RAWBangkok

It’s a common theme when you talk to Thai bar girls.

“No like Thai man… him butterfly too mut.  Me like farang; jai dee mak mak.”

When you first arrive in Thailand — okay, when I first arrived in Thailand — I believed it.  It sounded so sincere coming from that innocent mouth with those full, innocent lips and those shiny innocent eyes.

I also believed a lot of other things.  I believed that they had only been working in the bar for a few weeks, that they wanted to stop working in the bar and would if they just had the chance, and that she had only gone to dinner with the guy who paid her barfine earlier tonight.

I guess I believed these simple lies because it seemed that there was no reason for her to lie to me.  After all, I knew she was a hooker, she knew she was a hooker… why lie?

But I learned over time that Bangkok bar girls lie to customers all the time.

They  lie mostly because customers want them to.

Customers want to believe that the girls hasn’t had sex with several other guys this week (or this afternoon).  He wants to believe that he is special, somehow.  He wants to believe that the attraction he feels to this girl is somehow reciprocated.  He doesn’t want to believe that she’s merely doing her job.  Somehow this is all important to his ego.

Me?  I don’t feel that way.

I figure I’m fairly realistic about the fact that the girls are just doing a job.

Yeah, over three years I have had a few girls fall for my charms — but damned few since I’m not that charming.

A slightly larger number have fallen for my wallet, believing that I was capable of offering them long-term financial security.  In these circumstances a poor farm girl isn’t always very concerned about being in love.  It may be enough that the father-like farang seems to love her and is devoted enough to take care of her and her family.   Whoring herself out to one man instead of dozens weekly can look like a pretty good trade off, especially if he’s generous, kind and pleasant.

But most girls who have had sex with me in Bangkok haven’t really had much thought beyond the hour or eight hours that I have hired them for.  As long as I don’t sodomize them against their will or beat them up they are happy to take my cash, close their eyes and think of the King while I grunt and sweat on top of them.  It’s strictly a short term financial transaction for these girls.

But they’re smart enough to figure out that I’d like to hear from them how special I am to them, or at least, that they prefer my kind (white guys) to the other kind (Thai guys).

So, yeah, I’m pretty jaded about what I hear come out of the mouths of Thai girls.  When they tell me things that I figure they want me to hear I often assume that what I’m hearing isn’t necessarily the truth.

But there are times when I engage a bar girl in conversation and I get the feeling that she is being earnest with me… actually sharing part of the truth of her life.  There can be many reasons for this.  It may be driven partly by her saying many things that are contrary to what I would expect to hear if she were just shining me on.  Or it might be more indefinable.  I have spent my business life dealing with people in a variety of circumstances and I think that one of my more highly honed skills is the ability to read people and their motives in face-to-face situations.  As a man who has managed thousands of people, and spent about a decade earning a crust by the ‘hunting and gathering’ activity of direct sales to customers, I think I am well above average with my jing-jing radar.

And so I was surprised to find that I had two heart to heart discussions this week with two long term bar girls that I assessed as being ‘genuine’.

I thought it was worth telling you a little about these two conversations, in the light of my belief that they were both being truthful with me.

Bargirl #1

Number 1 is a ‘retired’ bar girl.  She has an overseas sponsor who pays the bills.  She’s been retired for about a year, and she seems to be genuinely retired.  After six years of earning her living on high heels and on her back I think she’s happy not to have to sleep with different men regularly.  I think her preference would be to find a good man and get married, but absent that, the next best choice is to have a man sending her all the money she needs to enable her to sleep all day, and go drinking with her friends when the mood strikes.

Personally I think this is driven primarily by the fact that this girl is lazy.  Even when she was working in a go go as a showgirl she often took nights off (one or two times per week) with headaches or stomachaches.  Also, she’s a bit of a romantic, and at least until recently, the trials and tribulations of being a bargirl haven’t been enough to knock that romanticism out of her.

Talking to her the other day she told me how frustrated she is with her life right now.  Her sponsor has been calling her and asking her things like, “Why don’t you love me?”

She had a string of complaints against the guy, but when I asked if he’d been sending her money regularly she said he had.  I asked how often he comes to Thailand, and she said that he came here about every six weeks or so, usually staying for 8 or 10 days each visit.  When he was here, she had to attend to him full time, but the rest of the time she was free to do as she pleased.

I asked if he’d threatened to cut off her cash.  Nope.

So what’s the problem?

I think she’s just getting bored.

I mentioned to her that all she has to do is open her legs about one week out of seven and that didn’t seem so bad.  I suggested that she should just smile at the easy money and concentrate on enjoying life.

She said that all her friends told her the same thing.

And that, to me, was the telling comment.  Thai bar girls are very pragmatic when it comes to money and/or security.  They are happy to give you what you want or need as long as you offer security.

But, as my friend’s current attitude demonstrates, security isn’t quite enough to satisfy.  Thai bar girls also require fun.  They’ve led lives on the edge for as long as they’ve been in the bars and settling down to a scene of domestic bliss is difficult — especially if that scene is alone.

Thais are social creatures, and bar girls may be even more accustomed than others at living in close quarters and communal structures.  To take a girl completely out of that structure, put her in her own apartment alone, and expect her to be happy because all the bills are being paid is probably a bit niaive.

A lot of girls fill in the gaps by continuing to work freelance in spite of the support from abroad.  As I said, I don’t think my friend does that — but only because I think she really dislikes having sex with different men and because she’s basically lazy.   I don’t think its driven by any sense of loyalty to her sponsor.

Bargirl #2

Number 2 is an active bar girl.  As far as I can tell she’s had a pretty good week, picking up three or four barfines in the midst of a dreadful low season.  She got barfined last night — I presume for a short time session — and she called me at midnight saying that she was about to go home early, but she was happy to come to my place instead if I was interested.

I was asleep when she called, but I figured I could rally, so I invited her over.  She showed up twenty minutes later with a fresh salad for my dinner and some salted fish snack and seaweed strips for herself.

She had said on the phone that the guy who barfined her had taken her to dinner.  No mention of a session at the short time hotel, but I presume that was for my benefit.  Who barfines a girl to go to dinner then sends her home at midnight?

Anyway, I ate my salad and we watched a movie.  Showers, sex and sleep.

With the (relatively) early to bed Friday night, she and I both woke up around 11 a.m. this morning and spent an hour or so chatting.  During the conversation we talked about bar girls and their Thai boyfriends.  She told me a few stories that sounded very genuine about friends who have Thai boyfriends.  Each story was a morality tale about the Thai guy’s butterfly habits.

She talked about one girl in particular that works in her bar, who is 27 years old.  She said that the girl has a Thai boyfriend who has always been a terrible butterfly, sleeping with many many other women.

Her friend finally had a brainwave, thinking that if she had a baby her man would settle down and come home every day.  So that’s what she did — she got pregnant and gave birth.

Effect on the boyfriend was exactly zero.  Apparently being a dad didn’t dim his sexual appetite for other women, and the friend simply ended up with an extra burden in the form of an infant to support.

Number 2 reported that in her opinion, relationships with Thai guys have a shelf life of between one and three years before things blow up and they leave.

She also discussed age.  She is late twenties, and due to some teasing from me when she proclaimed herself a fan of a popular Thai boy-band, she told me that she reckons young Thai boys “19 years old” are the worst trouble a woman could ask for.  She said that she would only consider dating a boyfriend 30 years old or older.

She commented that she still reckoned that all Thai men were butterflies, and commented that she didn’t know if foreign men were any better or not.  Certainly working as a bar girl in Bangkok hasn’t given her any reason to believe that foreigners are better, but she seemed to understand that it was probably not the best population sample for forming an opinion.

She told me a story.  In answer to my question she told me that she doesn’t have a Thai boyfriend.  I asked if she used to.  Yes, she told me, once upon a time.

It turns out that she has only ever had one Thai boyfriend (in fact only one boyfriend ever) when she was “very young”.  Apparently, he was sleeping with her and another girl, and the other girl got pregnant.  He wanted to maintain a relationship with Number 2, but she wasn’t having any of it.  She cut him off, and she has never seen him or talked to him again.

If I understood her correctly, it was at this point that she moved to Bangkok and went to work in the bar.

I asked if she had ever had another boyfriend.

Nope.

Why not?  I asked.

I got my heart broken once and that was enough, was her reply.

Yeah… I know the feeling.

This girl really does mean it when she talks about Thai men being butterflies.  She either doesn’t know for sure about farang men, or she was just being polite to me, but she had the good sense not to tell me that all farang men are jai dee.

I got the clear impression (without her saying it) that she’d love to find a good man and settle down to a normal life, but that the pain of that first boyfriend cut too deep for her to ever trust a man again.  She seems as though she will stay alone until or unless circumstances force her to hook up with a man.

So?

Being a large guy with a waistline that is far too large, I am skeptical when I hear a girl tell me that she likes men who are “bumpooey“.  It strains credibility.  Certainly she’s just trying to do her job by telling me not to worry about being fat.

In the same way, it’s easy to think that you know when a bar girl is lying — like the old lawyer joke, you know when she’s lying because her lips are moving.

I understand that sentiment, but I think it’s too simplistic.  There are times when bar girls can be disarmingly honest.  They are, after all, not machines but people.

Some of them really do take money from sponsors and stay out of the bars.  Some really do live without a Thai boyfriend in the background.  But it can be hard work sorting out the honesty from the bullshit.  In the end, it proves easier for most punters to simply dismiss everything every bar girl says as being self-serving and disingenuous.

Bargirls often are disingenuous, but in my experience it is rarely malicious.  Usually, they are either trying to give you what they think you want, or they are simply papering over pain in their own lives.  Either way, they may be telling the truth more often than we realise.