Travelogues
Cheap thrills
(From: Raging Against the Machine, 30 Years of Campaigning for Global Justice, Ed Chris Brazier (New Internationalist Publications). This feature was originally published in New Internationalist magazine. I was in Thailand, staying in Bangkok between trips to villages in the North East, where I was doing some research for the World Health Organisation – but felt I had to write about the sex industry too.)
What a grand hotel it is: a white palace, delicately floodlit, fountains playing in the courtyard, trees festooned with white bulbs in the best possible taste. Though it’s nearly midnight, eight lanes of traffic stand tangled, hooting and snarling, in the Bangkok street outside.
Up the wide marble steps and in – through huge smoked-glass doors – to the foyer. You stop and blink. It’s dark. You step forwards, bump into someone, apologise, step forward s again, bump into someone else. Then realise that you are in a crowd. It’s a well-dressed crowd (this is, after all, a grand hotel); their wallet bulge with baht*. Their eyes are bulging too. You follow their gaze.
They’re looking at a huge shop window lit from the inside. It’s the only light in the foyer. Behind the expanse of plate glass the goods are displayed on wide shelves that look like a shallow flight of stairs running the entire length of the shop. Deep-pile rose-coloured carpet, like velvet, covers the stairs, matched by folds of hanging drapes that clothe the walls.
At this time of night business is brisk and the shelves are emptying fast. The goods are coded by numbers on different coloured discs pinned to each item. You make your selection, pay the cashier, and – before you can pocket your change – your purchase is waiting to take you to your room.
What a bargain! Blue Number 33 has long shiny black hair cut into a thick straight fringe over eyes that are dark and slanting – but not too Chinky. Blue means body massage (not just hands, but Number 33’s luscious body rolled all over you) – all the trimmings too, for just 100 baht. Spain touts sunshine and sangria. Thailand specialises in sex.
The Vietnam War taught many lessons. And Thailand was not slow to learn. Having seen American GIs turn the country into a giant restroom away from the battle zone, Thailand learnt to service the servicemen: service with a smile. The GIs went home in 1976, but the word got around. Now everyone wants the same service.
To day Bangkok welcomes bulges of all kinds: wallets and eyes definitely, and trousers particularly. Bulges mean business.
In 1977 one-and-a-quarter million foreigners had tourist visas stamped into their passports at Bangkok airport. By 1981 the number had doubled and the bulge business had become the country’s third biggest money-spinner, swelling currency coffers by over $220 million.
Welcome to Pattaya, just over four hours’ drive (by air-conditioned bus on a tarmac road built with America money) from the grime and sweat of Bangkok. Walk on the white sand, bathe in the clear blue water, breathe in the scent of a hundred brilliant tropical blossoms, dine by candlelight overlooking the bay. Then walk down the main street and take your pick. Garish sigh=ns hang above every doorway: room with a view – and a little bit extra.
Then back to Bangkok next day for something even more exotic. Tram around the temples all afternoon and take a taxi to Pat Pong after dinner. Upstairs in a bar is a bath full of bubbles. Sip your lager and imagine you’re that man in that bath. Yes, there’s two of them in there with him.
Thailand will satisfy your every appetite. Come one, come all.
Japanese? No problem. In 1976, four-fifths of Japanese tourists to Thailand were men: 74,000 of them, travelling without their wives, roaming the neon-lit Pat Pong streets, bumping and apologising in darkened hotel lobbies, licking lips at leather mini-skirts. With throngs of Singapore men and Malaysians, they come searching for purchases, for bargains that will writhe and sigh wantonly beneath them.
Two weeks of sweat and saliva, then back to their perfunctory formalised unions with their wives: restrained and reluctant as decent women should be.
German? Dutch? Fleeing from women who demand to be equal? No problem. Thailand will fulfil the tour brochure’s promises of bargains without desire for emancipation, but full of warm sensuality and the softness of velvet. For a tiny amount you will feel like Don Juan. Travel with confident anticipation: your purchases, say the brochure, are not especially particular. So no European need fear going to Bangkok fir nothing. Money back if not completely satisfied.
The perfect playmates are waiting for you: ardent, carnal craving lurking neath an enchanting shy demureness. And the pouting panting lips barely speak a word of your language.
Come one, come all.
And they do. Tourists are not the only takers. Thailand’s men stalk the shop-fronts in thousands: older businessmen shopping for virgins (the rich man’s expensive rare delicacy); some Chinese Thais prefer hill tribe playmate – their strangeness and wild blood puts strength in their veins, they say. And their pouting panting lips can barely spear a word on Thai language.
Demand now outstrips supply – especially for specialist morsels. Even the flood of young titbits – who left villages for life on the bases, learnt to wear high-heels and lipstick, and to service the servicemen’s dollars – are too few to feed all these appetites.
Last year the Thai Parliament (with its 324 men and 10 women members) heard from a Select Committee that there were 500,000 prostitutes in the country – that’s one per cent of the entire population. Two-fifths of Bangkok’s wage-earning women are for sale in the bars, coffee shops and massage parlours; giving the client his money’s worth. Satisfaction guaranteed.
Where else can you get such a good deal: a tumble with a honey-skinned siren for the price of a packet of cigarettes? Just pay up and don’t ask any questions. Look at it this way: it’s not a bad life as a harlot. Average monthly wage was $40 in 1979 – $15 more than being a waitress, on a par with a job in a factory, and a lot more than working the paddy fields. In fact most of Bangkok’s bargains are playmates from the paddy fields: 47 per cent are from the north and 49 per cent from the northeast, the two poorest parts of the country.
Of course there are occupational hazards: 70 per cent have venereal disease. And the hours are what you might call ‘unsocial’, with breakfast at four in the afternoon, into the shop window by five, pouting and panting till five in the morning, and dinner when the rest of Bangkok is at breakfast.
No, it’s not a bad life as a harlot. Strange that the Select Committee d=found that one in ten had been forced to take their first man – raped, in effect. And there was a fire ion Phuket Island last January, acrid black smoke billowing above the tourists’ paradise. Fifty buildings were burnt to the ground; among them were 14 brothels. And when the smoke cleared they found chains round charred ankles in the debris.
*baht is the Thai currency