Poisonous Love

Lust & Love in Southeast Asia

Books by Richard Symanski and Korski Nonfiction The Immoral Landscape

Irreverent Essays on Geographers

Order and Skepticism

The Inquisition and Other Essays

Wild Horses and Sacred Cows

Here’s to a Martini in Your Shoe

Outback Rambling

A Father’s Journal of His Son’s First Year

Blackhearts

Bullies and Other Essays

Geography Inside Out

The Thousand Mountains of Borneo

87 Days in the Gentle City

Famous Geographers in Need of Schooling

Brumbies and Blue Eggs

When I was Immortal

Wandering Vietnam (2004 - 2014)

Bad Boy Geographer: A Memoir

Fiction Improbable Fictions on the Road to Poona The Bar Girl and the Belly Dancer I Cry for You & Other Stories The Libertine & Other Stories

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Lust & Love in Southeast Asia Korski

Estrilda Publications

Copyright © 2014 by Richard Symanski All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Estrilda Publications. No part of this book may be reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For written permissions and copies of the book contact Korski: [email protected]

ISBN 1-4276-9606-9 First Edition

For All the Genuinely Needy Bar Girls of Southeast Asia

Contents Introduction

1

I Don’t Love You

5

Someone Else’s Kid

9

Headed for Princeton

13

A Farang Female among Mongers

17

Nok: A Thai Bar Girl

23

Indifferent

31

Poisonous Love

37

The Butterfly

49

Two Tales of Deception

53

A Bird in the Hand

61

viii The Man from Madison, Kentucky

65

From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang

71

Mick

79

The Girlfriend Experience

85

Ian from Australia

87

Honey for Money

89

Loni from Negros

95

Cherry Girls

101

Venus in Love

107

Facultative Soft Lesbians

111

Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl

115

Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman

121

Sopha

127

I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women

131

The Perils of Being an Avatar

137

ix Rebuffed by a Bar Girl

143

The Five-Year Girlfriend

151

Are Mongers Sex Addicts?

155

Stories Men Don’t Want to Hear

159

Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms

163

Bar Girl Tidbits

171

Who Really Smells Bad in Southeast Asia?

179

The Odd Couple

183

Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers are Clinically Sick

189

The Next Step

197

Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong

203

The Cowboy and the Fat Lady

209

When is Enough Enough?

215

Looking Just Right

221

Will You Marry Me?

225

x Toxic Women, Toxic Cops

229

Suckered and Duped Twice Over

233

May Farang Come to Me This Night

239

Distortions of a Whoring Kind

243

The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology

253

Introduction Southeast Asia is infamous for prostitution for foreigners, especially Thailand and the Philippines. Men come from Australia, the U.S., Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, and in lesser numbers men from Malaysia, Singapore, India, and even Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. There is simply no place in the world that is really comparable, either in terms of the number of young and attractive women available, in the services provided, and in the cost to a customer. Unlike virtually everywhere in the West, and much of the rest of the world, in Thailand and the Philippines the young women go with a man short-time (typically two or three hours vs. a half hour or so in the West) or long-time (eight to ten hours or more). In the latter case, the customers are sometimes treated as if they are boyfriends, and thus there is what is commonly referred to as the Girl Friend Experience, or GFE. In the GFE there is openmouth kissing, one or more bouts of intercourse, and very often oral sex; and, more importantly, a sense (to the customer) that the whole experience is as good or better than what one can get on a first or second date with a Western woman. These various kinds of sexual couplings for money—prostitution pure and simple--can be had in Thailand in 2013 for $100 to $200, and for half this in the Philippines. It is an experience that is enjoyed by literally tens of thousands of men a year (much less so in Thailand today than a mere five years ago), and by men who are anywhere from ten to thirty or more years older than the women. Most of these men have little to offer other than money. They are not only old but often overweight, show all the signs of having neglected their

2 Introduction health, and are heavy drinkers. But on the whole, little of this matters to the young prostitutes, because they are that needy for money, much more so in the Philippines than in Thailand. They need it for themselves, for their child or children by a Thai or Filipino man, and for their parents and siblings. In a surprising number of cases a prostitute-customer relationship that began in a GFE quickly turns into a serious romance, and one that even results in marriage. In the Philippines, a fair number of the young prostitutes are actively in the market for a foreign husband. This is also true in Thailand, though to a lesser degree, and not least because Thai women are generally not eager to move to a Western country, and also because they are not as needy as their Filipina sisters. Many of the Thai prostitutes, with the money earned over a period of a couple of years or more, or cleverly “extracted” from gullible foreigners, and assuming they didn’t squander what they made on clothes and drugs and gambling, can return to their home villages and start small businesses. The principal places where these women are found in Thailand are in Pattaya, Bangkok (Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy and Patpong), and Phuket. In these places the young women are typically found in either go-go venues or outdoor beer bars where there is no dancing (or rather the pretense of dancing that is found in go-go bars). Typically, in the beer bars the women are older, generally not as attractive, and cheaper. The principal center for prostitution for Westerners in the Philippines is Angeles City, about two hours north of Manila. Here almost all the young women work in go-go venues (there are no beer bars comparable to what one finds in Pattaya and Phuket), ranging from those that have a dozen or so women to those with a hundred or more. There are also some well-known prostitution venues for Westerners in Manila (Makati and EDSA) and Cebu, but, in the case of Manila, with much higher prices, and with a smaller number (though still considerable) of women to choose from.

Introduction 3 Bar fines, or what a customer pays to get a girl out of a go-go venue or bar for the purpose of having sex with her, are different in Thailand and the Philippines. In the Philippines, a bar fine means that you pay the bar an amount up front and the girl agrees to go with you, and understands that it means there will be sex— either intercourse or oral sex or both. She goes either short time or all night, the latter an arrangement either negotiated with the girl before leaving the go-go venue, or something that simply happens as the night unfolds, an indication that among other things the girl is “happy” with the man she’s with. She enjoys the hotel accommodations, without exception considerably better than where she sleeps when not working, and also sees the possibility for repeat business. In Angeles City, many of the go-go venues don’t use the word bar fine, but rather refer to what is paid for the girl to the management as a fee for releasing her from work, not “officially” as a dancer or prostitute but as a “GRO” or “Guest Relations Officer.” In the last couple of years, some of the Angeles City venues will bring out ten or so shot glasses with tea in them, or a cheap bottle of wine, which the customer is allegedly paying for (rather than for the girl). The rationale is that this is a way of doing “legally” what is in fact illegal—namely the girl selling or renting herself for sex. The bar fines in Angeles City range from roughly 1,400 to 3,000 pesos (about 43 pesos to a dollar), the difference depending on the particular venue (often its location and interior setting), and whether or not the girls are “special dancers” or have put in more time in the bar than others and therefore “deserve” to be paid more. Depending on the customer and his degree of satisfaction and how generous he is, he will tip the girl when she leaves his hotel in the morning anywhere from 200 to 1,000 pesos. Sometimes he will give her no more than 50 or 100 pesos, for “trike money”, often as a way of lettering her know that he wasn’t happy with her attitude or performance. Or in some cases he’s simply “cheap.” It’s a little different in Thailand. There a bar fine runs about 600 to 800 baht (about 30 baht to the dollar). But on top of this the girl sets her

4 Introduction own price for short time or long time. It may run from a low of 1,500 to as much as 4,000 or 5,000 baht. In general it’s around 2,000 to 3,000 baht. The Thai women tend to be much more predatory than their Filipina counterparts, and much more likely to only want to go short time; or they will say they will stay longer and then do a “runner,” find an excuse to leave early after having a single bout of intercourse. Angeles City prostitutes will also do runners or come up with reasons to leave earlier than agreed, though this occurs less often than in Thailand. These essays on foreign men on having sex with and falling in love with Thai and Filipina women, and on the prostitutes and how they get into the game and how they feel about it, are meant to give a sense of what one finds in the infamous prostitution areas of Thailand and the Philippines that I’ve noted. As will be evident, not all of the stories about foreign men revolve around their involvement with prostitutes, though clearly the great majority do; and it is quite common—indeed the rule (though they are often quick to deny it) for foreign men of the sort depicted in these sketches to have met their wives in a go-go venue where she was working as a “dancer”—the euphemism for prostitute. All of these stories and sketches were collected over the course of number visits to these two countries and locales between 2003 and 2013. What I have to say here by way of individual stories and other more general pieces are by no means exhaustive, and yet they do collectively, I think, give one a quite good sense of what is going on in the most well-known—for foreigners-prostitution venues in Thailand and the Philippines.

I Don’t Love You

6 I Don’t Love You While he tells you his story, you try to decide what word best describes how he feels about his predicament, the two divorces from the same woman and all that she legally stole from him. Cleaned him out—words that bounce around in this part of the world and all over the West like loose tennis balls on a practice court. You’re not sure which word is a best fit for his state of mind, but then you tentatively conclude that it’s all about resolve, a commitment to the end of his life to never again get married. He’s from a small town in Indiana, and he and his wife twice over first met when he was sixteen and she was fourteen. They got married three years later. Five years on they got a divorce, and then remarried six months after it became final. She was the one who wanted to get back together, begging and crying with enough tears to fill a juice glass. A single mom with two kids is not the best catch in town, big, small, or any size for that matter. Thirteen years into the second go-around, she wanted a bigger house. He loved her no matter how she looked or what she did, so he found what she wanted and signed the eye-opening mortgage papers. Shortly after they moved into their new home, she had a new demand: she wanted all new furniture. Again he met her wish, right down to teak tables and pink lawn chairs. While these purchases were arriving, she concluded that she needed a new car, and it wasn’t long before she was driving a red Camry with lots of extras. His head was still spinning from all her demands when one Saturday afternoon the wife he adored said she had something she wanted to talk over with him. He had no idea what was on her mind, thinking only that maybe she now wanted some new appliances to make cooking easier. But to his utter surprise, she opened the conversation with the words: I don’t love you, I never loved you. Then she turned to a long list of what she had already gone over in detail with the attorney she had hired. She demanded all the equity in the house, all the new furniture, and all the old stuff that was worth anything. And, of course, on her list was the Camry; and honey you can have the one that’s so old we can’t even remember when we bought it. Then there were the monthly payments for her and the kids, more than a thousand a month, plus responsibility for medical bills, dental bills, and bills that fall from heaven or climb up out of hell and somehow made it onto the You-Pay-List, because an ingenious attorney put them there, a long list making for a larger billing fee.

I Don’t Love You 7 But the greedy, I-never-loved-you wife was generous. She signed a statement that she would never ask for any of his retirement. He was stunned. He swears that he didn’t see it coming, and he still has no idea why it happened or what went wrong. Fifteen years on he says he doesn’t have a clue, not one. The childhood sweetheart of I’ll-love-you-forever-and-ever vows got everything she wanted. All he got from all those years, he says, were two kids. That’s it. One brave son who said, Dad, don’t let her clean you out. Words that charged out of his young mouth when his mother was telling his father all she wanted and there’d be no compromises and if he didn’t like it that would be his problem. When he told me this story he had just retired, at the age of fifty-five. For several years he’s had a Filipina girlfriend. Since they met, he has spent all his vacation time with her, and with no one else. He loves her, he says. But he has told her, more than once, I will never marry you. If you can’t accept that, then I walk. The ex-wife has been through two more marriages, and two more divorces. Who knows what she got in each of these? The first and second husband doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. We talk on, and he tells me stories of other men. There are hundreds of these stories all over Southeast Asia. I’ve heard scores of them. From Australians, from Brits, from Americans, from Canadians, from Germans. What you learn is that men continue to repeat their mistakes, and they don’t, or rarely, see what they did wrong. Then one day they hear about all the available young women in Southeast Asia, and their neediness, and how age differences don’t mean the same to Asian women as they mean to women in the West. Before long the broken men find themselves among the disaffected flotsam of Southeast Asia, and on the hunt for a young wife. A very young wife. In countries that are full of oppressed and abandoned and abused women, who want a life, and money, and have families and very often kids to support. These young and poorly educated women don’t care that much about sad and teary marital histories, and they care hardly at all that the foreign man with money that they’re quite willing to call a husband is twenty or thirty years older than they are and is fat and not in good health.

8 I Don’t Love You *** I had the last bite of an egg and ham sandwich and finished off a second glass of ice tea and watched this Indiana man amble down the street to collect his laundry. He was going home tomorrow, after six weeks with his Filipina girlfriend. He’ll be returning soon, he says. He’s planning to spend up to six months a year in the Philippines now with his petite sweetheart. He’ll stay with her, he says, until she decides it’s marriage or else. And then he’ll walk and not look back. And, based on what I heard, who can blame him?

Someone Else’s Kid Not long ago I got talking with an American who makes frequent trips to Angeles City, with the aim of simply having fun. He wants to enjoy as many different girls as he can in the time he’s there, usually about three weeks at a stretch. He doesn’t restrict himself to a narrow band of possibilities. He will go with those who are eighteen and those who are in their late twenties and early thirties. He doesn’t particularly care if they have kids, though he tends to shy away from girls who have obvious stretch marks. He prefers not to take a girl if she smokes, but this trait won’t rule her out if she’s got other things going for her. He prefers that girls stay with him for the whole night, but again if a girl catches his eye and he likes what he hears when he buys her a drink or two, he will go with her if she only wants to go short-time, for a couple of hours. This particular American, who I will call J., is fifty-seven, had been divorced for nine years when we met, and has three grown children. He has a university degree, and an unusual one at that; he had a double major, in electrical engineering and political science. It was clear from talking with him that he was well-educated and had catholic interests. This background material is germane to the conversation we had, for one particular issue—a strong prejudice on his part--arose that made me wonder just how common it is, and whether or not as it played out in his case is largely confined to men who are older, and perhaps better educated. What J. was insistent about is that the one factor that would preclude him from considering a bar girl, or any Filipina for that matter, for a

10 Someone Else’s Kid serious relationship is that of her having a kid, even if one or two of them were as old as ten or twelve. He related a story that happened to him three years before we met. He said he had met a twenty-four year-old bar girl in a bar called Emotions (in Angeles City), and while he knew right away from talking to her that she had a three-year-old daughter, he found enough about her that he wanted to bar fine her. He did not think initially that he would want to see her a second time, and certainly not more than twice. But to his surprise, and going against his usual M.O., he bar fined her on five consecutive days. The more time he spent with her, the more he became emotionally involved. She was fun, had a consistently sunny disposition, was street smart, and more intelligent and perceptive than her high school education would have suggested. She was also warm and affectionate in all those ways that Filipinas can be warm and affectionate. The last two of the five days that J. spent with this girl were in Subic Bay. It was there that he realized just how much he had fallen for her. The girl lived with her daughter and a younger sister in Angeles City. It was the younger sister who cared for the daughter when the mother worked in the bar. These facts came out early, and then hardly anything else was said about the daughter to J. after that. So it wasn’t as though he sensed that he was taking a back seat emotionally to the girl’s concern or commitment for her child. The girl behaved more or less as if she didn’t have a daughter. And the daughter did not in fact come up in the discussions that began to unfold on this last day together when J. and the girl talked about her quitting the bar scene and her interest in moving to Kansas. J. said she seemed more than receptive to the idea of being with him on a long-term basis, meaning marriage, and her principal preoccupation was how often she would be able to see her family, who lived in Mindanao. She said it would be important to see them at least once a year. This, he thought, would not be a problem. But then in the taxi on the return trip to

Someone Else’s Kid 11 Angeles City, the girl came forth with this question: Will you help my son get enough schooling so he is as smart as you? J. said that it was not until the following day that he realized what he would be getting himself in for, and once he did he saw that there would be no future with this young woman. There was now one factor that stood out above all the others that would preclude him from getting seriously involved with her, or any woman for that matter, and that was whether or not she had a child, and especially a young one. He said his thoughts on the matter reduced to two main issues. He already had had a family, and he had no interest in going through a long period of raising another child or two. He enjoyed a good part of this child rearing experience when married, but it was also a lot of work and not something he wanted to go through again. Then too he simply couldn’t deal with the idea of raising someone else’s child. This girl, like almost all of the bar girls, had had a child by a young Filipino, who took off soon after the child arrived and subsequently had no interest in the child’s welfare, and never offered so much as a peso to the mother for support. Although the girl in this instance had not made any kind of an issue of the child, or allowed the child to intrude into their brief relationship, J. imagined that all of this would be different once they were a household—the three of them. He imagined that, much as with his own children, the mother would give the child a lot of attention, and he was at that point in his life where, if he was going to have another wife or live-in companion, he did not want to share her with one or more children, and especially when one of them was not even his. Was J. concerned about other issues? He was. The age difference was one, the way he would be perceived at home and among friends and family with such a young wife. Secondly, there was the great educational divide between them. And yet when he thought about each of these issues, and even when he considered them together, he said that they paled in comparison with the idea of spending fifteen or more years with a child that was not his. He

12 Someone Else’s Kid was certain that over time he would come to resent the child, and probably the mother, both for the time he could not spend with the young wife and the resources that the child would command. I have no idea how often this issue is the one that prevents a serious hookup between a foreigner and a young Filipina, bargirl or otherwise. I do know from lots of anecdotal evidence that there are plenty of middle-aged foreigners who have already had a family and who do marry bar girls from Angeles City who have one or more children. Is the issue not important to them? Or do they not see clearly what is at stake and what will unfold through the years?

Headed for Princeton He caught my eye right away, and I knew I’d target him for a chat even before I got my coffee. It was the sandals and ugly bare feet, the six-two broken skinny frame and the dangling girly cell phone on his belt, like a colostomy bag in miniature. And then too the ashen face with lines like rivulets on a soaking steep hill beneath million-dollar Southern California bungalows. Sixty he was if a day, maybe seventy, or twenty less and what’s left after too much neglect and a diet of gin and Dunkin’ Donut pastries. I couldn’t miss the green and gold earring in the left ear. Late-life hippie, the midlife crisis over the ratbag Aussie wife, I’d learn. The one who cleaned him out after she kissed his ass and sucked his dick all the way to a house in a fancy Melbourne suburb. Then, everything she wanted in her greed basket, she told him, Stick your sick Yank country and your meatless ass too. Yeah, the earring, that’s why I targeted him, meaty chat prey, and who knows how many more I’ll roll or bump into in the next couple of months, and then years, on My Endless Road to Nowhere. I invite him to join me and get inside the confessional and put his mouth to the peep hole and bare his soul, because no one gives a shit about a dying old man with one earring and chapped lips and broken teeth who’s not sure how to hold a fork and knife at the same time. Right away he tells me that he’s been married for five months to a young Filipina from Davao, but he hasn’t seen her for more than half this time. But now he’s on his way to pick her up in Hong Kong for a delayed honeymoon. That’s what he called it, a delayed honeymoon. They’ll spend six days there, and then fly to Bangkok. And then they’ll get on another plane headed for Manila, there to fill out all kinds of official forms with maybe believable fictions for the scrutinizing bureaucrats in the U.S. Embassy. (This last part he revealed after he said, Fuck Davao and

14 Headed for Princeton all the mooching relatives, I’ll only go back there in a grave digger’s wheelbarrow). He’s not looking forward to interview number four or five, answering questions about why at his age he wants to take a twenty-something Filipina with an eighth grade education to America. And all because they know, they sure do know, why he married her and what she’s got in mind what with five sisters and four brothers and twice that many cousins and half cousins and needy buffalo cousins slurping sewer water and imaging how it’ll soon turn to pure honey. Questions, doubts, suspicions—Home Security at work; you got to give them something to do after all. They’re not the brightest lights in the room, but then they’re not jackass dumb when they smell the sweat of an old and dying man trying to get a semi-literate twenty-something Filipina into the country who wants U.S. citizenship, which then opens the door for a shed full of very poor relatives. He didn’t tell me it was love. Maybe the idea of love, after so many wrecked marriages and relationships, smelled as bad as his feet. Nor did he flinch when I told him honey-for-money stories and I didn’t make up a word of any of them and he knew it. He said he tried to get her into college, as a sponsor, before the marriage idea came to him. Chicago or Princeton, I bet, my unkind smile said, my cynicism about the motives of these young women now deeper than Pacific trenches no man or beast has seen. She comes to him with an eighth grade education from a bamboo school that floated away from the nasty edge of Mindanao, and he seriously wonders out loud why a good university didn’t send her a Fed-Ex invitation. He wonders why the dullards at the Embassy and the Home Security politely told him: No buster, go get a better excuse or forget it. We don’t need forty-two more Filipino gardeners and maids and kitchen sweepers, thank you very much. We’re trying to be a bit more selective about our slave labor. He met her on the Internet, on a dating service I’d never heard of and I’ve heard of just about all of them. A dating service called the L.A. Café, I thought. Manila’s low-end whorehouse that would not have been good enough for Henry Miller’s lovely Germaine, the lusty slutty favorite in his stable of cunt-sweet whores. He’s telling me this about this Internet site he can’t bring to mind and I’m thinking, You mean she was really a hustling hooker, and yeah you bet she’s as innocent as any Filipina with eyes all over foreigners,

Headed for Princeton 15 completely innocent before she got bonked with three inches of an uncle or boyfriend bone on the dirt floor in the nipa hut while mom was out back feeding the chickens. Now she can’t even remember the year in which it first happened, and surely can’t count how many times she dropped her panties before you, heaven sent Dr. Peters, appeared and made all her dreams look like golden rainbows.

16 Headed for Princeton Peter is Dr. Peters, which degrades to simply psychiatrist without that Dr. up front, a low-end shrink in a nuthouse facility in biker Brawley three days a week. I imagine that he listens to John Lennon or the Beach Boys to calm his nerves on the mountain expressway to San Diego before he concocts more sage advice on how to deal with Life. He lives alone, he tells me, the rest of the week inside a stucco box in Escondido. Okay, he finally says, almost tearful, but I don’t know for what, I have to go. Time to get me to where I can get her on the phone and talk about the Taliban and what we should really do with Iran. What we should really do with Iran! Taliban and Iran in the same sentence, I swear. I get to my feet and wish him luck and a long life, and hope against odds that he gets a grip on what he’s doing and where his Filipina Special One is really at.

A Farang Female among Mongers

18 A Farang Female Among Mongers Few are the Western men who haven’t heard all kinds of nasty putdowns and had ugly and demeaning charges and labels thrown at them when former girlfriends, ex-wives or present wives, and women friends of any sort in their homelands have heard that they have spent time in Pattaya, Phuket, or Bangkok, because it is assumed that they consorted with Thai prostitutes. Dirty old man, pervert, sick bastard, degenerate, predator, scumbag, and loser are just a few of the words that Westerners love to throw around. And in almost all cases without having been anywhere near Thailand or having more than the foggiest idea how the whole system of farang-prostitute interactions works. Nor, from all I have heard and seen, have more than a tiny fraction of these people given enough thought to prostitution in Thailand to even conceive of the possibility that in a great many, if not most, cases it is not the whoremonger who is the predator but rather the clever and scheming Thai prostitute who best fits this strongly judgmental word. Often these hookers are amazingly adept at corralling a farang for both his money and deepest emotions, and with as much skill as a wily hawk nailing a fleeing field mouse. There are, of course, farang women who have been to Pattaya and other well-known prostitution venues in Thailand. But whether they have changed their minds about what men are up to after looking carefully and talking to whoremongers (if they ever do so) and seeing what the eyes can see (often not much), I don’t know. I’m not aware of surveys that address this, and in any event it might be close to impossible to get anything like an unbiased sample, one that would clearly show how Western women who have spent some time in the major prostitution venues of Thailand think about what’s going on. Whatever, now and again, one runs across a Western woman who has traveled widely; is beyond the twenties backpacking age; has actually set foot in one or more of the beer bars or go-go venues in Pattaya, Patpong, Phuket, or Soi Cowboy; and has had her thoughts published. One woman who more or less fits this description is Jhana Bach. In 2004, she wrote a short piece called “City Undone,” in which she came forth with

A Farang Female Among Mongers 19 some strong opinions about western men in Soi Cowboy. (Her essay was published in The Best Travelers’ Tales of 2004: True Stories from around the World , Travelers’ Tales, 2004). Now one shouldn’t, as a rule, make much about the opinions of a single person. Yet when they so nicely reaffirm all that one so often hears from Western women about the “degenerate losers and dirty old men” in Thailand, one can only shake his head and think: Not again. Before even setting foot in Soi Cowboy, Jhana had decided that it’s “perfectly trashy,” a “miniature Vegas of neon and skank,” and”the first neighborhood in Asia that displayed prostitutes behind glass in the ground floors of pay-by-the-hour motels.” Perhaps she has some information that I don’t have, but this historical way of portraying Soi Cowboy doesn’t at all fit with what I’ve read about the street’s history or know from personal experience. Having been to both Las Vegas and Soi Cowboy many times, I cannot see the comparison she’s making, and I certainly don’t think Soi Cowboy is trashy, and certainly not “perfectly trashy.” It is hard not to conclude that Jhana has never been to a place—and there are many of them all over the world—that is either skanky or trashy. In the one and only club that Jhana and her friend, Ed, visited, they saw laughing girls, a “not unpleasant scene of youthful ripeness and ebullience, as if wiggling naked to the music were the most natural thing they could be doing.” This is about all we learn from Jhana about the “four thin teenage girls in bits of string [an exaggeration, to say the least].” How Jhana knew these were teenage girls, I have no idea. Asian girls and women typically look younger than they are, which means that it is quite possible that the girls in this one club were in their early twenties, or even older. This use of the word teenager is, I think, part of a set-up. For the reader is now primed to understand that it is naïve and very young girls—barely of age or underage--who are prey to sex-hunger and predatory Western men.

20 A Farang Female Among Mongers As soon as we’re informed how “ripe and ebullient” the four go-go girls are, we are then, in the same paragraph, and the very next sentence in fact, given some “truthful” travel writing as only a woman with too many Bible classes and too many gone-wrong relationships with men could write. “The men seated around the stage leering were another matter. I scanned all the faces watching the show, light and dark, expecting them to be embarrassed by my presence, as if I were a stand-in for their long-distant wives. They stared unabashedly, mouths partly open, plainly predatory (emphasis mine). Their craving was clearly for something other than just sex, beyond the animal: subjugation (emphasis mine). We left before our drinks arrived, our bravado in pieces.” It doesn’t take anyone with more than a little familiarity with Soi Cowboy and whoremongers to see that this description based on a very short stay (Jhana and Ed left before drinks arrived) is the most pathetic kind of female (or male for that matter) tripe imaginable. You can’t see many of the faces in the bars in Soi Cowboy, both because of the design of the bars and the lighting. You’d be lucky, and one hell of a mind reader, to read “embarrassment” into the men’s faces, to say nothing of the fact that I have rarely met a whoremonger anywhere in Southeast Asia who paid any attention to or cared about the presence of a white woman in a go-go bar. Subjugation is a concept that feminists love to embrace when bashing men, and it is one whose meaning I’ve never had satisfactorily clarified by any woman. One reason is that from all I know there are an awful lot of men who quite enjoy getting their head between a pair of legs to give a woman pleasure, a kind of behavior that if anything puts men in what might be called a subservient position. Giving a blowjob is another matter, and would seem to be where the idea of subjugation might apply. However, I’d bet good money that it is rarely seen this way by prostitutes. It may be seen as foreign or unnatural, or even disgusting if never before tried. But it is also viewed as a great way to get a man off more quickly so that the girl can get dressed and

A Farang Female Among Mongers 21 leave and head straight for the bar, and with a little luck pick up another profitable short-time customer. Or, to come at the matter differently, get the man sleeping if she’s with him for the whole night. More than a few prostitutes I’ve known have figured out that giving a man a blowjob has another payoff, namely that the less fucking a woman does the less pain she’ll feel when she next finds herself being penetrated by someone who has a hard time getting off.

22 A Farang Female Among Mongers My guess is that Jhana really had something much more degrading in mind when she claimed that the “cravings” of whoremongers are “beyond the animal.” In desiring subjugation, what the men really wanted--as Jhana would have it--is for the Thai go-go girls to get back to the room and bend over a chair and suffer through a good spanking with a leather belt. Or get down on their hands and knees and crawl to the laughing farang before kissing the soles of his feet. No doubt there are a few men around who want to degrade women in just the terms suggested; but I’ve rarely met one, or sensed that I’ve been in the presence of one, and over the years I have been around hundreds of whoremongers. Yet Jhana, in five minutes and without talking to a single monger, knows that sex is all about subjugation. Have I gone too far with my inferences about what’s on Jhana’s mind? Not likely, for what I have failed to thus far note is that Jhana, on her last night in Bangkok, was not at all sure that her friend Ed would be at the appointed place where she agreed to meet him. And if he did not show up, she made it clear that she was going to hire a male Thai prostitute to service her needs. She didn’t just want to get a good fuck from someone who was ten or fifteen years younger (she’s probably it her mid-thirties from what I can tell from the piece). No, what Jhana wanted to do—to use her own word—was get “kinky.” She wanted to be able to “taste the power” of her money, a large stack of small denomination travelers checks in her possession that made her feel good and powerful. She wanted to be able to tell her young Thai prostitute to bring her, on command, her shoes, and to “suck her toes.” And she wanted to know that he would behave like this “all night long and smile.”

Nok: A Thai Bar Girl There are thousands of bar girl stories, each one different in its particulars. Here’s one such story; the story of Nok. It’s about how she got into the life, and how she feels about the customers, what she prefers doing with them, and what she has imagined she will do after leaving the life of whoring. The narrative that follows is factual. I have simply recorded in my own words what I was told by Nok (not her real name) over dinner and some drinks. Since I do not speak Thai, one might wonder how Nok could have communicated her story to me, for, as I note below, she had only been working in Pattaya for a little over three months when we got together. She is, by every measure, one of those extraordinary young Thai women who have picked up English quickly. She is energetic, she goes to her English grammar and vocabulary books frequently, and she is curious and wants to learn as much as possible. If she hears a new word she does not know she asks what it means, and she may even want you to write it down for her. While Nok’s story is unique in the sense that I am sure all bar girl or farang stories have their own defining peculiarities, it is also clear that her story illustrates some well-known aspects of Thai life and the bar girl scene, and therefore this brief narrative of a single bar girl has elements of the universal about it. Nok is twenty-five. She is small and slender, less than five feet tall, and quite attractive. She has an outgoing and vivacious personality that combined with an open and inviting smile, and a beautiful set of white teeth, make it obvious why she would have little problem catching the attention of a farang passing by the bar where she works on Soi Seven. The only reason Nok isn’t working in a go-go venue--where she would get better commissions on more expensive lady drinks and a larger bar fine, and get more for going short-time or long-time--is

24 Nok: A Thai Bar Girl that she confesses to having a very prominent scar from a caesarian birth. It would be a considerable liability were she a dancer. Nok is one of three sisters and comes from a family of poor rice farmers north of Korat. At the age of eighteen she went to Bangkok and found a job working on an assembly line putting together hard drives. For more than five years, she worked seven days a week and twelve hours a day, with one day a month off. For this grinding work schedule she received 10,000 baht a month, about $350 in 2008 (roughly $250 when she was midway through her factory career and the dollar had a higher value against the baht). It was on the job that Nok met her husband, who was working in a different part of the plant. They started dating, they fell in love, and they got married. The young man, about her age, and from a similarly poor family in Isaan, had to give Nok’s parents 50,000 baht and three pieces of gold to marry her. About the only thing that Nok was insistent about with her future husband as a condition of marriage was that he get a tattoo on his upper left arm removed. He did as she asked. Nok did not, and does not now, smoke or drink, and she has no tattoos and obviously dislikes them. Nor did her husband smoke or drink, or as many young Thai men are inclined to do, gamble and chase other women. He was, according to Nok, faithful to a fault. They did have one rather peculiar arrangement between them. Each of them took 2,000 baht a month from their factory job salaries (he made about the same amount she did) to use for food and other expenses; exactly how they used this money for household food and other necessities was not clear. Nok did say, however, that they were free to spend the money anyway they so desired. Early in their marriage, Nok’s husband’s parents needed financial aid, and they both gave willingly to help them. Nok said she gave from the heart, and without resentment. But then it was not too long before Nok’s parents needed some money for their farm, and at this point Nok’s husband rebelled. He simply did not want to give anything to her parents. Nok was extremely upset by his decision. Finally, the husband relented, but not enough, or convincingly enough, to bury the shock of his initial decision. She had interpreted his decision as selfish and as that of a person who simply did not like her parents. From all I could read into her words and gestures, Nok’s parents are more important to her than her husband ever was or could be

Nok: A Thai Bar Girl 25 (which suggests that it is not only farang who marry Thai women who find themselves in this sometimes hard to accept predicament).

Nok soon became secretive and deceptive with her husband. She found a way to save as much as 500 baht a month from her 2,000 baht allowance to send to her parents. But several months after she began doing this, her money-

26 Nok: A Thai Bar Girl conscious husband found out about the deception. He expressed considerable displease at what she was doing. Nok was unrepentant. Other small issues began to fracture the marriage. One that bothered Nok a great deal was that one of her sisters, who was three years younger and lived about a kilometer away from them, was someone she was close to. When she had an hour or two free and wanted to visit her sister, her husband would throw a tantrum and forbid her doing so. Nok had not given him any reason to be jealous, and yet it was clear that he wanted to know where Nok was all the time. Anything he could not control was off-limits for Nok. More than two years into the marriage, Nok got pregnant. They were both delighted. The husband’s delight and pride at having a child did not diminish as she became large and put on weight, a time when many Thai men begin to philander. For the first three months after the daughter was born, a time when Nok was allowed to be at home and with the child, she found that she thoroughly enjoyed motherhood. But then the day came when she had to go back to work. Because she was working some seventy hours a week she obviously had no time to raise the child. She and her husband, who were trying to save money for their future, ruled out child care as a possibility. It was simply too expensive. She thought that the only reasonable solution was to have her parents take care of their daughter. Nok’s husband didn’t like the idea at all. He wanted her to care for the child while working—which she quite reasonably saw as impossible. Nok insisted that the only real way to deal with the problem was to have their daughter stay with her parents. Here, as with the money given to their parents, it was clear that her husband strongly aligned with his parents, who he insisted should take care of their daughter. Nok prevailed and their daughter went to live with her parents. A rift opened early in the marriage over the husband’s unwillingness to help Nok’s parents financially now grew larger when the daughter’s care became an issue. It became too much for Nok to bear, and she told her husband that they should separate. But because she still loved him, and he said he loved her, they would work at finding a way to repair the relationship. The husband tried hard for the first month. He called her constantly, he professed his love repeatedly, and he insisted that he had changed his attitude. He

Nok: A Thai Bar Girl 27 wanted to get back together with her. But then New Years came and the husband agreed to go to Nok’s village and be with her family and their daughter. He did not go, and he gave no explanation for not doing so. Nok gave him one more chance to show that he was sincere and wanted to repair their relationship. When he again promised to go to her parent’s home where the daughter was being cared for and did not show up, Nok ended the marriage. The thought of continuing at the computer factory and working such long hours and having to support herself and send money to her parents for the daughter did not sit well with Nok. After three weeks and feeling very lonely and alienated, she quit her job. On the advice of a friend, she went to Phuket to find work. She had no interest in being a bar girl or anywhere around that scene in Phuket. She got a job as a receptionist in a hotel. She could understand no more than a few words that the foreign men said to her. Two days into the job she quit, and then promptly got a job at Pizza Hut. But this job was also short lived, and again because her English was so poor. Nok returned to Bangkok, managed to get her job back at the computer assembly plant, and didn’t find the work any more satisfying or promising as a way to meet her needs than she had before quitting. Within a couple of weeks, she quit again. The immediate precipitant for doing so was a persuasive argument by a close friend that she could make plenty of money if she moved to Pattaya and worked as a bar girl. Before Nok went with her first farang, she asked the mamasan what she should do with him in the bedroom. She was told: Do everything he wants to do. That’s the only way to get business. And so the first farang who paid her bar fine took Nok at her word when she said she would do anything in bed. She allowed him to enter her anally when he said that’s what he really wanted. Nok was sore for a week from the traumatic experience, and she greatly regretted what she had done. Now she began to seriously talk to other bar girls. They told her: If you don’t want to do something just refuse. If the farang insists, leave and forget about the money. And this is how she has behaved since that very first experience that went so wrong. Nok worked hard at learning English. She quickly became, as bar girls go, quite good at both understanding and making clear what she wanted to

28 Nok: A Thai Bar Girl say. She also began to get a good sense of what kind of customers—as she and bar girls refer to farang mongers—she preferred to go with. She prefers men above forty. Young guys, she says, are often crass and inconsiderate, and in many cases interested only in “boom boom” all night long. She has little tolerance for this, and not least for the reason that it makes her small vagina sore, a soreness that might last for days. She likes older men because she finds that so many of them will be satisfied with one session of sex if she goes with them for the whole night, and that a fair number of them really don’t even want sex, just the warmth they get from cuddling in bed. If she has a problem with older men because they have a hard time coming--because of age, alcohol, using a condom, and taking Viagra—she will tell them she will be quite happy to give them a blowjob. Nok likes to go with customers for the whole night, even though she can make more money by going with two customers for a couple of hours. Her rationale is that she dislikes the coldness and anonymity of a short-time arrangement, one where she and her customer repair to his hotel room, have sex until he climaxes, and then she is paid and leaves. She won’t rule out the short-time customer, but she much prefers to go all night and get the sense of warmth and affection that often comes from staying with someone that long. In the three-and-a-half months that Nok has been working, and quite successfully as a bar girl in Pattaya, she has had one serious relationship with a farang. He’s a German who she met in her second month on the job. He’s forty-seven years old. Their first time together he told Nok that he had a German girlfriend back home. But he found Nok nearly irresistible, and he was with her for three consecutive days. Subsequently, he went on a short trip abroad, and when he returned he and Nok were together for five more days. During his second stay with Nok, the German confessed that he had had a quite serious relationship with another Pattaya bar girl the year before. He had in fact gotten so serious with her that upon returning to Germany he began sending her between 10,000 and 15,000 baht a month. This continued for several months, until quite by accident he discovered that this woman he was in love with and wanted to marry was simultaneously receiving money from two other farang. At this point, he told her that their relationship was over. And the reason it was over was because he “felt sorry for the other two men who

Nok: A Thai Bar Girl 29 were sponsoring her.” (I found this a little hard to believe, and yet had little reason to doubt that he might well have said this to Nok.) Nok said that she is sufficiently serious about this person that she can imagine marrying him, even knowing that at the moment he has a girlfriend at home. She is in daily e-mail contact with him. She claims that they “honestly share everything” with one another about their lives, even to the point of her telling him what kinds of customers she goes with. He would like her to stop working in the bar, but she has made it clear to him that she will not do so unless he sends her money. Then and only then will she return to her village. She has told this man for whom she had considerable feelings that she has two major financial obligations. One is to support her daughter—the most important one. And the second one is to pay for her younger sister to go to university, a sister to whom she is quite close. He understands her predicament, she says, and recently he has agreed to send her money for the next couple of months if she goes home, a time of the year when business for bar girls is not that good in Pattaya. (I talked with Nok toward the end of May). And then he will be coming to Thailand again to be with her, at which point they will decide whether or not they might have a future together. The German has expressed his concern that Nok could well deceive him when he is sending money to keep her in her village. Yet he has, according to Nok, convinced himself that he can tell the difference between a call made from or to a village and one made from or to Pattaya. Nok is aware that this is a fool’s take on reality; but, she said, she is honest and would not deceive him if he financially supported her. Nok is puzzled why this man twenty-two years her senior cannot see any kind of parallel between him having a girlfriend that he sleeps with all the time and Nok sleeping with customers she meets in the beer bar. Okay, there is the difference in the number of different customers she has sex with, but still, she reasons, why can’t he see that I should be as upset with him sleeping with his girlfriend all the time as much as he is upset with me going with men I don’t even know? It should be easier for him, she says. After all, none of the customers are her boyfriends and she quickly forgets most of them. Nok does not know how long she will work in Pattaya, or will be able to. Foremost in her mind are the obligations to her daughter and to one of her

30 Nok: A Thai Bar Girl sisters. Beyond this, she has vague thoughts of working long enough to make enough money to open a very small restaurant in her village. Do her parents and sisters know what she is doing? She was vague about whether her two sisters know, but she wants neither of them to do what she is doing. She has told her parents that she sells clothes in Pattaya. But she suspects that her father knows what she does, and he does not approve. She does not want to address his doubts directly. She has simply told him that she must continue doing what she is doing to support her daughter and to help the family in ways that he cannot. After I had gotten Nok’s story, I asked myself this question: Would I want to see Nok nine months or a year from now if she was still selling her sexual services to farang in Pattaya? I’m not sure I would. I fear what she will become if she continues working as a bar girl, the changes in that period of time can be that dramatic.

Indifferent We have all felt love for someone. We have all hated someone. We have all had that feeling of indifference. We have seen these feelings in others. Is the feeling that someone is indifferent toward us one of the most disturbing conditions we encounter? I don’t recall exactly when it happened, but somewhere in the fourth year of my first marriage I felt indifferent toward my wife. It was not long before I said to her: The marriage is over. You have three weeks to move out, or I will move out. I don’t care which way it goes. You can file for the divorce and claim anything you want. She said she wanted to talk. We really must talk, she said. I said there was nothing to talk about. She was gone from my life inside a week. After that I rarely thought about her. Then as the years rolled on I didn’t think about her at all. I was indifferent to her very existence. Did I love my first wife in the beginning, in the first years of marriage? I don’t know. That part of my memory bank has largely been erased. It is now, and has long been, of no interest to me. Did I hate my wife at any point in our marriage, or after? I don’t think so. I had no real reason to hate her, and I could not bring myself to hate her because we were sexually incompatible. Or because she was more niggardly with money than I was comfortable with. Or because she was fastidious to a fault, and this is not how I live or then wanted to live. No, I was merely indifferent toward her. As indifferent, time would show, as I am to a complete stranger on the street.

32 Indifferent Hatred. Yes, real hatred. When I got TB a couple of years ago, I was told that it could be cured. And it was. After there was no detectable TB in my body, a friend wrote to me and said that he knew some people who had hoped that I would die from the disease. They hated me. They hated me with a passion, he told me. They hated me because I publicly questioned their scholarship and gave a bad name to their profession by doing to these haters what I had done to many others just like them. Many years ago one individual had the power to literally change the entire course of a career I had. I came to hate the individual, and I’ve never been bashful about saying that when I heard he died I was elated. The truth is, I celebrated his death. I was reminded of these small pieces of my personal history, and these states of mind we call love and hate and indifference, when I found myself chatting with a whoremonger one afternoon in Angles City. He was drinking to blunt the depression he was experiencing, all brought on by how he had been treated by a bar girl. Walt met a twenty-three year-old Filipina bar girl by the name of Amy toward the end of her second month as a dancer. She had a three-year-old child that lived with the father. The girl had had some bar fines—not many—and the first time that Walt bar fined her they stayed together for four days. They had a good deal of mutually satisfying sex, they went to afternoon movies, they listened to live music at night, he took her to some good restaurants, and they talked openly about relationships they had had in the past. He found Amy sweet, a good conversationalist, and someone he just could not stay away from. He liked the fact that she had asked for nothing from him, and on two of the four days when he tried to give her a generous tip upon leaving his room she refused to accept it. He said he would not have called how he felt for her love, but he did feel that they had established a bond in these four days together. For reasons he didn’t explain to me, he said that he did

Indifferent 33 not see her for three days after they had been together on this four-day run. But he returned to her after that. He bar fined her for another three days. He had not changed his opinion about her, and at no time did he entertain the feeling that Amy did not want to be with him.

34 Indifferent On the day following this second set of days with Amy, Walt went to the bar where she danced. He intended to spend the afternoon and night and part of the next day with her. They would carry on as they had before, he thought. They would have sex a couple of times, take in a movie or watch one on TV in his room, and perhaps find some live music at night to listen to. Indeed, he thought that he might well spend another three or four days with her. When Walt got to the bar, Amy came off the stage and sat with him. After they ordered drinks, he playfully said, Do you want me to bar fine you now? She hesitated. It was, he later thought, a long hesitation. Then she said, Up to you. He was caught off guard, at what he immediately saw as her casual indifference. And he said, Do you want to go with me? Up to you, Amy again said. She showed little emotion, he thought. Then she followed with a vague statement to the effect that she wanted to spend some time with a girlfriend. She didn’t say why. He didn’t have any reason to suspect that there was another customer who had come back into her life who she preferred to be with. Then you don’t want to come with me? he now said. I can see you in two days, okay? Okay, he said. Walt paid the drink bill, gave Amy a kiss on the cheek, and left. He said he felt utterly deflated. Much worse than if they had gotten into a good argument. He felt that she didn’t care one way or the other if she spent another hour or day with him, and that had another customer come along and caught her eye before he arrived, or even while chatting with her, she might well have gone with him. And gone without either apology or giving excuses. Amy was, Walt concluded, simply indifferent toward him. It was, he had to admit, how he felt toward a bar girl with whom he’d had a so-so experience and didn’t expect to ever see again.

Indifferent 35 I suspect that this kind of indifference that Walt experienced hurts as much or more for many people than does an uncontrollable outburst of anger and apparent hatred. At least an expression of hatred shows that in some sense you matter to the person coming forth with hateful words and gestures. Love is love. Hatred is real and a strong feeling, and rarely an admirable one. But indifference? It is a state of mind when seen in others that rattles the senses, makes one numb. My enemies, or those who wanted to see me die from TB, were paying me a considerable compliment. I had gotten under their skin, and about mere matters concerning their ability to think and do good scholarship. I had had a greater impact on them than I had ever known, a fact I was unaware of until told of their wish. And herein, in a sense, lies one of the arresting negatives of the famed Girlfriend Experience (GFE) of Thailand and the Philippines. It is this experience that more than perhaps anything distinguishes prostitution in the West from what one finds in Southeast Asia. It is what men, and men who become mongers of any stripe, often seek and greatly relish upon finding, even if the GFE lasts for a mere day or two. But in lasting for a mere day or two, the GFE can bring forth some very strong emotions, including plenty of lust, what is often erroneously called love. With this kind of lust-love, mongers and otherwise sane men make all kinds of mistakes, not least a willingness to send from afar and for months on end considerable sums of money to a girl who is, because of what she does, and a good deal of conditioning from being on the game, rarely faithful. In these sponsorship relationships there is much talk of love, and then of hatred when things go bad and the betrayals become obvious. But at least there is not indifference. Or is there? And is it a condition that rather naturally arises from the kind of work that bar girls do? If on the game any length of time, bar girls seemingly must become indifferent, caring not one way or the other about the person to whom they have expressed some

36 Indifferent manner of love. The disappointments are constant. The betrayals, by mongers, are ever present, and the next one is only minutes or hours away. There arises in the girl’s mind, and notwithstanding her ability to give a convincing GFE, a need to not care. Or not care very much. And not carrying very much eventually, with enough hurt and time on the game, becomes unqualified indifference.

Poisonous Love Gerhard is thirty-three, speaks five languages including Tagalog, has lived in the Philippines for five years, and has managed to establish a thriving business importing feed supplements for livestock. Although he travels a good deal in the Philippines, and often to Manila, he does a surprising amount of his business by cell phone. I learned this and a great deal more when, looking for conversation, I chided him about obsessively turning to his cell phone. During the course of several hours, Gerhard not only told me all about cell phones in the Philippines and his business and what makes Dumaguete the most desirable of places to live in the Philippines, but he also gave me insight into Filipinos, reinforcing and correcting impressions I’d picked up here and there. Before the evening was over we retired to a German restaurant across from the hotel where I was staying, and it was there that he told me a long story about what, in retrospect, I came to see as the power of the need to believe. The story revealed a lot about lust and love and what is both so compelling and yet so dangerous about getting romantically involved with young and very needy Filipinas. Gerhard was married for three years before he moved to the Philippines and virtually cut all of his ties with family and friends in Switzerland. During his marital years he was quite happy. His wife was attractive, she loved to travel as he does, she was a good cook, she could be intellectually challenging, and she was more than an adequate bed partner. She also contributed significantly to their income, and in fact accounted for more than half of what they earned. A couple of years older than Gerhard, Miriam was a well-paid computer and

38 Poisonous Love networking consultant. Her job often took her on the road for several days at a time. Because Gerhard and Miriam had not been married all that long and were happy together, Gerhard had no reason to suspect that she was unfaithful when traveling. But she was, though to what extent and for how long Gerhard never found out. What is clear is that the marriage came to an abrupt end when Gerhard woke one morning and saw that he had what some men come to know as the easily identifiable symptoms of gonorrhea. Although Miriam insisted to the end that she did not give the disease to him, he had never once, he claimed, been unfaithful to her during their marriage. He said that in retrospect there had been three or four occasions in which he should have suspected that his wife was cheating on him. One time she was not registered at the hotel she was supposed to be in. Another time she claimed to have a vaginal infection that required immediate attention upon returning from a trip, an infection that did not allow for intercourse for what was an unusually long period of time. And there were one or two other pieces of evidence that a suspicious spouse might have made a great deal about by way of questions and a demand for convincing explanations. But Gerhard said that he had absolutely no suspicions whatsoever about his wife, until that fateful morning when he got the distinctive burning sensation while urinating. In the months after the discovery of his wife’s infidelity, and even after the divorce was finalized, Gerhard said that there were days when he was prepared to believe his wife’s adamant denials of infidelity. He half believed that he’d gotten the gonorrhea from a toilet seat. There was a strong need to believe anything, in this instance one fueled by a good marriage and the kind of love that was all that Gerhard then believed he might’ve hoped for. After the marriage ended, Gerhard resolved that he would never again find himself gulled by a woman. Or by anyone for that matter. He would pay attention, he would read what was happening around him with eyes wide open, and he would not miss the obvious. He never got remarried, and though he has had several brief affairs with Filipinas and scores of encounters with prostitutes since his divorce, he has not been seriously tempted to get romantically involved with a Filipina or anyone else. But having said this, and now well along in our night of eating and drinking, he confessed that several months ago he found himself exactly where

Poisonous Love 39 he was certain he’d never be again. And this time it should not have happened, and not just because of the rending and deeply wounding experience he’d had with his ex-wife. How could it have happened? he laughed several times as he told me this story.

He had come to Manila for four days of business, and as he had often done in the past, he went to the L.A. Café an hour or so before midnight, a

40 Poisonous Love time when this most famous of Manila’s bars for picking up freelance prostitutes has a hundred or more young Filipinas prowling about on two floors in search of a score that will net them between 1,500 and 2,000 pesos for a couple of hours or a night of sex. Over the years, Gerhard claimed to have picked up no fewer than forty young women in the L.A. Café. Invariably, he would take one of them back to his hotel room, usually encouraging her to stay until they’d had breakfast together in the morning in his room. On a couple of occasions he’d see one of these girls two or three times, but he tried to avoid repeats. He preferred, as they say in the Philippines and in the world of whoremongers, to butterfly, not go with the same woman more than once or twice. He enjoyed the variety. This greatly diminished the possibility of involvement and thereby any kind of heartache. Gerhard, to his own surprise, broke this rule about five months ago. It all began when he arrived early one night at the L. A. Café and spotted a young and slim Filipina he’d never seen before. He found her physically quite attractive but suspected that she was not eighteen. When he asked her when she was born, the year she gave made her seventeen. He asked to see her I.D. but she had nothing to show him. Unwillingly to take a chance, fearing that she could be setting him up for extortion by the police, Gerhard walked away. He was so disappointed that he decided to return to the hotel early and sleep alone. But on the way out of the Café, three freelancers beckoned for him to come to their table and chat. They were hoping for more, obviously. He went to them, was immediately grabbed by one girl, and before he could get a good look at her he was in her arms and she was kissing him on the lips. It took Gerhard all of five minutes to decide that he wanted to be with her for the night. He was so anxious to do so that when he asked her about her age and she said she was eighteen he made no effort to get confirming evidence. Ten minutes after he met her, not even having bought her a drink, and knowing no more than that her name was Joy, he was walking with her arm-in-arm on the way to his hotel. He said the sex with Joy was good that first night, but not outstanding. She was obviously inexperienced. He had no plans to see her again. The main reasons, he said, were because she was unusually quiet and didn’t seem to be at all curious about him or anything else. She was attractive enough, but had her

Poisonous Love 41 hair cut to the nape of her neck. Gerhard prefers Filipinas with hair that falls to the waist. A business appointment that he had that morning was cancelled, and on the spur of the moment, after handing Joy a 1,000 peso note, he asked her if she regularly went to church on Sunday. She said yes, and he suggested they pay a visit to the Manila Cathedral in Intramuros. It’s a famous ancient cathedral and he’d never seen it. They got a taxi, sat through half a mass, and then when Gerhard got bored they left. He immediately put her in a taxi and said goodbye. He expected he’d not see her again, or that he’d ignore her the next time he found himself in the L.A. Café. That night he returned to the Café, and shortly after arriving Joy came to his side. She was unusually affectionate and spoke to him in Tagalog to make clear just how she felt about him. She made him feel as if they had been together for some time. Still, he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t interested and wanted to find someone else for the night. He delayed telling her, and the more he did so the more her words and physical warmth affected him. He bought her some food, and a couple of drinks, and she began to open up about her life. She claimed that she had been in Manila a month and had only been to bed with one other foreigner, a Korean, and that the only reason she had gone with Gerhard the night before was that she had gotten a little drunk on one beer, her first ever. She also said that she was from Davao, and that her parents had sent her to Manila to finish her last year of high school at a better school than was available at home. The reason she came to the L. A. Café was because her two friends, with whom she lived in nearby Paco, came all the time to work. Work is a euphemism for finding a foreign man for the night for money. To his surprise, Gerhard found himself back in bed with Joy. The sexual experience was not much better than it had been the first time with her. But emotionally he found Joy much warmer and more inquisitive this time. Again, he had breakfast with her in the morning and paid her the same amount he had the first time, a thousand pesos. Despite feeling good about the time spent with her, he nevertheless told himself that he would not see her again. He resolved that on his next visit to Manila he would not frequent the L.A. Café, that if he wanted a girl for the night he’d go to the EDSA Complex where there are plenty of available girls—albeit more expensive. Or he’d even go to

42 Poisonous Love Makati on Burgos Street where it is easy enough to find someone attractive and accommodating, if you’re willing to pay up to three times the going L.A. Café rate. On Gerhard’s next visit to Manila, this one to last three days, he picked up a girl at the EDSA Complex. She stayed the night with him and proved to be better in bed than Joy. Still, she cost him more than he liked to pay. With this in mind, he returned to the L.A. Café on his second night in Manila, determined to tell Joy when she approached him that he wanted to go with someone else. But, he said, she must have caught him in a moment of true weakness, or perhaps it was the wounded look and the pleading words that came from her that night, and what he remembered from their previous times together. She convincingly claimed to have greatly missed him, and then was equally persuasive in saying that she was in love with him and that this was the first time she had felt this way in a very long time. Gerhard should have known better, and might have in a sober moment. But he bought into Joy’s claims; he fell for the idea that she had not fallen for anyone else in years, and he wanted to believe, as she claimed, that she only came to the L. A. Café to be with her friends, not to hustle or be hustled by men for money. Gerhard said he realized just how thoroughly he was hooked when that night they walked into the lobby of the Frendy Hotel with Joy on his arm and he found himself singing, feeling as good as he could remember feeling in a very long time. On Gerhard’s last night in Manila, he gave Joy a gold chain with a cross that he’d bought that afternoon. She was thrilled with the gift, and out came the words, I love you, I love you. He said he’d heard this before from girls that he’d been with for a couple of nights, but there was something more convincing in Joy’s words. Then too, he said, it was all there in her sparkling eyes, and the way she insisted on holding and hugging him. But then in the morning it all came apart. When they finished breakfast in the hotel room and he was about to give Joy the 1,000 pesos he’d given her each time they were together, he realized that all he had in cash was 600 pesos and some change. He hadn’t stopped the previous afternoon at an ATM machine. He now thought, however, that since Joy had been quite clear that she was in love with him, giving her less than he had previously would not matter. They were boyfriend and girlfriend; this is how she saw them, she had told him. So Gerhard gave her the 500 peso note that he had and kept the rest for a

Poisonous Love 43 contingency, forgetting that he had money coming back from the hotel when he checked out. Joy looked at the five hundred peso note and immediately gave it back to him. And then she went silent. He concluded that money was secondary in their relationship just as he had suspected. She was a true girlfriend; her words were as meaningful as the expressions of physical warmth. The illusion of love or love-in-the-making lasted less than fifteen minutes. For just before leaving the room, Joy told Gerhard that she wanted the usual 1,000 pesos. Give it to me, was the way she put it. In his mind she’d now made herself unequivocally clear that however much she loved him, she still wanted to be paid as much as he’d ever given her. Gerhard said that in the minutes that followed he felt only shock, an indefinable kind of dismay. He could not look Joy in the eye for fear of exploding. Joy stood by him as he checked out of the hotel, and she saw that he received over 1,000 pesos back from the deposit he’d made upon registering. When they got to the street, Joy again asked him for the 1,000 pesos. He stuck two five hundred peso notes in her hand, kissed her on the check, and said goodbye. He made no mention of seeing her again. He meant the goodbye to be final. He was sure that their brief affair was completely over. If he saw her at the L.A. Café he would just ignore her. After all, she was just another heartless and hungry prostitute, no different than any of the others. It was several weeks before Gerhard again found himself in Manila. On this visit he went to the L. A. Café early and had a few beers and something to eat. He saw no sign of Joy. Good, he thought, just as he wanted it. No need for a confrontation that would make him look bad and possibly cause Joy to throw a fit. Somewhat later, however, and unexpectedly, Joy approached Gerhard from behind as he sat at the upstairs bar alone. She gave him a big hug and murmured in his ear that she missed him more than he could imagine, and why hadn’t he called or texted her that he was coming to Manila? He said he let her go on for several minutes and then whispered in her ear, I’ll go with you tonight but there’ll be no money. She immediately drew back and said, Then come and see me when you have money! She pointed to several girls behind him, and said, There’s plenty over there for you. Go get what you want. She turned away and left.

44 Poisonous Love Gerhard said that as she left he felt as though he’d been mean and should have found another way to let Joy know that she had a different definition of a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship than he did. And he wanted to add, If only you had said, I will go with you without payment, he would have then told her that he would pay her in the morning as he always had. But he had to hear these words from her, and if he didn’t he couldn’t imagine sleeping with her again. Joy returned to Gerhard about five minutes later and without much ado or a show of affection said, You can pay me tomorrow then. He had seen her huddling on the other side of the bar with her two roommates and constant companions and figured that one of them had suggested this to her as a way to get what she wanted. Gerhard didn’t budge. He just repeated what he said to her earlier: I’ll go with you tonight but not for money. She left without saying another word. I thought it was finally over, he said. I felt a certain satisfaction because she had now shown me that my worst suspicions were true. Gerhard had been sitting on one side of a circular bar on the second floor of the L.A. Café. When Joy left, both times, she took a seat with her friends at some tables with high stools beyond the other side of the bar and yet in plain view of Gerhard. He could see Joy from where he sat, and she could see him, even in the poor lighting. She had maintained eye contact with him the first time she left him, but after leaving the second time she seemed to purposely avoid his gaze, while nevertheless taking the identical table stool facing him. Gerhard could not avoid staring at her, even after their second encounter. It got worse when she was approached by a heavy-set man in shorts and a singlet, a man that Gerhard judged was well into his fifties. Gerhard could not see clearly what went on between Joy and this man he’d never seen before, because with all of his heft the man blocked any view of Joy. But when he moved closer to Joy, Gerhard was certain that at one point they either kissed or embraced. When he saw this—or imagined it--he became jealous. He was surprised by his own reaction. He didn’t know whether it was the alcohol speaking to him or some deeper feeling, but whatever it was it made no sense in light of what had recently happened. He had been sure he didn’t want to be with Joy anymore, and he certainly didn’t want to take her to his hotel room; though why had he earlier told himself that if she hadn’t demanded

Poisonous Love 45 money he would have gone with her, and then paid her? He confessed to feeling confused that night, and very much on edge.

Gerhard sat watching the man and Joy, and his mind kept racing back and forth between a feeling of she’s-mine-and-don’t-touch-her and a desire to see Joy blatantly do something with the man that would be convincing evidence that she was as cold-hearted as any prostitute he’d ever met. But no such

46 Poisonous Love behavior occurred. There was only what he could infer from watching the man’s backside, and the slight movements of his head. It was, he said, all very inconclusive. I wanted them to do something, and yet I didn’t. After a long ten minutes or so, Gerhard said he felt utterly irrational, and he had not the slightest idea why he had any feeling whatsoever for Joy. He reminded himself that on more than one recent visit to Manila he had hoped that she would not be in the Café so that he could choose someone else for the night. He also reminded himself that he could name a dozen girls in the last six months that had been better in bed than Joy. He even reminded himself that she was not particularly mature for her age. Then why did he care about her at all? Why was he now filled with jealousy, a desire to push this stranger away one moment, and see the two of them do something outrageously provocative the next? On the one hand he wanted to find a reason to genuinely hate her. On the other he wanted to get back with Joy, perhaps begin to establish something permanent with her. Gerhard does not know whether at this point he acted out of some vague kind of spite or to try to simply bury what he was seeing and what was on his mind. A tall girl in a pants suit had been making a play for him for over an hour, even before Joy surprised him from behind. She was attractive, he thought, and on a normal night he might’ve bought one or two drinks for her, asked her how much she wanted, and then taken her to his room. But, he now realized, Joy had been on his mind from the time he entered the Café, even though he’d told himself he did not want to see her and would not go with her under any circumstances. He precipitously asked the lanky girl how much she wanted. She said 2,000 pesos. He said, I’ll give you 1,500. She said okay. He then told her to meet him downstairs and outside, at the entrance to the Café. He’d join her in about five minutes. He wasn’t sure that he would. She left, he paid his bar bill, and he went over to Joy, who was now alone. The man who had been hustling her had moved off to one side and was talking with Joy’s friends. Gerhard stood in front of Joy, and he said, He wants to go with you—he pointed to the man. Why don’t you go with him? He’s just a friend, Joy responded. I want to go with you. I love you, she said. Then go with me for no money tonight, he said.

Poisonous Love 47 No, she said. This is my work. On hearing the word work, Gerhard immediately turned away and headed for the stairs. He did not look back. He met the other girl outside and spent the night with her. She was good in bed, and she got the hiccups right after sex, which made him laugh. When he woke in the morning he told her that he had pressing work to do. He paid her the amount they agreed upon, and then he couldn’t wait for her to leave. Gerhard related this story in riveting detail, and I’ve not done justice to his descriptive powers, nor have I conveyed adequately how he said he just seemed to have slid mindlessly into this affair of the heart only to belatedly discover that Joy had a hold on him that made no rational sense whatsoever. In retrospect, he saw that the few words of love and claims about how much she missed him had thoroughly seduced him. All reason had fled and, he claimed, this made no sense because above all else he saw himself as a man of reason. He had not, he hated to now admit, seriously considered that Joy was probably going with a different guy every night when he wasn’t in Manila. The one time that he had asked her about this, somewhat in jest, she had—and as convincingly as anything his ex-wife had ever said—claimed that Gerhard was the only person she had slept with since she first met him. But now, in their last encounter, she had told him that she would not go with him unless he paid her because this was her work. Her work, her work, her work—how could he have been so blind, so dumb? The rent-a-girlfriend-for-the-night phenomenon that is so common in the Philippines (and other countries in Southeast Asia), and virtually absent in the West and in Latin America, is what makes Filipina prostitutes so attractive to Western men. And, as suggested in this story, so poisonous. Poisonous because some men do get deeply involved with these prostitutes, and some marry them, and then they find to their considerable chagrin that the young women have acquired habits not easily abandoned. But the phenomenon is poisonous for another reason, namely that for most men, and like Gerhard, it is all too tempting to believe that love and not just sex is being bought, and that when the girl utters words to the effect that she loves or misses you these sentiments override her desire to be paid. They do

48 Poisonous Love not. The economic need is too pressing, the long-run view cannot be seriously contemplated by the young girl, and even for those relatively new to prostitution they quickly learn that the man, much more often than not, does not feel the kind of love that would lead to an enduring relationship. Filipina prostitutes dislike little more than a man who is a butterfly, who will not stay with or be faithful to one woman, even if that woman is a prostitute. Many of them became prostitutes because their live-in partner or husband, and very often the father of their son or daughter, went with other women at the first opportunity.

The Butterfly Every monger knows all about the butterfly label. Hookers will ask him at some point--when the suspicion arises as to whether or not he’s going to return for round two or three and be a worthy investment: Are you a butterfly? Or in the Philippines, if they have reason to think you might be that and a bit more, they might ask: Are you a helicopter? (I’m not quite sure of the image they have in mind. Lots of territory to be covered, or already covered?) The smart butterfly never admits to being one, and for good reason. The hooker, with even a little experience, if told she is with a butterfly will conclude one or all of the following: He’s just like that Thai or Filipino boyfriend or husband I once had who got me pregnant and as soon as I got fat in the belly and turned my back he was out chasing another girl, and this I don’t want more of and therefore this customer is a bad bet for being a long-time boyfriend or husband; I better try to get as much as I can from him as soon as I can, including—and most of all—a shopping trip tomorrow, and perhaps I’d also better give him a good story about a sick and dying father or an operation I need for a nonexistent tumor on my left breast; and I’ll do what I have to do to earn my money, but I’m not going to give him the full Girl Friend Experience. So, no true butterfly with any brains will reveal his hand, a hand that rests on two fundamental premises: Novelty, even at the risk of disappointment, is more important than knowing or expecting that going a second time with a hooker will be as good

50 The Butterfly as it was the first time; and all hookers are losers in the arena of long-term relationships and therefore it is foolhardy to get emotionally involved with any of them. As committed as a true butterfly is to never going with the same hooker a second or third time, he knows how they think about butterflies and, dumb as they might be in other ways, how they reason. He adamantly denies that he is a butterfly, and in fact he behaves as if the lovely and charming Thai or Filipina girl that he chooses to bar fine is someone he simply cannot do without. To the extent that he says anything to her about this rather sensitive issue of butterflying, he addresses the issue by indicating that their relationship—brief as it has been for the one or two days (and the last day he will be with her)—is headed down a road that spells genuine commitment. Of course he’s lying, but so what? He knows if he knows anything at all that he’ll have to spend many years in country to be as good a liar as any Thai hooker, and though Filipinas aren’t nearly as wily and clever and convincing at the art of lying as their Thai sisters, plenty of them are very good at telling a convincing lie. In all of this, there is a small irony in that a great many hookers (most?) will get indignant if they are called butterflies. Their response invariably is: I am not a butterfly! What I do is just the nature of my business. Which is true enough—and there’s no need to get into fine distinctions about those few cases where one monger will take a hooker for a week or two. Hookers aren’t really butterflies, I suppose. They are, rather, the nectar that mongers are drawn to and so often can’t resist, in exchange of course for an out front quantity of the local currency. Even the dedicated butterfly who lives by the rule of not taking a hooker more than twice or three times finds himself being tempted in Thailand and the Philippines—in a way very rarely possible in the West—to fall into that trap called love, where he becomes blinded to what she does and he does and the demands that will soon be placed on him and cannot be easily resisted because of dramatic changes in brain chemistry. Savvy and wily

The Butterfly 51 hookers embrace all these changes that they cannot articulate and in fact do not understand because, among other things, it gives them the prospect of something long-term and even permanent, and a welcome release from all the mindless dancing and blaring music and the uncertainty of whether the day’s return will be small or good—good meaning at least getting paid the local going rate for going all night with a customer.

Lastly, the true or dedicated butterfly, consumed by a desire for novelty, knows, because of that burdensome thing in his head called consciousness, that there will be plenty of moments of

52 The Butterfly indecision when the hooker for the night proves so charming and so great in bed that he feels compelled to take her for a second night. The question he faces again and again, and sometimes struggles with mightily, is: Will the novelty of a new experience, bad or unwelcome as some or all of it may be, outweigh the pleasures and good moments of the sure bet and the predictable behavior that quickly and inevitably brings on boredom? With rare exception, the true butterfly answers in the affirmative, for he is a man not just committed to novelty, and with a clear vision that all hookers are losers in the arena of long-term relationships, but also a man who loves to gamble and is willing to take his share of the losses that accompany almost all risk-taking ventures.

Two Tales of Deception TALE NO. 1. She said her name was Mary, although some people called her Rose or Rosie. She likes Rosie best. Her middle name is Rose. She had been working at the Red Rooster Restaurant and Bar for five days when I met her, and she was still so new to the job and to Manila that she seemed in a fog about her job and the local environment. The distant provinces—Samar and Leyte principally, where so many of these young girls come from, you come to appreciate, are more than a country away from this urban miasma that is all congestion, pollution, and slowly choking to death on too much garbage and too many squatters from the Visayas and Mindanao and other points north and east and south in search of a little something better. Rosie comes from a small town in Samar. As she tells it, she was in her second year of university and on a scholarship when she got pregnant. The pregnancy was a hard one, and as a result her grades slipped badly and she lost the support she could not do without. Then, just before the child came, she discovered that her live-in partner (her description of the relationship) not only enjoyed dressing like a female but also preferred to have sex with boys more than with her. She persisted in the relationship for several months, but finally could not emotionally deal with the sexual orientation of the man who was the father of her son. She told him to move out. Rosie has three sisters and two brothers and all of them live with the mother and father eight kilometers outside of town, in a nipa hut (invariably made of sticks, bamboo, palm fronds, and with dirt floors). Her father, fortysix, has long supported the family by peddling a trike around the nearby town. He leaves early in the morning and does not return until late at night. He rarely makes more than 300 pesos a day. The father, Rosie said to me this

54 Two Tales of Deception first day we met, was now disabled. Shortly before the discovery of her husband's sexual orientation, a doctor said that her father needed an operation for a tumor near the base of his spine. Without an operation he could not continue working. So Rosie found herself in a bind. Lacking the scholarship she could no longer go to school, she had a child to support, she had a live-in partner who was no longer a live-in partner and was not providing support for her or the child, and then there was her father's medical predicament. Someone needed to find money not only for the operation and to raise Rosie's child but for the entire family since her mother does not work nor do the younger brothers and sisters. And there are, Rosie claimed, no relatives with resources to share with her family. On the day that I met Rosie at the Red Rooster she claimed to have thus far not had a single bar fine. This may or may not have been true; if true, this made her more attractive to certain well-traveled foreigners in search of something different. A whoremonger would, in Rosie's case, not be getting a virgin, but he would be able to have sex with someone who had never had sex with a foreigner. Rosie was what is sometimes referred to as a "strawberry;" she had only had sex with Filipinos. In the sexual fruit bowl that fascinates some men, there is, of course, the most prized fruit of all--cherries. Cherry girls are allegedly virgins, and so important is the term in Filipino society that a virgin working in a bar in Manila or elsewhere will openly state that she is a cherry girl. She may or may not be available for a bar fine, and if so only to bar hop, or perhaps give her customer a blowjob. Until the day when she puts her “cherry” up for auction or sets a price, which can run to 50,000 pesos or more. When I met Rosie she said that she had come to the Red Rooster because after arriving in Manila by bus (more than a twelve hour trip, plus a two-hour ferry ride) she found herself walking down Mabini Street in Ermita and saw a flier on the door of the restaurant announcing that a waitress was needed. Upon inquiring, she was told that the job was actually a little different than she might have imagined; she would be given a small wage in addition to her cut from ladys' drinks—drinks that customers bought her--and bar fines, an amount paid to the bar so she could leave with the customer, and always with the expectation that she would have sex with him. She would have to buy all of

Two Tales of Deception 55 her own food and would be expected to clean on a regular basis the one room above the restaurant in which she worked. The restaurant owner, in turn, would allow Rosie to sleep without additional charge in a room with five other girls who were also "waitresses." There are no beds in the small second-story room. Everyone sleeps on mats on the floor. There is only one small fan. And herein lies one of several inducements for Rosie and the other waitresses to bar fine. Foreign men almost always have hotel rooms with air conditioning. And, of course, beds with soft mattresses and pillows.

56 Two Tales of Deception Rosie told me this story in a rather straightforward way, and for nothing more than the price of a couple of ladys' drinks. She also told me two other things that caught my attention. One was that she had considerable anxiety about her first bar fine--she was scared; but she also felt some satisfaction in knowing that with the 500 pesos she'd make on a bar fine she'd be able to buy herself a pillow. Additionally, she was afraid of a bar fine because she did not want to get pregnant. I told her this should not be a problem; all she had to do was insist that the man wear a condom. She said that she did not know what a condom is. Herein lies a problem because the Philippines is Catholic and the church does not condone the use of condoms. Too, there are large numbers of foreign men who despite the risks of getting a disease or getting a girl pregnant do not want to use one. Going bareback, it's called. Many of the girls don’t care if the man doesn’t use a condom, and a great many simply cannot understand the consequences of a man not using one. Yet an additional factor is that the Catholic Church, I had been told more than once, tells Filipinas that they are only likely to get pregnant when they are "wet." When their vagina is "dry" they have nothing to worry about. I did not think a great deal about the veracity of Rosie's story at the time she told it to me. It came out easily and I had little reason to doubt the particulars she freely provided. But more than a week later, after I'd returned to Manila from a trip north, I stopped into the Red Rooster, chatted with a couple of Aussies and Brits, and then Rosie and a couple of other bar girls appeared. In the short while that I'd been away Rosie had changed. She was now more physically and verbally aggressive, and she clearly wanted me to bar fine her, as she had not on our first meeting. I told her that it was not in the cards, and why. Before I finished talking with her this second time she found a clever way to tell me that one of her sisters was sick and needed medical attention and that this was very much on her mind. She didn't directly ask me for money, though the clear implication was that a bar fine would go a long way toward helping with the problem. Wouldn't I reconsider taking her for the night? Although she had struck me as reasonably bright, in part indicated by her good command of English, she must not have a very good memory. For on hearing that her sister had a problem, I said, Does anyone else in your family

Two Tales of Deception 57 have a medical problem? No, she said. Does your father have any medical issues? I asked. No, she insisted. One of the most common ways that young Filipina bar girls try to get money from foreigners is to appeal to the Good Samaritan in them with a sob story about a family issue that requires money. Just about any foreigner who has been around a bar girl will tell you that the stories of the sort I heard from Rosie are as common as coconuts in the Philippines. Some are undoubtedly true, but many, perhaps the vast majority, are patently false. Who can really know without catching the girl in an obvious lie, or paying a doctor or hospital directly for an alleged medical problem? TALE NO. 2. Lilibeth is twenty. Her father died when she was very young and her mother, whose whereabouts she does not know, abandoned her to an aunt at an early age. She only finished one year of high school before getting pregnant by a young man she met in a grocery store where she was clerking. He abandoned her two months after learning that she was pregnant. He disappeared, and Lilibeth only knows that he lives somewhere in Manila. The young father has never seen his son, nor has he ever given Lilibeth any money for herself or the child. Seven months after Lilibeth delivered her son she was desperate, and the idea of how to solve the problem came from a girlfriend who told her that she should work as a dancer in Angeles City. There the arrangement is similar to that found in the Red Rooster. The principal difference is that a dancer is, in a club like Camelot where Lilibeth works, one of fifty or sixty young girls who shuffle their feet and wiggle a bit to the tune of very loud music. The dancer gets paid a small amount for dancing on stage for four or five of the nine or so hours she is in the club. If she is bar fined then she leaves the club for the night, and this becomes an opportunity to make much more than she would get from dancing or from commissions on ladys’ drinks. Three months and numerous bar fines after beginning work at Camelot, Lilibeth met an Australian from Sydney who was spending two weeks in Angeles City. He was forty-eight years old and claimed to be separated from his wife. After bar fining Lilibeth for eight consecutive days, he found that he had fallen in love with her. He said he wanted to marry her and would do so as soon as he could clear up some personal matters in Sydney.

58 Two Tales of Deception The Australian wanted an exclusive claim on Lilibeth. He did not mind her working at Camelot as a dancer and even having drinks with customers, but he did not want her to accept an offer for a bar fine. Her days of giving sexual favors in exchange for money were over--in his mind. To make his exclusive claim on Lilibeth credible, he would send her money every couple of weeks. She wouldn't tell me how much, but said that it was "not much." In order to check up on Lilibeth, he wanted to call her three times a day: just before she began work at six in the evening, after she got off work at three in the morning, and at one in the afternoon. He felt that these three daily check-ins would be sufficient to assure him that Lilibeth was being faithful. I have no idea how he came to this conclusion, or what he concluded when he called her at other times and found that her cell phone was turned off; what she often did to avoid getting caught with a customer who had bar fined her and wanted to spend the night with her. It took only a couple of weeks for Lilibeth to do what almost all foreigners who are hooked on bar girls learn. They quickly return to making themselves available for bar fines, and they baldly lie to the love-struck, absent foreigner that they are doing no such thing. The temptation of the extra money is too great, the personal and family needs too pressing, and the man is not around to closely monitor the girl’s behavior. Furthermore, bar girls quickly learn through friends if not through personal experience that promises made by the man who has professed love evaporate rather rapidly. He may send money for a couple of months, and then either lose interest or begin to have too many suspicions about what the girl is really up to. Why, then, should bar girls with very considerable economic needs and opportunities for additional money be honest? It is simply not in their best interests to do so. When I talked to Lilibeth about the Australian, she seemed rather indifferent about her deception. The main reason for her behavior, she said, was that she had decided that living in Australia was not something she really wanted to do. She could not imagine what she would do there. She would not have her friends, she did not speak very good English, she had no education, and, like many young Filipinas she was rather shy. Then, too, there was so much money—in her scheme of things--to be made by being bar fined, and the man with all the promises had, with the passage of time, become a rather vague and distant memory, someone she now knew only through text messages,

Two Tales of Deception 59 frequent calls, and love notes that came with the small amount of money that he sent.

Bar girls like Lilibeth do what they do not because they love to fornicate, or because they were raped and abused by relatives and a Filipino boyfriend, but rather because they must. Necessity never calls more urgently than when a

60 Two Tales of Deception young woman has a child to support and receives nothing from the father or her family. Or the state. Living a life of lies is the least of her concerns. What, it might be asked, puts a brake on deception in an environment chockablock with deceptions; in other words, what slows or dampens runaway positive feedback in such a system, one where some quite attractive and wily bargirls manage to get four or five foreigners on the hook—sending them money--at the same time? One brake is that foreigners talk a great deal among themselves about what so often happens when their kind gets serious with these young women. They love to tell stories about suckers they know, if only to show how “smart” they are. Those who get truly love-struck, however, can't hear what those around them are saying--at least in the short run. But many do get smart when there are too many instances of unanswered calls or the girls begin to seem distant or evasive. Finally, it is worth noting that some level of deception is always selected for. What varies so dramatically among different environments are the risks of getting caught vs. the payoffs. If a scientist doing cancer research gets caught fabricating data his research career is over. If a Filipina bar girl gets caught in a lie about family needs or whether she is accepting barfines when she promised she would not do so, the penalties are minimal. Her bar girl career is not endangered, and the loss of money may not be great. In fact, over even the short run there may be no loss worth talking about since the men often deceive the bar girls about their true intentions, or they can’t see how much their absence dampens the initial infatuation. Bar girls lie and deceive themselves; foreigners lie and deceive themselves. No one can be trusted. The bar girl environment in a needy society like the Philippines may be one of the most deception-loaded environments to be found anywhere. Even two stories, brief and unique in the particulars, make it apparent why this is so.

A Bird in the Hand In the Philippines, offer a bar girl fifty pesos today and a hundred pesos if she waits until tomorrow, and she’ll take the fifty pesos just about every time. I’m not sure it’s much different with Thai bar girls. Or girls in both countries that are not bar girls but decidedly poor. This attitude strikes a lot of foreigners as nonsensical, stupid, and short-sighted. A typical, middle-class Westerner grows up in an environment where the idea of planning or looking to the future is a pervasive part of the home environment. The young child frequently hears mom asking dad and perhaps siblings what they want to eat for the next couple of days; why make a trip to the grocery store every day when you only have to make one once or twice a week with a little forethought or planning? Likewise, there has to be some sense of a budget or planning if one is going to buy a house or a car or an expensive appliance and pay for it over a period of several months or years. One learns, sometimes at a fairly early age, that postponing satisfaction can result in a greater payoff in the future, as when interest accrues on money left in a bank. One learns when older that it is wise to save and invest earnings that can be used in an emergency, or in retirement. The principle of planning for the future is—excluding the poor or lower classes—widespread in the West. The picture is different among the poor, and particularly among those who are really poor. Concerns are immediate, and pressing, and hardly trivial. How can I earn enough today to get

62 A Bird in the Hand rice and some vegetables for myself and my family? How can I get my hands on enough money to take my mother or father to the local clinic because of a painful and persistent tumor on the neck or an inexplicable ache in the abdomen? In the same way that living and growing up in an environment pervaded by a sense of planning for the future creates a mind-set subject to reinforcing positive feedback, so it is that an environment in which the concerns are consistently those of the moment or the very immediate future--a mind-set that will also be subject to reinforcing positive feedback loops, it is the payoff in the present that matters. Planning, as known in the West, simply does not make sense. It is logical to take and eat that bird that you’ve got in your hand rather than take the bet, however good it may seem, that you’ll be able to get two birds sitting in the bush tomorrow. Imagine a realistic scenario, another way of thinking about this issue. A foreigner falls in love with a bar girl and tells her that he wants to marry her and will take her to his home country and will send her money in the interim, until he can finalize his divorce and get his finances in order. The bar girl believes that she loves the foreigner and promises to wait; she is planning, thinking of the future, she says. The monthly support arrives as promised, and it has been coming regularly for six months. The foreigner keeps telling the girl that the divorce is not quite finalized, and she has to be patient—be everything she could not be when she was a member of a poor rice growing family in Isaan in Thailand, or Samar or Leyte in the Philippines. Along comes a less handsome foreigner, and an older one, and he is attracted to this former bar girl who is ostensibly doing nothing more than being a waitress while she waits for the divorce to be finalized. This new foreigner makes a play for the girl, and he plays his cards carefully. He pursues her for three or four weeks: avidly, carefully, always calculating his next move. The waitress, the future wife in waiting, finally succumbs. She does so not because the man is a good lover—and let’s assume he is not. She succumbs not because he showers her with gifts--which we

A Bird in the Hand 63 might assume he doesn’t. She succumbs not because he constantly says he loves her, as the absent sponsor does and always did. She gets her visa and marries the man who is older and not particularly handsome and not a good lover and not a gift giver and not even much on words about love. She does so, and in short order, because she was doing exactly what her world view had taught her, and ingrained in her, was the best or most rational thing to do: take the bird in the hand, it is certain in a way that no future is ever certain. Of course, the sponsor, now the loser, is beside himself, and he thinks the girl was positively stupid to have settled for much less than he had to offer. But from the girl’s perspective, she was anything but stupid. She acted rationally, exactly as all of her past experiences had taught her to behave. What is so striking in this hypothetical example (but one played out often in Thailand and the Philippines), is that she waited so long to give in to temptation. The “stupid” person in this example is the foreigner who lost the girl he sponsored and treated well and genuinely loved. He is stupid for being so blind to how the girl was raised and how she and those around her behave. Had he opened his mind to the importance of a major cross-cultural and socio-economic difference, he either would not have gotten involved with the girl at all, knowing that it could be some time indeed before he would be with her permanently; or had he gotten involved he would have moved quickly, knowing that time and the quite rational reasoning processes of the girl were working against him. Are there numerous exceptions to the way I have portrayed attitudes among poor Thai and Filipinos about immediate vs. future payoffs? Certainly. Even in quite impoverished environments, there may be a little planning here and there; the girl does have a window, albeit small, on what it means to think of the future. Even if this is not the case, she may be a fast study in learning. Then, too, she may indeed wait months, and seemingly not behave as her history and environment would predict. But then on closer examination the fact that she did wait and seem so

64 A Bird in the Hand faithful may be little more than that temptations were few, or not all that tempting relative to all that she’s receiving in the present from the sponsor. This is a case where the perceived long-term benefits don’t just outweigh the cost of embracing a present offer, they greatly outweigh the alternative.

The Man from Madison, Kentucky

66 The Man from Madison, Kentucky He was heavy-set and well-rounded, but not obese. He had a kind face and small wisps of brown hair on an otherwise bald pate. There was calmness in his voice as he talked and I listened over two ice teas and a Thai pork noodle soup. I said little, and I rarely asked a question. He never asked my name and I did not give him my name, nor did I say what I do for a living. About the only thing he did learn about me by the time I left him was that I too had been to Brazil and speak some Brazilian Portuguese, and I have a decent mental picture of where it was that his story—or the one he wanted to tell this sweltering afternoon on Soi Four in Bangkok where he regularly drinks— began about twelve years ago. He had that kind of business in Madison, Kentucky that allowed him to get away for several months a year. It was not in investments, or real estate, or anything that required a fancy college degree; he wasn’t that kind of guy. He was a plumber, or an electrician, something along these lines—he was a bit vague as he was about other details I would have liked to know. And yet knowing exactly what he did wouldn’t have mattered in any major way to the story he told me. It all began in 1994 when his brother-in-law, who was married to a Brazilian, invited him to spend three weeks with him and his wife in a town of about 7,000 people south of the Brazilian coastal city of Salvador. As he was wandering about one night at a street party in the small town, a young woman came up behind him and ran her soft hand along his shoulder. He turned and he noticed that she was a dark mulatta and was wearing a short, tight, white skirt. She had gorgeous legs, big tits, and one of those famous Brazilian asses that only blind men fail to notice. Within the hour, seated on the ground and eating local food, he saw the woman again, made eye contact, and waved for her to join him. At the time, he didn’t know that the woman was pregnant by a man who had had her for a single night and now wanted nothing to do with her. Within six months, the man from Madison had bought a house overlooking the Atlantic in this small town, and the two of them began living together as man and wife. But because of his business, he had to spend two or three months a year away from the woman. She had the child that she was pregnant with when she met him, and before long he began to see the child as

The Man from Madison, Kentucky 67 his own. He had had two children in a marriage twenty-eight years earlier, but it had been a marriage so thoroughly unsatisfying that in all these years since the breakup he had sworn to himself that he would never again get into any kind of permanent relationship with a woman.

This young Brazilian woman who was on her way to becoming his common-law wife was poor when she met the American from Madison. She

68 The Man from Madison, Kentucky had never worked at other than menial jobs, and now she didn’t have to work at all because she had a house, a cell phone, a credit card, and money that he gave her to spend pretty much as she saw fit. When the Madison man was in Brazil, the two of them spent their days on the beach: drinking, eating, and sleeping. Although he didn’t say as much, I assumed that after all these years of being single he had also rediscovered the joys of sex. Then, and right down to the present, he never got over the woman’s arresting body, always aware that in public men could not help staring and whistling at her. Their relationship came to an abrupt end four years and eight months after they began sharing the same bed. After a three-week absence to attend to business in Madison, he returned to hear his neighbors—now friends— gossiping that his live-in partner was cheating on him with a local married man. Two days after his returned, she told him one late afternoon that she was going to a female friend’s house and would return in a couple of hours. Shortly after she left, he saw a pickup truck pass by, and it was going in the direction that his wife had taken. He recognized it as the pickup of the man who locals said had been having an affair with this shapely woman to whom he had given so much. Making an obvious connection, he walked for some distance in the direction she had taken. Before long, and in the distance, he saw her coming his way and at her side the man said to be her lover. They were not holding hands or being amorous, because at the moment he saw them his live-inpartner was yelling at her fleeing and somewhat wild son. The man from Madison abruptly stopped and went in a different direction to avoid being seen. That night he confronted her, telling her of all that he had heard about her unfaithfulness from townspeople. She denied everything. He didn’t believe her. Within a month he had sold the house they lived in to his Brazilian sister-in-law, with the proviso that the woman of white skirt and great ass fame and his informally adopted son could continue living in it. She was furious at this great loss, for had the infidelity been discovered a mere four months later she and the man from Madison would have been legally recognized as married in common law, and under Brazilian law the house could not have been sold without her okay. Her luck was doubly bad. The married man she had been seeing and sleeping with now had no more interest in her once the man from Madison made public his knowledge of the affair. Thus she found herself pretty much where she had been before meeting the man

The Man from Madison, Kentucky 69 from Madison: without a cell phone, without a credit card, without spending money, and barely able to provide for herself and her son. Brazil no longer had the appeal it once had, and the man from Madison heard from a friend that he ought to take a vacation in Southeast Asia and broaden his perspective, forget the past and try to find a new life. He traveled, and he discovered Thailand and the inimitable charms of its many bar girls. He had heard that they are less trustworthy than the scummiest of politicians, and once he decided to patronize them he swore to himself—as all men do— that he would never get emotionally involved with a one of them. But he just couldn’t help himself, and he believed every word the young girl told him about how faithful she would be while she waited a mere two weeks for him to go home to Kentucky and make some arrangements to stay in Thailand for a long enough period of time to start down the road to marriage. He returned in two weeks, just as he said he would, and she was there to greet him at Bangkok’s Don Muang airport. The news he received was that in his absence she had found someone else to take care of her. He could hardly believe his misfortune, and he swore that never again would he get involved with a Thai bar girl. He did not change his mind a month later when this Thai beauty who had stolen his heart came back to him and said that she had made a mistake and now wanted to resume their relationship. He told her that he had no interest in her, that he could never trust her again. More than a year later he met, through a friend, a young Thai woman who was not a bar girl, or so it goes in the story I heard. (One never really knows because so many foreign men get involved with them and don’t like to admit where they met them.) She came from a poor family that lived not far from Bangkok and farmed rice. He told himself that while this woman did not have a great Brazilian body and a love of short white skirts, she was kind and considerate and would meet his needs. He recognized that he was getting to that point in his life where despite what had happened with one Kentucky marriage in the distant past, and what had happened with a young Brazilian woman who made his eyes happy and sore, and what invariably happens with a Thai bar girl, he needed someone to do the laundry and clean house and cook and make the bed, and not forget to bring him the pills the doctor prescribed. He made a deal with the Thai woman when he proposed that they get married. He would not give her any money for her parents—as is the norm

70 The Man from Madison, Kentucky among foreigners who marry Thai women, even well-traveled bar girls. But he would, for as long as he lived, give her a yearly sum of money at the beginning of each calendar year. She could spend it anyway she wanted. He would not ask her what she did with the money. And he never has asked her. He has told his Thai wife that he has provided for her in his will, that she will get most of what he has, and this—one can read between the lines—is a major reason this Thai woman decades younger than this man from Madison finds it so easy to stay with him, and never forget his medicines. They live eight months a year in Madison, Kentucky, and they spend the months of January through April in Bangkok in a hotel. They rent a car so his wife can make daily trips to her parents’ home in the country. He goes to the farm now and again, but doesn’t much like it there; it’s too hot and dirty and uncomfortable. Instead, what he prefers to do is to spend every afternoon in the very bar and restaurant where we met. He drinks three or four rum cokes, and then he returns to the hotel and either takes his wife out to dinner if not too tired or drunk, or she gets food from the street or a restaurant and brings it back to their room. He says he is very happy with his Thai wife, and he could not have done better. She respects him, and she treats him very well. He has no complaints. But he confesses to thinking all the time about the Brazilian woman and the young boy who is not his own but calls him dad and he sees as his son. He still pays for his schooling. The Brazilian woman, now quite poor and without any prospects, calls him now and again. She has made it clear that she would take him back anytime, and under any conditions. But he won’t consider returning to her. He just can’t let go of someone who treats him so well, and yet remains so thoroughly Thai. His wife has had few problems making friends in small town Madison by the big river, but she refuses to take out U.S. citizenship. He knows that as soon as he dies, his wife will take her inheritance and return to her Thai family and the only home that matters.

From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang There’s no one story, and all kinds of exceptions, but having said this let’s imagine what might be called a fairly typical case and identify some of the many changes a young woman undergoes on her way to becoming a successful Thai bar girl or prostitute, and one that often becomes a real pro at the game—manipulative, exploitative, clever, deceptive, and with a fat bank account and life style to prove it. A girl living in a village in Isaan, Thailand’s poorest region, hears through another village girl (or her sister--more of these cases than one might imagine) that there’s good money to be made in Bangkok or Pattaya or Phuket fornicating for money with farang. She’s told she will be able to make money unlike anything her parents are making or have ever made, or that she can imagine making in the village or in a Bangkok factory, no matter what she’s doing. No doubt many girls don’t want to do what they imagine they will have to do with all these strange and demanding farang. But an incredible number of them, as history so amply shows, give it a try, and a great many succeed, and succeed wildly. Some clearly don’t and they return to the village after a week or two. It just wasn’t for them, it’s worse than they imagined, they find English impossible to learn. The language barrier is considerable, and my guess is that most of the girls find it very hard going for the first couple of

72 From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang months, and for some it takes much longer to understand what foreigners are saying or to be able to respond to them in the most minimal way. In the beginning, they literally understand nothing, not even how to ask those mantra-like questions: What your name? Where you from? You here on business or vacation? The words thank you are utterly foreign to them. I no do are three words that probably come much faster to their lips. Then there is the shock of those first times with a farang. And the shock is real; it must be. They are looking at penises larger than what they have been used to with their Thai boyfriends or exhusbands—assuming they have had some previous sexual experiences. What shocks them as much as anything—unless with Koreans and the Japanese--is not so much the length of the penis, shocking as this can be, particularly when it bangs against the uterine wall and causes pain or pleasure (they’re not always sure which, even when they bleed); it’s the girth that often visually catches their attention. They may or may not have had a child before turning to prostitution. But they still find it hard to accept (not all of them, to be sure) that they can deal with the fat farang penis. All their looks of surprise and comments in the bar and the bedroom about penis size are not just idle talk and false flattery. In the beginning and for some time thereafter what they say and see and feel are very real. As far as I know, most of the girls come from sexual experiences not much more complicated than the proverbial manon-top-of-woman, the classic missionary position. And because they are young, as is the Thai young man or men they have been with, and very much because of the society they live in, it’s all very cut and dried. It’s akin to what one sees in copulating non-human primates. He’s on—boom, boom, boom—and then he’s off. A couple of minutes start to finish (ask a Thai woman fresh off the farm and this is what she will tell you), and if there is foreplay at all it is of the sort that is often briefer than a thirty second TV commercial.

From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang 73 Suddenly, for the young woman to find herself with farang in the sexual arena, it’s a whole different matter in all kinds of ways. They’re older and they don’t come as quickly. They don’t come as quickly, young or old, because they’ve been drinking too much and have what in the West is known as “whiskey dick”—ten, fifteen, twenty minutes or more to get off; and even a quite drunk farang of any age can be quite persistent. It takes longer with the farang, a great many (most?) of them, because they are using condoms, and for almost all men it takes longer to get off when you use a condom. And then it’s all further complicated by all the men now using Viagra or Cialis, which along with the other factors of age and alcohol and a condom and frequent fucking make it very difficult to get off. Some men don’t get off at all, or they only get off only by a subsequent blowjob or hand job. Yes, blowjobs and hand jobs. Yet more adjustments for the young girl off the Isaan farm. No one really knows how many Thai girls have given blowjobs to their Isaan boyfriends or husbands, but my guess is that the percentage that have done so is low— perhaps below ten or fifteen percent. (One old expat who’s been doing Thailand hookers since the sixties told me that in those days virtually none of the girls gave a blowjob, and that it was the Americans who first started asking for it in great numbers.) And so another adjustment, and one that some never make, is taking that big farang penis in the mouth, and more than the first quarter inch, which satisfies no man. Then, too, the young and naïve farm girl presently discovers that having more or less made one adjustment—getting around to doing something resembling a blowjob, she comes upon that awful farang who comes in her mouth; and then all she wants to do is retch, and spit it out, and cough until she clears her mouth and throat of every last hint of sour farang sperm. There’s another adjustment that the young girl off the farm has to make, and it’s probably a small one compared to accepting the idea of “smoking,” the Thai bar girl term for a blowjob. And that’s even knowing what the farang is doing the first time he

74 From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang turns her over and wants to take her from behind—doggie style (not in the ass—no, that almost never!). There’s yet more. There’s all the other positions that the farang asks for, or demands: going cowgirl (sitting on the guy— which they soon come to love for the control it gives them, particularly over penetration of the long penis); doing it in the shower (now they’re really adjusting to the farang’s idea of novelty); astride the chair near the window: or standing against the door or the wall (the bed will now never be seen the same way again when it comes to the pleasures, or the bar girl chore, of fucking). Imagine the farm girl’s reaction when a farang for the first time puts his head between her legs and starts giving her clitoris a real go with his tongue and a finger or two. Dirty, perverted farang! So strange this big=nosed stranger! Who knows what’s going through her mind the first and second time the farang pleasures her in a way she had never imagined possible in the village? It’s hard to believe that she’s not unsettled by it all. Soon, however, she learns that clitoral manipulation and stimulation are more than okay. The farang has now taught her that it’s not intercourse that will so effectively get her off and wanting more, but the tongue or two fingers working the clitoris. Before long, she’s doing it to herself while the farang is behind her and banging her head against the pillow or headboard. Imagine the farm girl’s reaction when the farang wants to take fifteen or twenty minutes to warm her up, and his tongue and hands are meandering all over her tight young body, all the way down to her toes; and then he’s in her ear with his tongue, which drives her half nuts and yet she loves it and can’t get enough of it. How can a young girl beginning to go through all of this— hating some of it and loving some of it even more—ever go back to the farm boyfriend and enjoy the two-minute boom boom, followed by one kiss on the cheek and no cuddle because he’s in a greyhound’s rush to get out the door to drink and gamble and spend whatever money he’s got in his pocket?

From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang 75 There’s so much more going on at the same time all of these things are occurring. Having to deal with farang who are fat, and ugly, and have bad breath, and insist on groping in a way that she had never imagined possible. Having to learn from watching others that when the guy sits down next to you at the bar it’s quite okay to put your hand on what he’s got and size him, and give him a short massage, and then suggest that you’re going to take him places that his enormous dick has never been before. There’s so much more to learn. How to woo any old or young or beguiling farang and get him to buy you a lady’s drink before he pauses long enough to figure out whether you’re his type, and maybe he wants to leave without buying the drink on which you get a commission. How to get him to believe that with that young body of yours and your always charming smile you’re going to give him sex like he’s never had before. How to make promises that are just vague enough so that you’re going to be able to leave the hotel room earlier than he believes. You’re going to do a “runner” on him (you’re now beginning to think quite strategically), so you can get at least one more customer short-time, or perhaps a better paying long-timer, before closing time. How to get the gullible farang to believe that he’s going to be smoked like he’s never been smoked, and then after a long twenty or thirty seconds of some shaft licking and a bit more plead that he’s too big, or your mouth hurts, or you’ve got a sore in your mouth, or you only do it until orgasm with the boyfriend or the husband you swear you don’t have. Then there’s the whole bar girl culture, a world unto itself. Where you learn to deal with the other girls who are better looking, or have bigger breasts, or simply really know the game and how to hook farang and get not just the lady drinks but the lucrative bar fine and big baht money that follow in three hours or in the morning at the door. And do it just about every night, even in low season.

76 From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang Where you learn to know exactly when to go short-time rather than long-time, and give just the right excuse to leave at five in the morning when you promised to stay until eight or nine. Or if you’re going to stay into the morning making sure that he buys you breakfast, and then takes you shopping, which can be the real payoff. Should you, just off the farm and stuck up to your eyebrows in tradition, get your hair cut shorter, or curled, or dyed? How about getting butterflies or flowers or the American flag painted on your fingernails and toenails? Should you get a tattoo? And where? And how many of them? What about getting a flashy belly button stud on a silver chain? Or getting a lip or nose ring? Then there are the sexy clothes and the hot shoes and the eye shadow and the lipstick you start to think about, issues that on the moneypoor farm were never an issue. All of this central to an enormous change occurring rapidly, seemingly overnight, literally in weeks, or a month or two. You’re able to hang in there and stay on the game if you’re able to deal with the massive assault on your sense of right and wrong and everything else that’s changing so rapidly. Just don’t lose focus: it’s all about the money. It’s only about the money. Should you require all farang to wear a condom? Or make exceptions to what you’ve been told is the right thing to do: exceptions for the man you’ve been with two or three times and who seems clean, and insists that he’s disease free, and who you like more than just a little bit. You like him, of course, because he has a “big heart” or a “good heart,” which really means he’s not too demanding sexually and he takes you places you’ve never been and, best of all, he’s putting all that baht in your hand or purse. And not infrequently taking you shopping. But what about the older farang, or young ones too, who insistently plead that that they’re disease free and they hate condoms and they just can’t come with one on, and who say so insistently: so what’s the problem going without? You want an extra two or three hundred baht? No problem...

From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang 77

For some girls, a lot of this change is just not possible. They can master the English language enough to get by, but they just can’t buy into the blowjobs. They can handle the ugly farang but they can’t handle the over-the-top fat ones, or the smelly ones with repugnant breath. Or they can handle doing blowjobs with fat and ugly farang with bad breath, but they can’t—just cannot—deal with the unpredictable drunk skinheads with tattoos everywhere who turn abusive and want something truly kinky and are into hard fucking until you’re sore and want to scream. It’s obvious that tens of thousands of young Thai girls right off the Isaan farms have been able to make all of these adjustments, but that some (no one knows how many) have not

78 From the Farm to Fornicating with Farang been able to do so. The incentive to succeed, of course, is the money, rather pure and simple. And even when not wildly successful with convincing farang in the bar to take them shorttime or for the night, the girls can do okay with commissions on ladys’ drinks, Even these women, and some of them are well into their thirties, find themselves with money for themselves and for their families they never imagined before getting on the game. What I suspect very few if any of the young girls can imagine is what all these changes really mean. Where they will find themselves in one or two or five years—perhaps drug addicted, slutty beyond their farm girl imaginations, married to a farang and with his kid and scheming to get every last baht or dollar or euro he has before getting rid of him. Or, in the very worst case, diagnosed with HIV, probably picked up not from a farang but from the drug-injecting bisexual Thai boyfriend or husband who like all pimps happily feeds and prospers off the hooker girlfriend or wife’s earnings. And how many understand—even a little bit—that once they start down the bar girl road their life will never be the same? It isn’t that they just can’t go back to the farm life of innocence and poverty of a kind that farang don’t understand; but that they are now stuck with a past they can’t forget, or shed. And like it or not they now have dreams and expectations that have nothing to do with living on a poor rice farm, and seldom a thought that as they age they become less desirable, and then more or less undesirable. What a challenge then for the girl off the farm and on the road to fornicating with one strange farang after another! A challenge that were I in her boots I could not imagine handling easily, and without, in the beginning, a genuine sense of fear about what might happen with that big, hard-drinking farang who wants to pay the bar fine and take me for the night.

Mick Ever since my Colombia dissertation days in the late sixties, I've found few places that are more fertile for quickly sizing up a place than bars. People in bars are easy to approach, usually have loose tongues, often know a good deal about what's going on locally and who to contact if you want to pursue an issue. The bars I've frequented over the years have run the gamut. Some have been posh and full of moneybags and highfliers I usually can't long tolerate because they don't care about anything other than themselves. Some have been as seedy as they come, as on my last visit to Guatemala City several years ago when shortly after entering the dark den of iniquity that went by the name of Las Vegas Bar seven policemen wearing flak jackets and carrying automatic weapons came in, made everyone stand and raise their arms, and then submit to a full body search. They were looking for drugs. And then there was that recent night in Manila. Several Aussies were in Flor's Red Rooster on Mabini Street in low-end Ermita. They were drinking hard and grabbing any waitress that came within arm's reach. They'd pull her to their side, plant a heavy hand on a tiny ass, squeeze a tit, or reach for the groin. One asshole always went straight for the crotch with a hand that resembled a shovel, smiling not at the girl as he did so but at everyone else. Ain't this great what I can do here in the Philippines? was written all over his face. His name was Mick. He was short with salt and pepper hair and a shaggy mustache. Four months ago he had a heart attack and wound up on the operating table where they gave him some stents to keep him alive. He said that before the surgery he weighed over 100 kilos; now he was down to less than half that, and he looked it. He had legs as thin as what you find on

80 Mick petite Filipinas. Another piece of his story was that eight years ago his "cunt bitch" Aussie wife left him and cleaned him out of everything he owned. But he found his way back, made a new fortune, and now all he wants to do is spend the rest of days thinking about and molesting "Filipina pussy." This is all part of what he described as his own peculiar "brand of pornography." His pornographic M.O. rarely varies, it seems. He goes into a bar, grabs the first bar girl or waitress that comes his way, and right off begins stroking or pinching or squeezing her tits, her ass, or her groin. And spraying her with obscenities. When he's feeling "generous", like the night I sat beside him, he'll offer a girl 100 pesos (52 pesos to the dollar) to see a tit, 200 to put his mouth on one right where he's sitting, and 500 if the girl will lift her dress or drop her panties and show her vagina. He'll be really generous and give her 750 pesos if he guesses right that she's shaved. I asked Mick why he was so crude with the girls, why he couldn't treat them with respect even if they were prostitutes. He said, Fuck it, mate. I'm fifty-two and I died once with that heart attack. I'm not going to waste time waiting for the next one. He was molesting Melanie, and I was getting a bit beside myself with this asshole, and at one point I asked her why she was putting up with Mick and the other Aussies who were almost as rude. Melanie was as sweet as they come, and at twenty-eight strikingly bright. She told me it was all about money. More money in two or three minutes for a little public abuse than she makes all day for tending bar and serving food at the tables. Yeah, the money, stupid, I thought to myself. It's always about the money. Mick makes 50 times or more what Melanie can make working at anything other than what she's doing: making her young and shapely Filipina body available to an Aussie pervert who publicly treats women worse than sadists treat their dogs. I had an urge to pop Mick a good one in the Adam's apple, see if I could bring on his second and final heart attack. I think all that held me back was the thought of the pounding I'd get from three or four Aussies if I put Mick on the floor. And the night or two I'd probably spend in a rat-infested 6 X 6 Manila cell.

The Girlfriend Experience

82 The Girlfriend Experience Recently, a frequent and well–known contributor to various Internet sites in Thailand, and a long-time expat married to a Thai woman, opined that men who go to Thailand and find themselves in the Girl Friend Experience (GFE), are “real losers.” They’re a “sad lot.” No doubt, there are others—mongers and expats who were once mongers, and plenty of women of all ages in the West-who feel the same way. And not only feel this way but are privately and publicly smug in proclaiming the GFE is all rot, for losers, and worse. As men who go to Southeast Asia for sex that they’re willing to pay for know, there are two major destinations for those who want the GFE: Thailand and the Philippines. It can also be gotten in Indonesia and Cambodia, though it doesn’t occur on the same scale in these two countries, largely because there are simply a lot fewer prostitutes available, or easily accessible, to Westerners. The GFE, if not exactly unique to Southeast Asia, is certainly nowhere else as prevalent, and in fact in most parts of the world it just does not exist. Rather than finding oneself sexually and emotionally involved with a hooker within an hour or so of meeting her, and more so than anyone could imagine who hasn’t experienced it, and being able to extend this involvement for a day, a week, a month or longer, prostitutes in most of the world will only have sex for a quite short period of time: a half hour, an hour, perhaps a bit more—excepting, of course, very pricey call girls. What can be said in favor of the GFE? Plenty, as it turns out. For thousands if not tens of thousands of men who have had the experience, it is mind-boggling, unforgettable, and deeply seductive. So seductive in fact that in more than a few cases it leads to long-term relationships, sponsorship in the form of money being sent to the hooker monthly from afar, and more often than one might imagine--marriage. A man in the middle of the GFE genuinely feels that the prostitute cares for and about him, and is even falling in love with him. As is he with her. This is even more so the case in the Philippines than in Thailand, where a goodly number of the young

The Girlfriend Experience 83 women just out of the impoverished island provinces are genuinely looking for a husband, a serious search that they make known verbally and in numerous other ways. And, it should be noted, at a point where they may not even know the man’s last name, whether or not he is married, or even how old he is. Those who consider this GFE bad, or something only engaged in by losers, are forgetting several things. Or perhaps not so much forgetting as blithely ignoring what should be obvious with a little reflection. One is that it is irrelevant the extent to which the prostitute is running a number on the man, deceiving him as to her intentions and encouraging him to embrace his fantasies. Nor does it matter that when, later, he is sending her money from abroad she is also receiving money from other men just like him, and professing her love and fidelity to each one. It is also not relevant that even when he’s with the prostitute in Thailand or the Philippines she is, at one and the same time, twotiming him, or is married to a Thai or Filipino man. The reason it doesn’t matter in all of these instances is that the man is getting something that—from his perspective—makes him feel good. And often very good, the best he has felt in a long time. He feels good even when he knows he is being cheated or lied to. And, of course, this is what matters—the man’s state of mind. The critic who sees only losers in these situations might well argue that it does indeed very much matter what the girl’s state of mind is—if she’s honest, if she’s a liar, if she’s a cheat, if she genuinely feels the love she professes. But surely this is wrongheaded. For one thing, none of us, even in the very best of relationships and marriages, can get inside the head of the person we just “know” loves us unconditionally. It doesn’t matter how long we have been with him or her either—five days, five weeks, or twenty-five years. Wives, girlfriends, and others who are not prostitutes—all of them can be just as devious and full of lies and self-deceptions about how they feel about their partner. As much as we would like to think otherwise, no one ever knows what another person is thinking.

84 The Girlfriend Experience It needs to be noted, too, that for a great many middle-aged men who become occasional or serious mongers, the GFE is a great improvement over not having any or infrequent sex, or any kind of an emotional relationship with a woman. Many of these men have literally suffered for years, sometimes decades, with little or no sex in a marriage, and little or no love or concern for the wife other than the perceived value of maintaining a relationship for the sake of kids, or because getting divorced is so expensive. If a man having a GFE doesn’t like how things are going— she’s getting bitchy, she wants to go shopping all the time, she only wants to sit in front of the TV, she doesn’t want to have sex except on her terms—all he has to do, with rare exceptions, and without exception if he’s been careful about protecting his privacy, is to pay up to the moment and tell the girl to get lost. And literally never see or hear from her again. There are very few married men who can so easily do this, knowing that to do so either means losing a substantial part of one’s assets. One of the marvelous payoffs of any new relationship is the novelty, not only of sex with a new person but also that which comes from getting to know someone about whom one knows nothing at all. Any man who has been married for any length of time, and that time often doesn’t have to be very long, will admit—unless in denial or blatantly lying—that the sex has gotten routine and often boring, and that daily life is little more than the same stale stories and grinding complaints. Those who have gotten into a GFE know that when they need novelty in its many forms, and they’re no longer getting it, all they have to do is walk away. They are then free to pick up with another hooker and have a new GFE, as soon of course as they’re able to mentally break with the last one. There are critics who will claim that what’s really wrong with the GFE is that it cannot endure. This is a dubitable claim, even taking in account that a long-term relationship with a hooker is not the best bet in town. Many relationships that begin in a GFE do endure.

The Girlfriend Experience 85

This line of argument often quickly turns to the claim that only long-term relationships are worth having, because only with time is there the possibility for genuine growth, and it is growth that is good and distinguishes a long-term relationship from the ephemeral kind of attachment that may begin in a GFE. Perhaps. But I’d venture that there are plenty of men who think otherwise, and they no longer want any part of marriage or a long-term relationship. They are more than happy to pattern part or all of their lives existentially, taking the pleasures of the day or week or weeks as they come. And then moving on when the negatives outweigh the positives. There are probably plenty of men around who, in their own words, subscribe, and not facetiously, to the idea that any good marriage is based on a one-year renewal contract, with few or no claims on the other person’s assets. Put differently, there is nothing inherently good about a long-term relationship, other than for the purpose of raising children. And there is plenty to be said against one, as evidenced by the very high divorce rates everywhere in the West, to say nothing of the unknown number of unhappy marriages that persist for reasons of money and children. I have no doubt that a great many men who

86 The Girlfriend Experience have been married for any length of time will staunchly maintain that long-term relationships are in fact bad, and precisely because of the accumulating negatives of history. Married people have a way of being the best of fantastical historians with “impeccable” self-serving memories when there are problems in a relationship. Perhaps the biggest downside of the GFE, because of chemical changes in the brain akin to a cocaine addiction brought on by “love,” is being able to break away when one begins to rationally sense that he has had enough. He’s reached a point where there are too many things he doesn’t like about the girl, and it’s time to say goodbye and not look back. In the larger scheme of things, surely, this kind of decision is less rending than the predicament that so many married men have found themselves in when there is nothing left emotionally or sexually in a marriage and the cost of getting out is a genuinely painful mind-fuck. The central idea in my argument is that it is the monger’s state of mind that matters, not that of a judgmental outsider attempting to know what cannot be known, i.e., the mind of someone else. The disadvantages of the GFE and the harsh judgments about it, then, live primarily in the minds of moralizing and often angry women, many of whom have or have had few opportunities with regard to a relationship with men. And no less in the equally moralizing and judgmental minds of married men, and even single men, who have not and cannot experience the GFE. The only way to assuage their own conceited and intrusive minds is to turn against those who get, and sometimes with great frequency and enormous satisfaction, what they would so love to experience and for whatever reason cannot get.

Ian from Australia I see him in the early evenings when I walk down the Quay to find a new place to eat. Ian is his name. He’s an Australian, a former publican from Queensland. He is a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a pile of gray hair and bad posture. He slouches noticeably in his chair as he sips from his tall stem glass of red wine. I have rarely seen him without a smile on his face. Ian is usually still at this table when I return from dinner on my way back to the hotel. He always invites me to stop and have a beer or glass of wine. Most nights I stop, and on some of these nights he is eating a bowl of ice cream, or a banana split. One night, without a question from me but reading my mind, he told me he stopped worrying about his weight one year after becoming a publican. There is a rather tall and pretty Cambodian waitress who works at this small restaurant with outdoor tables. She is twenty-nine and always vivacious. Ian wants to have her for a wife, he has told me two or three times now. He is fifty-nine, and he is certain that when he seriously gives her his proposal for marriage she will accept. She will be willing to live in a trailer and do things for Ian that he cannot now do because of his weight, and because of bad arthritis in his arms and shoulders. He has yet to have a date with her, or see her outside of her job at this restaurant. He makes obvious eyes at her when she serves him, or us. He calls her his lovely girl. He hints that he loves her. Sometimes when I sit with him he doesn’t hint at all. He is quite direct in expressing his affection for her. She always smiles at what he says. Have you asked her yet if she will go to Oz with you? I asked him one night.

88 Ian from Australia Not yet, mate. The is not the right time. It is coming soon. Does Ian know that she will accept his proposal? He knows, he says. He says he is certain. She will do it because of the money he will give to her family. He has never claimed she will do it because she might love him. I have all kinds of things I feel certain about. But there is something about the way this waitress smiles at Ian that tells me he should not be so certain. I would not be certain, even were I as young as thirty-nine and handsome. There are certainties that as often as not become alarming and unwelcome surprises. I thought of saying this to Ian one night, but I did not. We all entertain comforting dreams, imagine we are someone who we are not. That we have power that we do not have.

Honey for Money The stories are everywhere. You cannot miss them unless you spend all day in a hotel room talking only to yourself. They are, to paraphrase a line from that most famous of opening lines in a very famous Russian novel, all different and all the same. The men come from Australia, Canada, the U.S., England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland. Many of them are fairly young--in their late twenties and thirties. Many are much older-well into their forties and fifties. Some are even older. The older ones have been through two or three marriages, and almost all of them seem embittered toward First World women. Embittered is putting it politely. They describe Western women as gold diggers, insensitive bitches, cold, uncaring, fat, and sexless. The details of these stories leak out slowly in the course of a conversation, and it's not always clear what went wrong or exactly who was to blame. Sometimes the wife walked out on the husband. Sometimes she squandered his money and he threw her out. Sometimes they just fought all the time and could find no reason for spending another day together. Two or three bad marriages is not a sample, it is a universe of understanding mistakes not to be repeated. So the men go to the Philippines--or stayed there after their Subic Bay or Clark Air Force days--and with rare exception no matter how old or how ugly or how broken in spirit they find it very easy to get a young Filipina to give them everything they cannot get in their country of origin: warmth, understanding, servitude, devotion, and that kind of beauty that belongs only to the very young.

90 Honey for Money The principal reason foreigners can so easily get Filipinas-their love and devotion--is economic. Honey for money, in the local parlance. And this motive is no more blatantly transparent than when the girl is from the provinces--essentially anywhere outside Manila. Though getting a girl from Manila can be just as easy, because the city is so large and has so many poor people and is growing so fast as people charge in from the Visayas and Mindanao and all over Luzon to seek a better life. What are these ageing and middle-aged foreigners getting when they find themselves hooking up with young Filipinas? One of the most striking things talked about is the emotional warmth, a strong sense of physical and emotional closeness. The Filipinas, it is widely noted, are like no one else in Asia. No, make that the world, say world travelers in search of the perfect young woman. This is a claim repeated so often that there is no reason to believe that it a rebound response made by men badly bruised or deeply wounded by relationships and previous marriages, hurt to the extent that they cannot see that it was the same in the beginning with their First World wives. What is it about the Filipina that makes her so emotionally and physically warm? I don't know, and after hearing scores of stories about them I am eager to know the answer. Is it because they grow up in such large families and in such close quarters: six or seven people sleeping on a mat floor in the same room in nipa huts, lined up like silverware at a buffet, a one-room home where electricity is a word as foreign as magnetic field or filet mignon? Is it because the young girls often spend years caring for their brothers and sisters while the mother does this too and also attends to other chores: cooking, cleaning, and tending to the demanding husband, who might be away starting another family? Is it something about the sharing aspect of Filipino culture--a sharing of resources that can include a trainload of aunts and uncles and first cousins and second cousins and way too many brothers and sisters?

Honey for Money 91

It is this sharing that creates a real problem for many First World men who have finally found what they claim to have always wanted. For much more so than in the West, when you marry a girl in the Philippines you effectively marry a very large family, one that in a variety of ways will ask you for money. Can this sharing be kept within manageable limits? Some men claim it can be and they succeed in doing so. Others don't try, or don't try very hard

92 Honey for Money and just accept that this is part of the bargain of getting a young Filipina wife. Others say, I didn't understand this in the beginning, I can't handle it; and they take the next flight home and don't return until they once again think of that special Filipina warmth. There's another big plus. Many Filipinas are fastidious about the appearance of the home. The floors and the tables and the walls are so clean you can almost lick them, I’ve heard. Everything is washed and pressed and right where it belongs and nowhere else. You have, it is claimed, not just entered into a relationship with someone more affectionate than you can imagine but also with someone who is your servant, the maid that those in Hong Kong who pay obscene amounts for rent for an apartment cannot do without. Filipinas are not just good at what they do; they're the best. Their mothers trained them well. A problem for many foreigners is that old and familiar beast called jealousy. To hear many of the expats describe why their Filipina marriage or live-in relationship failed is to learn about nooses and short ropes around the neck and constant snooping and endless questions about what the husband has been doing when alone. And why has he been looking at this or that woman? Was he philandering when he couldn't be reached on the cell phone? Yes, jealousy, that bugaboo that you hear so much about in Latin America and other Third World regions. Women quickly learn that their husbands are often looking elsewhere. The young girls learn early on, if not from the mother about the cheating father than with the young Filipino boyfriend who took her virginity at sixteen or seventeen and gave her a kid and promised her everything and then after she got pregnant was in someone else's arms. When this happens, and before too long, the very young single mother finds herself leaving the province and heading down that lonely and unpredictable road that leads to Manila, and then for many on to Angeles City and whoring in the city’s hundred or so go-go bars. It is here that she learns the multiple

Honey for Money 93 meanings of money for honey. Or, as it is sometimes put, honey for money.

To be sure, First World women are jealous too, and many no doubt just as jealous as Filipinas and Mexicans and Cubans and Brazilians can be. But an awful lot of them have their own jobs and careers and financial independence. They can more easily say:

94 Honey for Money Why bother with worrying about what he's up to? If I'm unhappy with what I see or hear or can't live with my suspicions, then fuck him. I'll throw him out, and I’ll take half of everything or more as I’m going out the door. I'll find someone else. I'll go it alone. But it's not so easy for the young Filipina from the very poor provinces. Her skills rarely extend beyond being able to make tacos or sell chocolate dipped cones at a Dairy Queen. She can be plenty bright enough--maybe; but she needs an education that she never had. How do these middle-aged foreigners cope with the poor education of the vast majority of Filipinas? Basically, I conclude, they don't care all that much, if at all. And maybe for a pretty simple reason. It has struck me that the great majority of expats I’ve met in the Philippines are themselves close to being intellectual black holes. They come from the world of loading ships, driving buses, fixing broken landing gear and engines when Clark Air Force Base had 5,000 people to maintain the largest base of its kind outside the U.S. They're alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. But the problem isn’t that they’re losing brain cells. They never had all that many active ones to begin with. They don't see the irony in an unflattering line they constantly throw out about Filipinas. They speak of the young women as talking fence posts, dumb as wood or paint. How does all this add up? Who knows, I don’t. Each story, notwithstanding what I’ve said, is different. Perhaps the one commonality is that largely irrespective of age and intellectual prowess we’re all after human contact and warmth, and a desire to reorder our messy pasts. We distort the present as much as we need to in order to justify to ourselves and others why our situation of the moment is as good as it’s ever been. And for a twice or thrice divorced man of fifty, a twenty-year-old Filipina is as good a new start as one can imagine.

Loni from Negros

96 Loni from Negros Loni is tall by Filipina standards. She is twenty-four, and has a young son who lives with her mother in Bacolod in Negros. She began working in Angeles City as a go-go dancer in June of 2009 because she had no money, and a policeman and the father of her child claimed that he had nothing to give her for the child. Loni met the policeman when she was twenty, moved in with him, and a year and a half into the relationship she found herself pregnant. The policeman was then, and still is, married to another woman, and neither he nor his wife seriously considered separating after the wife found out about the affair and the child. Desperate for money for her very large family, the wife had been working in Dubai for a year before Loni met the woman’s husband. She is still working there. It was Loni who eventually said she had had enough and she could no longer live with the policeman. She liked him well enough, but she didn’t love him, and she knew that there was no future in their relationship. And then, too, he was going to move away, several hours distant from Loni’s family. Loni had heard about the bar scene in Angeles City, and having no idea what it would be like going with foreigners, or how much money she could make, she decided to give it a try. There were no jobs in Bacolod. She was yet one more victim in a country with a very high unemployment rate and with jobs that pay very little. She was also another young woman who had heard through a cousin or a friend or sister—a cousin in this case--that she could almost certainly make more money in Angeles City than at any other job if she was willing to go with foreign men. In her second month in Angeles, Loni met a seventy-one year-old retired German who was on vacation. He took an immediate liking to Loni and bar fined her for eight consecutive days. Like so many Asian women, she had little problem at all with the age difference, even one this great. The man wanted to see her leave the bar and go-go scene. He promised to send her money if she returned to her home in Negros. This she agreed to do. The German had heard plenty of stories of these kinds of arrangements, and he expressed doubts that she would really leave Angeles City and return to her family. But her word was good; she took pride in telling the truth, being candid about everything. She talked to the man daily on her sister’s computer.

Loni from Negros 97 Often one of her sisters was at her side, a kind of questionable proof that she had indeed done as she said she would. The German only sent her money once, and then he began to express serious doubts about Loni’s claim that she had returned home. He intimated that he would be returning to Angeles, though he was vague about when. Now their Internet exchanges became less frequent. Loni began to sense that there was no future with this man who had given her a little money, and had not in fact made firm promises about where their relationship might go. He was also unwilling to visit Loni’s home to meet her family and child, an invitation she had given to him on several occasions. In Loni’s mind, their relationship was over. For a brief period of time, Loni tried some Internet dating sites. But she was put off by men who wanted to talk dirty and only about sex. She decided that this was not a good place to find a decent man. Before long Loni found herself a local boyfriend. He did not have a steady job, or much money, but she began to feel that she loved him. She could see a future with him, especially when it became obvious that he was willing to accept her child by another man. But then one of her sisters, who was now divorced from a man she had met in Japan while working there as a bar girl, took a liking to Loni’s boyfriend. She told Loni how she felt, and she asked Loni to “give” the boyfriend to her. The sister was older, and she contributed to the household income. In her mind she was deserving of her sister’s boyfriend. But Loni really cared about him, and she had no intention of giving him up to anyone. A month or so later, Loni’s sister found herself in Manila. It just so happened that Loni’s boyfriend had family there and went to Manila at the same time the sister was there. The sister had his cell phone number, called him, and soon they were in a serious relationship. It did not take long for Loni to find out about the double betrayal. Upon the sister’s return to the family home, Loni confronted her sister. Her sister was unapologetic, and she lashed out at Loni for not giving the same kind of money to the family that she did. Money was how the family determined who had a voice worth listening to, Loni was reminded. Several days after this confrontation, Loni was at her mother’s home, where she lived with her child. A serious argument broke out between Loni

98 Loni from Negros and her mother and the betraying sister, and another sister who had also worked as a go-go dancer in Japan and was now married to one of her Japanese customers. On the day of the argument, one of Loni’s two brothers also happened to be at the house. He sided with the betraying sister. The argument, like none Loni had ever known, allowed her to see exactly how her family felt about her, and how they would take sides, and why. No one in her family gave Loni any sympathy for how she felt about the double betrayal. As she tells it, she got no sympathy because unlike her brother and two older sisters she was contributing no money to the household. In her family, one would be listened to and taken seriously in proportion to how much money they contributed to common needs. The argument got out of control, and it spilled into the nearby street, and before several neighbors the mother and the two sisters and one brother began pushing and kicking Loni. She came away from the street fight with bruises and cuts. She felt wounded and rejected as she had never before. She could turn to her father and another brother who lived in a separate small house. But she could not expect much, no more than a little sympathy. Both of them were mechanics who repaired trikes, and they smoked and drank to excess. And both of them were in poor health. It was only a couple of days before Loni was able to borrow some money from a neighbor and get back to Angeles City and find herself in the bar she had worked in previously. She didn’t like what she felt she had to do, and most of all didn’t like the idea of being away from her son. But she didn’t think she had a choice. She had been badly humiliated by her own family, and she had no money or job. She felt a compelling obligation to send money home for the care of her son, and if there was anything extra it was for her sick father and brother. Loni doesn’t like the idea of working in a go-go bar or going with foreign men, and if she has to go with them to make some money she prefers to find herself with someone who will take her for several days. She has an irrational fear of getting HIV, and she prefers to give all her clients blowjobs and nothing more, believing that this will preclude the possibility of getting the virus. She very much wants to find a foreign boyfriend or husband. Loni is quite attractive, and yet does have one notable liability, one about which she is extremely self-conscious.

Loni from Negros 99 Sometime in the first months after she was born, it was discovered that she had a wandering right eye. It moves about uncontrollably, and it is hard not to notice when sitting with her. It is sufficiently obvious that other bar girls make fun of her, and when she initially sits with a customer for a lady’s drink she is always careful to keep her head turned so that the wandering eye will not be noticed. She doesn’t think that it matters all that much to customers who find enough interest to want to bar fine her. And yet she confesses that at times she feels that this handicap will make it difficult to get a foreigner serious about marrying her. She says she is not choosy, or rather she has no qualms about marrying a man who others would consider unattractive, or an older man, as with the German. In fact she likes older men, because she believes they will be faithful and will treat her well. This is a fairly common refrain among Angeles City bar girls. She also says that she would be happy to care for an older man, whatever his needs. Loni had been back in Angeles City a little over a month when she told me her story. She was looking forward to working another month or so and then returning home to be with her son. She was eager to be with him for his second birthday. She says she thinks about little more than her son, and he is so important to her that the kind of suicidal thoughts she has had in the past, going back to high school when she slit her wrists, now never come to mind. And the sole reason is because of her son, and her fear that no one would care for and properly raise him were she not around. She has no idea how she will be able to survive, or if she can find any kind of job when she returns to her home in Negros. She seems to be pinning her hopes on the unrealistic prospect of making enough money with bar fines in the month or so remaining in Angeles to be able to open a small store. Loni says she has only very modest dreams. First on her list is being with her son and caring for him. Second is getting an operation on her eye--if that’s possible--to correct a problem that is a source of constant anxiety. And the third dream, and more important than being able to have her own small store, is to own a modest house and live with a man would love her for who she is.

100 Loni from Negros *** Each story is unique, with its own telling historical particulars, and yet the story of virtually every Angeles City bar girl contains commonplace themes. Loni is rather typical is finding herself young and without support from a Filipino father, and then feeling the need to find work, thereby virtually “forcing” her to sell the one thing that is in constant demand by foreigners in the Philippines-- sexual favors. I say forcing her because she has no sense of how she might begin to find employment in a city like Manila or indeed elsewhere in the Philippines. Loni is also typical in feeling a very considerable attachment to her child, enough so in her case that it allows her to find purpose in life where previously there was little or none. And to find direction and enough energy to do what has to be done to be able to meet her minimal needs. Loni is one of three daughters, and all three of them have found themselves working as prostitutes—two in Japan for extended periods of time. More than one daughter working as a prostitute in Angeles is not at all uncommon. She is not untypical in wanting to find a serious boyfriend or husband in Angeles, a desire seeming more evident, or more openly evident, in Angeles than in Bangkok or Pattaya, Thailand. What this story also illustrates is the extent to which even in close rural Filipino families, those with money to give to other family members carry real authority. Loni has had no source of income at home, and this has rebounded in unwelcome ways. In her eyes, and probably with good reason in such an impoverished environment, rank in the family, and the extent to which bad behavior is tolerated, is positively correlated with how much money is being contributed to larger family needs. Will Loni again return to Angeles City, as she has already done once? I wouldn’t bet against it. Working as a dancer in the City of Angels is not the best job in the Philippines or anywhere else. But if you have no money, and you have to support yourself and a child, and there are no other options that one can clearly see or even imagine, then selling sexual favors will have to do.

Cherry Girls The Cherry Girl Phenomenon of the Philippines is not unique to this island country, but then it is found nowhere else in Asia on such a scale and with such evident prominence. It is, in fact, a notable part of the go-go bar scene in Angeles City. Yes, cherry girls. They are, as the term would indicate, girls working in go-go bars who allegedly are virgins. This “fact” of virginity is clearly announced on the identity cards that are pinned to their two-piece go-go outfits. It’s all there to be clearly seen, even from a distance: a large V, in red. How prevalent are cherry girls in Angeles City? I don’t know, but my guess is that they range from a low of about five percent of the girls in some bars to upwards of ten or twelve percent in others. And this can be quite a considerable number, what with some of the go-go venues having upward of 200 girls in them. These virgins are in Angeles and showing off their young hard bodies on the stage like all the others to make money, about this there is no doubt. But they vary enormously in what they will do. Some will take a bar fine and only barhop, and then expect to be released for the night. Others will sleep with a man, but what they will do varies a lot. Some will only hug and cuddle and kiss and nothing more. Others will do all of these things and give either a hand job or a blowjob. How long do cherry girls remain cherry in this kind of environment? It’s hard to know, and it obviously depends on how desperate they are, how much they’re influenced by peer pressure,

102 Cherry Girls what they see around them, and how much they’re enticed, or pushed by the mamasan, to seriously put their “cherry offer” on the table. Which means they want between 30,000 and 50,000 pesos from men who want to take their virginity. A few will ask for as much as 100,000. I recall talking with one girl who was a dancer when I met her, and who said that she had sold her cherry to an American for 25,000 pesos, about $600. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. It hurt more than she imagined it would, and he wasn’t small, and he wasn’t gentle. Then this American, about whom I have no details, told her that he would give her an additional 25,000 pesos that very night if she allowed him to take her two more times. No! she adamantly told him. She hurt that much, and she saw more blood than she imagined possible. Are the girls really virgins? It’s hard to know for certain in a great many cases. Many young women who have never been penetrated simply don’t have a hymen; it was never there. Or it was broken in a childhood or teenage accident. And then there’s the possibility of deception, repeatedly claiming you’re a virgin when you’re not, and selling your “cherry” to yet one more gullible foreigner. When the bar girl says she’s cherry, does she mean that she’s simply never been penetrated by a foreigner? In other words, she may not be cherry at all if the former Filipino boyfriend back home is considered. Or is she cherry only with regard to not having been penetrated by a penis? Did she, on more than one night, allow a foreigner to do with one of his fingers just about all he could, and perhaps more than he could do with his crude penis? Experienced mongers who aren’t interested in cherry girls invariably ask one question before they agree to buy an Angeles bar girl a drink: Are you cherry? It’s wise to do so because to the eye of many a monger the best looking girls, or at least those who seem most desirable, are very often virgins. Allegedly.

Cherry Girls 103

(The other question experienced mongers always ask before buying a girl a lady’s drink in Angeles City is this: Are you menstruating? This is important because the girl in fact might be menstruating, and she may not be willing to give anything more than a blowjob. It’s also an important question because so often “I’m menstruating” is the standard and easy way for a bar girl to

104 Cherry Girls say: Thanks for the lady’s drink, but I don’t like what I see or hear and don’t want to find myself in bed with you.) Why are there so many cherry girls in what is clearly a whoring environment, Angeles City with its thousands of bargirls? These girls often feel enormous pressure to give money to a very poor family, and one where the father may be unemployed or unable to work. Through their own extensive grapevines they have heard that they can make some money via a daily salary of a couple of dollars, and they can add to this amount with commissions on ladys’ drinks. I’d imagine that in the beginning, when they first venture into this life where just about everyone around them is going with foreigners, they don’t contemplate giving up their cherry to a foreigner for any amount. But it always comes around to the money; and $500 or $1,000 is a lot of money to a poor bar girl, cherry or otherwise, and especially if just off the tiny rice or corn or cassava farm. It is the kind of money that will make mom and dad and a dozen siblings happy for two or three months. As for demand: there are plenty of men who take great pleasure in being first. For these kinds of men a good fuck is beside the point. It’s not the point at all, in fact; it can’t be. I don’t imagine there’s a place in the world where the word cherry is used so much, or heard so frequently, as in Angeles City. And for the reasons that this essay outlines. But the word also comes up in other and related ways. Many mongers will find themselves attracted to the door girls, those outside the bar hustling business. A fair number of them are cherry girls. So a monger may ask the same question here that he’d ask in the go-go venue. But—and here’s where the term comes up in a different way—if a girl is not a virgin, and quite willing to bar fine, as most door girls are if not cherry, she will often laugh and say: I’ve got a cherry ass! The rare one might even say: I’ve got a cherry mouth too! There are some cherry girls in the whoring bars in Phnom Penh. How many? Again I don’t know, but not anything like the numbers that one finds in Angeles City. The few I know about

Cherry Girls 105 seem to be open to the kinds of things that their Angeles City sisters are willing to do, with one major exception. Giving a blowjob is near the top of every Cambodian girl’s list of things she just will not do. Are there cherry girls in Thailand who work in the go-go bars? I suspect there are very few, and the major reason is that Thai girls just don’t make their way into the bars if they’re still a virgin. If they’re a virgin, they’re in the village or working in a Bangkok shirt or electronics factory, and they’re waiting for the “right” guy to come alone. The right guy is not going to be a foreign whoremonger. Or probably any foreigner at all, unless she just happens on one and he doesn’t look or act anything like your typical farang whoremonger. Too, I suspect the difference in poverty in the rural areas in the two countries is a factor in understanding why cherry girls are common in the Philippines and nearly nonexistent in Thailand. Farmers may be poor in Thailand, but there aren’t that many who are as poor and have to support ten or twelve kids like one finds in the Visayas, in particular in Samar and Leyte, the two principal source regions in the Philippines for virgin and non-virgin bar girls in Angeles City. Thus, the deep poverty found in the provinces distant from Angeles greatly adds to pressures from the families for the girls to bring in money. Not to be forgotten, of course, is the old tipping point issue. Until there are enough cherry girls working in whoring venues, girls who are still virgins are not going to want to find themselves alone among a crowd of girls who take it for granted that they’re in the bars to fuck for money. It’s a lot easier being an outsider of sorts, a cherry girl, if you’ve got one dancing beside you, and she’s willing to hold your hand to boot, something you’ll see all the time in Angeles City. What is fascinating beyond what I’ve noted is that the presence of all these cherry girls in the Angeles City bars adds a kind of welcome variety or distinctive flavor to the Philippine mongering experience. What it offers to the monger with catholic

106 Cherry Girls tastes and an insatiable appetite for variety is akin to what an untried wine offers a man who never tires of trying what he has never tasted, no matter the kind of reputation that comes with it.

Venus in Love This is the story that Venus F. told me as we munched on sirloin tapas and breaded calamari rings in Guernica’s, an upscale restaurant on Mabini St. in Ermita (Manila). At the age of 18 she fell in love with a man twenty years her senior, a successful Filipino lawyer. He was all she could think about, she was devoted to him, would have done anything for him. It bothered her that he wanted to work all the time and didn’t see her as often as she would have liked. Then one day, after they had been seeing each other for six months, he told her that he wanted to break off the relationship. It was not another woman that was the problem; and it was not a fear of marriage or having a family that bothered him. He just wanted to be more successful than he already was. He didn’t have time for her. Venus was heartbroken. She fell into a deep depression, wanted to talk to no one, stayed in a room at home where she lived with her parents and two younger brothers, and then could not go on. She took a razor blade to her left wrist; she wanted to die. A friend found her before she had bled that much, and she quickly recovered. She tried to get back with the love of her life. He said no. He gave her the same reason as before. She tried a second time to commit suicide. She cut two slits, close to one another, both of them about half an inch or so from the first attempt. Again, a friend found her. But this time she was close to death. She had lost a tremendous amount of blood, so much that she had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Venus had been out of the hospital in Cebu for two months when I met her. She had been in Manila for two weeks looking for a job. The only luck she had so far (she is nineteen) was an upcoming interview at Jollibee Express,

108 Venus in Love a Philippine fast-food outlet similar to McDonald’s. Venus didn’t know if she would get a job at Jollibee as we talked, and she was of the opinion that she should seriously consider a better paying if riskier option. Risky because if her father, a maintenance man, found out what she was doing he would kill her. The option would be that of working as a go-go dancer in a Manila club complex (EDSA) where hundreds of young girls worked. They get paid 300 pesos a night (less than six dollars) for wearing a bikini-like outfit and shaking their bodies on a stage (theoretically dancing, but this is an inaccurate description) that looks like a twentieth-century auction market in young girls. Thirty or forty of them, sometimes two and three deep in some clubs, and often hip-to-hip, will stand on the stage through two or three mind-numbing songs, then have a short break. They repeat the routine, again and again, for seven or eight hours, often until three or four in the morning. When they are lucky, among the chosen few, men—usually foreigners—will ask them to sit and chat and have a drink. If the girls doesn’t bring in a required number of ladys’ drinks a month, they will be let go. If a man wants to take a girl for a couple of hours or all night to his hotel for sex, he will have to pay a barfine of 1,000 to 1,200 pesos (twenty to twenty-five dollars). The bar gives the girl none of this money. Everything she earns at this point she will have to get by cutting a deal with the customer. Usually she can get between 1,500 and 2,500 pesos, depending on her looks and bargaining skills. If the girl decides to not show up one night to the club, she will be fined 1,000 pesos; it is obviously risky to get sick or make a separate deal with a man she met in the club and wants to see on the side, cutting the club out of its share of the action. Venus, an attractive girl with a vivacious personality and obvious intelligence desperately wants to work at Jollibee. She doesn’t want to die by her father’s hands or go with lots of strange men. She just wants to be happy, find another man and fall in love again. She asked me if I would like to see where she was living. She took me there the following day, into a slum that I would not have ventured into on my own. We walked through a street cluttered with petty vendors and young men who looked at me like they would have liked nothing better than to cut my throat and go through my pockets and daypack. Venus and I walked close together. At one point she took my hand. She was smart enough to know

Venus in Love 109 that she was my insurance policy, and that she was signaling to those around us to leave me alone. We went into a long alley and after a hundred yards or so came into an opening where there was a cement slab covered with rusted junk, pieces of old cars, and garbage cans that looked as though they had not been emptied for a week. I stayed close to Venus as we passed several young, curious men sitting on the edges of the rubble. I didn’t see any obvious exits if I got in trouble. Venus pushed open an unlocked door and we entered into a stuffy and very humid living room with a small couch on which a girl about Venus’s age was lying down, half asleep, wearing only shorts and a faded bra top. The girl got to her feet and greeted us; she seemed surprised at seeing me. She was one of two of Venus’s roommates, and unemployed, no job prospects on the horizon, Venus had told me. I didn’t have to be told that this roommate wasn’t pretty enough, or shapely enough, to be able to work in a go-go bar. Even someone like Venus, because of the intense competition and number of competitors, might only be able to score with a man two or three times a month. Better money than she would get at Jollibee, but not great; there are far too many young girls just like her. In every sense it’s a buyer’s market. There was another woman in the room, seated on a rickety chair that looked like it would crumble at any minute. She was older, perhaps in her mid thirties. She had a worn appearance, a sagging sad look; in truth she looked more like forty-five. She was a friend, a neighbor, also unemployed, and without a husband. Venus’s other roommate was away. I didn’t learn what she did, though she did have a job. She had been seeing a middle-aged American for about two months. He had told her he wanted to marry her. There were three or four framed pictures of the couple on the small TV, on an old table, in a room so cluttered with cheaply framed photos and kitschy wall hangings and little knickknacks that it made me feel claustrophobic. There was a small kitchen that I could see from where I sat in an overstuffed chair. At the far side of the kitchen, still within my view, there was a door that opened onto the bedroom. At night, they all slept in the closed space of the room with a small fan that at this moment had been placed at my feet. Before it got dark, Venus walked me back out to the buzzing, crowded street where I caught a taxi. I thanked her for showing me what otherwise I

110 Venus in Love would have had a hard time seeing on my own. I could not have pictured the place from the way she had described it the previous evening. On the return trip to my hotel room, the cab driver passed through a section of Manila I had not seen before: shacks made of tar paper and discarded lumber, anything that had been found or bought for next to nothing. Tiny jerrybuilt messes that jammed against one another, often a sharing of walls. Kids and moms and dads were out front enjoying what they could of the occasional breeze that came out of nowhere in this oppressively hot Manila April. I thought about how lucky Venus and her roommates really are. Relatively speaking, of course. But it occurred to me that unless Venus got as lucky as her roommate and found someone to love her as she had loved her successful Cebu boyfriend, she was in trouble. Maybe she had three or four good years as a go-go dancer in her, that is if she didn’t revert to being chubby (her description) as she had been before trying to kill herself the second time. Or get unlucky and have a kid because like so many young Filipinas they give no more thought to using a condom than they do to the geography of Greenland. As I walked the short distance to my hotel, I thought of what Venus really loved--her cell phone. The previous day, when we had had calamari and the sirloin tapas she had been preoccupied, and not with me or thoughts of a new boyfriend. She had inadvertently left her phone with a friend and had no way of recovering it until the next day. I love my cell phone, I love it! she had shouted more than once. On my first trip to the Philippines a year ago I read that more than fifteen million Filipinos have cell phones. I would guess that a lot of the owners of the phones don’t have any more money than Venus has, if as much. (She was currently living off some savings she had accumulated when living in Cebu.) I gathered that she is no different than most Filipinos today. They have a mania about texting friends, incessantly and obsessively sending one- and two-line notes that have as much content as a blank piece of paper.

Facultative Soft Lesbians There’s a saying in the Philippines, and it’s not much different in Thailand: they lie when they open their mouths or move their lips. Or: they begin lying when they wake up in the morning, and they don’t even stop lying when they fall asleep. In Angeles City everyone I bump into or have a chat with regard to bargirls says: They all have Filipino boyfriends, and no matter how insistently they deny it—and virtually all of them deny it--don’t believe them. If you think they don’t have Filipino boyfriends, you’re just deluding yourself. I’ve bought into this line about all Filipina hookers having boyfriends, and have repeated it to others. Have I, like so many others, been wrong on this score? That is, the great majority of Angeles City bargirls really don’t have Filipino boyfriends. And then there’s another matter in Angeles that I don’t think I’ve had quite right, and it’s related to the boyfriend issue. On one trip to Angeles, I stopped outside one go-go joint and started up a conversation with a twenty-six year-old door girl, one of several who stood not far from the front door to hustle business. Arlene had a five-year-old child and said she had worked the previous year for three months as a dancer at the Blue Nile. She didn’t like being a dancer and quit to return to Subic Bay to be with her daughter. After several months she returned to Angeles, but only to work as a door girl.

112 Facultative Soft Lesbians I found Arlene sufficiently interesting that I invited her inside for a lady’s drink. What struck me about her was her intelligence, and her candor, brought on perhaps by my own candor when she asked me questions. Over the next hour or so, and a couple more drinks, she revealed that she was a lesbian. She loved kissing women and feeling their asses and stimulating their clitoris with her tongue. She didn’t enjoy being with men, and when they tried to kiss her on the neck or on her breasts all she could do was giggle. She would have intercourse, but there was no pleasure in it. She simply went through the motions, faked what had to be faked and then tried to get the guy off and leave as soon as she could. We kept returning to her lesbianism, and among the things she said was that for every bout of sex she had with a customer, she had three with girls. And they were invariably bar girls. It is not uncommon in Angeles City bars to see go-go dancers holding hands while on the stage. It is also the case that a very large proportion of the bar girls live in dorms or dorm-like conditions where there are bunk beds and a large fan or two. It is well known that the great majority of the bar girls are coming from Samar and Leyte in the Visayas, not from Angeles or the surrounding cities and towns, and this means that their closest ties are to cousins and sisters working as bar girls, and secondarily to other bar girls from the same province. It is also pretty common knowledge that the great majority of Angeles City bar girls don’t get many bar fines, perhaps no more than a couple a month on average, the nines and tens another matter of course. All of this is suggestive of what might happen when it’s an all-girl environment, and when you’re far from home and family and relatives and friends, and when you may be getting a fair number of negative impressions about men, those you are seeing in the bars and with whom you are occasionally having sex. Thus the Angeles bar scene is ripe for what might be called facultative lesbianism, that which comes about because of the environment, and is not a permanent condition or lifestyle. Indeed, when one thinks about what the environment of the girls

Facultative Soft Lesbians 113 is really like, and how they are far from home, it would be quite surprising if there wasn’t more lesbianism, or lesbian behavior among the bar girls, than one would find in the general population.

My suspicion, however, is that to the extent there is lesbianism among these bar girls it is a “soft lesbianism,” only

114 Facultative Soft Lesbians present as long as the girls find themselves in the Angeles City bar girl life (facultative, in other words). It is a soft lesbianism in the sense that some of the girls find themselves hugging other girls as they had not done in their home environment, and shamelessly holding hands, and occasionally kissing one another on the lips. There are probably also fairly strong emotional attachments that develop. But that’s about it, or so I would hypothesize. Give these bar girls the opportunity to get into a relationship with a man and the great majority of these facultative and soft lesbian bar girls, I’d bet, will be as heterosexual as they were in their home provinces before arriving in Angeles City. This brings me back to the widely held idea that most of the bar girls are blatantly lying when they claim they do not have Filipino boyfriends. In fact, they’re probably telling the truth— most of them. It’s almost certain that they’re not bringing their boyfriends from the provinces, if they had one just before leaving—not very likely. Once in Angeles City they have precious few opportunities to hook up with local Filipinos. They are working too much, and after their dance shifts or bar fines they are tired and they want to sleep. There are also no obvious venues in and around Angeles City for the bar girls to meet local Filipinos in their free time. So, the commonplace belief that most Angeles City bar girls have boyfriends that I and so many others have bought into is probably wrong, and wrong by a country mile. It’s more likely that those who do have Filipino boyfriends are those who are from the local area and who are living away from the dorms and other living quarters provided by the bars.

Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar girl Jaelyn, like her somewhat older sister, quit school after the tenth grade, and the reason in both cases was that the parents did not have enough money for school expenses. They did, however, find the money for their three sons, all of whom completed high school, and then headed into a workforce that when you do get a job it usually pays dog wages. Two of the brothers are unemployed, and the third one works in construction—when he can find something. It is imperative that this one brother try hard to find work, for at twenty-six his wife is currently expecting their sixth child. After leaving high school, Jaelyn, like her mother and father, worked at a street stand selling prepared foods. This did not add much to the family income. Her father, like one of his sons, works construction when he can find a job. The rest of the year, if he’s not trying to make a small handful of pesos selling what his wife prepares he stays at home and does nothing. When Jaelyn was eighteen she wanted to try something different. She turned to showing her body on a cybersex site. She has a pretty face and an engaging smile, but her biggest asset is very large breasts. She didn’t like the job, and she didn’t make much money in the form of commissions, and so after one month she quit. It was not long after the cybersex job that she had an “accident” (her word) with her twenty-four year-old jeepney-driving boyfriend of one month. He loved her until she was five months pregnant. He then said goodbye, took up with another young Filipina, and neither saw the birth of his daughter nor has he seen her since. He has never given Jaelyn any money for the child’s support. Jaelyn has not seen him since he left her, and she now has no idea where the father of her daughter lives. Three months after her daughter arrived, and now nineteen, Jaelyn took a job in one of the more upscale go-go bars in Angeles City. She is one of forty or

116 Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl fifty girls who nightly dance or shuffle their feet and smile and try to look sexy. If they’re lucky or “show well,” they may get a customer or two to buy a lady’s drink. If they get real lucky, they get bar fined, and that means that rather than working until three in the morning when the go-go bar closes they’re either asleep in a foreigner’s bed or doing what they must do to meet his sexual demands. With Jaelyn’s age and figure and face working in her favor, one might think that in the five weeks she has worked as a go-go dancer at the time I met her she would have gotten numerous bar fines. Perhaps upwards of ten or fifteen, one might’ve guessed. In fact, during this period of time she has had only three, which means she has averaged one approximately every eleven days. On the one hand, this is not too surprising given that there are some 10,000 registered dancers in Angeles City and perhaps 4,000 or so working at any one time. Thus there is an enormous amount of competition for a very limited supply of men, not unlike what one finds in Pattaya, Thailand. On the other hand, such a meager number of bar fines is surprising, because Jaelyn is not only young and quite attractive but has breasts like few of the girls in Angeles City possess. The principal reason that Jaelyn went to work in the go-go venue was because once she had a child and soon after the child’s birth there was considerable pressure from her family to bring in money. Jaelyn and her family live in Balibago, literally a piece of Angeles City and not far from all the go-go bars. Jaelyn was aware of all this whoring activity before she gave birth, and when the need for a “decent” income arose, and combined with pressure from her older sister who had been a dancer in a go-go bar, working in one seemed a logical choice. Jaelyn’s sister, three years older, had been a dancer for over a year in one of the clubs, until she hit the jackpot and got herself an American boyfriend who regularly sends her money. It is money that went, in part, to help Jaelyn not only in the months after she delivered her child but also to pay the hospital bill for the delivery. It is worth looking at the income of a go-go dancer like Jaelyn to get a small window onto how much girls like her make. What this exercise illustrates is how pitifully little they get for their efforts, which is due not only to exploitation by the bar owners but also to the cheap cost to a foreigner of taking an Angeles City hooker for the night. The going bar fine rate in the

Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl 117 spring of 2008 was 1300 to 1350 pesos (approximately 43 pesos to the U.S. dollar at this time). Unlike the bar fine that one pays in Thailand, this is theoretically all that a customer is required to pay the girl for going short-time (two to three hours) or long-time, which means all night (which of the two depends on how she feels and what the customer can negotiate). Many of the girls prefer to go all night with a customer because they get to sleep in a large bed and an air conditioned room rather than on a mat and under a fan alongside half a dozen other girls, or in similar conditions if they are living at home with their family. Many customers, if pleased with the girl’s performance and attitude, will tip her in the morning, a figure that ranges from about 300 to 1,000 pesos. Jaelyn gets paid 130 pesos a night for eight hours of dancing and sitting with customers and trying to get bar fined. This amounts to less than $.40 an hour. Assuming that a dancer like Jaelyn can get two ladys’ drinks a night, this would mean that she is making, because of her commissions on the drinks, approximately $.80 or thereabouts an hour (a figure that includes her salary). Now if she gets bar fined once every ten or eleven days, as happened to Jaelyn up to the time I met her, her cut from each bar fine is 600 pesos, or a little less than fifteen dollars—forty-five dollars in total for five weeks. If it be assumed that Jaelyn performed well in bed, and she went long-time, perhaps she got five to ten dollars added in tips to each of her three bar fines. If it further be assumed that she spent an average of ten hours on the “date” and in bed with each of her three customers, and each customer tipped her ten dollars, this would mean that she was being paid an average of $2.50 an hour for her company and for hugs and kisses and groping and for however much fucking and sucking she was asked to do and agreed to. If this income of $75 is spread over the average length of time it took Jaelyn to get bar fined, this means— from one perspective--that approximately $2.50 could be added to Jaelyn’s average nightly income. So, this gives us a little more than a dollar an hour that someone like Jaelyn is making, and this is for doing the following: dancing or hanging around in the bar eight hours a night (a little less than forty cents an hour), getting a couple of ladys’ drinks and being hugged and groped and kissed for the commissions she’s getting on the drinks (again, a little less than forty cents an hour), and then the occasional bar fine where she finds herself in bed with a complete stranger for eight or ten or twelve hours and being fucked

118 Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl and sucking on the man’s penis once or twice during the night, depending on the customer (somewhat more than twenty cents an hour averaged out in Jaelyn’s case). Any sane and reasonable person can only conclude the following: in the twenty-first century a young Filipina in this predicament is simply slave labor. She has to be either the cheapest or one of the cheapest (outside of some African countries where a fuck or a blowjob might go for a can of sardines) sex workers around. Any man from the West who would complain about what he is paying one of these young Filipinas is either grossly insensitive, unable to do the most basic arithmetic, or an insane exploiter when it comes to what he is paying to fuck a young woman who may be anywhere from ten to fifty years his junior. Now, for arguments sake, let’s assume that a go-go dancer in Angeles City is getting the same salary that Jaelyn gets. But rather than getting commissions on two ladys’ drinks a night, she is getting commissions on five or six. And instead of getting bar fined once every ten days, she is getting bar fined once every three days, and in each case getting a tip of ten dollars on each barfine (about 400 pesos), in addition to the 600 peso cut of the bar fine. Add all this together and she is still only making about $18 a night (the bar fines and tips averaged over three days and added to the salary and commissions on five or six drinks). By this calculation, instead of making an average of a dollar and a bit more an hour, she would be making somewhat less than $2.50 an hour. And for this, she is going to be subjected to a lot more groping and kissing and hugging and fucking; and the emotional toll on her for a mere increase of about a dollar and a half an hour has probably increased substantially. Furthermore, because of the reputation of Angeles City as a place where a fair number of the young girls go bareback (without a condom) with little or no resistance, there is not only going to be more instances where she will be pressured to have sex without a condom, but one can almost be certain she will cave in--or the customer will simply “forget” and she will find herself having sex without protection. And with all the possibilities for getting an STD, and possibly pregnant; and following this the emotional and financial expenses that ensure and that must be deducted from the average per hour wage of less than $2.50 an hour that she’s getting.

Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl 119

I suppose if one wanted to be an optimist or look at the bright side of all this, one could focus on the hope that many of these young girls entertain. They do want out of their lives of poverty where their fathers (principally it’s the man who decides) are little more than breeding machines; and the great majority of them would be absolutely delighted to move to another country (much more so than Thai hookers); and it would seem that the great majority of Angeles City

120 Jaelyn: An Angeles City Bar Girl prostitutes care not at all that that the “noble” men from the West who rescued them are well into their fifties or even sixties, and fat and unattractive, and with numerous medical problems, and are simply in need of someone to care for them physically and emotionally, and occasionally sexually. Is it hard to hear stories where a young girl, or one not so young, has lucked out and found a foreign “gold mine” for herself, her child or children, and her family too? No, it is not. One of several “good luck” stories I have heard concerned a fairly attractive and reasonably charming (I met her) twenty-seven year old woman from the Visayas with three children, the oldest of whom was twelve years old. She found (or he found her?) an American in his early sixties who wanted someone to take care of him. The woman is now back in her home province with her children and family receiving money from the man and waiting for the paperwork that will result in marriage and the good life in the U.S. for the woman, her children, and with an economic spillover to her entire extended family. Just as this woman returned home, her twenty-one year old childless sister—there are nine children in the family—began working in the very same go-go bar where her older sister got lucky. Poor Filipino families, not unlike many poor Thai families, are not averse—eyes and minds allegedly half closed—to sending more than one daughter into prostitution if it means more pesos or more baht for a family on the far margin in a Third World country.

Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman It will quickly become obvious that I am speaking about my own needs and what I would wish to avoid, and that each person reading this—needless to say—will consider things important that I do not, and will place little or no importance on things that matter greatly to me. I would guess that fewer than five percent of men in the West, and irrespective of age, would line up their priorities as I do. Among Asian women, I would have the least interest in those who are often described as hi-so or have anything like a strong sense of class and privilege, what is often referred to as entitlement. I very much dislike being around or with people who make judgments along class lines, who are eager to put themselves into a particular class of people and judge, and often quite explicitly, the race, class, color, or social status of those around them. So, for example, hi-so women with university degrees would hold no interest whatsoever for me if they look down on other Thais because of their darker skin color, or because they come from Isaan, or because parents were poor rice farmers, or because the hi-so women are eager to define their lives in terms of people who are thought to be socially important and have money and influence. In other words, all those Thai women who are difficult to get access to—not just because of age differences, but because they belong to the “better” classes of Thai society, and know it and want it known—would be of no interest to me. I would care

122 Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman not in the least that they are strikingly beautiful and know how to dress tastefully and have university degrees. Which brings me to the issue of physical beauty. I like young women, thin women, women with pleasant features and good teeth and good hygiene habits—in general women who smell good and are pleasant to look at. With a few exceptions, the women I would most seek out anywhere would not be the ones through sixes, or the nines and tens, but rather the sevens and eights. The first category includes too many women who I would see as physically unattractive, perhaps even ugly. The nines and tens, with few exceptions, are conscious of their physical attractiveness, and they invariably exploit it and use it to advantage as much as they can. I would want a woman around me who is kind and considerate and can see beyond her own nose, to the concerns and needs of others. Although there are plenty of exceptions, I would venture that these traits would be more commonly found among women who rate as one through six or seven, than among the nines and tens; and more commonly among those who don’t see themselves as superior by virtue of birth, family wealth, or any other measure of entitlement. People who see themselves as privileged tend to feed off and reinforce that image. I have another requirement for someone I would want to spend serious time with, and from all I have heard and read and discovered it is a trait much more difficult to find in the Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, than in countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, England, and the European countries. And that’s the trait of being curious, of wanting to learn, of understanding the value of ideas and debate, of appreciating the value of books. There are minimum requirements, of course, when it comes to formal education. For it is simply impossible to discuss a great range of ideas and what is going on in the world if you only have an eighth grade education, and even more than this doesn’t count for much if the education was obtained in a Third World country where independent thinking and analytical skills are given

Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman 123 short shrift. So by these criteria, and quite apart from what the women do for a living—if anything, all but a tiny fraction of the women who come from Isaan or the poorer parts of Thailand would not meet my minimal criteria for a mate or relationship of any duration. But, then, I have met hardly anyone in Thailand or other parts of Southeast Asia who speaks of more than a small and elusive handful of women who have the traits I have briefly described.

124 Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman I have no interest in finding myself supporting a wife or her family or relatives. If any woman’s primary loyalty is to her family and not to me, or if she insists on financially supporting them at any level with our resources, including any money she makes on her own when living with me, then no matter how well she stacks up in terms of physical beauty, intelligence, warmth, and sexual prowess, I want nothing to do with her romantically. To put the matter differently, I would not allow either my mother or father to live with me and my wife, and I would not permit either a wife’s father or mother to live with us. Nor, of course, would I dream of permitting any other close or more distant relatives to live with us, including blood brothers or sisters. On the whole, Asians feel much more strongly about providing this kind of support to parents and siblings—very notably among Filipinas, and while I can appreciate the value and its cultural roots, it is a value I do not share and have no interest in acquiring or nurturing. I simply put too high a premium on my freedom to take in and support parents or relatives. Yet another trait for which I have little tolerance is that of jealousy and lack of privacy, a demand by any woman that she know all about my life and what I do, and insists on my not only accounting for my time when I am away from her but puts limits on who I talk to and who I eat with and who I spend time with when I am not with her. I understand the roots of her concerns, and I also understand that the overwhelming majority of men I have ever known put up with such jealousies and intrusions. But all this is for others, not for me. I cannot fail to mention the way so many Asians routinely deal with one another on matters concerning what might broadly be called truth. Everyone lies, but because of the enormous value placed on face in Asian societies, lying is so pervasive compared to what one finds in the West that it is not just a difference in degree but in kind. No doubt many Westerners who have married Thai women have found a way to deal with all this blatant lying and dissimulation. I could not and would not.

Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman 125

Where does all this leave me? Well, exactly, I think, where the title of this essay suggests. Put quite simply, there are too many cultural differences between native Asians (and it might well be the same with first-generation Asians in the West) and my own values to want to get seriously involved with any of them. This, I should note, is not a value judgment about what tens of thousands of

126 Why I Wouldn’t Marry a Native Asian Woman Westerners have concluded or done by way of getting romantically involved and married to native Asian women. It is merely a statement about my own values, what is important to me. There are other issues that might be addressed. One is that of whether or not someone with my stringent set of criteria could ever enjoy Asian woman. Most certainly: as friends, as lovers, in short- to medium-term non-binding relationships. There is an awful lot to be said in favor of Asian women, and not least their warmth, and largely irrespective of whether or not genuine. But however long the list of favorable traits they may possess, for men like me, and I suspect more than a few mongers and non-mongers alike from the West, the costs of a marriage or something similar to a native Asian woman are higher, and perhaps far higher, than the benefits. Can I understand why so many middle-aged men from the West, some of whom no doubt have at one time had standards as high as I profess for myself, have married Thai and Filipina women? I certainly can. Who, in the approaching winter of his life, and a life marred by bad marriages and numerous disappointments, wouldn’t want to put aside all kinds of values to be daily ministered to by a young and attractive woman, one twenty, or thirty, or even forty years his junior? This certainly seems more desirable than hooking up with a fifty- or sixty yearold Western woman with a couple of marriages behind her and a voracious materialistic appetite and more mental baggage than anyone cares to contemplate. What sane man, unless strapped with fears about what neighbors and friends and others will say, does not want to have sex with and sleep with and gaze at someone who is by every measure young? Yes, why worry when the Grim Reaper may be two blocks away and you’re not far down on his human harvest list.

Sopha The warning is a screeching siren hard to miss. If you marry a Thai or Filipina woman, or any Asian woman for that matter, don’t take her to America or England or Australia, anywhere in the West. In a year or two, at most, she’ll be different. She’ll be that person you didn’t want to marry in your own country. Her values will have changed. She’ll demand what she never had or once thought impossible to ever get or achieve. She may even buy a ticket on a speeding out-of-control train called feminism, eager to search near and distant landscapes, not for equality but for privilege and advantage. But then who knows what will happen even when she stays in her own country after marriage to a Westerner? I met Sopha on a flight from Phnom Penh. She was sitting across the aisle from me. She smiled as we were about to take off. I returned the smile with a pinch of sweetness and interest, and from that point on we talked almost nonstop during the short flight to Bangkok. She is twenty-five, a couple of months away from her twenty-sixth birthday. She’s attractive, in that somewhat unique Cambodian way—a little round in the face, with nice small teeth, hair to the bottom of her back, and exhibiting a quiet provincial innocence and a gentleness in the way she uses her hands and speaks. At first Sopha did not say that she was married, though I assumed as much from the filigreed gold rings on her left hand. She wanted to introduce herself by sharing a little “story,” the reason why she was on her way to Bangkok. She was going for an operation. She had a scar in her uterus, and it had to be removed, because she’d been told that were it not taken care of she

128 Sopha could expect to get uterine cancer within three to five years. How she had gotten this portentous problem that she called a scar was not clear, nor did I understand how any scar could predictably turn into a potentially deadly cancer. Perhaps she has a pre-cancerous tumor, I thought. But as we talked she seemed puzzled by what I had to say in this regard, and unable to clarify the confusion she simply said that the operation was really no big deal. It was only going to keep her in the hospital one night, or two at most, and there would only be a minor incision as a reminder of what she already wanted to forget. She did say that it would have been comforting if one of her parents was with her in the hospital. But both of them were dead. Thankfully, her husband, now in Singapore, would be at her side this very afternoon when she entered the hospital. That would be comfort enough, she assured me. Sopha has been married almost six years to an Australian who, at fortytwo, is the CEO of a telecommunications company. He travels a fair bit, but the nature of his position and the long tentacles of the company in Southeast Asia allow them to live in Phnom Penh where they have a home. This is highly desirable from Sopha’s perspective, because this is where she was born and raised and where she has all of her friends. Her husband also likes Phnom Penh, and apparently is content to return to his native surroundings in Perth once a year or thereabouts, which is more than enough for Sopha. She really doesn’t like Perth, or anything else she has come to know about Australia. Perth is a place to endure; it is either too hot or too cold for her. Phnom Penh is the measure of all things good and great, and just the right temperature throughout the year. Sopha is also employed in telecommunications, though I sensed that she did not work for her husband’s firm. It was a point she didn’t clarify, and I didn’t pursue. She makes a salary that while paltry by western standards, is quite good for someone of her age and education. She did not graduate from high school. Her only employment regret at this stage in her young life is that she sees little opportunity to improve her position or make much more than the $280 a month she is currently earning. Sopha suggested that there have been difficult moments in her marriage, and that probably the best kinds of relationships are those of a boyfriendgirlfriend nature. What this attitude turns on, I soon discovered, is her

Sopha 129 unhappiness at not having children, something that she says her friends joke about in her presence all the time. It is a concern that her husband does not seem to appreciate. Her husband has two children by a previous marriage to an Australian woman, and that “mistake” is currently costing him a thousand dollars a month. Sopha was quick to admit that she did not discuss the matter of having children with her husband during their courtship. And it was a courtship of some length, a point of pride to her. She had not been an easy catch, she claimed. She had kept him guessing for nine months before committing to marriage. She suggested that Cambodian women will not commit easily, even to a foreigner with money; and yet she took no exception when a little later in our conversation I remarked that though I am older than her husband, and by some number of years, I have little doubt that I could get a marriage commitment from a very young Cambodian woman in a month or less. The conversation kept returning to her desire for children, and her husband’s insistence that he did not want more. I made an effort to explain why I thought he did not want to raise another family, but I sensed that Sopha was not listening, or did not want to hear what I said. She had it firmly fixed in her mind that her life was incomplete without at least one child and her husband would have to relent on the matter. He had only a short while to change his mind, since she had given him a fixed date by which to say yes or no to her demand for children. And if he says no, what will you do? I asked her. Then that will be it. I will leave him. I was somewhat taken aback, not knowing of course what other issues she might have with him, or if this was the only one. I was fairly straight forward with Sopha at this point. I noted that even without knowing anything about her husband, other than his age and employment status, I doubted that he would have any problem whatsoever getting another Cambodian wife, and as young as she was when they met—nineteen. I also noted that I did not think that she would be nearly so lucky at her age, and especially because she would have a marriage behind her. I didn’t say so, but might have added that the prospects were probably no better with a Cambodian man than with a foreigner, perhaps worse.

130 Sopha We soon landed, and we went our separate ways, my wishing her the best in her operation and with her desire to have a family. While waiting for my flight to Manila, I could not help but reflect on just how fortunate she had been in finding a relatively young foreigner, and a successful one, and how she might well have come to take what she has for granted, mistakenly believing that if she could meet a man like her husband while working as a waitress in a bar, then surely there was no reason to think that at twenty-six or twenty-seven she could not repeat that success. Perhaps Sopha, like so many Asian women who marry foreigners that they meet in Asia, need not leave this part of the world to pick up many of those kinds of values that they would surely embrace once resident in a western country. Attitude change in this instance is not about geography, but rather about habit and what one has become accustomed to having. And what one has then taken for granted, which allows women like Sopha to erroneously believe that they will always have what—as very poorly educated but young and attractive Asian women—they were so very lucky to have gotten.

I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women These were the words of a late forty something Swiss woman, married with two kids and traveling on her own in Cambodia for a couple of weeks while her husband and children were in Malaysia. They would soon meet up and then travel as a family to Vietnam. The woman was thin and quite attractive, had an engaging smile, and seemed genuine in her desire to treat locals as she would treat her friends at home. She and her husband had traveled as boyfriend and girlfriend in this part of the world almost twentyfive years ago, and among their memorable experiences was being detained by the Burmese police. There was a concern over why the couple was in the country and what they had been doing. They were released after several hours but not without emotional scars and haunting memories of how unpredictable travel in a country like Burma can be. I sensed she and her husband were reasonably well off and quite happy with their marriage and life together. We talked for nearly two hours, on a morning in Phnom Penh before I was to catch a flight to Bangkok. At one point, the conversation turned to expats in Southeast Asia and her observation that older men with young Southeast Asian women disturbed her, made her feel sad for both of them. We talked at length about her feelings and my thoughts on the matter. Here is a little of what I got out of the conversation and have added to from other discussions with Western women in

132 I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women Asia and elsewhere on this subject of older Western men with young Asian women. Middle-aged Western women feel sad for the young women because they are with someone so much older than them, from fifteen to thirty-five years or more. And this is just “not right.” They should be with someone closer to them in age, and as in most of the West with an eight or ten year age difference at most. This will make it possible for them to share values, and all those things that are somewhat unique to each generation. What do very young women have in common with older men of another generation—to say nothing of the fact that they are from a different culture? Almost nothing, the argument goes. These younger women, then, can be little more than housemaids, servants, youthful bed mates. In short, the quite young woman who marries the middle-aged or old man has made a huge mistake. One should feel “sad” for both of them. The critics feel sad for the middle-aged and old men because it “looks so bad,” it’s also “just not right.” Worse still, with such young women they look like “dirty old men,” “sick men,” “men who are unbalanced.” They even look like perverts, to put the most damning spin on what these men are doing and what outsiders see. These men, the argument continues, are not thinking through what they are doing. They are not at all thinking about the young woman they have brought into their lives and what they are doing to them. And, again, what could they possibly have in common with someone so much young than themselves? How does one answer these kinds of critics? I think there are several straightforward answers, all of them, in a sense, of a piece. What adults, even adults as young as eighteen, agree to do is their business, and if two people have decided that having a relationship or getting married will work, then that’s all that matters. Whether or not such a relationship or marriage can or will work when there are great differences in age, and culture, no one really knows a priori. As the saying goes: time will tell. And

I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women 133 as time and the record show some of these relationships work and some don’t, as in all marriages or relationships.

There is a widespread and badly mistaken idea that because they—the outsiders—see such relationships as sad or wrong, then the people involved will see them similarly. This is obviously not the case. However irrational or twisted such a relationship may

134 I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women appear to outsiders, it may not at all feel this way to the older man and the younger woman. And that’s what matters. To repeat the important point here: if it works for the two people involved, and they are comfortable with one another, then there is little, perhaps nothing more, to be said. What Western critics seem so unwilling to accept is that while most young Asian women would, in an ideal world, prefer to be with someone close to them in age, there is no doubt that Asian women have a much easier time dealing with great age differences that do women in the West. Indeed, fairly large numbers of them see considerable advantage in being with an older man. The older man is perceived as more responsible, as less likely to philander. And he is seen as much more likely to provide what the young woman wants as much as she wants anything: economic stability. It borders on being a truism to say that enormous numbers of young men in Asian countries are bad bets for any woman: they love to philander, they do not take their jobs seriously, they are not good at wisely spending what money they have, and a great many love to drink and gamble and do whatever they feel like doing, and be damned the wife and children. As soon as they are caught with another woman, or wish to follow their carnal urges, they leave the person they’re with, and very often the child they have just sired. Young and poorly educated males are an enormous problem in Asia, and, in a quite fundamental way they are responsible for a lot of the prostitution that young Asian women turn to in desperation because they are without any means of support. Critics in the West cannot accept the fact that the young Asian woman (invariably poor) is willing to overlook all kinds of things, and not least age, because she will be provided for, and her family may be provided for too. Where are these women most likely to find men who will meet these needs? Among older men from the West who have been divorced one or more times, and who are often jaded about the attitudes of Western women. And this is to say nothing of how much a premium older men place on being with someone young and attractive. Again, it is a failure of

I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women 135 critics to be able to project, or even imagine, that young and invariably poor Asian woman can overlook all kinds of things, and feel comfortable in doing so, if they and their children (invariably by someone in their local culture and almost always by someone who was their age and then left them), and perhaps their family, are given what they have never had.

136 I Feel Sad for These Old Men and Young Women The older Western man very much likes the idea of being able to be with someone who is young and attractive. He does not want to find himself with a woman his own age, someone who invariably will bring to a relationship all kinds of middle-age baggage from a previous marriage or two. He simply cannot get access to younger women in his own country. He has probably made more than one effort to find someone more “age appropriate” only to repeatedly discover that what he finds is not very satisfying, or that it’s going to be more of the same, the same thing that he had to deal with in his first or second or third marriage. And then, too, and for all the reasons cited, he is happily resigned to having to deal with critics and onlookers at home who will make all kinds of judgments about the man and his very young wife. Put differently, critics may feel sad for both the older man and the younger Asian woman, but their feelings and objections are largely beside the point. Or beside the point if the older man and young Asian girlfriend or wife are able to ignore what others say and think about them. In short, what two consenting adults do is their business and no one else’s (as with a young woman of age freely accepting money from a man for sexual services). What critics cannot seem to do, fundamentally—beside minding their own business—is imagine that others can be quite happy and content with life choices that others find “sad” or despicable and cannot imagine for themselves. What critics also cannot seem to appreciate is that middle-aged divorced men just do not see good or desirable alternatives among Western women in their age cohorts. It is for this reason as much as for the inherent attractiveness of young women that middle-age men from the West find themselves in serious relationships with young women from the East.

The Perils of Being an Avatar He had met her on the Internet, one of the Filipina dating sites. They chatted for almost three months before he made his first flight to Manila, and then on to Cebu where she lived. He had gathered several facts about her that made her attractive, finally convinced him to spend six months with her to decide if he would want to propose marriage. He had been divorced for seventeen years, and now in retirement felt it was time to have a steady companion; he had become increasingly lonely now that he was no longer working. The woman had two grown sons and no one at home with her. He did not want to start another family, and he did not want to be with someone other than his spouse or live-in partner in his Toronto home. She had shared several photos with him before they met. He was struck by her beauty. She appeared to be a good ten years or so younger than her actual age. She was a little older than what he had in mind when he began his search for a Filipina wife, and yet her age--forty-one--was attractive for two compelling reasons. He wanted a relationship with a mature woman, and he did not want to deal with all the problems that come with great differences in age. He was also concerned about his two daughters. Both were in their early thirties, and he did not want to be seen as a father who had “lost his mind” by going for someone younger than his children. From all he could tell before meeting her in person, the woman was intelligent, had wide-ranging interests, and she loved to travel, as he did. She had successfully worked in retailing, and he saw this as an encouraging sign that she had an active mind and could find work in Toronto, if that’s what she wanted to do. The woman had applied for an annulment of her marriage, but this was still pending. (There is no divorce in the Philippines.) She assured him that it would go through with little difficulty and that her husband, who had been

138 The Perils of Being an Avatar with another woman for several years and had children with her, would not contest the annulment in court. She had no objections to the fact that he was sixty-two and lived in a city known for harsh winters, unlike anything she had ever experienced in the Philippines. Nor did she make anything of the fact that he too had been married, and like herself had grown children. She was Catholic and he considered himself a good Christian. That he was not Catholic did not bother the woman. There were, of course, certain to be things he did not know about her and would only become evident when he met her in person and they spent some time together. What would he discover? He had no idea, but he told himself to be open-minded, and that he could not expect her to live up to some ideal he entertained from time to time, one that in any event was not something he could even fully put to words. When he finally met the woman at her home in Cebu he thought that she was just what he had been looking for. She was even more attractive in person, he thought. Her embraces and kisses proved to be a kind of warmth and affection he could not remember having in his marriage. Nor was she anything at all like the woman from Georgia that he had met on an Internet dating site and then visited in her home town for a week, there to discover that while she was sweet and apparently caring there was simply no chemistry between them. Within an hour of meeting the woman, he noticed that the baby finger and the adjoining finger on her right hand were each missing two digits. Several scars on her right arm also caught his attention. They had obviously been ugly cuts and had left some visually jarring scar tissue. He waited for three days to ask her how she had lost pieces of her fingers and where the scars had come from. They are nothing I want to talk about now, she responded. He did not return to the question for two days, not until a night when they were having dinner in Baguio where they spent what he would judge to be five fabulous and memorable days. On the night when he asked about the missing digits and the scars, she was still reluctant to tell him what had happened. He decided that he would wait for her to tell him when she felt more comfortable in their relationship.

The Perils of Being an Avatar 139 By the time they left Baguio, he was becoming agitated by the fact that the woman wanted to know everything about his life, and particularly whether or not he had thoughts about any other women since arrived in the Philippines. She insistently had to know how many women he had chatted with in the Philippines before they met, and whether he now continued to correspond with any of them.

140 The Perils of Being an Avatar He initially did not allow himself to think too much about all this inquisitiveness. He told himself that it was little more than wanting to know as much as possible about him. But as they spent more time together he began to have doubts, and questions, about what she was really asking him. He began to sense that he had not given the kind of attention he should have to her probing questions, especially when she quite pointedly wanted to know why he had looked at a particular woman when they were out shopping or walking through a park or going to a restaurant. Each time she raised this question he told her—honestly---that he had no recollection of staring or even looking at someone that she described to him in some detail. Finally, he asked her to stop being suspicious. He made it clear to her that she was the only one he cared about, and wasn’t it obvious from all the time they had spent together since his arrival, virtually even minute in fact. After yet another accusation from her about his “wandering eyes,” and an insistent demand that she stop behaving like a very jealous girlfriend or wife, and without any reason for doing so, she shouted, I can’t trust you! I could not trust my husband either, she added. When I was sure he was having an affair and told him what I knew, look what he did to me! She held up her hand with the missing parts of two fingers, and drew attention to the scars on her arm. She explained that he got more drunk than usual the night she accused him of having an affair, and that later that very evening he came to where she was lying down and beat her with his fists and then slashed her with a machete. And, as a final measure, he took her hand and lopped off two digits on each of two fingers. He told her that he did this to remind her to never question him again about having an affair. The relationship continued to develop more or less to the Canadian’s satisfaction, in spite of the continuing suspicions she expressed about his wandering eyes, and that on two occasions she came forth with questions about what he looked at on his laptop when she was not around him. In the fifth month of his stay in the Philippines, all of this time in her company, he gave her the money she needed to finalize the annulment. Getting the annulment had proved to be more arduous and costly than she had originally thought. Her husband, despite rarely seeing her and being involved with his new family, declared that he did not want to let her go. He said that she still belonged to him. Nevertheless, the annulment was finally approved,

The Perils of Being an Avatar 141 which meant that now, and officially, the woman could once again get married in the Catholic Church. Five days after the annulment became official, the woman said she wanted to fly to Manila to visit her cousins for a couple of days. He said okay, and he stayed in Cebu at her home. He ate and slept alone, and he spent much of his time on some Internet chat groups that he had participated in before meeting the woman. In her absence, he also found a new chat group, one dealing with global political issues. To participate, he had to provide a picture of himself or an avatar. He chose to do the latter. He told the woman about the site he had discovered and why he wanted to be actively involved. He did not mention that he would be using an avatar. On the day the woman was to return from Manila, he talked with her on his cell phone and he told her to call him when she got to the airport. She said she would. While he waited for her call, he found himself on the new site he had found in her absence. He got involved in an exchange over whether or not the U.S. should remain in Afghanistan. The woman arrived at her home in Cebu, and on entering she immediately went into a rage about why he had been spending so much time with the new chat group. In particular, she insisted on knowing why he was trying to disguise his real identity. She demanded to know who he was courting on this group. And what else was he hiding from her? How long had he really been a member of the group? Why hadn’t he told her that he was going to be chatting while she was flying back from Manila? He tried to laugh off and make light of what he saw as childish and groundless jealousy. But she would have none of it. She now revealed that after the plane had landed in Cebu, she went to an Internet café and looked at what he had to say on this political chat group. She came forth with the claim that she knew exactly how much time he had spent on the site in her absence. He was stunned by the accusation, and he felt numb. It was not until the next morning that he began to see clearly what all of this jealousy really amounted to, and it all came to him when during breakfast she declared that their relationship was over. She had no interest whatsoever in discussing her feelings, or the possibility of reconsidering her decision. What made you decide to end our relationship? he asked; and asked a second time, demanding an answer.

142 The Perils of Being an Avatar are.

It’s all because you used an avatar, she said. You were not who you really

He left that afternoon to return home to Toronto. When he got in touch with her a little over two months later, curious as to how she was doing, she told him that she had met someone on the Internet, an American from Texas. They had not met in person, but they were planning to get married. She was certain that he would not look at other women, and that he would not in any way make her suspicious of his behavior by using an avatar.

Rebuffed by a Bar Girl It’s happened to all of us, and sometimes with a bite that we will carry to the grave.

I recall a time when I was on a bus in Bogotá, Colombia, and I hit on an American girl. She was thin, of average looks, and about

144 Rebuffed by a Bar Girl twenty-two. It was not even a “hard” or impolite hit. I started up a conversation with her, carried on for about forty minutes on the bus ride, and then at the stop where both of us were to get off, I asked her if I could see her the following day. For coffee, or lunch, I said. She responded by saying: No thanks. You’re not my type. I was twenty-six, slim, together, I thought. And no one had told me up to that point in my life that I had a case of the uglies, or was an obnoxious s.o.b. around women. The ultimate rebuff, of course, is when you find you’ve been in a long-term relationship and your live-in partner or wife one day comes forth with a sober statement that runs like this: I really made a mistake getting anywhere near you. You’re a fucking loser. In hardcore prostitution in the West hardly anyone is rebuffed. The transaction is, 95 percent of the time, going to last no more than a half hour, probably less. The woman takes off her clothes coming through the door, jumps on the bed and spreads her legs, and points to her money box. There are few or no preliminaries, and 99 percent of the time no lip kissing. Her whole aim is to get you off as quickly as possible, and she couldn’t give a rat’s ass where you are from or how old you are or when you last showered. By the time you’ve got the condom off and are on your way to the bathroom to get cleaned up, she’s got her hand out and is expecting the money—if she didn’t get it up front and is already heading for the door. There would seem to be a lot more choosiness in taking customers in Southeast Asia in all the venues of prostitution, outside the quickie nickel and dime places for locals. And what goes on in the bedroom rarely, if ever, is as cold and impersonal as I’ve described the situation in the West. This greater choosiness in Southeast Asia seems a bit odd. It’s odd because the need for money is so much greater than in the West among prostitutes (an arguable point among Western streetwalkers who turn tricks for serious cocaine or heroin habits that must be fed lest they go into mind-bending withdrawal). Fifty or a hundred dollars to a hooker in Thailand or Cambodia or the Philippines means a hell of a lot

Rebuffed by a Bar Girl 145 more (the noted drug issue aside), and will do a lot more for dayto-day living and providing for kids and family, about this there is no doubt. Also, with the exception of the crème de la crème, the top five percent or so of Asian hookers who score just about every time they make themselves available, most prostitutes in Asia go with customers rather infrequently, in a great many cases no more than three or four times a month. One thing that would seem to make an Asian prostitute choosier, or quite willing to tell a customer she doesn’t want to go with him, is the length of time she will spend with him. Even in a short-time encounter we’re talking two or three hours (much shorter to be sure among the real pros that get a guy off and then are quickly out the door). For those going long-time, eight or more hours to spend with a customer is quite a stretch, especially when you factor in a whole range of variables: age of the customer, attractiveness, personal hygiene, degree of inebriation, and, perhaps most important of all (if thought through at all, and many of the girls are not capable of thinking through much of anything), what the guy is going to demand when he’s got the girl naked and behind a locked door. Will he be satisfied with going once or twice, or is he young or running hard, or on Viagra and wants to pump away like a jackhammer all night long? Does he come with a bad reputation by way of belonging to a particular ethnic group. (Is he, for example, a Korean, who among Filipinas has a reputation for bad behavior in and outside the bedroom?) Does he just look or behave like he’s going to be a brute in the bedroom and is not someone who can be easily controlled—either because of physical size or the way he comes on verbally and with his hands? There are other factors considered by Asian hookers, one might think. If they’re going to go for the night—long-time, and it’s early, and you’re even reasonably sure you’ll be able to score with someone, then it pays to reject bar fine offers for any one of the various reasons noted in the previous paragraph. I suspect this kind of thinking goes on a fair bit, and much more so among

146 Rebuffed by a Bar Girl those who consistently bar fine and feel with a fair degree of certainty that before the bar or go-go venue closes they’ll get at least one or two more bar fine offers. And they’ll be better than the one rejected. Another factor, perhaps more prevalent in the Philippines, especially in Angeles City with a constant flow of new recruits coming out of the provinces (primarily Samar and Leyte), is that the young woman, as desperate as she is for money does not consider herself a prostitute; she will not go with just anyone who will come up with a bar fine. And in fact these young and very naïve women newly arrived in Angeles City are not prostitutes in the same category with hookers in the West. A fair number of them have had no experience with foreign men and entertain “boyfriend thoughts” when they meet a man, however foreign he may be. And more than a few are thinking marriage from the getgo, and are open to a wide range of phenotypes as possibilities. So it is not strange, then, to see hookers (not the best word to be using here) in Southeast Asia being willing to reject customers who offer to pay their bar fines. There are a number of ways to do so, but perhaps the most blatant and consistent way one sees this happen is via the bald lie that the girl is menstruating, a commonplace “excuse” in Angeles City for not going with a man. It is heard scores of times every day. Of course, it might well be true, since menstruation occurs with such predictable regularity, and hardly anyone to my knowledge in Angeles is using sponges or other means of masking menstrual blood. And yet there is plenty of evidence—stories from all kinds of men (as long as they’re not in denial) who will tell you that they have asked a go-go dancer to have a lady’s drink, had a bit of a chat with her, liked what they saw, and then offered to pay a bar fine. At which point, and not before, the girl comes forth with the line: Sorry, I can’t go with you, I’m menstruating. Where the girl is serious about her deception, the customer can be certain that saying he only wants to sleep with her and give her a squeeze or two during the night,

Rebuffed by a Bar Girl 147 or that he will settle for a blowjob (not always that easy to get in any event), will not get the girl to change her mind.

Not long ago I found myself in Angeles City, and in one of the very large go-go venues with lots of shows and scores of show girls for whom the bar fine was not the typical 1,500 pesos but rather double this amount. The name of the venue was the Crystal Palace, part of a conglomerate of high-end clubs in Angeles with hundreds of girls in each one, the vast majority of whom do not get bar fined on any given night.

148 Rebuffed by a Bar Girl I was seated near the front and had just watched a “beauty contest,” one in which about twenty of the more attractive girls came out on stage one by one and showed off what they had by way of physical attributes. Presently, my eyes fell on a very tall man who approached one of these girls who had just come off the stage. I would guess the man, who proved to be German, was in her late thirties or early forties. He was about six-three and solidly built. There was no belly fat or middle-age excess evident anywhere on him. He was dressed tastefully, in black jeans, a dark blue polo shirt, and running shoes. He had a full head of dark brown curly hair, no beard, no obvious tattoos, and—if there was a negative that caught my eye—he had what I judged to be a rather severe look to his face. The Filipina beauty contestant he approached was small, perhaps no more than five-one. She had a charming smile, no offputting moles, and a nice set of even white teeth, and by any measure attractive. She was the kind of go-go dancer who could afford to be choosy. But then it was already nearly one in the morning, this was the low season, and there were not that many customers about. And Crystal Palace was quickly going empty. One would have predicted that a request for a bar fine would get a positive response. They sat next to me. The German bought the girl a drink, a San Miguel Light, and he bought himself a Scotch. They exchanged a few words, he put an arm around her, which she didn’t seem to object to, and they chatted. About five minutes or so after they sat down, the man made a move to kiss the girl on the lips. She rejected him by turning her head. No one could miss the message. He seemed momentarily taken aback, and he went to simply holding her hand. Then, after a spell of a long minute or so, she released her hand from his. They smiled a bit at each other, drank some more, and before long he ordered another round of drinks. Again he took hold of her hand. He did not make a second attempt to kiss her, but he had put his face into her long silky hair.

Rebuffed by a Bar Girl 149 For all appearances, and despite her refusing to kiss him, it looked like it was going to be a straightforward bar fine. After about fifteen minutes or so, the German motioned to the mamasan to come to his side. He said he wanted to bar fine the girl. The mamasan sat beside the girl and spoke to her in Tagalog. The girl, facing away from the customer, shook her head. She then turned slightly and reached for her beer and gulped it. She obviously did not want to go with the man. The mamasan’s face expressed displeasure. She would be losing a commission on a 3,000 peso bar fine. She again spoke to the girl. The bargirl did not relent, nor did I sense that she had given the customer the excuse that she was menstruating. She simply didn’t want to go with him. Perhaps she told the mamasan why in Tagalog. She took one more gulp from her beer, put it on the table, got up and turned from the customer without saying goodbye, and headed straight for the dressing room. Shortly, the German paid the bill and left. He now had to find his own excuses as to why he had been rebuffed. What happened? Perhaps the girl saw in his face what I saw in his face, a hard determination, a person who could not be easily controlled in the bedroom where anything might happen. Perhaps—and this most of all—she did not like his attempt to kiss her in public, in this very public whorehouse called Crystal Palace. Kissing a dancer and putting your hands on her breasts and elsewhere goes on all the time in this and other Angeles City go-go venues. But perhaps it was not the kind of behavior this particular girl liked to see in a customer. Maybe she was the wildest fuck in town in the bedroom and nothing was off-limits. But this was not the bedroom, and here she had a choice that was pretty much hers alone. The tall and well-built, middle-aged German was at the beginning of his learning curve, one might guess. This was not anything-goes Asia that his friends back home might have told him about. Or that he had thought he had learned all about on the Internet. He was now among girls with a sense of self-respect

150 Rebuffed by a Bar Girl who didn’t see themselves as whores, not even as commonplace prostitutes. They might be desperate, but desperation too has its limits.

The Five-Year Girlfriend He had this blank, distant look on his face, like he’d been hit by something and stunned. He had lost or had stolen some thirty dollars the night before, and he wasn’t quite sure how it happened. He remembered drinking a lot, way too much he confessed, but that couldn’t have been the problem. Or was it? Had he paid too much, or been overcharged? Or was it that girl that he’d been talking to at the bar and somehow one of her hands found the pocket with his money? He didn’t know, but it was disturbing, quite disturbing, because thirty dollars was a lot of money to him. At first, Nick had told me that he was an English teacher in Hanoi, and knowing that teaching English in Vietnam pays well by the standards of other Southeast Asian countries, I assumed that he wasn’t as poor or starved for money as his worry about the thirty dollars had led me to believe. But like almost all stories, what you hear at first is not what you hear later, all those not so little things that in the end leave one with a different picture than that formed initially. Nick was on a visa run, and with papers in hand to get him another six months in country. He could not, as he had in the past, get the visa extension while in Vietnam. The reason was that he was not currently employed by a school or other institution that offered courses in English. He was a freelancer. He knew some people he could contact on returning to Hanoi, and they would get him some work, he claimed. We repaired to an outdoor café, near the Lux Hotel, where I am staying. I ordered a beer, and Nick, swearing off alcohol for the foreseeable future because of the previous night, ordered water with a touch of lime and plenty of sugar. Presently he wanted to know what I thought of Asian women. I noted

152 The Five-Year Girlfriend that many of them are quite attractive, but that for me they would not make a good marriage partner. A couple of factors in particular work to their disadvantage, I said. Their lack of analytical abilities and their curiosity beyond their small worlds of family and shopping and TV; and their usually large extended families that would always be more important in their lives than me, and that I would have to support financially. He did not argue about the second point, but wanted me to know that his Vietnamese girlfriend, who he had been with for five years, spoke four languages and was now learning Mandarin with great ease. I said that the ability to learn languages was not what I had in mind, and I gave him some examples of what mattered to me: some sense of history and the arts and the ability to think and talk critically about contemporary issues. He said he could see my point. But his girlfriend, with her degree in engineering, could talk about other things. What? I said. They are hard to put into words. I tried other angles to elicit some examples. I’ll have to think about what she can talk about, he said. Nothing comes to mind right now. It was becoming apparent that he wanted me to know a good deal about his special Vietnamese girlfriend. When he had first mentioned her, I assumed that he had a more or less regular kind of boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Since they had been together for five years, I imagined that they had spent a good bit of time together, had traveled as a couple, probably had plans to get married, and that they slept together more or less all the time. To be sure, if Nick was living in Vietnam sleeping with his girlfriend on a regular basis might be a bit of problem, but it certainly wouldn’t be insurmountable to find ways to do so for someone who had lived there as long as he had. But as with how I misread what he had initially told me about teaching English, so it was that there was more to the story about his girlfriend that proved to be revealing. It turned out that he had met her five years ago when she wanted to learn more English, they had become friends, and he saw her from time to time. They would have coffee, they would chat, and they would walk in a park or see a movie together. Occasionally, they would get something to eat. But he could not spend the night with her, and they had sex only infrequently. And perhaps they had sex much less often than infrequently, it

The Five-Year Girlfriend 153 was hard to know from the way he spoke to this matter. Nick was, however, hopeful that since he would be living closer to her in the future they could find time to see more of each other, and perhaps on an intimate basis. But you do spend a lot of time with her? I asked at one point. Sometimes I don’t see her for a couple of months. Does she see other men? I don’t know. I was puzzled. He didn’t see her for months at a time, he rarely if ever slept with her, she might or she might not have a boyfriend—he didn’t know. What kind of a girlfriend was this? Later I asked: You have talked about marriage? A little. Two or three years ago. Not since. I don’t know how she feels now. You’ve met her family? Not really. Do you know how traditional Vietnamese feel about mixed marriages? He didn’t seem to know. I told him what I had learned from young women who had parents born in Vietnam but now lived in the U.S. It seemed like news to him. I was getting hungry and asked him if he wanted to go to a restaurant I knew where we could get some good Thai or Khmer or Vietnamese food, and it wasn’t expensive. No, he wasn’t hungry, and he was still worrying about where those thirty dollars went. He returned to his loss. He went back over reasons he had advanced earlier, now wishing to emphasize that he drank so much he was really out of it, and, well, anything could have happened, right? Especially in Cambodia, I said. Nick had one last question he wanted to ask me before leaving, and I took it to be another kind of statement about his relationship with his five-year girlfriend. Did I know where he could get laid, cheaply? I said I had heard from a young American the day before that there were places about six or eight blocks away from where we sat where he could get a girl for ten dollars, only five more than what locals pay. I had no idea what he’d get for that kind of money, or whether or not they’d try to rob him—as they had on two occasions the all-balls American with Iraq and Afghanistan experience who thought he

154 The Five-Year Girlfriend could get away with anything, including openly carrying a revolver on the streets of Phnom Penh. Nick thought about what I said for a long minute or so. I assumed that he was trading off in his mind the thirty dollar loss with a carnal need that hadn’t been satisfied in some time with his long-term girlfriend. Finally, he said, Do you know where these places are? I said I didn’t, but that if he found himself in the vicinity of the Walkabout Hotel, which he knew by more than name, I was sure that someone could help him. His face brightened for the first time since we began talking. I paid my bill and left, and as I got down the street and looked back I saw that he was talking to the waitress who had waited on our table. I imagined that he was going to order a beer. For the second-hand information that I’d given him, he could now afford to again lose his mind and also find the kind of pleasure I assumed he hadn’t had for quite some time. Whether he’d also lose another thirty dollars to a clever thief while he shot his wad was problematic.

Are Mongers Sex Addicts? It’s not an easy question to answer, and there may well be as many different answers as there are mongers and others who are presented with the question. Consider some possible ways of thinking of sex addicts in the context of whoring in Southeast Asia. A sex addict is someone who makes two or three trips a year to Southeast Asia, each one for a period of two to three weeks. The sole or overriding purpose of such trips is to have sex with as many different women (hookers or “good” girls or some combination) as possible, and yet leaves open the possibility that in one or all of these trips he will spend some significant amount of time with one or two of these women. For whatever reason, he has found them highly desirable, enough so to decide that being a butterfly--moving from one woman to another every day or two-is a pattern of behavior to be put on hold. But, surely, merely behaving in this manner, or in some similar manner (going more frequently or staying for shorter or longer periods of time) cannot in itself constitute addiction, where addiction refers to a need for more of the same, and not only a need for more sex, and perhaps more sex with different partners, but a need in which other aspects of one’s life are being significantly affected. The monger is going into debt, and at some point crippling or debilitating debt to finance these trips. He is in a relationship in his home country and it is beginning to suffer as a direct result of these trips; and then at some point the relationship

156 Are Mongers Sex Addicts? fails because of this constant mongering activity. If either or both of these conditions exist, and the person also thinks frequently and perhaps obsessively of these trips, to the point of literally counting the days and hours until the next foreign sexual adventure, and perhaps also continually bringing to mind the women and the exploits of previous trips, then there is yet more reason to see the monger as a sex addict. Perhaps there is more that’s going on. These mongering trips, though constituting less than fifteen or twenty percent of a year, are becoming such a financial and emotional drain that one’s very job performance suffers, and suffers to the point where he is in danger of losing his job and therefore the very means of financing his trips to Asia. What I have suggested here in brief is the kind of addiction that very often in varying degrees characterizes drug addicts, those hooked on cocaine, or heroin, or meth. Such addictions so completely take hold of an individual that they rather literally destroy his (or her) life. But do many mongers—more than a very small handful—fit the characterization I have suggested? I honestly don’t know, and I’m not sure that anyone who has thought about it and has made frequent visits to Thailand and the Philippines—the two major destinations for mongers—has any firm data on this kind of question. Nor would those who have been long resident in Thailand and the Philippines and have spent a significant amount of time around expat mongers and those who come frequently to focus on their sexual needs but live abroad. So even assuming mongers fit the addict profile I have outlined, it is simply an openended question. Indeed, open-ended enough that it’s quite possible—and this is what I in fact believe—that the number of sex addicts among that population of mongers who year after year find themselves in Southeast Asia is very small indeed. There are, no doubt, plenty of people about who would want to argue that even if we relax or eliminate the three or four traits I’ve identified that would allow one to bring some definitional

Are Mongers Sex Addicts? 157 refinement to the word sex addict, there are more than a small handful of mongers who are, well, sex addicts. And hardcore sex addicts at that. This category would include all of those sex tourists who show any kind of consistent pattern of returning to Thailand and the Philippines for the principal purpose of having sex with any number of women. But is this really an addiction? Again, I don’t think so. In fact, with all of the damaging aspects of the behavior absent, I don’t think that fucking thirty or forty different Thai and Filipina girls year after year is anything like an addiction. It is not even in the same category as the addiction to cigarettes and alcohol that a very large percentage of mongers have, and would have more difficulty getting rid of than their two or three yearly trips to Thailand and the Philippines. Why would anyone even want to call the mongers of Southeast Asia in all of their many guises and tastes sex addicts? Well, for the simple reason that by the standards of the societies from which they come, their behavior is abnormal, indeed quite aberrant. Aberrant not just because of the number of different sexual couplings they have over any given period of time, but equally—even more so, perhaps—for the fact that sex is being paid for up front. Paid for in ways that nearly everyone recognizes as payment for the services of a prostitute, which the great majority of people in the West see as different that the much more expensive outlays for sex, and very often boring and infrequent sex, in a socially sanctioned marriage. The expected societal norm is to be, if not perfectly monogamous, then more or less so— perhaps cheating on one’s partner on an infrequent basis, but not, even in occasional straying, having sex with anywhere from a dozen to a couple of dozen different women every six months or three or four times a year. Among mongers, of course, the verdict on this issue might be quite different. They’re a self-selected lot, and, as far as I can tell, fundamentally unconcerned, or little concerned, about the moral nature of what they are doing. Very few seem to give a fig about

158 Are Mongers Sex Addicts? what the vast majority of their countrymen (and women of a thousand stripes) think about their sexual behavior, and whether or not they are going with prostitutes. Looked at this way, one would be much more likely, I would think, to conclude that the words sex addict are little more than the heavily freighted rants of those who disapprove, who cannot abide their moralizing, and who are often eagerly insistent on making it known that any kind of mongering behavior is not only an addiction but a genuine sickness. One, indeed, far more serious than addictions that they themselves embrace and fail to recognize: to food, to nicotine, to alcohol, to shopping, to conspicuous consumption, to loud moralizing, and not least to the need to insistently intrude themselves into the private and personal lives of others. Lives that are not in any sense any of their business.

Stories Men Don’t Want to Hear

160 Stories Men Don’t Want to Hear About the middle-aged American who retired early and moved to Thailand and found himself a lovely and accommodating Thai woman in her early thirties. They got married and moved to her village and he built a large twostory home and with many amenities, including a large swimming pool. The home and all that he put into it—every penny of which was his money—was the equivalent of a good half million dollar home in a California urban area that does not cater to those with real money. Three years into the marriage, and quite by accident, the man discovered that his wife had somehow managed to transfer his entire 49% interest in the home to other individuals, as well as his financial interest in other real and personal property, apparently with the aim of one day telling him, with credible threats, to get lost. (A foreigner is not allowed to own more than a 49% interest in real property in Thailand, with the exception of condos). When the husband discovered what his not-so-lovely wife had done, he hired a lawyer and, as luck would have it—and luck it was—the lawyer was able to get all of the stolen property put back in his name. However, a condition of the judge’s decision was that the man and his wife, who he now hated, and vice-versa, had to live together for a period of six weeks, ostensibly to reconcile. They did so, but not amicably; they fought all the time. Finally, the man had had enough, and one day he locked his wife out of the house. She responded by getting her hands on a large two-by-four and, while he was inside, began smashing all the windows. Seeing the considerable damage that was being done, and that his wife would soon proceed to break every window in the house, and he could only imagine what she would do once inside, he called the police. He also pleaded with his wife to stop her destructive madness. The police arrived shortly; the woman was still going about her nutty behavior. In front of the police the husband again pleaded with his wife to stop what she was doing. He then turned his back and began to walk away. At this point his wife took the two-by-four and hit him violently in the back, knocking him to the ground and severely injuring him (as subsequent medical treatment would show). The husband managed to get to his feet and slug the woman a good one in the face, knocking her to the ground. The police, who had been witness to all this, grabbed the American and told him that no foreigner had the right to hit a Thai woman and that if he did so again, for whatever reason, they would take him to jail.

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In another village in northern Thailand, an Australian was living with a Thai woman that he had married. He also had built the woman a house (none of the women from rural villages have enough personal assets to build more than an insubstantial pig fence, unless they have been hookers and were not on drugs and were uncommonly thrifty). After they had been married a little over two years (which seems to be about the norm for the period of bliss and happiness between a Thai woman and a farang—and maybe it’s the

162 Stories Men Don’t Want to Hear norm everywhere), the pair began fighting off and on, and as is common with Thai women when they get angry, with outbursts of violence and destruction of property. On a day in which they had yet another argument (the nature of which is unclear—perhaps unfaithfulness by the husband, perhaps an argument over her drinking or gambling, common problems with village-bred Thai women), the man got ready to go to town on his motorbike. His wife took the car they owned, which of course he purchased as he had bought everything else they owned, chased him down and hit him. He fell onto the road, the woman turned the car around, and then ran over him. He died. The woman was arrested, quickly got out of jail on bail, and in a court was judged temporarily insane when she killed her husband. As is commonplace in Thailand, the woman will serve little or no jail time for the murder she committed. No place in Asia outside the Philippines presently offers Western men so many attractive women who are willing to form serious relationships as does Thailand. The reasons Thai women are so attractive to men in the West are several: their youth, their beauty (highly variable), their apparent submissive ways (more myth than fact), and their willingness to couple with or marry a man many years older. But the disadvantages are considerable: a general unwillingness to leave family (Thailand); an invariant ranking of the family above the spouse—considerably above the spouse; an insistent desire to support however possible the extended Thai family (identical to the Philippines); a lack of education (often no more than an eighth grade, and even if college level not an education like the average college education in the West); a tendency to almost pathological lying and deception; and an inclination to turn quite violent.

Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms Three of us were sitting at a bar on Soi Six in Pattaya. Collectively, we knew more than fifty or sixty middle-aged whoremongers, all of whom had made at least three or four trips to Thailand. By middle-aged I mean guys who ran from their mid- to late thirties into their sixties. One question that arose in our conversation was that of why so many guys that we knew didn’t wear condoms or did so but only reluctantly and then perhaps sporadically. The list of reasons proved to be a rather long one, and probably would have been even longer had there been other experienced mongers present at our table. A keep-it-simple kind of reasoning with regard to condom use for many guys seems to go something like this: Wearing one isn’t “natural,” and if it’s not natural I can’t enjoy it. They might further add: If I stop to put one on I get distracted and then lose it or take forever to come, and sometimes I don’t come at all. Getting off is important to most guys, not least for the psychological feeling that “coming through” means that one’s sexual sense of self is still intact. Some prostitutes will also feel uncomfortable if a guy doesn’t come, and some will say so. A few grouse that they--the girls--have not come through on their part of the bargain, while others wonder what’s wrong with the guy. Climaxing, then, is important, and it feeds into a number of other complaints by whoremongers, especially those who are taking (or

164 Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms want to take) at least one and perhaps two girls a day for several days running. Or get it on frequently with the same girl. Get enough alcohol in your blood and it may be hard to get an erection or maintain one, as every man knows. More often, though, the real problem is that it’s either a lot of work to climax with too much alcohol in your blood, or it’s seemingly impossible. If one is also wearing a condom in addition to having had too much to drink, then it is that much more difficult to get off. The problem of climaxing is made yet more difficult if one has been shagging too often in too short a period of time. Without a break of sufficient duration, there simply doesn’t seem to be anything left to shoot, and thus no climax. Then there’s the age issue, and though many older guys don’t have a problem getting and maintaining a good erection, climaxing on a regular basis is not that easy. When the previously mentioned factors are thrown into the mix, there can only be one conclusion: forego the condom because, obviously, that’s the problem. No one to my knowledge has any good data on how much more frequent the use of Viagra or Cialis use is among guys who are above forty as opposed to those in their twenties or early to mid thirties; or on how much more frequent still usage of these drugs is among those above fifty. But one can bet that these drugs are widely used by a great many middle-aged whoremongers who go to Thailand for the bar girls. The reasons for heavy usage vary from simply wanting to fuck at least once and maybe twice a day to getting one good guaranteed shag a night and not having to worry about losing the hard-on. A widely recognized problem among those who use these drugs is that with or without a condom and with or without a good deal of alcohol in the blood, the drugs make it harder to come. While the erection never dies, it can become a lot of work to get off. Some men even complain of not only having the urge to pee rather than climax but fear that this might in fact happen. The solution sought to these problems by many mongers is the bareback blowjob. My suspicion is that irrespective of the strong desire for a blowjob by most men, its

Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms 165 desirability among middle-aged whoremongers is greater because it is seen as a way around the problem of not being able to climax via vaginal sex.

There are, then, a number of factors that singularly or together, and in various combinations, and not just as matters of psychology but also of biology, are implicated in keeping a middle-

166 Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms aged monger from climaxing: the natural feeling of skin on skin; the psychological feeling that it’s not natural to wear a condom and putting one on interrupts the “natural” flow of shagging; alcohol use and abuse; the amount that one is fucking per unit of time; the simple fact of age; and then the use of Viagra or Cialis. This list of reasons for not wearing a condom is not exhaustive, and another reason brought to the table this day on Soi Six in Pattaya (in addition to personal beliefs about HIV transmission—often half-baked or naïve) is that in some cases the girl doesn’t want a condom to be used. But this reason, I venture, probably reflects more often than not what a monger wants to believe, and it is often the result of a kind of coercion on the part of the whoremonger who either says or implies to a bar girl, I won’t go with you or see you again if I can’t go bareback. Some go so far as to tell a girl that they’ll pay her more to go without a condom, which is easy enough for the girl to buy into if needy or generally ignorant about getting HIV or other STDs. Once the girlfriend experience kicks into high gear—monger and bar girl have seen each other a couple of times and there have been some mutually reinforcing assurances that both are clean and free of STDs—the farang lets the bar girl know that sex without a condom will make the growing love bond even stronger. In the mind of the monger and behind this reasoning, of course, there are all those memories of the times he simply could not get off. In addition to all of the above psychological and biological reasons for not wanting to wear a condom, several features of prostitution in Thailand (and the Philippines) further increase the likelihood that mongers at one time or another will go bareback, and then slip into the practice of doing so more or less all the time. That there are so many desirable girls to choose from. That the young women are so cheap for the amount of time they will spend with a man compared to anything in the West. That so many mongers in Thailand are only there for a week or two and want to make the most of the experience. That it so easy to slip into the girlfriend experience, something quite rare outside

Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms 167 Thailand and the Philippines. That the vast majority of Thai hookers seem so clean and innocent compared to hookers in the West. And that whoremongers only hear or believe what serves their best interest when the issue of STD transmission arises. In other words, it is not just being middle-aged and fucking a lot and using Viagra and Cialis and drinking a lot of alcohol that turn men away from using condoms; it is also the very nature of Thai (and Filipina) prostitution itself that promotes risky behavior, both for mongers and bar girls alike.

168 Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms There are several consequences of not using condoms in Thailand and the Philippines. The most obvious one is that both mongers and bar girls are getting more STDs than in many prostitution venues around the world where play-for-pay sex is virtually all short-time (very short-time by Thai or Filipina standards), and emotional involvements and the girlfriend experience are virtually nonexistent. To mongers with a global perspective, this conclusion seems so obvious as to hardly be worth stating. What may be more interesting and provocative— and cannot be easily tested—are the following hypotheses. One is that in spite of the number of whoremongers who are not using condoms for vaginal sex with Thai bar girls, the amount of STD transmission is surprisingly low, given the huge volume of sexual coupling for money. Or, put differently, there is no hard evidence I have seen that there is anything like large or alarming numbers of STDs in the bar girl and farang whoremongering populations in Thailand. Furthermore, few of the STDS that one hears about are of the deadly variety (HIV); and by and large anecdotal evidence and a case here and a case there of infection with HIV are hard to interpret. At any rate, the claim that the HIV infection rate is low in the farang whoremongering environment of Thailand is precisely what every monger who goes bareback wants to believe, all the while telling himself that should he get something like gonorrhea it’s no big deal getting cured. What is not known is just how many of the bar girl HIV infections have come about because of the sex they have had with their Thai boyfriends. Thai men, with very rare exceptions, just do not use condoms. Thus, this may well be the major way in which Thai bar girls are being infected. What adds fuel to this line of reasoning is that the kind of Thai men who consort with bar girls are among those most likely to use drugs intravenously, and intravenous drug use is one of the easiest ways to get infected with HIV. Furthermore, some portion of this population of bar girl Thai boyfriends engage in homosexual sex with other Thai men. Gay sex, as is well known—particularly where one is the receptive

Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms 169 anal partner—is one of surest ways of getting infected with HIV if the partner is HIV positive. The Thai boyfriends of bar girls (and the great majority seem to have them) are, one must conclude, prime candidates for infecting the bar girls that farang regularly have sex with. They are, then, the indirect but major source of HIV infections in heterosexual farang who go bareback, especially when they do so consistently with the same girl. For it is in socalled monogamous relationships where so much HIV infection results. Although it is much more difficult for a man to get infected with HIV from a woman than vice versa, prolonged unprotected sex with a woman greatly increases the probability that the man will become infected. Herein lies the huge negative side to what makes Thai and Filipino prostitution so compellingly attractive, namely, the girlfriend experience and how quickly it mutates into a very familiar boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and talk of love and a future together. And here too, then, is yet one more reason (beyond, for example, being financially and emotionally drained by a scheming Thai hooker when one falls in love) why smart whoremongers find ways to discipline themselves to rarely go with a girl more than once or twice. Of course, it could be that a significant number of the Thai women infected with HIV got the virus from farangs. For this to be case, however, it would seem that one and perhaps both of two conditions would have to hold. A number of the farang who insist on going bareback or get into the girlfriend experience enough to go bareback brought the virus to Thailand. Or, a number of farang who are going bareback with the bar girls are bisexual; they were moving back and forth between men and women before they came to Thailand, and they do so easily enough in the Thai environment where there are plenty of male prostitutes in the same areas where the bar girls work. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of farang who are going bareback are clean upon arriving in Thailand; they are not carrying HIV or other STDs. As for gay foreigners who come to Thailand for sex with

170 Why Mongers Don’t Use Condoms gay Thai prostitutes, they are, it would seem, a group largely apart from heterosexual farang whoremongers. But then then this question, like most that I have raised, would benefit from careful surveys, of the very sort that are not being done and not likely to be made anytime soon.

Bar Girl Tidbits 1 So what’s it like getting it on with a fat man, someone with a huge belly? She laughs. It’s like sitting on a big wave. You ever let one of them get on top? I don’t want to die! Not till I’m older. Then it’s okay to die. 2 I had a guy I saw three days. Every day we stayed in the hotel and had room service. We watched movies. I watched some Filipino shows when he was sleeping. We went out once to Jollibee to eat. We got Jollibee food and went to a park for a picnic. It was nice. He was a nice man. When I met him I was menstruating. I was menstruating the whole time with him. He was okay with this. All he wanted was a hand job, nothing more. When he went home we talked on the Internet for two months. He was nice and promised to send me a laptop for my birthday. I didn’t believe him. Then it came a month after he promised. He was a very nice man. I don’t know what happened. He stopped answering my messages. Then I was working the door one night and I saw him with another girl here. He didn’t even tell me he was coming. I don’t know what happened. This happens with customers, I know that now. You cannot trust them.

172 Bar Girl Tidbits 3 I been with him maybe two or three times. He comes in and buys other girls drinks. Not me, I don’t know why. He laughs and looks at me. I feel embarrassed. Then before he leaves he wants to buy me a drink and bar fine me. You think I will go with him? No. Not the way he didn’t buy me a drink same as the other girls when he first come in. 4 I got a small pussy. This American he has a big dick. Fat, you know. I tell him, okay you big. But when you inside don’t move it all around. Keep your dick straight and I can deal with it. This is what happens when you have a small pussy. That’s okay though. I will get bigger now because I’m back working after three months in the province with my baby. 5 Do many of your customers want to go without a condom? I always tell them same. No condom I don’t do it. Sometimes they’re okay the first night. The second night when they bar fine me again they say no condom, I can’t come. I say same thing. No condom, no boom boom. 6 He wanted to bar fine me because he said I looked like his Japanese wife. He liked to look at me and hug me. That’s all. Just hug me. Look and hug and then go to sleep. After that I watch TV. You go with him more than once? Every day until he went home. Always the same about me and his wife. Except one time we boom boom. Little bit and no more. He was real small. She laughs.

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7 Do you go with Korean men? No. I tried once but I don’t like the way they smell. The eat lots of kimchee and garlic and raw onions. I can’t do it when they smell so bad.

174 Bar Girl Tidbits 8 She tells me she’s a cherry girl and lost her hymen when she was eight or nine. She fell off a chair. Do you go with customers? No problem for me, she says. I give them a blowjob till they come. You want to go with me? I give you a good blowjob. 9 I keep a record of how much I send to my family. In six weeks I sent them 18,000 pesos. My mother always complains. She says it’s not enough for my baby. She thinks I pick money off the road. Does she know what you do? I say I am a house helper. You think she believes you? I don’t know. She gets money. That’s what she cares about. 10 They think I work in a supermarket. I only tell my sister what I do. I ask her don’t tell them ever. She understands, my sister does. 11 I ask her how she got pregnant. She tells me she got raped. She gives me details about how she worked with this boy in a store. He wanted to see her and she wasn’t interested. Then she learned that he was keeping careful records about when she came to work and when she went home and what routes she took. Then one night she was going home and… She began crying and wouldn’t go on. She didn’t describe how the rape happened. But she got raped, about this she was certain. She never considered having an abortion. She has not seen her son in five months. He’s in the province, in Samar. Her mother is raising the child.

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12 I had this one German man. I have a small pussy. He tried to make it bigger with a vibrator. I didn’t like that at all. I told him no.

176 Bar Girl Tidbits

13 I give blowjobs. I always tell customers go wash up before I do it, okay. No problem then. 14 At first when I started working, I fell in love all the time. Every customer I loved. Not now. It might go five or six times with a customer now before I think about love with him. 15 I did not see my father for one year or more. We don’t know where he went. Maybe with someone else. We don’t know. Now he is with my mother again. Maybe because he’s older. She laughs. 16 She tells me she doesn’t get repeat business because the first time she goes with a customer she lets him know that she gets very jealous, and if he wants to go with her a second time he has to promise not to be a butterfly. She tells me this matter-of-factly, like it’s how she is and she will never change, and if customers don’t like her attitude that’s their problem. 17 I don’t always take bar fines, she says. If they want to boom boom a lot I don’t go with them. You can always know how much a customer wants to boom boom. All you do is look careful like at his face.

Bar Girl Tidbits 177 It’s easy to see in young customer faces. They want to boom boom all the time. That’s why I don’t like to go with them. Old men are better. One boom boom and then they sleep. You like this too? 18 She tells me that every time she goes with a customer she’s trying to see whether or not he’s responsible. She’s looking for a guy who will be monogamous and will take care of her. As soon as she finds a guy like this she will do whatever he wants so she can get him to marry her.

178 Bar Girl Tidbits 19 I didn’t understand nothing about him. All he wanted was a blowjob every day. Nothing else. Seven days like this. Blowjob every day. Then he disappeared. I never saw him again. 20 I want to be with him all the time. But he says we cannot have a future together. So after he says this again and again I tell him I don’t want to see him anymore. He still comes to see me. I go with him if I don’t have another customer and it’s late. I only go with him like this because I need the money for my baby. You understand? 21 I don’t want customers to eat my pussy. The mouth is very dirty and I don’t want a disease. 22 I’m afraid to boom boom now because I have a child and I don’t want a disease. So I only sleep with a man or give him a blowjob. That’s all. He’s not okay with a blowjob or sleep only with me I don’t go with him. 23 I shy and not talk or scream when I come. They don’t like that. They want me to come and hear me when I come. I can’t. I shy. 24 She wants to talk to him before she boom booms. But he can’t talk. He’s Japanese and he only speaks a few words of English. This is not enough, she says. She won’t go with him again.

Who Really Smells Bad in Southeast Asia? I don’t mean those who have bad breath because they have just smoked a cigarette and had four cups of coffee, or those who have bad breath because they don’t brush their teeth and have gum disease—which would include an awful lot of Indonesians, and a not inconsiderable number of other Southeast Asians, and plenty of foreigners who spend time in Asia. Nor am I referring to those foreigners and others who just don’t like showering frequently and have no qualms about drinking all day in an outdoor bar and sweating like a pig and then going on a hooker hunt at sundown without showering. I’ve got something else in mind. What I’ve got in mind are those foreigners who have gone to Southeast Asia for mongering and behave badly. And this gets me into the realm of what I have seen and heard, and what plenty of mongers have seen and heard and may even been party to. In recent years there has been quite an increase in the scummy skinhead and heavily tattooed Brit boys going to Pattaya for the purpose of drinking hard and fucking with equal vigor. These are the guys that you invariably see on Walking Street throwing a punch at one another and then tussling on the ground when Manchester United or some other team scores or is scored upon and someone at the bar begins pissing purple tulips because his team is now behind or about to lose. These are the guys that a number of the hookers will point to as using them as a drilling

180 Who Really Smells Bad in Southeast Asia? exercise, making them sore for several days. Which gets some of the bar girls thinking anew about why older men, even those who are fat and ugly and bald, are a better bet for the night. They’ll settle for one fuck, or one blowjob, and then go to sleep and not think about sex again until morning. And maybe not then either. Then there are all those individual cases—American, German, Aussie, English, the ratbags from everywhere who just love to abuse women physically, and often do so in public. (Who knows what they do behind closed doors?) A spectacle that, I am sure, has made more than one sane monger or observer want to kick the living shit out of the Big Boy physically abusing the hooker half his size. I recall vividly one instance in which I was in Blue Nile in Angeles City and about ten feet to my right was a young and very large American—about six-four and well over two hundred pounds—and for no good reason that I could discern he brusquely grabbed the girl sitting in front of him under her two breasts and lifted her high off the ground. She screamed and made an ugly face and he laughed. And then he did it again. At about the time she screamed and flailed and begged him to stop a second time, I got the urge to stand up and kick the guy squarely in the balls. I would have done so had I thought I had a reasonable shot of scoring with my foot; and I probably would have made the attempt anyway had he done it one more time to the girl and I’d had one more drink in me. There are examples that everyone has at hand who has spent any time at all in these monger environments in the Philippines and Thailand. Examples, I am sure, that are more disgusting than those I have heard about or personally seen. But what brings me to this little essay is a phenomenon that caught my attention on a spring 2008 visit to Angeles City, one I had seen but just had not paid much attention to previously, for the reason, I suspect, that it was neither so glaringly evident nor widespread. What I am referring to is what many mongers, and not just in the Philippines, have referred to as “the Korean Invasion,” documented in the fact that more Koreans go to the Philippines each year than any other

Who Really Smells Bad in Southeast Asia? 181 group, including Americans and Australians. They’re close and they can’t get anything at home remotely like what they can get in the Philippines, either in terms of cost or availability. Today there are more Japanese and Malaysians and Koreans and Chinese in the Philippines and in Thailand for the explicit purpose of mongering than there were half a dozen years ago. And there will no doubt be more in the future as a proportion of all mongers. But, based on what I have seen and heard, the Koreans are a bit different at finding ways to stand out. They are more aggressive, they are nastier with the girls, and they are pointedly disliked by many of them. They are often avoided if possible. When I’ve seen them they are often running in small packs of three and four, and when they get inside a go-go venue they often tend to be loud and want their way. If there are a couple of seats to your left or right, and they need an extra seat or chair, they’re not at all bashful about telling you to move. In a striking example of their brashness, in a go-go bar in Angeles City, four of them got up onto a stage and pushed the go-go dancers aside so they could put on their own little show. They obviously cared not a whit how the girls felt about it, or if the other mongers who were there to see the girls had the slightest interest in watching young and overweight Koreans wiggle their asses and swing their arms and beg for attention from one and all. I still might not have paid that much attention to the Koreans or singled them out in my mind were it not for the fact that I found myself one night chatting at length with a twenty-two yearold Filipina hooker who was full of charm and good looks and obviously had no trouble on any given night getting a couple of good-tipping short-timers. I don’t recall how we got talking about the Koreans or singling them out—I think she brought them up. The gist of her complaint was that she hated to go with them, and she avoided them as much as possible, because, as she put it, they are “sadists.” Which, when I asked her to explained what she meant, she said that they not only enjoy spanking and physically abusing the girls in public but that they frequently want anal

182 Who Really Smells Bad in Southeast Asia? intercourse. Very few Filipina hookers are willing to engage in anal intercourse, and in fact will often offer the comment that they have a “cherry ass,” and that this fact is not going to change no matter how much money is offered. What adds another dimension to the problem is that while one might assume that Koreans are not much different than the Japanese with their proverbial threeor four-inch pencil penises, this is often not the case. Many Koreans, apparently, are endowed not much different than English or Australian or American men—a good six inches or so. Three inches in length and a couple of inches in girth is one thing in anal intercourse; twice these dimensions or more and a small girl with or without a previously penetrated anus is going to hurt, and not just for a day or two. I had some doubts about this claim about the Korean interest in anal intercourse after hearing it for the first time; though I did not have doubts about other claims about their aggressiveness and brutish behavior with the girls in public, because I’ve seen enough examples with my own eyes. So I asked around. I asked other Angeles City hookers about Koreans and whether or not they had any “special” interests. Anal intercourse came up several times, something I’ve not heard about Americans, Australians, or other Westerners. The title of this brief essay comes from a Filipina hooker who talked at length with me about Korean mongers. She began what she had to say with these words: I don’t like Koreans because they smell bad. She was, of course, referring to something I had said nothing about: their love of kimchi, and for many their poor oral hygiene. But she was also using the phrase—she reminded me at one point--to encompass a good deal more that she dislikes about South Koreans.

The Odd Couple It’s still two hours to liftoff for the fourteen-hour Eva Air flight to Taipei. I’m sitting at a circular table on the floor above the departure area at LAX. John, a couple of feet away, has just introduced himself by way of saying that he’s on his way to his condo in Pattaya, Thailand, and that his boyfriend Tom has gone to the restroom and will be right back. John and Tom first went to Thailand six years ago, after they’d gotten bored with traveling elsewhere in Europe and South America and wanted to spend as little time at home as possible because they didn’t like being seen as “old farts” by those around them. The first time they went to Thailand they stayed for a month, the second time for three months. Now they live there. Or rather they will be living there since they have just turned over their million dollar Long Beach home to a real estate management agency that will rent it for $2,500 to $3,000 a month. Tom comes up on my left. He’s thin, wiry, with high cheekbones and a gaunt almost scary look in his deep-set eyes. He’s wearing a short-sleeve blue and white checked shirt and dark chinos. The shirt is old and needs a serious pressing. He extends a long arm to which is attached a mechanic’s hand— rough, with dirty nails. We shake hands and he smiles. He slowly sits down and immediately takes out two sandwich bags full of pills of many sizes and shapes. He carefully begins sorting the pills into smaller bags. He doesn’t say why, but I guess that all this has something to do with explaining to Thai customs why he is carrying so many pills. I turn to John, who wants to talk. He says that he and Tom have been together for thirty-nine years. But they’re not quite an ordinary gay couple, as one might assume. John says he is thoroughly gay and was never more certain of this than the first time he had gay sex. Tom is different. He’s emotionally gay, John says, but sexually heterosexual. Which means, he goes on, that they have

184 The Odd Couple a slightly unusual living arrangement. In Thailand, there are four of them living in the two bedroom condo they have in Jontiem, a ten-minute bus ride from Pattaya. Tom, who is fifty-nine, lives with his twenty-six year-old girlfriend, Jum, in one room, while John shares the other room with his young Thai boyfriend, Praya. John doesn’t reveal his age, nor does he give me the age of his Thai boyfriend. From what he says, and from his appearance—a thick head of white hair, a heavy jowly face and a hundred-pound sea of fat above his belt—I judge John to be about sixty, perhaps sixty-five. From various clues that he drops, I guess that his Thai boyfriend is in his twenties. Feigning ignorance, I tell John that I’m curious about HIV in Thailand. How’s it mainly transmitted and who’s getting it? I say. John, self-assured, all answers and quick to the draw in his flat, strong voice, says, Mainly in the villages is where you find it. The guys fuck around all the time with nothing on and then pass it on to their wives and girlfriends who would never dream of asking if they ever use a condom. Then the girls and women get it and they fuck around and pass it on. What about HIV among gays? Just like here, it’s not a problem among gays. After all, it’s a heterosexual problem, like I said. You never, ever go without a condom in Thailand if you’re smart. He looks over at Tom. Sternly, censoriously. John is the queen in their relationship, I conclude. I take the Fifth on that one, Tom says. He clears his throat and lowers his head, and he adds, I get tests for HIV every time I return here and I’m okay. Only thing is this last time the doctor found a venereal wart on my thing. He laughs. He was supposed to find two of them. They come in pairs. That’s what the doctor said. No, no! John says. It’s just an ordinary wart, that’s all it is. They got some new thing in Thailand to zap it off, Tom retorts. Something experimental, but I’ll go with it. I turn back to John. So what’s the deal with all the foreigners who go to Thailand? The Canadians, the Brits, the Australians, the Americans? Are they picking up HIV? I ask, knowing that no one has ever done a survey on the question.

The Odd Couple 185 Same, same, John says, using a familiar Thai way of answering. AIDS is a heterosexual problem there, just like here. Heterosexuals are the only dumb ones, and that means you too Tom. More gay bullshit, I think; these guys never give up on blaming heterosexuals, when it’s well known that ass fucking is many times more dangerous than heterosexual sex.

186 The Odd Couple Tom is silent. He’s the unrepentant barebacker that hates condoms and doesn’t even want to think about risk or how it’s calculated. He volunteers that his girlfriend, Jum, was a bar girl, and he’d choose a bar girl over a normal Thai girl any old time. I had a Chinese-Thai girlfriend for five months, he says, and all she did was scheme and lie and screw me around. A real bitch! Jum has never lied to me once about anything. Nothing. I’ll take a bar girl any day, don’t care what anyone says. You can trust her when you’re away? I ask. Yeah, sure. I’d be upset if she cheated on me. I know she doesn’t. I talk to her all the time when I’m away and I can tell where she is. You’re faithful to her? I go out a little bit when she’s not around, he says, chuckling, turning away from me. Every Saturday I have to go to the Nile Club, about half way down the road to Pattaya. There’s about 40 girls there and they have these great, first-class hotel rooms for 200 baht short-time. I just can’t do without my weekly blowjob. Got to have that. He laughs. I stare at the quarter-sized red scab on his right arm. Then I notice several others, smaller ones. I say, I heard that in Pattaya a foreigner a week mysteriously falls out of a window or dies with a plastic bag over his head. Any truth to what I’ve heard? You can read about that kind of stuff anywhere in the world, John says. Pattaya and Jontiem are normal places, just like other places. All kinds of success stories and normal things going on. People who say otherwise are just exaggerating or looking for the spectacular story. He looks at his watch, and says, We better get to the plane. You know how to get out of here? I point over his shoulder to some escalators. Little Tom and Big Belly Queen John grab their small travel bags. John leads the way. In the waiting area we’re standing around. I ask John if he and Tom are retired. He nods and says, We were both university teachers in human relations, in business schools. I was at Long Beach State and Tom was at Cal State Fullerton. Good to be out of there now. When I got to be 35 I saw nobody would give a gay the time or pay me any attention. You’re done at 35 here when you’re gay if you want sex. But I still had students who paid attention

The Odd Couple 187 to me. Then when I retired I found nobody gave a shit about me. Not at all. I didn’t exist. You don’t exist at all if you’re old here. There’s bitterness in his voice.

Tom says, What you think is what you say. What you say is what you think. Listen carefully to how many words people have for different things.

188 The Odd Couple Like women’s breasts. Hooters, tits, jugs, whoppers…he goes on. How many terms have we got for a male breast? One! Breast and that’s all, John says. What you think is what you say, Tom sings. What you say is what you think. That’s what you have to remember about all cultures. Tom is now on his haunches, his eyes all over me. I imagine he taught a whole semester course at Fullerton called: What You Think is What You Say. That’s what’s good about Thailand, he goes on. Look at all the words they have for old people. All those words show the respect they have for them. He comes forth with two Thai words for old people, then stumbles, can’t come up with others. Earlier he’d said he speaks Thai. Maybe it’s the Limited Edition, I think. Ninetyfive percent of everyone I meet on the road speaks the very limited edition of the local language, though they’ll rarely admit as much. Look at me, John says. I never have trouble getting around Thai people and getting them to pay attention to me and getting anything I want. That’s because I’m fat, I’m old, and I’m white. All things Thai people like. Fat people too? I say, showing surprise. Just like me, John says, slapping his mid-forty something waistline, getting me to stare at his oversized white cotton socks stuffed into rough-cut brown sandals. Long Beach gay fashion, I imagine. We better get in that long line or we won’t get these bags in overhead luggage, Tom says. We pick up our bags and a Chinese couple, and then another one, push ahead of us. We’re at Gate 103 and I’m leaving on a flight through Gate 102. As I’m about to head off, I say to Tom, Guess you don’t have any family you’ll be missing now that you’ll be living in Thailand year around? I have a sister I’ll be writing to. She’s good. I’ve got a couple of kids but I don’t like them. I hate them. Now I have Jum. And you have John too, I guess, talking to myself. Though this is speculation, and I need to work out in my mind this idea of having lived with someone for 39 years and being emotionally gay and sexually heterosexual.

Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers are Clinically Sick

190 Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers Consider an all-too-familiar and often talked about scenario. A man somewhere between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fortyfive or even fifty-five goes to Thailand because he’s heard numerous stories about all the young and attractive Thai girls who are available for sex and will come forth with the semblance of love (the well known girlfriend experience), and all for a relative pittance. This foreigner—this farang as he will be known in Thailand—swears to himself that he will not get involved romantically with a hooker; after all, he comes from the West (Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Great Britain, the United States, Canada) where prostitution and prostitutes are roundly and strongly proscribed. The man would almost never think of marrying a hooker that he met in a brothel or on the streets of his own country. But once in Thailand—in Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Chiang Mai—he quickly discovers that Thai prostitutes are uncommonly irresistible. They are nothing like the hookers he has known or heard about in his home country. Thai hookers have several things going for them. They are younger than any woman he could possibly date at home. Many of them are strikingly attractive, and small and cuddly, and not at all like the fat women (whales in the vernacular of middle-aged men in the West) has he come to dislike, especially in the form of ex-wives or lovers. Furthermore, Thai hookers, initially at any rate, seem happily subservient, and full of unbounded love, and they make great love—or so he convinces himself. And then too among many other attractive traits, Thai hookers don’t seem bothered, or only minimally so, by the great age difference—ten, fifteen, twenty years or more in some cases. Or at least they are not bothered in ways that the farang is familiar with in his own country. In fact, he will conclude that the only people that will be preoccupied, even obsessively so, with this matter of age difference are all those moralizing sorts back home who, when learning about what he is up to, will conclude that he is just another “dirty old man.”

Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers 191 The typical man in this all-too-familiar scenario is one who is coming off one or more bad relationships or marriages in his home country, and he is often deeply bitter because he is making heavy child support and alimony payments and often has had to relinquish half or more of total household assets in a divorce settlement. But now that he is in love with a Thai hooker he suddenly feels that he can start his life over, and in a way utterly unimaginable in his homeland. So, going against all that he told himself before coming, and all that he has heard from others about how he will be almost surely be played for a sucker by a Thai hooker, he falls madly in love with one. And in so doing he quickly convinces himself of several things. He believes he can overlook her sordid past--all those scores or even hundreds of men that she has slept with and sexually done everything imaginable with. He convinces himself that he is as good a lover as any of the men the young hooker has ever had. He also convinces himself that whatever great cultural differences there may be between this young adorable hooker with a grade school education who probably spent most of her life on an impoverished rice farm in Isaan, and who has an utterly different concept of family and dealing with interpersonal issues than anything he grew up with, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that cannot be easily overcome in the name of love. He can either stay in country and provide a new and rich and unimaginable life for himself and his new partner, or he can take the hooker to a strange country where she will not for some time speak the language fluently or easily make friends and will have to learn to live in a climate that is trying if only because it is so different than what she is used to. But love is love, and love lasts forever, does it not? Or so imagines a man in those days and weeks and months of blinding passion that only those in love can truly understand. A love that is really not love at all but lust. Now what is never admitted, or even really known about in any rational or quasi-scientific sense in this new life with an alien hooker from a largely unknown culture, is that the man is, in fact,

192 Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers clinically sick. He is sick in the same sense that a schizophrenic or a person suffering from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder is sick. There is a chemical imbalance in his brain, just as there is with schizophrenics and the millions, tens of millions of people worldwide, who suffer from chronic depression. But unlike people everywhere with mental illnesses that are often or in good part the result of brain chemistry imbalances rather than problems rooted in twisted childhoods and bad parents, it never occurs to the farang madly in love with a Thai hooker that he could be sick in the very same way as mental patients are sick. Love is, in fact, a sickness that looks a lot like someone with a compulsive— obsessive disorder, or one seriously addicted to the most dangerous drugs known. Love is a sickness that can commonly last in rather severe form for a period ranging from twelve to eighteen months. There’s an old and familiar saying that men everywhere, when in the presence of young (and even not so young) and attractive women, think with their “little heads;” in other words, their dicks. They don’t think straight, or rationally. The idea of the “little head telling the big head what to do” is much more than a crude street joke voiced among men. We know because of tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging that chemicals called serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine show up in quantities in the brain when in love that one does not see in people not in love. This sickness serves an important function in the mammal mating game. And mating, of course, as Darwin so clearly saw, is at the very heart of evolution or what he referred to as descent with modification. At the risk of repetition, and the addition of a few details, it needs to be noted that being in love is not merely the alteration of just any kind of brain chemistry. Rather, when one is in love, elevated dopamine levels are evident in the nucleus accumbens, that part of the mammalian brain associated with craving and addiction. That very part of the brain, in fact, that cocaine and heroin so effectively work on. (For more on this argument among humans and in species as different as elephants,

Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers 193 bats, butterflies and chimpanzees, see Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Henry Holt, 2004). So, to summarize to this point, we have with whoremongers in Thailand a rather sizeable population of vulnerable (some might say highly vulnerable) males who see an opportunity to begin their lives again with a young and attractive woman who seemingly has everything that an ex-wife or two didn’t have, and that women at home that he might have reasonable access to as a future partner just do not possess. But when the man falls in love with that very person—a Thai hooker—that he finds so desirable, he is, in fact, like men everywhere and for long stretches of mammalian evolutionary time--clinically sick. He is, in his sickness, drugged, doped if you will. And, yes, blind and easily gulled. Because the man in love is sick, and the sickness can easily persist for more than a year, he will tolerate an unusual amount of lying and deceptions from the hooker, or anyone else he’s in love with for that matter. He will repeatedly overlook all of the many obvious signs that would suggest—and do clearly tell those not similarly affected--that he is in for a great deal of emotional trauma and financial loss in the not-too-distant future. The in-love man refuses, adamantly refuses, to believe that he is anything like any of the other men who have fallen in love with Thai hookers. His situation is, he will be quick to tell anyone who will listen, unique. The Thai hooker that he’s in love with is “different,” never, in his mind, like all the other scamming prostitutes he had heard so much about. This man in his own mind is most certainly not sick; he is merely deeply in love. He even heartily embraces the addiction of love—just as those on coke and heroin love their addictions. Anyone, then, who wishes to advise a person in love of his or her condition, and draws attention to altered brain chemistry and the many and obvious perils of what any truly addictive sickness entails, “just doesn’t understand.” Indeed, such a person to a person in love may sound like a certifiable quack, a most unwelcome intruder.

194 Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers Enter the Thai hooker as loved one. She, of course, has no concept whatsoever of sickness in the mind of the farang as I have just outlined it. Rather, what she and those like her quickly learn is that foreign men who get involved romantically with them are simply the best and biggest gulls or marks imaginable. They will accept an unending string of deceptions and lies, and they will go on accepting them even when they are baldly transparent. Thus, a farang in love can be milked, and repeatedly milked emotionally and financially. Until finally one day there’s a fatal misstep—one or two lies and deceptions too many, perhaps a lie or deception that is just too big following on all that preceded. It is at this stage that the brain chemistry itself may be changing, and perhaps quite rapidly. The direction of the chemical positive feedback loops have been reversed. The farang is coming to his senses, he’s beginning to understand how badly he’s been taken. And before long he and those around him will, in their own words, see that he is once again his normal, rational self. All will go well, until he once again falls in love and serious changes in his brain begin to take effect, and then chemically magnify altered brain states to such an extent that the man is once again “blind.” He will no longer be receptive to friendly counseling and all the obvious evidence around him that he is being financially milked and repeatedly taken for a sucker, again. So much has been said or written about the “dumb,” the “stupid,” the “irrepressibly stupid” farang in Thailand. But using these kinds of unflattering and heavily judgmental words is the wrong way to characterize the predicament of any man or woman in love. People who are sick are not stupid; they are, well, just sick. They are no different than the tens of millions of people all over the world who have mental illnesses because of “bad” brain chemistry. People who, with good medical attention, can be diagnosed and treated with medicines. Thus, distasteful as the idea may be, romantic love is a sickness and should be seen as such. (Hookers, I should note, may also share many of the problems that come with love sickness, because many of them do in fact

Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers 195 genuinely fall in love with farang. At least long enough and convincingly enough to get what they so desperately need—or come to need—money.)

Is there a way to avoid this sickness or deal with it, such that fewer farang will find themselves hopelessly strapped with this sickness called love not long after meeting and sleeping with an irresistibly young and charming and beautiful Thai prostitute? I think there are two main ways to avoid this “drugging,” this addiction based in the biochemistry of the brain. One is to literally use drugs such as Prozac that blunt or attenuate love sickness. In other words, add to the Viagra or Cialis or alcohol cocktail that so

196 Men Who Fall in Love with Thai Hookers many whoremongers use a manufactured drug that has just those properties and in sufficient doses to keep dopamine and serotonin and other key brain chemicals at “normal” not-in-love levels. Another way to deal with the problem, and one followed by a great many whoremongers who have no knowledge whatsoever of what I have outlined here, is to butterfly. And do so with discipline. Simply follow the rule that no Thai prostitute (or any person for that matter to extend the argument), no matter how attractive or unusual or good in bed, should be seen more than two or at most three times. To break this rule is to invite disaster, allow the brain chemistry to be sufficiently altered such that one simply cannot resist the incredible high that is no different than a coke or heroin high but which is so innocently and naively call love.

The Next Step It was nearly eight in the evening and I was anxious to get to the street and find a bar where I could play some pool and eye the locals and alcoholic expats. But the young and the old children were still about with their water guns and buckets of water, and they were no more discriminating than very young children behaving badly. I would get wet walking the streets, and I wasn’t eager to get my blood pressure up and start shouting because a fifty something asshole from England or Australia aimed his water gun or bucket of ice water at me rather than his girlfriend. I had no desire to have to return to my room and change my clothes. This was, after all, Songkran, that too-long Thai holiday every year when sensible people in Bangkok make certain that they stay away from certain areas where water madness and bad manners prevail. Or they buy a ticket to the Philippines or Cambodia where they can avoid the problem altogether. The restaurant was empty, save for three people at scattered tables. I targeted a short and stout middle-aged male with a trimmed beard and a very round face with odd sleepy eyes. He was Asian and he wasn’t. He was eating a plate-sized desert that would do nothing for the flabby hinge above his belt. He looked like a good target, a talker. And who knew what his story might be? If I’ve gotten good at anything in this life on the road it’s getting a complete stranger to tell me a revealing story about himself, unload truths that only shrinks and ghosts that listen to dreams might be privy to. I took the table next to him, ordered onion soup and rolls and a coke, and before the order came I threw my target a large smile and lots of teeth, and then made a comment about all the water children out the front door and not twenty yards from us. He chuckled and forked another piece of apple desert and brought it to his mouth. I asked him if he’d like to join me.

198 The Next Step Martin was Australian and, I would soon learn, had mixed parentage. His mother was Caucasian, his father mainland Chinese, which accounted for a facial phenotype that caused my eyes to pause and stare on first seeing him. He said that he was leaving the following morning for Brisbane, and that in the next nine days he was going to purchase a new car, buy some land, and either rent an apartment or buy a home. He explained that he had just finished a three-year stint in China, in a role in which he had become rather uniquely talented, a rare commodity, he claimed. Once an exploitable coal seam had been pinpointed his job, as part of a small team, was to extract the explosive and increasingly valuable methane found with coal deposits. He explained the mechanics of his job with professorial clarity. Other companies like the one he was with had undertaken similar ventures in China, he noted, but all of them had failed, for reasons that were unclear and he never explained. The company that Martin was associated with was a singular and shining exception to a pattern of failures, in good part, I gathered, as a result of Martin’s talents. After three years of working in China, however, he’d had enough of the fast marching country and wanted to return to Australia, get a similar position close to his native home (he had already had a couple of job offers and expected more), and then quickly find a young woman and start a family. From the conversation—actually a rapid monologue where I did little more than nod and interject a question now and then —it was evident that Martin was quite bright, and more than a little fastidious in his planning. Among other things, he had apparently done a masterful job of saving virtually everything he made while in China. Nothing escaped his frugal accountant’s mind. He got free housing, the food he allowed himself was cheap, he stayed at home at night, and he didn’t drink or smoke. He went on at length about getting dollar haircuts, a telling measure of how he thought and economized. But there was more. On a previous trip to his home near Brisbane he had hired an attorney to put all the money he made in a trust, one with one sole living beneficiary and several more that were fictitious. This, he claimed, was legitimate under Australian law. All this asset hiding was done in anticipation of getting married. He wanted to make absolutely certain that should the marriage go south he would have most of his real assets protected

The Next Step 199 and out of reach of the courts and the proverbial predatory and soon-to-be exwife. For reasons that puzzled me, he was anxious, almost aggressively so, to share his history of relationships with women. He opened with the claim that they had been nearly nonexistent since his early twenties, when he had been in love with a lovely girl, who was stolen by his best friend when he found himself out of town for a couple of weeks. Since then—nothing. The dry period had been a long one indeed. He was now thirty-six. Martin claimed that he was unusually good at meeting women. He said that he was far better at introducing himself to women who were complete strangers and of any age or social position than any of his mates. He could do what the most talented of them could not do. But the problem, or rather his particular problem, came at what he called the next step. He simply could not find the courage or the interest to get romantic, make any move on any woman that might lead to the bedroom. This failing he attributed to being shy, which I found hard to believe based on my brief time with him. And then too there was this considerable claim of great prowess in not only getting to know women but chat with them at great length, a talent on a par with dealing with that tricky and volatile greenhouse gas called methane. I know a beautiful girl who is twenty-two and I am going to get together with her when I get home, he said. I want to get married soon. How lucky, I said. I told him of a strikingly handsome New Zealander that I had been talking to recently in this very city. He is forty. He had gone to some dating sites in New Zealand, and the best he could get by way of someone who showed interest in him was a woman in her late thirties or early forties. And this, he said, was in a country where many of the males his age and younger had left to work in Australia, because the pay was so much better. How could anyone do so poorly in an environment in which the sex ratio was biased in favor of males? Martin was unmoved by my brief narrative, as if New Zealand and Australia were as different as Outer Mongolian herdsmen and Kansas farmers. Yet there was no hint of arrogance in his claim. It was simply what he had found: a beautiful young Australian woman of twenty-two who he was certain would be eager to date him and marry him after a short courtship.

200 The Next Step It was at about this point in the conversation when, with no prompting from me, and seemingly unrelated to what preceded, he confessed that he had several thousand tablets of Viagra that he had bought in China. They all had the same basic ingredient, but some in his possession came out of India, and some contained what he described as herbal Viagra. I gathered that the herbal variety was better at getting a reluctant dick to rise to the occasion. On hearing about this great mountain of Viagra that Martin had accumulated, I assumed that he had bought them to sell or give to friends in Australia. But when I questioned him on the matter, he said that no, they were all for him! I had a hard time not laughing. He had said he was thirty six and I could not imagine that he had a problem at his age. I said, I’d bet there are scores of expats and other men in this city who are well into their fifties, and some even into their sixties, who have never seen or thought of using the big blue pill. They put their eyes on all these young and beautiful half-naked Thai women and they have no difficulty at all of getting a good hard-on, I added. I have a problem, he said. I have not had an erection in four years. He went on to say that he had gone to a couple of doctors and they had run him through a series of tests and found nothing to explain his condition. He was, he said, a little overweight and marginally diabetic, and perhaps this explained his problem. Once he moved back to Australia he planned to regularly visit the gym and watch his diet. Have you tried any of the Viagra you’ve bought? I asked, unable to prevent myself from being the doctor I wasn’t. I have, he said, and it did nothing for me. What then was he going to do with all the Viagra he had? I wondered. I said nothing, and he followed with: I’ve even tried pornography. All kinds of it. Nothing happens. Why don’t you try one of the Thai girls here? I said. There are hundreds, thousands of them available. They won’t give a second thought to your beard or being overweight. All they’re after is what’s in your wallet. I don’t like Asian girls, he said. You don’t like Asian girls? Why not? I don’t like any of them because they remind me of my sister. I think she’s ugly. He took out his cell phone and made a point of showing me a photo of her. She was a little plump in the face and wearing unbecoming

The Next Step 201 glasses and did look like she could have been well into her thirties. She wasn’t going to turn heads, but I wouldn’t have said she was ugly. Surely you’ve been on the streets around here, I said. For a hundred or so in Aussie dollars you’ll be able to have just about any of these girls for the whole night. If you can’t get it up with one of them when you get her naked, just tell her to smoke you. Smoke? he said, like a newbie just off the plane for the first time in Thailand. Give you a blowjob. And if you’re worried about that working, take some of your herbal Viagra beforehand. There’s nothing to lose. If nothing happens, she won’t care. She might even like it better that way and just fall asleep and hope you don’t get horny in the morning. I’d bet she won’t even remember your name or face ten minutes after leaving the room, so you needn’t worry if your problem persists. Can’t, he said. He didn’t elaborate. Was it the money he didn’t want to spend? Was he afraid that he’d fail one more time? Was he thinking that he’d get one of these attractive Thai girls in bed and all he could see before him was the face of his ugly sister? Give it a try, I now said, feeling empathy for this young Aussie who seemed to have an erection problem that could not be addressed. Not the kind of thing you run into every day in Southeast Asia. He shook his head, then said, It will be different with this twenty-two year old girl I met on the Internet. Maybe he was right? How was I to know? Maybe it was no problem for an overweight male with Chinese facial features and a salt and pepper beard and not more than five-six to get a hot and young white Australian fourteen years his junior to be his wife, something that the likelihood of doing in New Zealand and England and the U.S., and probably every European country today, was most unlikely, the odds no better than a hundred to one. Maybe when Martin finally got to the next step and he had found a way to determine the right dose of Chinese herbal Viagra, and had also turned to alcohol to make a mutt’s ass look like the face of a beauty queen and not his sister, he’d see that magical erection. And he’d make that twenty-two year-old girl who would be his future wife go wild, and in ways that would make every man with thirty years on him and three or four hundred twenty-something hookers on his scorecard go crazy with envy.

202 The Next Step I said goodbye, then made a quick exit and opened the glass door to the restaurant and the hot air rushed in and enveloped me. Before I’d taken half a dozen steps a stream of cold water hit me on the side of the face. I shook my head, swore loud enough to be heard half a block away, and hurried down the street to avoid a shower. At the spirit house at the far end of the open air bar, I came up short and thought, That was quite a tale Martin told. He had me convinced, even buying his last words to the effect that he would soon repair to his room and try out a new game on his laptop. He was going to do so at the prime gaming hour in one of the most infamous hotels in the world, the Nana Hotel, one which through the years had seen more two and five and ten hour couplings between whores and whoremongers than probably any hotel in history.

Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong It happens all the time, and not just in the bar girl scene in Southeast Asia. A young girl (woman) falls madly in love for the first time, and then something goes wrong. The boyfriend cheats on her, or gets her pregnant and then cheats on her; or they get together in a relationship, and perhaps even get married, and then the love turns sour or dies. Again, he cheats on her, he physically and emotionally beats her, or becomes an alcoholic, or won’t work, or all of these. It’s a story as old as stories go, and the small variations on this kind of story will play out, one can be certain, until the proverbial end of time. A particular variation on this story, and one that is commonplace and has a thousand different subthemes, is where the Thai or Filipina girl falls out of love or gets badly burned by her local boyfriend, live-in partner or husband, and then finds herself in the world of bar girls. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that she is living in a different universe, and even though dealing with a loss of dignity by virtue of fucking and sucking for money, she is ready to fall in love again, this time with a foreigner. The foreigner is invariably one of her customers. He’s “kind” and he’s got a “big heart” and he’s got money, and it all happens quickly, within a matter of a month or two if not weeks after becoming a bar girl.

204 Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong Thoroughly smitten she more or less convinces herself that the foreigner is different. It isn’t just that he’s of a different color and with a bigger body and a large and lovable nose and from a strange culture and often significantly older and with a great deal of money in his pocket; it’s all of these, and the simple fact that he is not Thai or Filipino. She doesn’t hate the kind of men with whom she grew up with and with whom she speaks a common cultural language—occasional protestations to the contrary; it’s just that the memory of the bad first really serious relationship won’t go away, and now there is a shining new and very different kind of love beckoning on the near horizon. But this new love connection is fraught with real and potential problems right from the get-go, and not least, and perhaps foremost, because of where the young woman and the foreigner met, in a whoring venue in which the bar girl sees and sleeps with a number of different men—because this is her job; and the monger sees and sleeps with a number of different bar girls—because he can afford to do so and can’t pass on the seemingly unique opportunity to find himself with a very young and attractive Thai or Filipina woman. Still, he falls in love. The love connection seems perfect, or nearly so. At least for the first couple of weeks, even months. Then, slowly, it begins to unravel, may even come to a sudden end when the man embraces an epiphanous moment about what he’s gotten himself into. The man in love tires of what in a short period of time has become predictable sex, and if still around the whoring venues where he met and fell in love with the young hooker, it becomes tempting to do what had, in the not very distant past, become a habit of sorts—going from one woman to another. And then there are other matters that begin to come into focus. One is the demand by the young girl to meet not only her financial needs but also those of the child or two that she invariably brings to the relationship. And not just the child but the poor or sick parents, and all the siblings, and perhaps other relatives that include aunts and uncles and cousins. These great

Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong 205 extended families—especially in the Philippines--are often tight social webs. They are very unlike what Western men are used to dealing with. For some men, in their eagerness to marry a nonWestern woman and a much younger one than they can ever imagine getting in their home countries, this additional financial burden, and perhaps a lifelong commitment to it, is easy to accept—in the name of love. For others, upon reflection, it is an unwelcome burden and a future source of conflict; love is love, but even love has limits, and the limits are very often about money. Then, in a sobering moment, the man in love may also begin to reflect on the considerable age difference, and the fact that he is taking on a wife who is really mentally a child, in part because of the education she lacks, in part simply because she is so much younger and of a different generation. Each generation has its own music, its endearing and commanding behavioral clichés, its unique take on the world around it. This sobering moment may include quite realistic thoughts on living with a very young woman who is constantly, almost obsessively, texting friends and family. It doesn’t take much reflection to understand that the little noisy metal and plastic rectangle in her hand is never going to go away; its significance in her life will only grow with time. He didn’t have anything like this kind of intoxicating gizmo in his youth, and while he has one now it has its place. What he is now coming to understand as he did not initially is that the wife-in-the-making takes the seriousness of her cell phone and its immediate link to friends and family to a level that requires an unusual amount of tolerance from someone of an older generation. Not least on a list of issues that comes to his attention, and often early on, is jealousy. The bar girl—now girlfriend and future wife--is distrustful, and keenly so. She has grown up in a society in which cheating by young Thai and Filipino men is endemic. Now she is working in an environment in which she quickly comes to understand that virtually all the men around her—these foreigners—are butterflies, or butterflies in the making. They

206 Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong confess to having gone with several, perhaps a couple of dozen bar girls. Some fess up to also being married, and adding—not always truthfully--that a divorce is in the making. These foreigners, then, have picked up the habits of the bar girls. However much the bar girl may distrust Thai and Filipino men, she now has plenty of reason to distrust all the foreigners around her when it comes to being faithful, and to distrust them even in their seemingly most sincere moments—when proclaiming their unwavering love, doing so by showering money and attention on her in ways she cannot recall ever having known. And so many of these love affairs that began with such high expectations unravel, slowly at first for some, rapidly for others. Now the bar girl has been burned again, and she does not feel at fault no matter her demands, especially those revolving around the larger family that must be accepted as a part of her very being, and supported accordingly. Deeply wounded a second time, she is likely to be much more cautious about getting into another relationship with a foreigner, and in the only real environment she knows: the world of bar girls and mongers where men are unconscionable butterflies, and she—she loudly shouts--is not a butterfly because she is “simply doing her job.” She has her own simple story about what went wrong in the love affair with the foreigner, and she has been collecting since her entry into this whoring world similar narratives about bar girlmonger love relationships and how they went south before they resulted in marriage or shortly thereafter. One result of her sad story and all of those from other bar girls now sandwiching her own is that she will be doubly cautious about getting into another serious relationship with a foreigner. She will learn the value of declaring her love for a love-struck monger, and indeed will do it many times and at the same time to a parade of foreign customers. But this kind of declaration isn’t love at all. It’s vacuous, it’s a ploy, it’s all part of being savvy and on the game, reaping as many baht and pesos as she can from as many gullible men as possible. She gets good, really good, at getting love-struck men to believe

Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong 207 that she loves them as she loves no one else, and least of all any Thai or Filipino man. If she was a pretty good risk, with all of her failings, in the early weeks or months of entering the bar girl life, now she is a poor one. And an even poorer one the longer she remains a bar girl. Habits, increasingly bad ones, and salted with cynicism, are reinforced. And yet at some point, she may well come out of her cocoon of disappointments long enough to find herself again in love with someone, invariably another foreigner. Will it work this time? Maybe this time she has found someone who is older, and whose sex drive is weak, and who only wants a maid and a caretaker who provides occasional sex, and yet who has enough resources to support her extended family, and who is sufficiently indifferent to her childishness and her cell phone behavior and other Thai or Filipino cultural tics. So why not call it love and try to believe that it’s the real thing? Too, she may have reached that point in the bar girl life where she has become tired of the grinding and largely luckless downhill whoring life. Not least may be the eye-opening realization that she is no longer a prime pick: there are more and more days between one barfine and the next one. She’s put on some years, and it shows. She’s added a tattoo or two, and some foreign men don’t like them. She’s now smoking, and some mongers don’t like this. It’s time to get out. It’s time to now take the best she can hope to get. What generalities can one make about young Thai and Filipina women getting into the bar girl life and discovering all the good and the bad of foreigners? The Thai or Filipina girl from the provinces who finds that necessity has forced her to turn to the bar girl life to support a child where there is no support from a former boyfriend or husband, and none from the state, has a seemingly new and promising start in the arena of love, now with a foreigner. Yet very often it is just as doomed to failure as was the first and unforgettable love that got her pregnant with the local boyfriend.

208 Bar Girl Love, and All That Goes Wrong It’s doomed because she is meeting almost exclusively a subset of Western men who are middle-aged and old, and with possibly a divorce or two behind them, and needy for female companionship and physical love, and largely morally indifferent in the sexual arena. But these affairs of the heart are, on the whole, invariably doomed, because of considerable cultural differences, differences that are masked in the short-run when the brain is a scrambled chemical mess because of that drug called love and its bedmate lust. In what might then be called a third round, the bar girl actively exploits men who fall in love with her, as often as not men unable in their irrational love-struck frame of mind to assess the the almost certain problems and disappointments about to unfold. But are these bar girl-monger love affairs gone wrong unusually high as a percentage of all those that get off the ground? I don’t know, and to my knowledge no one has done the careful on-the-ground work to find out. I’m not even sure that the percentage of bar girl-monger love affairs gone wrong is any higher than what would be classified as normal love affairs, those initiated outside anything remotely like a whoring environment. The divorce rate in the West is in the range of fifty percent, and the rate does not take account of all those marriages that might be classified as de facto divorces, where people stay together because of the kids, because of the financial cost of divorce, or simply through the inertia of habit reinforcing habit. So while the easy conclusion is that getting seriously involved with a bar girl is risky and a recipe for disaster, could not much the same be said about a serious involvement with any woman?

The Cowboy and the Fat Lady It was a hot and muggy morning that hadn’t gone all that well, and not least because in walking the narrow and congested streets of Little Hanoi I’d run into a jagged piece of steel jutting out from a slow-moving motorbike. Looking down at my left leg I saw that I’d ripped my blue jeans, and on closer examination had put about a four-inch gash in my left thigh. I returned to my hotel, wiped off the blood, decided the cut didn’t need stitches, and covered it with three bandages. And then I went in search of a new pair of jeans. After a few hassles over price, the norm in Vietnam, I got what I was looking for. Now I began to feel hungry. I wandered down the street and came upon the Green Tangerine, an upscale French restaurant with a charming garden patio and, to the rear, an elegant high-ceiling, air-conditioned dining area. Several of the tables were reserved, and without much ado, and no objection on my part, I was seated near the rear and not far from the cashier. After I ordered something to drink and was trying to decide what to eat, a misshapen and frumpy middle-aged woman in a frilly crème top and ill-fitting orange peddle pushers entered and took a table near mine. She had no more than sat down when a tall and slim male with short salt and pepper hair and wearing cowboy boots and a short-sleeve purple cowboy shirt was guided to a table adjacent to the woman. As he maneuvered his chair into place, he turned briefly and I noted that stuck between the back of his belt and his shirt was a paperback copy of Robert S. McNamara’s, In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Viet Nam. I had just finished reading the book five days earlier.

210 The Cowboy and the Fat Lady I ordered a salmon and eggplant dish, and while I waited for the food I perked my ears to a conversation that quickly unfolded between the cowboy and the fat lady. You look exhausted and in need of some uplifting conversation, the cowboy said after some opening remarks on the décor in the restaurant. I feel beside myself, the fat lady began. I can hardly believe the mad motorcycle drivers here. I don’t know how people don’t get killed all the time. I’m deathly scared to walk across the street. Her short, bleached blond curls danced around her bulbous cheeks as she talked. Just close your eyes and walk into the traffic, the cowboy said, smiling a crooked smile. Mischievously, I thought. All white teeth, and a good tan, a recent one, and striking deep blue eyes. I guessed he was in his mid fifties. He had an air of confidence about him. You do that? she said. It’s second nature, he said. Oh! she exclaimed. And may I ask where you’re from? Home when I’m not away is Arlington. Arlington, Virginia. Oh, really, she said. Maybe you should join me at my table. I live in Washington. We’re practically neighbors. He moved his wine glass to her table. He took the book from his backside and placed it near his glass, then sat and pushed his chair back to straighten out his long legs. I had a good view of his face. I was struck by the sharp angle of his chin, and a small but noticeable scar beneath his lower lip. Hadn’t he been with the woman, I might’ve tried to strike up a conversation and ask about the book he was reading. All the major details were fresh in my mind. I’ve long had a fascination with the Vietnam War. Their meals came, and the cowboy ordered a second glass of wine. He asked the woman if she would like a glass. It was on him. Oh, thank you, she said. But I just cannot. I will be leaving for Laos this afternoon and must be sober when I get on the plane. Have you been there? Many times, he said, raising his glass. A delicious place if you know where to go, he added. And elsewhere in Southeast Asia? Everywhere.

The Cowboy and the Fat Lady 211 You work here, then, I gather. She turned a little in my direction and I could see her teeth, as yellow as ripe squash. I couldn’t decide whether she hadn’t taken care of herself or she was older than the fifty or so years I would’ve ascribed to her. No, he said. I don’t work in Asia. I come for other matters. Do you mind if I ask what you do here? Coming so often? There was a notable pause. I expected him to say something rather vague. Like he was engaged in an import-export business. Or he had investments to tend to. But instead he brought his legs under the table and leaned toward the woman, and peering into her eyes, he said, I come because I have a bad case of yellow fever. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that! A hand reached for the short curls on one side of her head, then for the base of her neck with a clasped hand. She said. You come here to get it treated, then? I do indeed. He smiled. I didn’t know that the doctors in this part of the world were that good. The cowboy gulped the rest of his wine, raised his hand, and motioned with his glass to the waitress. He wanted another glass of the red he was drinking. At the rate he was drinking I wondered why he hadn’t ordered a bottle. Finally, again looking straight into the woman’s eyes, a broad smile now on his face, he said, I’ve not got the kind of yellow fever you imagine. I don’t in fact think that there is any in Southeast Asia, not the kind you’re thinking of. Oh, I see. I don’t think you do. I don’t? I come for the young girls. How young? Never younger than the legal age. Oh! The fat lady dropped her fork and looked down at her plate. There was a creamy sauce covering a medley of vegetables. She didn’t seem to know what to make of what she already started eating. You are, then…, she said, sputtering, her voice trailing off. I’m a connoisseur of Asian girls. I love their color. Their gorgeous tight skin. The way they make love. They are one of a kind.

212 The Cowboy and the Fat Lady Do you mind if I ask if you pay for them? Of course I do. Fifty for all night. A hundred sometimes. Maybe a couple of hundred when I’m up for it and I take two for the night. Depends on the country. She shook her head several times, but said nothing. I heard the door to the restaurant close. Someone slammed it. The cowboy clicked the stem of his wine glass with his middle finger. He did it a second and third time, then smiled over at me. I now heard a deep guttural sound from the fat lady from Washington. She reached for her glass of water and nearly knocked it over. I do these girls an enormous favor, the cowboy said. They could not earn anything like what I pay them to give me a night of pleasure. Have you see the recent movie about the girlfriend experience? I have not. Her chubby cheeks had gotten redder. Her voice sounded deep and harsh. She was now sitting tall in her chair. My eyes were drawn to how the fat from her hips rolled over to cover the chair’s upholstery and frame. The cowboy brought the wine glass to his nose and moved it from one side to the other. He began again: What I get from the girls is better than anything you will see in the movie. See it, remember my words, and then you will perhaps understand why I come here as often as I do. The woman abruptly turned in her chair to one side and stood, and she shouted at the waitress. Bring my bill! I need my bill, right now! Her back rose, she seemed to be filling her lungs with air, searching for courage, to do what I wasn’t sure. I was prepared for her to scoop up the creamy sauce and the remaining vegetables on her plate and throw them at the cowboy. Or perhaps turn again in a quarter circle and push the table as hard as she could, in the hope of knocking him and the glass of wine in his hand to the floor. I stared at the cowboy. I had the sense he was enjoying this exchange, laughing at the woman, purposely taunting her. The waitress came and the fat lady reached in a pocket and pulled out some bills. She glanced at the waitress, then took four green notes, or 400,000 dong, and threw them on the table. One of the notes landed on top of the creamy sauce. She glanced at this note, then said, with obvious sarcasm, her eyes on the creamy bill, I imagine there is plenty of room for love in these relationships?

The Cowboy and the Fat Lady 213

The cowboy raised a hand toward her face, the index and middle fingers crossed, and said, All my twenty something two- or three-day girlfriends sleep like this with me, and all night long. Or at least until I push them away. I can only take so much love in one night. How disgusting! And this love, all this love you get…?

214 The Cowboy and the Fat Lady When it starts to go where I don’t want it to go, I take them on a twenty-dollar afternoon shopping trip. That’s usually good for several more days of sleeping on top of me, if that’s what I want. The woman was without words. Her chest began to heave, and again I wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t turn violent, with the crème sauce, or the table, or a chair. But instead she just slowly let all the air out of her lungs and began to waddle away, mechanically, as if badly injured. Half a dozen steps or so before reaching the French doors, she turned and shouted, You’ve spent too much time in Bangkok! The cowboy chuckled, turned to me, and said, Not nearly enough. And while single out Bangkok?

When is Enough Enough? It’s a familiar scenario that has been played out thousands of times in Thailand and the Philippines, even in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. A man from the West, usually but not always middleaged, meets a young woman between ten and thirty years his junior, and they get romantically involved. There is a profession of love, often declarations of deep and everlasting love. And then they get married. The Western man of some years understands— if he has eyes even half open—that love and money are inextricably linked, more so than he might have imagined possible growing up in the West. He also understands, particularly in the Philippines, that he will be expected to give money to the extended family, and that should the wife work in all likelihood she will send home part or a significant portion of her earnings. Perhaps even want to send all of it home. All of this seems like a great and almost unimaginable bargain for both parties, a getting together of a sort that rarely happens in the West. After all, the man is getting a young and attractive wife who will not have Western values—at least not initially (and this he often sees as highly desirable, since he may harbor very strong views on feminism, and they are rarely positive views). He will expect her to take care of the house (do the housework, the cooking, the shopping, and take care of the child or children, perhaps even if working). And he will expect his young wife to take care of him— his sexual needs, and medical needs that come with advancing age. The young woman knows—knows quite clearly in the

216 When is Enough Enough? beginning—that she is getting a very good deal, something she never could have imaged while living in the provinces, or were she to stay in the Philippines. What makes it such a great deal for her, and equally so for her family, is that in all likelihood she has come from a quite poor background. The annual income of her entire family will be a small portion of what the Western man has at his disposal over a comparable period of time. In short, each person has something quite valuable to offer. The coupling, then, has all the appearances of a classic win-win situation. But a deal struck in a long moment of unfolding and uncontrollable passion is rarely to either party the same deal either in appearance or fact with the passage of time. The man may well have believed, or wanted to believe, that what he agreed to at the outset would be all that he would have to give, either to his wife or to her family. There were no explicit or implied clauses to the effect that the wife would want more for herself or her family as time went on, and certainly nothing to the effect that she might at a later date play a quid pro quo card or two, and often by trading sex for the need of the moment. From the young and naïve and uneducated woman’s point of view, all the largesse was simply unimaginable—in the beginning, and the last thing on her mind was the thought that, with time, she would up the needs, the demands. And learn all that needed to be learned about threats and reprisals. The young Asian woman started with nothing, and for all of her young life she had no reason to think that she or her family were ever going to have much more than they had before she met and fell in love with the Western man with all the money. If she were able to say so, or would do so honestly, she would say that she fell in love not with the man but with his money and all that it would buy. Once she gets a little—and it doesn’t take much, she is like almost everyone else. She now has a new standard, and that new minimum standard will change, and not just once or twice. Her appetite grows, like a single mushroom grows and reproduces and

When is Enough Enough? 217 spreads and will soon fill a football field. Soon she’s on a fast train without brakes; it’s a train called greed. A larger wardrobe is needed. A new car must be had. She needs a new and better cell phone, or a second or third one. She has to have a larger allowance. Her husband isn’t to simply consider giving her family a larger monthly allowance, he must do so.

It’s now not about reason, or being reasonable. She’s become heady, full of herself, out of control, and all that she can see is the bottomless money pit that her husband controls—if he’s been smart enough to keep control of it, and even smarter in keeping some assets hidden. Whatever kind of person she was at the beginning of the relationship, now she is very much another person. If she’s living in the West and had any luck at all in manipulating her big and old fish that’s not got much swim left in him, she will have her own car, and it might be a quite nice one at that. And with the car will come all kinds of freedom, and not least the freedom to muck about and fuck about with guys her

218 When is Enough Enough? own age that she meets while shopping or doing other things. If she wanders, and it’ll be easy with her ageing husband, she’ll probably like it. The guy who is much closer to her age speaks her youthful language, and he’s got a good supply of sexual energy to keep her happy. If she hasn‘t already contemplated divorce because the old man she’s married to has tried to brake her fastmoving demand train, now she will. After all, she’s already learned how well women in the West do in a divorce, and with her half or more of everything it’ll be no problem at all picking up with a younger man. If she’s still got all or most of her youthful looks, it might not even be that much of a problem if she’s got a five or six year-old Filipino or Thai kid to bring to the relationship. If she happens to be living in the Philippines or in Thailand with her western husband and he’s not being “reasonable,” and in fact is being downright “unreasonable,” or there’s a boyfriend issue, it’s not going to be that hard to have some friends or relatives get rid of the “problem.” There’s a robbery, and someone gets killed; the husband winds up in a casket. Now she’s got it all, or she thinks she does. What I have sketched with a broad brush happens all the time, and by no means only in the kind of relationship under consideration. Change and time go hand in hand in the human drama called life. Change is no mere abstraction, for it takes on a life of its own. What change means is reconfiguration—and very often not a minor reconfiguration--of the terms of the original deal. The man was a fool to not see that demands were going to change with time. After all, if he’s forty or fifty or sixty he should have had this inevitability deeply embedded in the very core of his being. But did he? Perhaps he was as naïve as the young woman, naïve here really meaning love-drugged, “out of his mind” finding someone so young and attractive to marry. The young woman is another matter, and it’s easier to justify her change. She had little education, had no framework for understanding change and changing needs, and she had the excuse of being young.

When is Enough Enough? 219

I have framed the issue of change in a love relationship in one particular way, namely when a middle-aged foreigner from the West marries a quite young Asian woman. But I need not have defined the problem so narrowly. For is it not the case that nearly all deals made in the beginning between a man and a woman, or in almost all interactions in life, look like a good or great deal? And

220 When is Enough Enough? then they inexorably begin to look very much like something else with the passage of time. No deal in any relationship, no matter how clearly specified, is going to remain the same. Deals always mutate into newer versions, and newer versions rarely if ever look as good to at least one of the parties. Change is part of being human, and to not anticipate that there will be a series of changes in the initial negotiated deal with time (well, sort of negotiated, depending on the power/wealth imbalance), and some of them will be unacceptable, is to be a fool. The smart man—the man who comes to his senses following the first disaster (and what man hasn’t had at least one by the time he’s into his thirties?)-concludes that there is only one kind of a good deal. It’s the one that is realistically imaged as having a short life and with a painless exit, in anticipation of that day when enough is enough.

Looking Just Right Let’s say you want a sex change, the real deal. Not just the perfect set of tits—that’s easy enough to get. But the vagina that will fool just about anyone, even a man who’s had his penis inside more vaginas than a plumber who has spent a lifetime fingering and fisting sewer pipes. That artificial vagina is now easy enough to get, and you don’t have to go through nine swinging doors of well-meaning counseling to make sure beyond all reasonable doubt that you know exactly what you’re doing. Getting such an operation is no problem at all in Bangkok, a city where at certain hours of the night you can be surrounded by literally dozens of hustling ladyboys or Thai men dressed and acting just like women, some of whom can only be described as stunningly beautiful. To get the vagina that certifiably looks like one, and I guess feels like one (I wouldn’t know from experience), it’ll only take about five days in a hospital. Just enough time to get the penis removed and a good piece of the skin from it folded inside a hole and, with the aid of something resembling a dildo stuck inside for a suitable period of time, you’ve got the next best thing to what some men will go to any and all ends to pursue and enjoy. However one might wish to talk about Thailand, there can be no doubt that in terms of heart bypass surgery, dental work, sex change operations, and a couple of dozen other medical procedures, the country’s doctors, very often trained in the West, have done a well above average job of targeting Westerners who don’t have insurance, or have inadequate insurance, or are budget conscious, or don’t want to wait six months or a year as they may have to do in a country with socialized medicine. *

222 Looking Just Right I’m having my third cup of coffee and I see a man at a nearby table who is sitting alone and about to have breakfast. I approach him and ask if he minds if I join him. I’d already had breakfast but see an opportunity for a conversation. What brings you to Bangkok? I ask him. Eric, the name he gives me, says, I’m here to get an operation. Dental work? I say, taking a shot in the dark, wanting to open him up. In the years I’ve been going to Bangkok, I’ve met more than a good dozen foreigners who have come to this great Southeast Asian city to get a root canal, some teeth capped, several cavities fixed, or for some a general overhaul of the interior of a mouth that has been largely neglected for a lifetime. It has always been about cost, often a fraction of what one would be charged for the same procedure in the U.S., Europe or Great Britain. No, he says. I’m here to get this turkey flap under my chin largely removed. He pulls on it to draw it to my attention. At the same time they get rid of this they’re going to cut me below and above my eyes, he adds. Eric’s got a couple of small pouches beneath his eyes, small compared to those I’ve seen on many men much younger. The total bill for the neck and eye cosmetic surgery will be a little over three thousand pounds, less than half of what Eric would have to pay in England. And the doctors at home, he says, might not be as good or experienced at this kind of work. I look at Eric without trying to stare, and I think: Well, yes, you’ve got some skin to cut off around the neck if you want to look younger, and I can see that some work around the eyes will make a small difference. But for my money, if you want to genuinely look younger you’d be a lot better off putting some brown color in your pretty good head of white hair. And if you want to chop off yet more years, get some serious work done on your awful looking teeth. They’re crooked, several of them are broken, and worst of all their color reminds me of overripe corn. Eric explains that he found the Bangkok doctor who would do the work on the Internet, has had three one-on-one consultations with him in the previous couple of days, and will go under the knife for a three-hour operation in two days. He doesn’t want a local, which he could have opted for. He wants to be completely out, even if there’s a somewhat greater risk of something going wrong. Eric will only be in Bangkok for six days after the operation, and

Looking Just Right 223 that, he confesses, is cutting it a little close since he’s been warned that he needs to be quite careful for a good week after the operation to avoid an infection. I ask him how old he is. I would have put him in the mid to high sixties range. I’m seventy, he says, proudly. And I thought, now or never is the time to go for it. My father only lived to be seventy-five and who knows when you’ll go. The changes will be good for about five years, and with a bit of luck, up to ten years, he says. Then I understand you revert to looking about like you did before the operation. With a finger he shows me where they’re do the cutting around his ears and under his chin, and he adds that there’ll be some scars but that they’ll fade with time. This is of little concern to him. I’d assumed that Eric was in the market for a young Thai wife and wanted to look younger, even though Thai women are not nearly as concerned about age and age differences between husband and wife as is the case in the West. But never secure in my assumptions, I say, Are you married? Yes, I am. I’ve been married to a Thai woman for eight years and she’s just great. Two days into my very first trip to Thailand, I met her in the Asia Hotel in Bangkok. We started dating right away. We kept in close contact and before long I was consulting an attorney on how much dowry to pay as part of a traditional Thai wedding. The advice I got was that the more I paid the better it would make the girl and her family look. You’re also supposed to pay according to how much you can afford. I paid 300,000 baht. It was about five to six thousand pounds. I resisted offering an opinion on paying a dowry. I don’t much like the idea of “buying” a wife. Perhaps Eric caught the look on my face, because after telling me what he paid he expressed a sentiment that mirrors my own feelings. He went on to note that his wife has been quite successful. She works as a nurse in Cornwall where they live. She had gotten her basic training for nursing in Bangkok before they met. You look like someone who’d want to live here rather than in that wet and cold climate, I said. I’ve seldom met a Brit in Southeast Asia who hasn’t complained about the weather at home and this being a major reason for wanting to permanently live in Thailand. Exactly right! he said. When I came here nine years ago, that’s what I had in mind. I came to see what I had to do to retire here. But then I met my

224 Looking Just Right wife, took her to England, and she hasn’t wanted to leave since. I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade her to come back here or not. This is certainly where I would like to spend my last years. Eric had an appointment with his doctor shortly, and I had an itch to get right another assumption about him that I thought had an obvious answer. I said, I take it you’re getting all this done for your wife? He’d mentioned that there was about a thirty-five year age difference between them. He chuckled. Not at all! She thinks I’m absolutely crazy and has no idea why I’m doing this operation. It’s just a big waste of money to her. She accounts for everything we get and spend, and would never do something foolish like this. Good thing I had this money on the side and she didn’t know about it!

Will You Marry Me? In Bandung, Indonesia’s fourth largest city, I wander into a nice restaurant in a major hotel and I see fifty or sixty tables at seven in the evening that are empty. But off in one corner, four Indonesian men are seated at a table. Before long they are joined by three other men. All of them are in their thirties or early forties, quite dark, and with short curly hair. They are dressed in cheap and colorless pants and shirts and are wearing, to a person, hotel issue throwaway thongs or slippers—white and tasteless, meant for the bedroom and the bathroom. One of the men, with a prominent mustache and a large black mole above his lip, has his feet folded beneath him on the chair, the slippers below on the floor. All of these men are smoking, one cigarette to another. Two of them don’t seem to be inhaling. They take the smoke to the back of their throats and then blow it out, like young teenagers trying a cigarette for the very first time. On the other side of the very large dining room, seven or eight Indonesian men are seated at a long rectangular table. I cannot see what they are eating, but from what I can tell every one of them is smoking. Signs advertising cigarette brands in Indonesia are as common as cockroaches in the hot dirty lowlands of the tropics. Maybe it’s all an insidious scheme to kill off an ageing population before its time so the state won’t be caught with unwanted health care bills. Every one of the men I have been describing has a cell phone in his hands, and during the course of a meal I’m eating while watching them, they incessantly, almost obsessively, finger the

226 Will You Marry Me? phones that in their pinks and oranges look like they should belong to Filipina or Japanese teenagers. Only one of the men at the table near me orders a meal—a steak and some vegetables stuck in a small dish that resembles a large candle holder, the carrots and broccoli sticking in the air like wild saplings. As soon as the meal comes, his cell phone rings and he immediately answers it; he talks and listens for a long five minutes. While he does so, the men around him play with their phones—checking for messages, or learning a new trick with it, or...I don’t in fact know exactly what they’re doing. But I do know that they’re as bad as any Thai or Filipina or young stateside girl I have seen with a cell phone in her hands. One of these men bangs the table and a glass full of water goes flying and spills all over the floor. The men at the table laugh, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes not one of them around or near the table draws to the attention of a waitress the huge pool of water on the floor. I bring to mind the fact that within the first hour of landing in Jakarta, I was told that Indonesian women don’t like Indonesian men. The words in this regard were stronger than similar claims that I have heard repeatedly everywhere in Southeast Asia and throughout Latin America. I tried to recall how many times I have heard American women say they don’t like American men. Speaking generally, as people do all the time, I couldn’t recall any times; but then maybe it’s because I hardly ever find myself around American women. I can recall numerous times, particularly on the road in Southeast Asia, Australian and British and Canadian and German and American men saying they don’t like white women in the West. Too greedy, too sloppy, too fat, too materialistic, too individualistic, too... As I looked at these men, I brought to mind a scene in a bar two nights earlier in Jakarta in which a twenty-five year-old Indonesian woman with a five-year-old child—and a quite attractive woman by any measure—looked me in the eye and said,

Will You Marry Me? 227 Will you marry me? It was obvious from a few things said previously and subsequently that she was dead serious. What she knew about me was nothing at all. Not my name, not what I do, not my age, not my marital status, not how many children I might have, or up to this moment anything more than that I was an American. And being American in this part of the world means rich, always plenty of money in the pocket. She had asked me this question about marrying her after she approached me at the bar where I was standing alone having a beer. She was not the only woman eyeing me. She was just quicker to my side than the others. Two tables away from the one where all these men sat that I have described, an Indonesian man was eating alone. He was handsome and wearing a long sleeve red and white checked shirt. He was, unlike these other Indonesian men around me, rather light skinned. I glanced over at him several times and I noticed that with his fingers he was clumsily stuffing food in his mouth. A Muslim, surely. A minute or so later he was talking on his cell phone, loud enough to be heard halfway across the restaurant. I am struck in just a couple of days in Indonesia how many downright ugly and old expats I have seen with some very attractive and young Indonesian women. But then that is a pattern generally in this part of the world, the ugliness more obvious to my eye than age. An ugliness born not of genes but of neglect, self abuse, alcohol and cigarettes, and too much of the wrong kind of food. Expats are a desirable lot to poor Indonesian families, Muslim or Christian. In the first hotel I stayed in the bellhop told me shortly after registering that I should pay a visit to the sixth floor bar. His English was poor and I didn’t get a sense of exactly what he was trying to say to me. But later, after I’d walked the streets for a couple of hours looking for photos, I made a trip to the sixth floor bar he had suggested. On entering, there were no fewer than ten young female eyes all over me. When they thought they had

228 Will You Marry Me? caught my eye, their solicitous smiles and lips invited me to bring them to my side. Presently, I found myself talking to an expat who has been working and living in Jakarta for more than a decade. He told me that all of the young girls—18 to about 22—are sent out by their Muslim and Christian parents to make money to bring home food and to send their brothers to good schools. Like the dowry, another way of selling the daughter to the highest bidder, I thought. The girls, all small of build and dressed in street clothes and quite attractive, and certainly attractive compared to what I see on the very Asian university campus in California where I teach, work either a morning or an evening shift. The first one goes from ten until five in the afternoon. The second runs from five until midnight. The girls are there to get the men who come— principally married expats, I was told—to go to a room for an hour in this same hotel. The price is about $35, more or less, since the actual amount paid can be negotiated. During that hour, I was also informed, a man showers with the girl, gets a blowjob, and then gets to shag her. Though these girls are outwardly rather shy—their come-on glances and stares notwithstanding—they are, apparently, because they have been trained, good at what they do. The girl must give the first $17 of each trick she turns to the hotel. The expat who gave me this information while we had a couple of beers spoke matter of factly about how calculatingly rational the predominantly Islamic mothers and fathers of these young girls are toward using their daughters to meet family needs. It was easy to imagine parents running the numbers, rationally concluding that prostituting an attractive daughter, even for just a year or two, is a far better strategy, economically speaking, that demanding a very sizeable dowry which they may or may not share in.

Toxic Women, Toxic Cops Consider the problem faced by men in the U.S., and not just in the U.S. It revolves around that issue called domestic violence. If there’s a 911 call from a home, or bar, or someplace on the street, and just about anywhere in the U.S., the cops are going to show up, and there are going to be a few questions, and not very probing questions, and someone is going to go to jail 98% of the time. And 98% of the time that someone going to jail is going to be a man. So is it that Western women are toxic? What I mean is that a man had better be damn careful that an argument or a fight doesn’t flare and there’s a 911 call, because if there is the man is going to be cuffed and on his way to jail, where he’ll be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken and swabs stuck in his mouth for DNA samples, and then be subjected to all kinds of bad shit— including facing a possible felony charge, and even if convicted of a mere misdemeanor spending, in some states, fifty-two consecutive weeks attending anger management classes, where there is a room full of people who may have had a genuinely good reason for smacking a wife or live-in-partner or girlfriend. And then there’s the need to hire an attorney, who will not come cheaply, and posting bail, and the amount may be a lot more money than one might have imagined. So, yes, Western women are toxic, and not just because they’ve had too much to drink and lose control of their senses or are weirdo feminists or have what simply can be called “attitude.” But then their toxicity, with regard to this issue of domestic violence, is a product of the law, is it not? A law made in good part by men in legislative roles who voted that it be put on the books.

230 Toxic Women, Toxic Cops My take on the matter is that the real problem lies fundamentally with the two-digit cops who come to a domestic scene and think and reason with their elbows. And for a reason I don’t particularly understand, since few if any of them are anything but hard-core blue-collar in their mentality, they seem to want to stick it to men. Men who in many cases are probably a lot more gentle and kind toward women than the arrogant pricks who cuff and charge them and treat them like shit. But then an arrest makes the cops look like they’re doing their job, keeping the community clean and healthful, and letting “abusive” men know that they’re in more than a little shit for just putting one little pinkie on a woman’s arm if she doesn’t want one there. Consider this case, one that I heard on my recent wanderings in Southeast Asia. An American living in Taiwan gets involved with a college-educated and very “hot” Taiwanese woman. He dates her for several months, and on one occasion, in a bar, she gets drunk, flat-out shit-faced. He whispers in her ear to “cool it,” that she’s acting like a jackass. She reacts by picking up an empty beer bottle and slamming it against his chest. He wants to strangle the fuck out of her—with good reason; but using good sense, even though a bit pissed himself, he does nothing. He just leaves and tells her to find her own way home. Several months later, he marries the woman. After all, she’s got some smarts, she’s hot looking and got a great body, she wants to fuck all the time, and he loves fucking her all the time. More than a year into the marriage, the man is out drinking with his Taiwanese wife. Again, and not for the first time, she gets silly and stupid drunk. He tells her it’s time to go home and takes her to his pickup in a busy parking lot (this is occurring in a southern state in the U.S.). She grabs his keys and gets in the pickup and tries to get it going, and insists on driving. But she has no driver’s license and doesn’t know how to drive. He tells her to get out of the pickup, that she’ll surely kill someone if she tries to drive, and not just because she’s drunk. She tells him to fuck off and pushes him away. He takes her arm and pulls her out of the cab, and in the process she falls to the ground. There are people in the parking lot, and when the woman screams that he pushed her to the ground one of the bystanders calls 911. Within fifteen minutes cops are on the scene, and the husband is cuffed and taken to jail.

Toxic Women, Toxic Cops 231

The cops didn’t have the good sense to ask what happened, or get even a partial story of what happened. All they had in their minds was the claim that someone saw the woman on the ground, and she screamed, and so the “brute” husband, a foot taller than his tiny Taiwanese wife, must have pushed her or thrown her to the ground. It’s all reason enough to cuff him and take him to jail and book him and take fingerprints and mug shots and DNA

232 Toxic Women, Toxic Cops samples, and throw him into a cell with drug addicts and dealers and real criminals. It’s two days before he’s out of jail on bail. His wife isn’t sure she wants to help him get bail because she got scuffed up on one arm and had to use a bandage! She might reconsider posting bail if he promises not to do what he did again. He hires an attorney, goes to court, and the charge against him goes nowhere. But he’s out money for legal fees, he’s now got an arrest record, and one that will never be expunged for federal purposes not matter what, and irrespective of the fact that he was convicted of nothing at all. Finally, on toward the end of the third year of marriage, the wife not changing for the better, and having had no sex whatsoever for eight months because she didn’t “feel the same way about him anymore,” he wisely gets a divorce. It’s not long before he finds himself in the whoring venues of Southeast Asia.

Suckered and Duped Twice Over Take a not atypical scenario in the West. A man in his twenties meets a woman in her twenties, and they repeatedly confirm to each other that they are in love. They have good sex and they have plenty of it. They get married and at the instigation of one or both of them, usually the woman, they decide to have children. One or two children come in short order, and for a period of time everyone is happy. But then the man begins to see that his wife showers her primary attentions on the children. She has less time for sex, she has less interest in sex, and because the children are her top priority now she gives less attention to her physical appearance. Her husband has become something of an afterthought. She behaves this way even knowing that her husband made his views about her appearance known from the get-go. The husband begins to express his displeasure at the changes, his wife ignores him or tells him that he is making much ado about nothing. Their sexual life decays even further. Then it ceases. Both parents continue to give to the children. They give them time, they give them money, they give them what they call— and mean to be—love. The children, from an early age, begin to take all this giving for granted, and before long they feel entitled to the money and the time and the love. Entitlement means that it is deserved. There are few or no obligations, none to return in kind. The child, or children, take; they only sometimes, or rarely, give. There comes a day when the man has had enough. There is no physical sex in his life; there is little emotional connection with

234 Suckered and Duped Twice Over a wife who has placed him second or third on her list of people who matter. And for years she has become—whatever the shortcomings of the man—needy, bitchy, and little interested in how she looks or how her husband feels about how she looks or behaves. The child or children are now teenagers or into their twenties, and perhaps on their own. They may show some interest in the parents, but this interest, as often as not, is a continuation of their sense of entitlement: what can you, my parents, give to me, which you owe me by virtue of being your children? The man has had enough. Or the woman has had enough. They both have had enough. They divorce. Perhaps the man gets married again, and perhaps the result is not much different than the first time. Or the second time. Then he discovers Southeast Asia: Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia. He discovers, most of all, that it is a part of the world that is chockablock with young and attractive and needy women who care little about age differences. And certainly they do not care when the man who courts them has considerable resources, those of a kind they have never known. These Asian women are different than the children raised in the West. Most (forgetting those few who come from families with money and power and social position) have no sense of entitlement. On the contrary, they have been raised to understand that as they get older it is their very duty to care for their parents, and to care for them until they die. They understand that family comes first, and love of family means caring for family, especially when they get older. There is, then, little or no sense of entitlement like one finds among children in the West. Enter the once or twice or thrice divorced and middle-aged Western man. He has discovered women who now have everything his wife had when he first met her. Or rather, to be more precise, he has discovered that she has youth and beauty (the two often go hand in hand), and a healthy appetite for sex. For many men from the West she has other things to offer. She doesn’t have Western values, the kinds of value that many men

Suckered and Duped Twice Over 235 from the West have come to see as negatives, like an abiding interest in feminism. She may have little or no education, but this doesn’t seem that important given the woman’s positive traits.

But what the Western man does not see clearly, and cannot see clearly in the flush of lust and love, is just how utterly different the young Asian woman is from the children he raised. She does

236 Suckered and Duped Twice Over not feel a sense of entitlement, but she does feel, and to the very core of her soul, a sense of obligation. It is a sense of obligation to her parents of a kind unlike anything the Western man is familiar with. He is told, quite clearly from the outset, that if he marries the Asian woman she does not come to his household alone. She brings her parents, and very often other relatives. She does not, most of the time, literally move them into the house with her spouse, but she does demand that they be given a share of the resources of the Western man she has married. The demand follows logically from the strong and unwavering sense of obligation that her parents instilled in her. The Western man, if he is to make a success of his marriage to the Asian woman, has to understand a concept that is largely alien to him in the West; he marries not a young woman, he marries her family, at a minimum the daughter and her parents. The Western man has a child or children with his young Asian wife, or he adopts the child she has by an Asian man before she met him. He accepts this additional burden while in the flush of lust that he mistakenly calls love. For a while, much as in his marriage in the West, all goes smoothly, and with all the appearances of love between him and his Asian wife. But it does not take long for the young wife to push sex into the background. She enjoys it for a while, and then it becomes a duty, a marital obligation. Much like the Western wife she sees her primary obligation to her children. But unlike the Western wife, she also sees an obligation on an equal plane to care for her parents, and until they die; and often an obligation to brothers and sisters who are as poor and needy as she once was. With enough time, and a bad Western diet, the Asian wife has not only increasingly lost interest in sex but she has lost interest in maintaining her youthful appearance. Biology plays a role, as it does for all men and women; but biology is only part of the story. The Western man, now married to an Asian woman, and increasingly with the perspective of time, wakes up one morning and begins to vividly understand that what very much appeared to

Suckered and Duped Twice Over 237 be a dreamland marriage to a young Asian woman has begun to look every bit as bad as the marriage or two that he had to one or more women in the West. Indeed, it is worse in many ways. For the one thing the man from the West did not have to deal with were the non-negotiable obligations of a wife to family. Indeed, with the Western woman they were largely nonexistent.

The Western man now wakes to other realities, perhaps. Not only is the Asian woman financially needy in a way that the Western woman was not, and not only has she physically let herself go, but she is, as she was from the beginning, poorly educated. She is, in all kinds of ways, simply dumb. Not stupid, just dumb. And with this lack of education there are often corollary attributes. The woman cannot reason, or reason in ways that are taken for granted in the West. She sees the world in simple-minded ways that are consistently black and white. She has no sense of difference, her prejudices are raw and crude. She has the mind of a child in a woman’s body.

238 Suckered and Duped Twice Over When the Western man truly comes to his senses, he realizes that all he got from the youthful Asian woman that he married was a long vacation, a time capsule trip into a poorly remembered youthful past. It is now time to pay for this vacation of a youth reinvented: one of good sex, and a youthful body to admire, and not much more. Now, on waking and facing reality as he has not done for some time, he sees that he is paying dearly for what he has done in middle age or early old age. He sees, if clear-headed, that the predicament he finds himself in is, really, no better than the one that he had with the first or the second or the third Western woman. It may, in fact, be worse. Of course, what has happened is that he has been suckered and duped at least twice, once in the West and once in the East. An awful lot of Western men of all ages who find themselves in Asia are not very bright, it is easy to conclude. They did not heed or pay attention to the street-wise adage: if it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it.

May Farang Come to Me This Night It was after eight on a sultry night on one of the more notorious streets in one of the most infamous areas in the world--this particular Soi of ill-repute lined with more than a score of down-at-heel bars, and at this time of night, still early and quiet by comparison with what would come, there were more than a hundred and twenty girls sitting outside at tables and bar stools and, at one edge of the street, on banked steps lined up hip-to-hip and seven deep shouting solicitously at passing farang, like braying mindless cheerleaders. Amn and I had been talking over drinks for nearly two hours about a great many things Thai--her English so good I was taken aback by her skills of comprehension and grammatical correctness--when one of the bar girls at an adjoining table who had left a short while earlier returned, now with a fifth of whiskey in her hands that she was trying hard to open as she walked toward us. I motioned for her to come to me and she did, and I offered to open the bottle for her, which I quickly discovered I could not do and told her so in a crude kind of sign language, adding that to get it open would require a knife or something sharp that I did not have. Understanding me perfectly, she turned and walked in the direction whence she'd come, into and through a small gathering of ladyboys with beautifully painted faces, delicate lips, towering pyramids of hair, gorgeous legs, and obvious Adams’ apples--men looking like women, all of them. And then she soon returned, the bottle now open. Five feet from the table where Amn and I sat, this girl with thick hips and designer jeans and hair the color of scorched corn stopped and faced the Gang Go Bar where she worked, a whorehouse where the girls go upstairs for an hour with a farang for fifteen dollars. Or pretty much anywhere the farang wants to go, once an agreement is made on how much he’s going to pay her.

240 May Farang Come to Me This Night Holding tight to the neck of the fifth, she brought the bottle to her chest and bowed her head, as if making the wai to a farang who had just given her a 1,000 baht note. She was facing the entrance to the Gang Go Bar where she and Amn and others around me worked. The girl with hair the color of scorched corn that fell like a fan to the middle of her back turned to the left and poured a six- or seven-foot line of whiskey in the street, then abruptly turned to her right and repeated the gesture. She then went to the nearby table to rejoin her friends. She sat down and poured whiskey in three glasses and added Sprite and chopped ice that she got from a plastic bag. I asked Amn what this was all about. She explained that this was all about magic, that the girl was asking-and not of Buddha--that this night be a lucky one, one in which many farang would come to the bar and drink and take her several times short-time, or one time long-time, and do the same with her friends, including Amn. Does the magic work with other drinks? I asked Amn. Yes, she said. She named some I had never heard of. Do they do it with beer? No, never, she said. She did not explain why, and could not when I pressed for an answer. Do they do this only in the afternoons or early evenings? At any time of the day or night. Earlier I had remarked about Amn's very long fingernails, fastidiously clean and trimmed. Those look deadly, I had joked. Half-joked would be closer to the truth. I had seen such nails on other young Thai women, and not once thus far had I seen the paste-ons that I see so often at home on women of all ages. Nails that I always think of as tasteless. Amn said that the nails on her left hand had been longer, but that she had lost them in a nursery where she had worked until recently. She had been there for five years, until she told the father of her seven-year-old daughter to get out, that she could take no more of the drinking and the blatant philandering and the beatings he gave her with his fists. But now she could not get by on Thai wages. She needed real money, which to needy girls and young women up to a certain age, and even those without children, means farang money. Dollars, the pound sterling, the euro, the Australian dollar.

`May Farang Come to Me This Night 241 The reason for the very long nails, Amn confessed, is that they make her feel more womanly. This she said honestly--irony not part of her working vocabulary as far as I could tell. The night began to grow noisier and more crowded and more colorful, and I asked Amn about the jelly-like and quite dark pea-shaped growths that I had seen on the backs and upper arms of Thai women. Amn, to my surprise--she seemed this worldly and knowledgeable about so much--said she knew nothing about these skin blemishes that I described and have talked about with other farang. Was it true, I asked, her ignorance notwithstanding, that the ugly little appendages might have come from a vaccination widely applied that went wrong? She laughed. She didn't know. She said that unlike farang she neither saw nor looked at the backs and upper arms of Thai women. I wondered whether the Thais see farang disfigurements that I am oblivious to. All I could now think of was what I had read not once but several times, that the Thais have said that farang smell, and the smell is not always pleasant. I wanted to ask her about this but didn't. Spend merely a day in Bangkok and you cannot but wonder about the imminent dangers in the zooming motorcycles flying down alleys and along the busy Sukhumvit. Motorcycles often have a young girl sitting sidesaddle and without a helmet behind a young male, who invariably is wearing a helmet. You hardly need be told that this is a country where too many young people die or get disfigured because riding a motorcycle is dangerous and deadly even when one is driven with a modicum of care. No farang with his eyes open can fail to see the scars on the arms and legs of young women, and then wonder about what lies beneath the shirt, the skirt, the blue jeans, on the feet and hidden from view. I asked Amn about the thick three-inch worm-like scar tissue just above the knee on her right thigh. I was with my husband fourteen months ago on a motorcycle, she said. He had been drinking. We were hit by a pickup truck. I was on crutches for three months. She now showed me what I had somehow missed. She put a leg up on the empty chair beside me and rolled it in my direction. And there in plain view was a scar that ran from below the kneecap to the ankle. It looked

242 May Farang Come to Me This Night like the entire lower portion of the leg had been sliced open right down to the bone and then stitched up in a way that can only be described as amateuristic. In the light of the street and surrounding neon signs, poor as it was, I could make out holes where the needle and thread had entered. I could only conclude that Amn had had her own magic going for her the day it happened. Thrown through the air like a wind-blown ping-pong ball, and yet no more damage than what I now saw. I had seen her walking earlier and I had detected no limp whatsoever. Somehow, and despite the markings of a botched sewing job, the color of her skin--lighter than I was accustomed to seeing on most Thais-had nicely masked the mess on her leg. Masked it well enough for me at any rate to have missed it in the bright light of a cloudless day. Even easier to have missed if you had laid your eyes on her breathtaking smile, one that told no story at all about a drunken and physically abusive husband and what she found herself doing at the moment. Before I left her, she told me that she didn't believe in the kind of magic we had witnessed earlier; her destiny was and would be of her own making. Amulets and strings on the wrist and candles and a Diet Pepsi for Buddha at a spirit house and lines of good whiskey poured on cement were for others.

Distortions of a Whoring Kind I was sitting in the back of a bus with a large man from Scotland who has an administrative position at one of the better schools in Pattaya, Thailand. To his right was his Thai wife, who had taken a pill for motion sickness and was trying to sleep. My conversation with him wandered, but at one point, knowing that I was an American, he said that he had no desire to visit Washington D.C. or Los Angeles, because of “all the violence.” I tried to point out to him that these kinds of generalizations about American cities are dicey at best, that violence everywhere in America is quite localized. (I could have also added, but didn’t, that the overwhelming majority of such violence is black on black.) I, for example, live a mere three miles from a city in Southern California that is estimated to have scores of Mexican-American gangs and plenty of drugs and a good bit of violence among the gangs. But my life, by day and night, is so safe that I sometimes don’t remove the keys from the ignition when I go to the grocery store, and three to four nights a week I don’t even bother to lock the front door to the house. These are small examples of just how facile, and wrong, one can be when making generalizations about violence and crime in large cities, or anywhere for that matter in America. Or elsewhere and probably anywhere in the world. Somewhat later in our conversation, the man from Scotland made evident his indignation over the way so many people characterize Pattaya. He, after all, is happily married to a Thai woman and never goes near the bar scene, and, surely, he pointed

244 Distortions of a Whoring Kind out, one should understand that Pattaya is so much more than Walking Street and all the beer bars—what more than once I have thought of and referred to as the largest whorehouse in the history of the world. The man from Scotland, of course, is right about Pattaya being more than its tens of thousands of bar girls and farang who are there largely to pay for their sexual services. And yet Pattaya, I dare say, and certainly to farang around the world, and to a great many Thais, is a place not known for its beaches or golf courses or schools or quiet living, but rather for all the singleminded farang who go there to pay for their bedroom parties with all the young women who have come primarily from Isaan to make money for themselves and their families back home. Yes, distortions, the thought that got me digressing a bit with my opening. What are some of the things that strike a visitor, or a monger, as odd or puzzling about this largest and perhaps greatest of whorehouses found anywhere at any time? This is the thought that brings me to this brief essay. I am struck by how in the very early hours of the morning there are so many girls and relatively young women who would like to get into bed for money before morning light and will not do so. At this time, and for hours before—beginning around seven p.m.-there are thousands and thousands of women in the beer bars, and the go-go joints, and in the discos (on toward and after midnight), and on Walking street, and along Beach Road--the freelancers—who will go to bed by themselves and wake up without any of the money they’re after. Even though I have usually been in Pattaya at the end of the high season or during the low season, it is hard to believe that at any time of the year the supply of available hookers in Pattaya does not greatly exceed demand. Enormous numbers of these women cannot be making a score with a farang more than a couple of times a month. And some, I’d venture, are not this fortunate. How do they manage to persist and carry on in this kind of environment? How can so many spend hour after hour and night after night sitting within or

Distortions of a Whoring Kind 245 on the edge of a beer bar, or standing around and smiling solicitously on its edges and waiting for the farang who will take them for even a couple of hours? My sense is that those who are doing so poorly in scoring a farang short-time or long-time have two principal things working against them: age—late twenties and above, and it tends to show; and a face that compared to the faces of so many Pattaya hookers is just not very attractive. In fact, many of them are downright ugly, especially compared to all the hookers who are younger. Perhaps those who score so infrequently with farang are satisfied with the little they are getting from drink commissions, and the money they receive from the bar; and then the occasional 1,500 baht and a piece of the bar fine for going with a farang. But there is, I suppose, something else that may keep all these older and less desirable hookers around: they are either near or at the end of the road—they’ve been around Pattaya and doing this kind of work for some time and they’re now in their declining years and have few or no alternatives, real or imagined. Too, like all humans they’re creatures of habit. They’re hooked on the lifestyle: all the drinking, being around the loud farang and women just like them, and the general buzz of the whole area that is music to an addict of a night life where just about anything goes. The same might be said for a great many of those even fairly new to the game and who are strapped from the outset with age and little in the way of looks or personality. Among this group are those who did not learn at a young age of the rich possibilities of Pattaya, where you can if prudent in short order accumulate enough money to open a small business in the village where you grew up. But when they finally come, after their best years of youth are behind them, and with all the competition and over supply around them in Pattaya, their chances of doing well are not very good. Which brings me to a distortion of another sort. There are, surely, enormous differences between a small percentage of the Pattaya hookers who make very good money—five or more bar

246 Distortions of a Whoring Kind fines a week and lots of drink commissions and even shopping trip dividends for mongers who keep them for a couple of days or longer—and those who, as I’ve noted, get so little of the considerable farang whoring money circulating at any one time. A sociologist or economist might well look at the Pattaya hooker population and divide it up into the familiar categories of upper, middle and lower class, and even go further with distinctions among these categories. Such a classification scheme might not be too much different than what one sees in many developing countries. There would be a very small percentage of rich and super-rich hookers at the top, perhaps five to ten percent. The bottom, where most make little, would be huge, perhaps upwards of seventy percent of the total. And then there would be a relatively unchanging middle-class—girls who score with a farang perhaps once or twice a week, but seldom five or six times a week, and they rarely get the bonus monies known to the rich and the super rich hooker—the trip for several days or a week to an island with all expenses paid and some new clothes on afternoon shopping ventures and then a pile of baht when the girlfriend honeymoon is over and they are ready to return to the go-go joint and score again before a day or two has gone by. I’m struck by how many middle-aged men I see walking around with Thai women in Pattaya are, to my eye, quite unattractive. What somewhat puzzles me is why this is so given that there are so many women available who are both younger and more attractive than those these foreign men are with. The explanation could be as simple as the fact that these men have gone with younger and more attractive hookers in Pattaya, and on too many occasions have been rejected when they have attempted to establish something more permanent than a one- or two-day relationship. The young and attractive hooker was more than happy to take the man’s money for a night or two of fucking and such but beyond that…well, no thank you, I can do better. The fact is that a disproportionate number of farang in Pattaya strikes me as physical rejects, and they would be no matter where you

Distortions of a Whoring Kind 247 would find them. They are significantly overweight and with all kinds of signs that they have not taken care of themselves through the years. So, one might reason, who but the Thai women they are with—whether or not hookers—would really want them?

Another quite real possibility is that a good bit of what I am seeing is simply due to the great range in taste that all men have. It’s easy enough to argue that there are cross-cultural commonalities in concepts of beauty—and there certainly are; and yet there are plenty of cases both between and among cultures where men differ greatly in what they consider to be an attractive or good-looking woman. One need look no further for evidence than to observe how many Western men seem to seek out and be quite satisfied with fat women, exactly what so many men expressly dislike and which draws them to a place like Pattaya. Too, there is always the matter of chemistry between two people, a factor that can easily override anything having to do with what others consider so important, i.e., physical attractiveness and age.

248 Distortions of a Whoring Kind I don’t honesty know what to make of the “tourist couples” that one sees on Walking Street and in the beer bars and elsewhere, couples that are very often well into middle age. Have they come to Pattaya because of its infamy and nude girly shows and they’re just curious to put their eyes on what is so hard if not impossible to see back home? Or have they come to Pattaya because the idea was planted by the husband who heard about it through his drinking mates in a pub in London or Sydney? The husband couldn’t come on his own because his wife wouldn’t allow him to, and yet he just has to see for himself what all the fuss is about. Then, after a week or so in Pattaya with his wife, and perhaps regretting every minute of having come with her, he will find himself spending a good deal of time trying to get back to Pattaya alone or with his mates. I’m struck by all the young Brits and Aussies (more of the former than the latter from what I can tell), those in their twenties and thirties, and even some well into their forties, who are just plain scummy to the naked eye. It isn’t because so many of them have shaved their heads, or because so many are overweight even at their young age. It’s rather that these Brits and Aussies who have come to Pattaya look trashy because they are so heavily and gaudily tattooed. All over their arms, and on their chests, and on their calves, and maybe even on their dicks too for all I know. When you combine the size of the tattoos, and their numbers, and the tasteless aesthetic of the designs, and because some of the tattoos are fading, it makes these men look, well, low-class, uneducated, trashy, just plain scummy. And in all fairness, there are Europeans and some Americans who fall into the same category. All of them lack any sense of taste (I’d bet most couldn’t distinguish between a Picasso and a piece of bathroom graffito), and probably anything legitimately called an education. Most believing, I’d bet, that being educated is having the ability to talk with authority about why Manchester United or Arsenal is currently the team to beat.

Distortions of a Whoring Kind 249 Not knowing what men in their twenties and thirties generally look like in England or Ireland or Australia, I have no idea whether what I see in Pattaya is representative of the socioeconomic class these men represent at home. It may be that the quantity and nature of the tattoos and other features—their shaved heads and weight--are pretty good indicators of the kind of men who feel sexually liberated enough to come to Pattaya to whore for two or three weeks once or twice a year. Although there are all kinds of men in the West who have tattoos and would never dream of going to Pattaya to pay for sex, it may nevertheless be the case that men with these traits, and particularly as I’ve characterized them, are much more likely to do so. The fact that they went down the tattoo road and to such an extreme, and in all likelihood at such a young age, probably means that by the time they were teenagers they felt alienated and had few qualms about sticking up their middle finger at convention. In Thailand, you can get a good-sized, thirty-year-old forearm tattoo removed for about one thousand pounds, or a hundred pounds for each of the ten sessions required to do the laser work. The comparable price in England for the same removal would be about four thousand pounds, I’ve been told. Assuming that a tiny proportion of the Brits I have described came to their senses about what they’d done to their bodies, the bill in Thailand to get cleaned up could well run upwards of 6,000 or 8,000 pounds, and well more than a total of ten sessions since not all of the tattoos could be worked on in the same session. But the subculture of those who are so heavily tattooed is, I would guess, one that rarely brings this possibility to mind. They’re quite content if not downright happy with what they have done to their bodies. They don’t have the kind of money needed to do the laser work, and if they did they’d probably prefer to spend it on drinking, whoring, cigarettes, and yet more tattoos, which are, compared to prices in England or elsewhere, a good bit cheaper in Thailand. I’ve long been struck, especially given the country’s population, how relatively few Americans I seem to see or hear

250 Distortions of a Whoring Kind about, not just in Pattaya but all through Southeast Asia. What’s up with Americans? Are they getting better and more frequent sex at home with their girlfriends and wives and those they pick up in bars than men from other countries who come to Thailand? I doubt it. Are they more uptight about paying a woman for sex with up front cold hard cash rather than on the dinner and movie and bullshit installment plan? Perhaps. Americans, on the whole, are a prissy and uptight lot when the conversation turns to good down and dirty fucking in its many and varied and lovely permutations. Is it because there simply aren’t as many Americans who have come to Pattaya or Thailand for sex, and the networks and gossip channels among men in America are not as developed and extensive as in Great Britain and Australia? Perhaps. To a large extent, I’m inclined to think this is the best explanation of the three, although it doesn’t rule out the role of puritanical thinking that pervades the all-too-religious and deeply moralizing American mind. There are numerous other distortions—if that’s the right word--that one might note about Pattaya. How, for example, in the main whoring areas outside Walking Street, the streets at eight and nine and ten in the morning must rank among the quietest stretches of commercial pavement in the world. How, for example, between the hours of say ten at night and two in the morning, no place in the world has so many young women in such a small area taking showers and knowing that within the next ten minutes or so they will be fucking or sucking with a man they have know for all of two or three hours. How, for example, no place in the world has so many men in such a small area talking with young women who, when he says, Would you like to go with me? never doubts that they are going to be doing a lot more than holding hands and cuddling. It is an assumption about what will follow that virtually goes unquestioned; all that does get questioned beforehand, and not always, is whether or not the hooker “smokes” or gives a blowjob, and perhaps how late she will stay after the first or second round of sex has been consummated.

Distortions of a Whoring Kind 251

Then there is the shock of seeing Walking Street at mid morning and trying to believe that it is the same street of pavement and go-go venues and tourists shops that you saw all through the night, beginning at about seven p.m. when it is blocked off and there are no cars or motorbikes or trucks and there are enough overhead neon signs to light up a small town. Walk down Walking Street at ten in the morning and about the only thing that assures you that you are in the same place you were in the previous night or morning before sunlight is the familiar names of bars and go-go joints and places to eat squid and lobster. At this mid-morning hour, the street is a congested clot of cars and motorbikes and delivery and garbage trucks, and, overhead, enormous tangles of electrical wires and huge lifeless signs that give little indication that at nightfall they will transform this

252 Distortions of a Whoring Kind inviting one-of-a-kind street and those that intersect it into a buzzing light show that promises, and delivers on, what few places in the world have even imagined. Finally, this little thought, what might be loosely called yet another distortion that characterizes the world’s No. One Whorehouse. It’s that so many farang seem to grouse about the price of what they are paying for, a price for raw and often fantastic sex that now, and even if the same prices existed twenty years ago, is simply astonishingly cheap. For those who don’t think so, or want to take exception to this statement because they are Cheap Charlie’s to the core, I’d say: Gentlemen, you have genuinely twisted and out-of-touch minds. You have forgotten not just how much a rank and zonked out hooker costs in the West, and for a mere half hour, if that. You have also forgotten just how much you pay in meals and for a movie and for flowers and all kinds of other things for a young woman in Australia or England or Germany or America who at the end of the night might well tell you that you’ll have to settle for a couple of fleeting kisses and a long hug. And if you do get her into bed there is no more than a 50-50 chance that she’ll be as good as a Pattaya hooker.

The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology Some questions are a lot harder than others to ask. Some questions are not supposed to be asked at all. Were you unfaithful? one suspecting spouse may say to another, knowing that the question is confrontational, threatening, and may well be rhetorical. Were there--to use a hypothetical example--three people in a life boat and the wife was the only one who could row and either the husband or the son had to be eaten or pushed overboard lest the other two perish, who would the wife choose (to not choose means that everyone perishes)? Or, to use another example, were an Evil God to descend from the heavens and say to the wife, In two days there will be a fatal automobile accident involving your son and your husband. I will only allow one to survive. Which one would you prefer to see live? The wife will choose the son over the husband, consistently and on average. This choice by her would not be a consequence of how much she loves or doesn't love her husband. Intense and abiding and unwavering love for the husband would only make the decision a little harder; it would not change it. This choice by her is not a decision based on the fact that the husband is much more likely to die before the son and has already lived a life and therefore the son deserves his time on Earth before his lights go out forever. No, the choice that the wife and all other mothers would consistently make is fundamentally a matter of biology. It is all about the immense number of chemical messages in that marvel called DNA that the wife shares with the son and not with the

254 The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology husband. The husband has no genes that he shares with his wife; the son has fifty percent of his mother’s genes. This is a calculation that if repeated often enough by the wife or any number of women would consistently be made one way, and no matter how much social or cultural "reason" was allegedly brought to bear. Culture is mighty powerful, and there are innumerable examples everywhere of culture swamping biological imperatives (as with so many Westerners opting for small families), but here and with regard to so much else in the human arena, the consistent outcome is predictable. Our potential as humans with culture arises from our biology, and as cultural creatures our habits and inclinations and behaviors are mightily constrained by biology. In evolutionary time, the choice of son or daughter over father by a mother is rational, the reasonable and right thing to do. Another question then is: Were a father forced to choose between his wife and his son, who would he choose? The son, of course. But what about the son, to look at all possibilities? On the surface, the answer may not be obvious, for the son got half of his genes from his mother and half from his father. So one might be inclined to say that it’s a flip of the coin for the son (or daughter), and that if there is a bias the answer would turn on the issue (to broadly generalize) of which of the parents paid the most attention to the child, or gave him or her the most resources. This is certainly the way an awful lot of women, maybe the great majority, would reason, arguing that they did so much more for the son or daughter through the years than did the husband. But in fact there is a good and rather straightforward biological answer to the third question posed. The son would choose to save the father (eat the mother, to put it crudely), and for the reason that not only is the father more likely to be more promiscuous than the mother and therefore on average sire more offspring, but the father in the great majority of cases would have a longer reproductive life, particularly if it be assumed in the hypothetical question that the couple are middle-aged when the choice has to be made. For most women, they are not producing viable eggs by their mid to late thirties; for most men their sperm is good (if a little slow or sluggish and not as abundant as it once was) for at least another couple of decades beyond that time when the woman no longer has viable eggs. What all this means is that by choosing the father

The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology 255 at the expense of the mother, the son is making the best “bet,” namely that the father is more likely to have additional children and therefore the son will have his genes in other bodies, in those other children that his father sires after the mother is dead. In evolutionary time, or from an evolutionary perspective, sacrificing the mother is the best decision. What does any of this have to do with Thailand and the Philippines? As everyone knows who knows anything at all about this part of the world, and of the many marriages between Thai and Filipina women and foreigners, one of the most prominent issues that quickly comes to the fore, and is a reason why many foreigners opt not to get overly serious with these women, is that the women make it quite clear—probably more so in the Philippines than in Thailand—that their son or daughter (and invariably by a Thai or Filipino man) comes first. And, to the dismay of foreigners, the foreigner and future husband most of the time does not even come second on the Thai or Filipina wife’s list of people that really matter, or matter when, as the saying goes, push comes to shove. That place is reserved for all the relatives, to include at the very least the girl’s mother and father, and not infrequently brothers and sisters, and even more distant (genetically and socially speaking) relatives. What is being played out in the Asian context, then, is a more direct and blatant expression of what might be called the biological or evolutionary imperative to maximize one’s “inclusive fitness” (the phrase and the theoretical argument put forward by the famous biologist, W. D. Hamilton), which means to reproduce oneself (one’s genes) as much as possible. (After all, it has been argued, if anything has the possibility of being immortal, it is one’s genes.) Even first and second and third cousins, of course, are closer genetically to the Asian wife than is any foreigner. I’d venture the guess that very few foreigners run through the simple biological logic that I’ve briefly outlined. Rather they confront or have to deal with these issues in a different logical and emotional domain or space. They might simply ask themselves: Is this young and attractive woman so compelling that I am willing to do what I would rarely do in my own country—not only take on a child to whom I am unrelated but also take on the responsibility of supporting what in the worst case might be a whole stable of the young woman’s relatives to whom I am unrelated? Now because in a

256 The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology very real sense a man’s small head (his dick) makes these kinds of decisions, the question is hardly worth asking, or isn’t even asked. It is, I suppose, easy to conclude that quite apart from all other issues (great cultural differences, generational differences), foreigners who marry these Thai and Filipina women are simply stupid. They would, of course, argue that they don’t really give a pink rat’s ass about passing on their genes, and as many of them as possible. What they care about is all the hot sex they are getting with someone who is so much younger and more attractive than anyone they could possibly get in their own country (get at least for a year or so before the wife decides to use sex as a bargaining chip for her endless list of material needs, to include more and more money for the relatives back home), and the good feeling of daily looking at and being seen with someone who is so attractive—at least until she begins to eat and get fat and unattractive like so many Western women are inclined to do. So, one might ask: What then is the best way of dealing with the predicament that I have just outlined? There are two obvious answers. The first is to simply not seriously consider getting involved with a Thai or Filipina woman to the extent that it involves the issue of marriage, or sending any kind of financial support to her—the widespread sponsor phenomenon, which makes utter asses out of so many men because the women cheat on the sponsors either by having a local boyfriend or going with other men, or doing this and also receiving money from these other men. Where a foreigner has any interest in all the nubile and irresistible women of Southeast Asia, his interest should go no further than an interest in good sex and what might be called a short-term girl friend experience, thought of perhaps as a one day or one or two week marriage. Then get rid of the woman—as good as the sex and all night hugs might be—and move on to another one. Smart men, I dare say, are not just butterflies in theory; they are butterflies in fact, and they never lose sight of why they are butterflies. Well, there are other reasons too for being a butterfly, principal among which is the sheer joy of novelty, something different and unexpected, even when not always welcome—the always risky price of playing the novelty card. The second alternative is what far too many foreign men do--and probably no more so than in the Philippines--is to have unprotected sex with the women—bar girls or other. This occurs with uncommon frequency in the

The Limits of Love, the Imperatives of Biology 257 Philippines, and with the predictable outcome that a child is produced. And because so many of the Filipina women eschew the idea of an abortion, it means that they now have the responsibility of raising a child, which the foreign father may or may not help raise. Filipinas, from all that I can tell, more or less understand the risk (or one of them) of unprotected sex—and yet they don’t fully understand it. (This might, for lack of a better way of putting it, be called “the mindset of a provincial.”) They all too quickly fall in love, for which they will do anything. Or they are all too quickly duped, especially in recent years by Korean men who peddle claims that because of drugs they are taking the young women need not worry about getting pregnant. And then, of course, there are all those older men of many nationalities who are eager to go bareback on the grounds that they can’t get hard or remain hard if they have to wear a condom; to which they may add layers of lies to the effect that they have had vasectomies, or will pull out before ejaculating and therefore the young woman has nothing to worry about. Why not go down the second road in light of what I have argued? After all, isn’t it what any good evolutionist thinking of his immortal genes would advise? Well…yes, it is; and well…I love myself too, and like to follow my own dictates, but I confess that I would not have the balls to give a poor young woman--and in the Philippines they are poor like one cannot imagine--a child that I would have no interest in helping raise or support financially. And yet while all this talk about biology and passing on one’s genes makes good sense, when it comes to getting into bed with a gorgeous young Thai or Filipina hooker the argument is of no more interest or relevance to the middle-aged or older man with a good hard-on and plenty of lust in his eyes than the fact that six species of beetles never before seen by humans went extinct this very day in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

Middle-aged Western women feel sad for the young women because they are with someone so much older than them, from fifteen to thirty-five years or more. And this is just “not right.” They should be with someone closer to them in age, and as in most of the West with an eight or ten year age difference at most. This will make it possible for them to share values, and all those things that are somewhat unique to each generation. What do very young women have in common with older men of another generation—to say nothing of the fact that they are from a different culture? Almost nothing, the argument goes. These younger women, then, can be little more than housemaids, servants, youthful bed mates. In short, the quite young woman who marries the middle-aged or old man has made a huge mistake. One should feel “sad” for both of them. From: I Feel Sorry for These Old Men and Young Women