Stickman Readers' Submissions March 5th, 2020

You Are Not The Victim

Let’s start off with a few ground rules. If you enter an amorous relationship with someone half (perhaps a third) your age, everything that goes wrong is your fault. That is even true if you’re a 36-year-old man in the West and the early rumblings of a mid-life crisis push you to scour a college bar for a college chick from an upper-middle class background with daddy issues. Even in that more charitable scenario, you’re still a bit fxxked in the head, and it’s ultimately an act of futility trying to fxxk your way back to a you that ain’t coming back.

But seriously, what are you thinking? Don’t you remember you at 18? You were a veritable maniac! And it makes sense. You’re prefrontal cortex doesn’t stop developing until you’re 25. Your cerebellum is likewise still a green banana. Your actual banana, meanwhile, was a god-damned hand cannon! Energy for days, cum practically gushing out of your eyes and shit for brains in a small, self-centered little world you called your own.

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And now you and your grey balls wanna fxxk the 18- year-old female equivalent of you?

Except now the beau you bed ain’t even batting in the same ballpark as the 18-year-old gash of your past.

This one, in fact, was not reared in a WASPY home in the Northeast, but rather a stilted-shack in the “Northeast”. And rather than fulfilling some pornographic fantasy, this girl is latching onto your 46, 56, 66, or hell, let’s be honest about this audience, 76-year-old chubby like some flotation device that came drifting by in the sea of shit she was born in.

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Well, buddy, don’t let me be the one to judge your life choices. But let’s just get one thing straight: You deserve whatever the hell comes your way.

I find it odd that people would ever come to this site, or any forum, be it a barstool or a message board, to bitch about being wronged by a Thai bargirl of any age, but particularly those whose age is practically the square root of their own.

Some men come East because transactional sex is taboo in the West, but then when they find that the transaction is just that, a transaction, here come the tears about “lying whores” and what have you. People say the girlfriend experience is dead? Then why are so many of these damned Johns falling in love when explicitly paying to play?

Without even getting into the morality of the sex trade, if you are willing to make it about money, then how can you ever get mad when it’s all about the money? And if you, the savvy world traveler with the assets, the education, the perspective on life, get bested by an 18-year-old living under a coconut shell with an an 8th grade education and a burgeoning substance abuse problem (along with daddy issues that might actually involve incest), then what the hell are you going to hold against her? Get a grip on yourself, man!

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I pity you your delusions, I do, but they’re yours to sort out!

Once upon a time, a 50-something Brit from the north started spilling his heart to me in the bathroom of my friend’s now defunct nightclub. It was an odd place for a heart to heart, but lots of men with emotional issues opt for therapy by ambush on strangers.

Anyways, while trying to wash my hands, he was professing his love for a hardened bargirl decades his junior whom I’ll call Som. Said Brit actually had an estranged wife and a teen-aged daughter in Japan. And yet not being satisfied with that family, he was out in Thailand, flushing his money down a golden toilet over an Issan sinkhole, ironically bemoaning his fears of being alone.

He recounted how Som had taken him back to her village for a weekend. No surprise, the mendicants came a comin’ at the sight of Som’s latest tag-a-long.

Broken truck, broken bike, home repairs, medical operations — you name it. After being treated like an ATM by half of her extended family, he said he “knew she loved him” because she made her family stop asking for money. I wanted to say you don’t slaughter a cow if you want milk the next day, but thought better of it.

Instead I asked how much he had given away that weekend. He said 30,000 baht. Then I tried to be charitable in my assessment. For some people 30,000 baht is chump change. So I asked if he was in a position to comfortably give away that sorta’ dough without flinching. Clearly agitated, he said no. So I delicately asked him to reconsider whether his “relationship” was a healthy and worthwhile one to continue pursuing.

Having a couple of decades on me and teen-aged pride, out of the blue he started pounding his chest, talking about how he was a hard-ass northern lad who loved to fxxk and fight.

It was quite a strange turn in conversation.

Strange, in that a man old enough to be your dad is trying to prove to you that he’s a man. But him not feeling like a man had nothing to do with me. I was just a mirror to bounce his ideas off of. And he did not like what he saw. But as the movie trope goes, angry people like to punch mirrors. And I didn’t feel like taking a few on account of his own personal reckoning.

In further pursuit of not getting my head bounced off the bathroom floor, I omitted to tell him that I knew, categorically, that he wasn’t even in the top three of her providers.

Her primary benefactor was some Scandinavian type who had no illusions and far more means. Knowing that made the man’s erratic display of pride all the more pathetic, and frightening.

Men like that always take it out on someone else when the lie becomes too great to bear. None of us can bear that kind of cognitive dissonance for long. So rather than hurt yourself, or others (including the sad girl you pried off of the chrome poll), take a proper accounting of your life and pull yourself together.

I don’t know the backgrounds of the people reading my words, so I can only begin to guess where some of you are coming from. I know it hasn’t always been easy. Hell, some of you have been through hell. Some of you are there now. And for that you deserve all of the empathy in the world.

I’ve certainly had my heart crushed, my expectations dashed, and my youth wasted (and joyously spent) on ladies who ultimately weren’t right for me. And I’ve done all the same things back to a few undeserving ladies too. But these were all my peers, women with perspective and education and intelligence who were equally accountable when it came to the scales of justice in our failed relationships.

But these bargirls, well, their corrosive lives are tragic enough as it is. No need for some relatively (or absolutely) privileged man to come and add his bit.

Simply put, you cannot go around shoring up the holes in your life using people far more damaged, and far less able to get help, than you.

You’ve got a smouldering in your heart, but their lives are dumpster fires.

And if really, really gotta jump into that flaming trash pit of pain and despair, then well, it’s gonna’ hurt. And dude, I’m sorry for your pain. But never forget one simple thing: You aren’t the victim in this.

The author of this article can be contacted at : WEBANGKOK@protonmail.com

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