Li giggled ecstatically as she flipped the grid to empty the playing pieces into their blue plastic bin. Could I really have lost that many games in a row? I turned to the fresh round of Singha my new buddies had ordered, well-aware that it wasn’t helping my winning percentage but more interested in the greater context. I’ve done stranger things in my life than play 40-odd games of Connect Four in a jungle-themed bar with two Thai prostitutes, but not many.
I had joked with friends before heading off for my spring break to southern Thailand’s Andaman Coast that I’d be knee-deep in whores as soon as I stepped off the plane, but I never thought it would be true. When I asked the young woman at the Phuket International Airport information desk about the best beach on the island, she pointed me straight to Patong, promising it was full of “more shops, more people, more fun!”
I hopped on the local minibus without a second thought, unaware of the area’s reputation, second only to Pattaya and certain corners of Bangkok, as a nucleus of the country’s notorious sex tourist industry.
Over dinner at a local restaurant I met a Swedish guy about my age whose name was something like Ingvar. Several rounds of pool later, he said we ought to head down to Bangla Road and see some of the wild clubs there.
The street was lit as brightly as a music video, with blinking neon and tourist police watching impassively over the final night of Phuket Harley-Davidson Bike Weekend ‘06. A few misguided families waded through hundreds of chubby, grey-haired Western men stumbling around with immaculately made-up Thai girls on their arms. Or at least, I thought they were all girls.
Ingvar and I barely had time to let our jaws drop when a tall, muscular, long-haired creature stalked up to me in 5-inch stilettos and huskily demanded, “Ladyboy? You like ladyboy?” I tossed off a stunned “Uh, no, no thanks, not for me,” and stared around awkwardly while Ingvar chuckled.
Dazed, we pressed on through a seething horde of aggressive transvestite hookers in search of a piece of our pie. Thai culture is extremely accepting of gays, lesbians and alternative sexual lifestyles and the evidence was everywhere.
Ingvar pointed out a club called Tiger Entertainment, and we passed through the gigantic fire-eyed, smoke-spitting tiger’s head doorway into a football field-sized room with about 30 tiny bars scattered across the floor at random. At each sat 10 to 15 underdressed girls who howled a collective “AIIEEEEEE!!” as we passed, stupid grins plastered across our faces as every girl tried to grope and drag us over to her bar. Apparently each bar pays the girls to draw in Western dudes like us to drink up a profit, and then presumably subcontract with the ladies for late night plans. At the bar where we sat down, the device of choice to keep you on your stool was Connect Four. Yes, that’s the classic children’s vertical board game, and these girls were total pros.
So I found myself sitting next to Li while the tattooed Om tended to Ingvar, shocked at my surroundings: not just because it was so bizarre, but because it didn’t seem quite like the horrifying degradation I’d heard about back home. The airport bookstores were packed with titles like My Name Lon. You Like Me? and Fake Smiles, Real Tears, both fiction and non-, for indignant Western women on holiday. I can’t even count how many Nicholas Kristof columns I’ve read in the New York Times on the evils of the Southeast Asian sex trade.
But I didn’t see any of those fabled girls in cages with numbered tags for ordering, but, of course that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. According to Li and Om, who were happy to chat in very good English about anything besides their T&A, most of the women were independent contractors. According to prices laid out in Michel Houllebecq’s novel Platform, they each make more from one customer than a typical long-tail boatman makes in a 12-hour day. Cleo Odzer’s 1994 book Patpong Sisters actually claims that prostitution can be empowering for Thai women with few other social options.
Yes, sociologists in the audience, I know that as a Western white straight male I am speaking from a dominant and privileged position of power in relation to these young women forced to sell themselves to survive. I find it pretty unpleasant myself; I have no desire to be a sex tourist, let alone the funds required. I left Ingvar at 2:00 a.m. in the arms of some nubile local who had leapt into his lap for a makeout session and quelled his slurred fears, “Do you think she is a prostitute? She cannot be a prostitute. But it cannot be so easy to pick up Thai women.” The woman in question certainly seemed on top of the situation.
