RAWBangkok

I wanted to give some relevant statistics on plastic surgery to put some meat on this blog, but Googling “cosmetic surgery thailand” and even trying to focus it with words like “article” “research” or “statistics” simply resulted in 8,953,257,951 advertisements for plastic surgery around the world.  I’m sure that with some more effort or more refined searching techniques I would have eventually found what I was looking for, but frankly, it just wasn’t that important.

So this is gonna end up being a bit of a ‘fluff’ blog… much emptier than I wanted to write, but putting forward the grain of an idea that’s worth some discussion.

I’ve had this blog in the back of my mind for a year or more, but it’s never taken shape fully.  Even now, it’s dreadfully short of material, but in deciding to finally write this blog, the precipitating event was licking a Thai girl’s navel the other night.

Yep.  I was playing with her belly button.

This girl is on of my ‘regulars’ so I’ve seen her body (inside and out) several times.  I am very familiar with it’s curves and crevices.  She was laying on my bed and I was caressing her body;  I was looking at her belly button for perhaps the 27th time and thinking — again — that it seemed a bit unusual.

Korean Actress Jeon Ji Hyun

See, it’s not very deep.  Just a dimple really.  You can’t put your finger inside (or your tongue for that matter) and it just looks really small.

I was looking at it and playing with it a bit, and I commented to her that her belly button had a 4-pointed star-shape inside.

“Yes” she said, “it hurt a lot.”

Misunderstanding her, I apologized, saying that I hadn’t meant to hurt her by stretching her navel… I was just looking and playing.

“Mai Chai!” she said in Thai, followed by a sting of quick Thai words.  The only two I caught were “maw” and “yep”.

Maw means doctor, and yep is a verb that means ‘to sew’.

“You said that the doctor had to sew it?” I asked, making a needle & thread sewing motion above her lovely tummy.

Yep, she replied.  That’s right.

I was imagining some problem she must have had soon after she was born, but puzzled why she would remember that it hurt.  Further discussion revealed the facts.

Throughout her life she never liked her belly button, thinking it was unattractive.

About two years ago (before I met her) she went to the doctor and had him change her navel to be more to her liking.  She said it was painful for a month after.

For as long as I’ve known her, the one feature of her body that has always left me a little disquieted is her navel.  Now I know why.  I don’t think that her surgical adjustment was an ‘improvement’, though she obviously feels better about it now.

Perhaps the most interesting thing she said about it was that her parents don’t know that she did it. She apparently makes it a point to avoid them knowing, though, as she pointed out, they wouldn’t routinely see her belly button — a fact that I forgot, since any farang who can afford 140 baht for a drink at her go go bar can see it any day of the week.  Fifteen hundred short time gives you the opportunity to explore it, as well as most of the the rest of her body, in fine detail.

Cosmetic surgery seems such an alien concept to me.  The desire to re-shape and re-mold bodies, faces and even the seemingly simple feature of a belly-button is strange to my way of thinking.

Talking to the same girl, she expressed to me that she’d like to enhance her boobs.

Let me go on record here.  I HATE boob jobs on any girl.  They might look spectacular, but to me they feel like overinflated balloons at a kid’s birthday party, and they are about as appealing, lacing the natural elasticity and movement that makes titties so erotically stimulating.  Plastic tits will probably turn me off faster than celllulite, bad breath and green teeth all put together.

So I’m not objective on this point.

Thai girls, in the main, have smallish breasts.  A Thai girl who has a huge set of hooters is the exception, not the rule.

The girl in my room with the tiny belly button has a very respectable set of Thai boobies.  B-cups, nicely formed, warm and soft to the touch with symmetrical nipples of just the right color and sensitivity.  They are some of my favorite boobs in Thailand.

We had a discussion about her desire to make ‘em bigger.  I said don’t.  She said she’d like to, but I got the feeling she never will.

But here’s the thing.  I’ve never yet met a Thai girl who, if the subject of boobies comes up, hasn’t said that she wants a bigger pair.  When, about a year ago, a girl quoted me the price for getting hers inflated, I started asking other girls who told me that they wanted surgery if they knew how much it would cost.

To date, every girl I’ve asked has known an exact number.  They’d done their research.

So, this goal of bigger breasts is not just a matter of whimsy, but a real consideration.  I think that most Thai girls I know (I’m talking bar girls here, but I think it may include regular girls as well) would leap at the opportunity to fill their chests with silicon if the cash were readily available.

I discourage them whenever I can.

There are two Thai bar girls that I had sex with back in 2005 that I have seen since who have had boob jobs.  In both cases they look great with their clothes on.  In both cases, I have seen the “new and improved” product.

One of the two girls is a dancer who strips her top off nightly at Nana Plaza.  Hers don’t look so great uncovered.

The other is a freelancer I met here on holiday.  I ran into her about 18 months back, and paid her for a roll in the hay, hoping to recreate the fantastic times I remembered from 2005.  Her boobs were a shocking disappointment.  Hard, rubbery, too round.  And her performance in the sack had gone sour as well.  The enthusiastic wildcat that used to make me work for 45 minutes to bring her to a sweaty screaming orgasm started moaning in faux-Ecstasy the moment I touched her.  Not only her tits, but her sex was now fake.

Sad.

But it does bring me to an idea that formed in my head long before I ever came to Thailand.

In my entire life I have never met a girl who was satisfied with her body.  Maybe she wants a dimple in her chin, or has one she wants to get rid of.  Her ass is too big, or not big enough.  Her thighs are fat, or her legs are too skinny.  Somehow, the nose is always the wrong shape to any girl’s liking.

Unlike men, who all seem to have a body self image that is greater than reality, women seem to have a universal dissatisfaction with their bodies.

I’ve met women who were perfect.  Physical specimens of beauty that you just wanted to cryogenically seal in plastic and preserve for all time.  Talk to them and you’ll find out that they are convinced that their clavicle is too bony and their earlobes just hang too low for them to be considered attractive in their own minds.

And I don’t think this is just a put-on.   My opinion is that women aren’t just giving me the “aw shucks, I’m not really pretty” routine.   I think women really do have a hard-wired dissatisfaction with their physical selves.  They all think that with some improvement they ‘might’ be pretty, but the way they are now… well… sorry.  No.

And so I walk around in amazement here in Thailand, where the phenomenon is exaggerated because of my unique circumstances.

Thai women fall into a few broad physical categories, but Bangkok bar girls tend to have a look that runs along these lines:

• relatively short (say 150 to 165 cm)
• apple cheeked
• dark skin, ranging from a light tan to deep chocolate
• flat broad nose
• full lips
• slender bodies (typical range 40 to 55 kilos)
• little body hair, but thick eyebrows
• straight teeth
• strong jawline
• small-breasted (typically 35B or thereabouts)

Meanwhile, the Thai standards of “true” beauty say that a girl should be tall (ideally 170+ cm), light skinned (the lighter the better), with full breasts (enhancements are welcome), with a prominent long, straight, narrow nose.

The societal message to the girls I usually end up having sex with here in Thailand is that they are very much the antithesis of beauty.  Being small, dark, large lipped, flat nosed, strong jawed and apple cheeked they are monkeys compared to the fair skinned beauties that grace the billboards and TV screens of Thailand.

The constant message to these girls is that they are not beautiful.

For me, the opposite is true.  I find their faces beautiful.  I find their delicate bodies graceful.  Their brown skin is exotic.

I hear many men say, and many bloggers write, that the longer they are in Thailand, the more they find the standard of beauty changes for them.  They say that they adopt local standards, preferring the tall, light skinned girls.

Personally, I think this has less to do with ‘adopting local standards’ and more to do with the universal desire for the exotic (with exotic meaning that which is not native or commonly found in your area).  Growing up in farangland, Thai girls (in fact all Asian women) seem exotic.  Living in Thailand, surrounded by petite brown-skinned girls daily, men’s craving for the exotic sends them in search of different heights, skin tones and facial features.

Not me.

I’m totally sold on Asian women in general and Thai women in particular.  Delicate, gracious, polite, sexy, beautiful; I love to look at them and be with them.  The tiny brown daughters of Isaan farmers match my personal ideal of feminine beauty, and I would rather that they didn’t change a thing.

So the overall effect is that I am surrounded by a population of women who have spent their lives being told that they are the antithesis of beauty and wanting to look different.   To an even greater extent than the average woman, Isaan girls feel un-lovely.

In my eyes they are often perfect.

They are puzzled, bemused, and sometimes downright unbelieving when it comes to my ideas about thier beauty.

All the better for me.  If they have a low opinion of their beauty, then they are that much more pleased with my attentions, I guess.

But their constant desire to re-shape their bodies to the extent possible frustrates and annoys me.  This perfect little woman wants to attach balloons to her chest and replace her button nose with a pole-like protrusion.  She’d love to bleach her skin and if she could she’d be five inches taller.

All women in the world seem to me to be discontent with their bodies, but the Isaan girls I know seem to be among the most extreme, ready to have any medical procedure, even if it’s just re-shaping a belly button, in a constant quest for outer beauty that they already possess.