Thai bargirls waiting for a customer

It’s always interesting to see how many facets of society people expect to remain the same around the world, which include details from the mundane and forgettable to serious and socially relevant. One of these places is Thailand, where some things have a completely different value set than we’re used to, many of which take some time to get used to. As an example of the mundane, take the sounds animals make. In every western country, dogs say ‘woof’, but do you know what they say in Thailand? ‘Hong!’. Similarly, chickens don’t cluck, they say ‘ekie’, and frogs don’t croak, they say ‘gop’.

On the other end of the gravity scale is prostitution, which is seen in a very different light than it is back home. As someone who has lived in Thailand since 2001, it’s easy for me to forget how offputting it can be for the newly-arrived to see an obese 68-year old man walking hand in hand with a 20-year old hottie who could stop traffic in America. As with many things, after a while, you become desensitized to it, and file it in the ‘easily ignored’ column along with alarm clocks, street scammers and deep-fried chocolate bars.

According to a study by Justin Hall (done in 1994, but still with a lot of relevant info), it is estimated that about 450,000 Thai men per day visit a prostitute. Now, where I grew up, going to see a prostitute was reserved only for the skeeziest guys who had exhausted every other option. I never knew anyone who visited a prostitute and even got nervous whenever I had to walk by a known corner hangout. It’s simply a part of western society to be avoided and shunned if you expect to remain above a certain strata of society.

But in Thailand, as in much of Asia, it’s not seen as such a harsh diversion from regular cultural norms. Evenings out with the boys often end in open and graphic discussions of which girl who will rent, as if they were choosing a DVD from Netflix. Foreign customers, it is widely known, account for only a small percentage of overall visitations, and many Thai men consider visiting a brothel a rite of passage or something to do with buddies when you’re bored, or horny, or… well, anytime really (see the above statistic). I always like to say that visiting a prostitute in Asia is like cheating on your taxes back home. Most people do it once in a while and everyone knows it, but unless you’re with close friends, it’s generally not talked about.

When many first-time visitors see a scene like the one I described above (old man + young woman), the reaction is (usually) the same – disgust, horror, pity, anger… choose your adjective. But I often have to explain that prostitution here is not as black & white as it is in western countries. Posit: You live with your parents, sister and her son in a tiny shack in northeastern Thailand (a poor agricultural area called Issan, where a large amount of prostitutes in Bangkok come from). You do backbreaking labor every day for the chance to earn, say, 3,000 baht per month (USD$90), just enough to help feed the family and maybe splurge on a new outfit every year or a couple of pirated DVDs every month. But you happen to be pretty, so you move to Bangkok and end up working as a bargirl who goes home with men for money (the reasons many girls arrive here are too numerous, varied and complicated to get into here). Now you’re making 3,000 baht per night, give or take, and can send money back home to support your family.

These girls aren’t stupid – many times I’ve talked to them with a genuine interest in the hows and whys of their situation, and the answer is usually a variation on a theme: No, it’s not the best job in the world and I don’t really enjoy it, but my family is fed, my sister bought a new motorbike to get to her new job, and my nephew can go to school. Is that really so bad? Granted, there are certainly many terrible stories, and instances of kidnapping, forced labor and rape are, if not the rule, definitely not unheard of.

In a short post like this, I can’t get into the many minutiae of the situation, nor can I persuasively flick that switch inside anyone’s brain that makes them fully understand how things work here (not that I have some kind of kung-fu grip on the topic either). However, you can’t paint the oldest industry here with same brush you use in your home country. There are levels within levels, and the long, strong roots of prostitution are woven into many aspects of Asian society in ways that are simply too complicated for us to understand.

Related Posts

Social Networking Sites’ Popularity Poses Problems for Users

Whispers

Manipulating Information on the Web: A Good Form of Activism?

No One Wins in the E-Book Spat