think that it will not continue to be enormous.
I will concentrate my comments on Thailand, with passing reference to the Philippines and Cambodia, and, for the West, on the United States, with passing reference to the scene in England, Australia and Europe.
The biggest difference between whoring in Thailand and in the West, often noted, is the famed Girl Friend Experience or GFE, and a big difference it is. A customer goes with a prostitute for eight or ten hours, and perhaps several days in
succession after this, and from early on in this hookup literally anything is possible: sex in all of its imaginable variety, and right from the get-go kissing, and open-mouth kissing as passionate as one will ever have with any woman. I mention
the latter because historically and right down to the present prostitutes in the West have overwhelmingly refused to kiss their customers, even with their mouths closed. The long-standing rationale has been two-fold: kisses are reserved for husbands,
boyfriends and pimps; and the mouth is the dirtiest part of the body (largely true, with more than 300 different species of bacteria and tens of millions of the microscopic critters in the mouth). Whether or not the hooker is faking in the GFE
or is genuinely behaving as a committed girlfriend might is largely beside the point, because the illusion of the experience as seemingly real is what matters, for the simple reason that we can never know the state of mind of another person, no
matter how close we imagine we are to that person.
One might take this idea of the GFE one step further and, with good reason, argue that what one gets in Thailand and the Philippines and Cambodia is even better than what high-end call girls are providing in places like New York, London and
Las Vegas where they are charging thousands of dollars a night. (Tiger Woods is alleged to have paid $15,000 for one night with a high-end call girl, and my money says that it wasn’t as good as hundreds of mongers get all the time in Thailand.)
These women are true professionals; they are cunning and calculating and educated about what they are doing in ways that the best and brightest of Thai hookers in Bangkok or Pattaya are not.
No one familiar with changes in Thailand in the last ten years can help but notice that the GFE in Thailand is not as easy to come by as it was a decade ago. And the principal reason is that a much greater number of girls have seen the value
of making, and making explicit to potential customers, a hard distinction between going short-time and going long-time (the latter a necessary but not sufficient condition for the GFE). They have made this distinction because, for the top five
to ten percent of Thai hookers—face and body and a certain “smarts” the determining criteria, largely–there is the real possibility that they can finish quickly with one customer and return to the bar and score a second and
even a third trick before the night is over. And some do, they are seen as that desirable. In Bangkok, at the present time, the women are asking 2,000 baht for short-time and 4,000 baht for long-time, both figures negotiable, the latter perhaps
more so than the former, and with more latitude to move the price downward. The very top earners bet that they can consistently do better going short-time; sometimes they do, but undoubtedly there are times when it would have been more profitable
to go long-time. It’s clearly a calculated gamble, and no doubt playing the short-time card doesn’t always give the best payoff, and an overconfident “hottie” goes home with only short-time money when she may easily
have gone long-time and made more.
How much harder is it to get the GFE today than ten years ago? No one really knows, but it is generally agreed that it is harder. A higher percentage of the girls simply say they only want to go short-time, and that’s all they will
do. But I think this generalization about the disappearing GFE needs to be significantly qualified. It’s probably a good deal harder to get the GFE among the top earning go-go girls than among those working in beer bars or in go-go venues
where they are only averaging a couple of customers a week. Mongers who hit on the fives and sixes and possibly sevens are much more likely to get a positive response to the request to go long-time than is true among the nines and tens. The former
are also less likely to be runners, those who say they will go long-time but find an excuse after the first pop to leave: there’s a sickness in the family, the child needs to be fed, a friend has just had an emergency, my mother just had
a heart attack while you were bonking me. All bullshit, of course, but part of the working verbal tool bag of just about all hookers, even in Cambodia and the Philippines.
Whether it’s going to be short-time or long-time and the possibility of the GFE also depends on the customer and his willingness to pay for long-time, and carefully negotiate the terms of engagement, telling the girl that if she stays
until seven or eight in the morning, for example, he will pay her the long-term rate, but that if she leaves any earlier than the time specified he will pay her the short-term rate or some significantly lesser figure. What has probably changed
rather dramatically in recent years is the need to be quite explicit about how long the girl will stay and the penalty for leaving early. This wasn’t necessary a decade ago, or at least one would get burned much less frequently by being
quiet on the matter.
You can, of course, get the GFE in the West, but it’s going to be ten times as expensive as what you’d pay in Thailand, and it is invariably going to have a harder and more professional edge to it. The illusion of the GFE won’t
be nearly as convincing, or convincing at all to someone who is reasonably savvy to what’s going on, easier to note when one is dealing with someone brought up in the same cultural setting.
Another notable and continuing difference between Thailand and the West is the already mentioned kissing, and usually open-mouth kissing. It is simply rare to non-existent in the West among hookers, and for many men this is a huge difference,
obviously making sex more impersonal with its absence. The lips are nothing if not erotic and no small turn-on to most men. So even when comparing short-time experiences between Thailand and the West there is a huge difference in this one regard–kissing.
But there are others differences that are not trivial. Short-time in the West is often a very quick run to the cum line, and then the customer or the hooker is gone; fifteen to twenty minutes, maybe a half hour and no more. You get to the room,
both parties quickly undress, there are few if any preliminaries, and then it’s all about how quickly the hooker can get the guy to come, which is why smart hookers invariably begin with a bit of sucking, and even finish this way for the
same reason. It may be this brief in Thailand when short-time, and sometimes it is; it very often is not, the period of time with the woman running to a good hour, sometimes two hours, even more depending on the chemistry. More than a few short-time
engagements quickly turn into all-night and then all-day affairs, the GFE seemingly coming out of nowhere in a way it never would in the West. Too, in Thailand and in Cambodia and the Philippines there are often warm-up preliminaries in the short-time
arrangements, which are almost entirely absent in the western short-time experience.
A yet further distinction is that the short-time experience in the West, generally, can be a whole lot more dangerous, and in ways largely unknown in Thailand. Street hookers in major American cities are rough, and they have nasty pimps—almost
all of them do in fact; and they’re often heroin and cocaine addicts. They’re hookers precisely because of the need to feed their serious addictions, and because of their addictions they are frequently careless about what they do
and become HIV positive, and contract other STDs. And there are more dangers, not the least of which is finding yourself in a roach- and rat-infested short-time hotel where it’s easy to be robbed or a victim of a vicious and dangerous shakedown.
Another significant negative, notable most prominently in the U.S., is that going with a hooker can get you arrested for doing what is illegal, and you can’t pay your way out it like it can pay your way out of something illegal–if
not drug running or running with underage girls–almost anywhere in Southeast Asia. This means you might well spend a night in jail and get an arrest record, and you might even have your name published in a local newspaper, which is not something
that anyone wants if he’s married, got a girlfriend, is famous, or simply has a job where the employer does not look kindly on his employees going with hookers.
Then too there is yet another consideration. In Thailand in go-go venues you get a chance to look over the girl’s body and face and chat with her over a drink or two, size her up, make a guess how she might be in bed, and possibly
even whether she’s on meth or ya-ba or some other drug. None of this is possible, or only rarely so, with short-time hookers in the U.S. and famous street venue whores in London and Sydney and Paris. You’re not going to get more
than a couple of minutes on the street or while sitting in your car to make an assessment of what you might be getting yourself into, and getting for your money—these factors alone then a huge difference between short-time in Thailand and
in the West.
And then there is the cost, the simple dollar difference. It’s no cheaper in the West to go short time, and when you factor in the significant intangibles that I have drawn attention to, it is in fact far more expensive in the West
than any short-time experience with the priciest hooker in Bangkok or Pattaya or Phuket. And this is even taking into account air fare and nice hotels and double martinis for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and shopping trips for the one-night Thai
girlfriend.
I have thus far said nothing about two other huge differences between prostitution in the West (to include Australia, Great Britain, Europe and the U.S.) and that in Thailand and the Philippines and Cambodia. One is that generally the women
in Thailand—to stick to this country–are a good bit more attractive than your average western hooker (plenty of exceptions here); they are younger; they are small and lighter (big pluses to westerners who almost universally dislike big
boned and fat women); and, to boot, they are exotic, charming and desirous precisely because they are from another culture and not yet westernized.
But perhaps as important or more so than almost anything mentioned beside the GFE is the size of the choice set, the pool of women to choose from in Bangkok or Phuket or Pattaya or Angeles City. These choice sets are orders of magnitude larger
than any to be found anywhere in the West. This is of a very considerable plus to legions of men who are choosy; and all men are choosy given the opportunity to be choosy. But it is also a huge plus to all those men who are known as butterflies,
who like nothing better than going with as many different hookers as possible in whatever time they have for whoring, for some two at the same time. You can be a butterfly in the West, but you better be young and handsome and rich, or simply rich
beyond what we normally mean by that word.
All this, these differences, these factors that are not purely monetary, considerably increase the cost of going with western hookers, or put different, make Thai and Filipina and Cambodian hookers in Southeast Asia a hell of a bargain—past,
present and future. They cost, effectively because of the many things I have mentioned, a tiny fraction of what one pays in the West for a hooker. This is a point so obvious it hardly needs to be stated, once one disabuses himself of the simplistic
notion that it’s all about comparing the straightforward monetary cost in dollars or Euros of pounds per unit of time spent with a prostitute.
I’ve said little about the Philippines and Cambodia, two places that are close to Thailand and not only increase the choice of hookers available but in fact add in a large number of women who are cheaper in dollars or pounds or Euros
than in Thailand, have sweeter and less predatory and cunning mindsets than Thai women, and have not yet started to make hard and fast distinctions between short-time and long-time; they are still relatively easy to get into the GFE, if that’s
what one’s after.
In conclusion, and without belaboring the point further, there remains, and will remain for a long time, a very significant difference between whoring in the West and whoring in Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia. For either the occasional
or dedicated whoremonger the differences, as I have briefly outlined them, are so enormous that to say or suggest that the two worlds of prostitution are converging is simply not to have thought through the real as well as the very real intangible
differences between whoring in the East and whoring in the West..
Stickman's thoughts:
As I am currently away from Bangkok and as the writer of this submission asked me to bump it in the queue as it was topical, I regret that I have not had a chance to read it yet or make any comments.
