I've been living with my friend in Phetchabun, Thailand, since late August 2022, and he expressed interest in going to Pattaya during his break from teaching. He had spent some time there before deciding to go all in and move to Thailand for the foreseeable future. He wanted to return to Pattaya for a visit. However, my friend doesn't like Pattaya for the reasons you might think he likes Pattaya (get your mind out of the gutter). He likes it because of its contradictions.
As we strolled around the city at night, we saw surly retired working-class Brits coupled with soft-spoken Thai women often half the age of their foreign counterparts. The bored faces of the latter told us everything we needed to know. We walked next to Muslim women in hijabs on streets that were lined with Thai sex workers standing in little more than underwear while men approached us with obscene pictures advertising their establishments' "ping pong" shows. Families with children, too, walked these same streets. The sign on the gate to the entrance of the apartment building we were staying at read, "No short-term renters." Around us were both old beer bellies barely contained and muscular bodies mostly exposed. We saw a stout but muscular man in cut-off military fatigues sporting a handlebar mustache that was seemingly as wide as the literal thing. The tattoos on his arms advertised military affiliations but his shorts, cut closer to the groin than the knees, suggested otherwise.
For those that don't know, Pattaya lies on the coast just a couple of hours east of Bangkok. It was once just a simple fishing village, but over time it was developed into a massive beach resort before turning into the city of sin that it is now.
As we wandered from street to street, we saw foreign man after foreign man — some British, some American, some Emirati, some Korean (seemingly every country of relative affluence represented) — that were all looking for the same thing. There were men of all ages. Some were in their 20s while others were barely alive. We wondered out loud what had driven these men to come to Pattaya seeking pleasures of the flesh.
We imagined many had gotten sick of their wives by the time retirement had become a reality. We imagined the much more believable reverse of that when a towering British pensioner curtly responded to his Thai escort, "But we just ate!" when she was suggesting that he try a snack from a street vendor. "She was trying to show you her culture, you idiot," my friend remarked later when we recounted the scene.
We imagined the younger men we saw to be the shy, awkward types that normally become incels. But instead of becoming incels, these men just resorted to paying for it rather than facing yet another awkward Tinder date. Was it fulfilling to them? Were they actually finding the hole in their life left by the lack of emotional intimacy in their lives?
Still, we imagined others to be sex addicts. If you just can't get enough, then Pattaya is the place where you come close to getting close to enough.
Whatever path led them here, they were each seeking the same thing, but with degrees of difference. While some men elected for one night with one woman, there were others who preferred to have a "girlfriend". I'm not entirely sure how this is arranged, but it's something like this:
- A foreign man connects with a Thai woman at a girly bar for one night of fun
- The same foreign man returns to the same girly bar to connect with the same Thai woman for another night of fun (this step seems skippable)
- The Thai woman suggests that she becomes the man's "girlfriend" (whatever that means in the context) for an unspecified period of time
- The Thai woman provides sexual intimacy to the foreign man while the foreign man provides money as the sugar daddy
One night, my friend was getting dangerously close to pissing himself. Not because he was so drunk, but because he just really had to go! We passed girly bar after girly bar, knowing full well that once we entered any one of them we would be approached by a woman looking to pick up a John. Finally, my friend could not hold it anymore, and he made a beeline into the closest girly bar while I sat down and ordered us two drinks.
I made sure not to make eye contact with any woman around, lest they misinterpret my sociological curiosity with sexual curiosity. My friend came to the table with a renewed well to be filled with the golden nectar of the night.
A woman standing at the front of the bar turned around briefly and gave us a feigned pouty look.
A minute later she was sitting next to us with a lightning round of questions: Where were we from? What were we doing in Pattaya? What did we do for a living? What did we like about Thailand? All questions that were part of a conversation that I was not very keen on having.
This is what I wanted to avoid. It's not that I thought I might be "seduced". It's that I didn't want to spend the energy conversing because I knew I didn't want to be seduced. I had also predicted that the conversation would be surface-level small talk, which I usually abhor. Retrospectively, I probably came off as snooty, and that's certainly not the impression I wanted to give. I guess whereas my friend saw it as an opportunity just to have some conversation, I saw the conversation as a means to an end — an end that I didn't want any part of.
While she was talking to us, Chad responded kindly while I was watching TV, trying to disengage from the conversation as much as possible. We did find out that she was from Issan, the North of Thailand. This is where the majority of sex workers, taxi drivers, and other working-class Thais generally come from if you are in larger cities in the south. The north is generally recognized as being poorer, not having the bustling tourist centers of the south (with Chiang Mai being a notable exception) or any of the international centers of commerce, which all seem to be located in Bangkok.
Later, after Chad expressed his dissatisfaction with how rudely I had acted, we again wondered aloud. What drives these women to sex work? Clearly, money was an important factor. Poor Thai women can make handfuls of money, even enough to finance trips abroad and relatively lavish lifestyles (for the average Thai person).
While staying at Chad's, I read a collection of essays and stories from people who had lived or traveled in Thailand. One story was part of something like an ethnography that was exploring Thai sex work. What the essay seemed to imply was that it was not just Thai women who were being exploited. But, in a way, the foreign men who get involved with Thai sex workers are sometimes also exploited. There were men who the author interviewed who were promised marriage only to find out that their Thai "girlfriend" was sleeping with other men or even had children with other men! But yet those very women were receiving monthly allowances from their Dutch, American, or Australian "boyfriends". I want to emphasize that I think the majority of the exploitation is overwhelmingly one-sided. But, to a certain extent, there is mutual exploitation in these transactional relationships.
The idea that you can arrange to have a short-term Thai "girlfriend" in this way is so fascinating to me. Since it's defined in this way, it comes off as playing a part. Where is the authenticity in this type of relationship? You're play-acting a relationship. You're play-acting intimacy. Perhaps "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" are misnomers in this context. For precision's sake, perhaps there should be different words to describe these relationships that are not your everyday transactional sex work interactions, but also far from being "authentic" relationships. I suppose that at some point the relationship can turn into something more authentic, but I learned that Thai relationships, even in marriage, don't often contain the same amount of loyalty, authenticity, and intimacy that many people in the West often expect of relationships. If that's the case, where is the boundary between "true" authentic relationships and more transactional relationships in Thai culture? Are these relationships between foreign men and Thai women just microcosmic examples of married life across the country?
I'm just not acquainted enough with Thai culture to know the answers to those questions. But after learning all of this, I have thought the same thing about Thai culture that I have in other cultures I've visited or lived in: where do people here find intimacy? It seems that relationships in Thailand are often surface-level and capricious. What sort of internal lives do Thai people have, generally speaking? Do they crave intimacy and vulnerability? Does the culture dictate that they wear figurative masks and just keep everything bottled up?
These questions are rife with generalized criticism that can fall into stereotypes at best, but it forces me to think about my own issues with intimacy and vulnerability...and that will be saved for another post.
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