WorldFun Posted December 20, 2011 Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 someone mentioned having a trust fund to fall back on yeah? now take that away. take education/career options away. take away any family support. in fact imagine your family disowning u! then consider the real options: welfare, factory worker/cleaner/min. wage, taxi driver or ... prostitute/erotic dancer! no hard choice really for quite a few, but given we have the luxury of time/money to post here well expectantly we cant really imagine it on ourselves but the BGs can & so can natascha or ivan the escort! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashermac Posted December 20, 2011 Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 What is surprising is that so few Thai women in that situation actually take the BG option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gobbledonk Posted December 20, 2011 Author Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 What is surprising is that so few Thai women in that situation actually take the BG option. I wonder if those numbers have been swelled after the floods ? As worldfun pointed out, its easy to postulate with full bellies and a steady income - that said, I have no idea just how bad it really is there atm. My experience, admittedly more limited than many here, is that women who find themselves in the bar purely out of financial need dont show a whole lot of enthusiasm - if anything, sorting the wheat from the chaff may be harder than ever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
think_too_mut Posted December 20, 2011 Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 I wonder if those numbers have been swelled after the floods ? Why would they? Those going to the bars are already there, flood or no flood. It's not sending significant if any number of workers from the inundated factories to make up for the living while the factories are being repaired. Being ready to go to the bars is a mental state independent of floods or whatever disasters. World lowest unemployment (is in Thai) with anyone showing at the factory gate in the morning having a job, nobody can say there are no regular means to earn what is national average. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dave32 Posted December 20, 2011 Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 Some people can do the gig sober, many cant - I dont think that changes whether its Bangkok or Budapest ..... The girls/women I've met in my lifetime with the hardest inclination towards binge drinking and drugs was the one year I went to Catholic School in Chicago (protestant parents sucked it up for the 'better' education). But drinking in social situations is pretty much a norm even in the West. Put me in a crowded place with lots of people and there's a drink in hand, otherwise I'm not hanging around. I don't know about sober vs. drunk, it's not an either/or proposition. Most of the time out and about in a crowd you'll not find me in either camp. It's funny that the conversation I've had with BGs walking around to grab a bite to eat in the morning - 'how long have you worked in bar?' 'what did you do before?' 'Do you like/dislike it?' etc., has revealed things in contradiction to the portrait I see being painted here: drug-addled women rejected by society and desperate for a buck forced to fuck old fat smelly men that repulse them. It sounds like another bullshit stereotype to me. There's people that like being a BG, and the power & autonomy it affords, and there's people that don't. And they do have power, and they pick who they go with. I don't know. But if I saw things the way some of you guys do --> my next question would be, if you honestly believe this -- why the hell do you then go to the bars? (btw, I'm not talking about you Gobble, although I think your perceptions are a little skewed). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gobbledonk Posted December 20, 2011 Author Report Share Posted December 20, 2011 I don't know. But if I saw things the way some of you guys do --> my next question would be, if you honestly believe this -- why the hell do you then go to the bars? (btw, I'm not talking about you Gobble, although I think your perceptions are a little skewed). Like anything on a forum, its easy to draw conclusions - you seem to assume that I see things in black-and-white, and thats a long way from the truth (at least as I see it). I've spent enough time living among these girls (and I mean in the same apartment blocks, outside of work hours, getting pissed with them and, in some cases, having some very real confrontations) over the last few years to know that they arent all cliches. This post was about the fact that *I* couldnt do it without getting hammered, but clearly some are able to treat it as a 'job' and avoid the pitfalls. I spent most of my time in and around Soi 22, and I know for a fact that one of the bar owners wouldnt allow his girls to go home until all of his customers had finished for the night/morning - if that meant they left at 6am, so be it. They made a large chunk of their income from ladydrinks, and when a customer demanded they scull Tequila or Vodka, they complied. Low seasons have been longer and deeper in the past few years, and when the customers do come back, no-one looks a gift horse in the mouth - they drink whatever the customer is buying. I've also seen girls come and go, usually back to the provinces but sometimes to things like waitressing : not as black-and-white as many would have us believe. In one case, a girl dumped her Farang boyfriend to have a baby with a Thai guy and seemed a lot happier to be working in a salon than she had been in the bar - her biggest complaint was that Farang 'think they know everything about Thailand', and I happily agreed with her that we are *all* butterflies Dave, I've been with working girls in several parts of Asia, but rarely do they feel the need to tell you their life story the way many do in Thailand. When I first came to the board, I thought that many of the longtimers were overly cynical about these stories - I've since come to agree with them, mostly - its a tactic designed to elicit sympathy. As one of the more professional girls said to me after some truly great service : 'You have a story, I have a story - you didn't come to Thailand for stories'. Her name was Lyn, and I scoured Cowboy trying to find her in subsequent months when it became apparent that later 'conquests' were only too keen to tell me stories. The good news is that now I get to bore you and other T360ers witless with *my* stories, but the punchline is that I dont have a sick buffalo to support. Finally, I've copped plenty on the board over the years for being a 'Thai apologist' when I do stumble across the 'whore with a heart of gold' or somesuch, and I dont agree with some of the malcontents who spew endless bile about the Thai people on various boards, but I can definitely see how the cynicism starts to kick in after a few extended stays. Getting 'the look' when a phone rings and one of the girls in your room starts telling her BF that she is 'at home, watch TV', being chased down a Soi by a knife-wielding nutjob - its all grist for the mill, but its also reality. (Of the 10 or so girls who could have really screwed me over, only one has, but she did so over an extended period. I consider that a pretty good average) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dave32 Posted December 21, 2011 Report Share Posted December 21, 2011 Like anything on a forum, its easy to draw conclusions - you seem to assume that I see things in black-and-white, and thats a long way from the truth (at least as I see it). It's the black and white stuff that gets me. "All these whores are out to screw the falang" or "All these BGs are victims" or "All the Falang customers are exploitative assholes" or "they're all naive marks getting played". There's some truth in all these categories, but it's a small part of a much broader picture. It's not black and white, I'm with you 100%. I'm not sure what the draw of Thailand is for me, it's raw - it's a challenge to understand the nuances and what's going on around you --> and yeah, I do find the women beautiful. I can tell you what I don't like at home --> people dead past the age of 30 (I don't mean literally dead, I mean spiritually - their hearts have waned and atrophy in a dull comfort zone). People in shitty marriages, on prescription anti-depressants to get through the day. Grinding their lives away long hours in an unrewarding job to pay a ridiculous mortgage. That's the dream???? Don't carry illusions about anyone making my dreams come true, or me doing that for someone else. Just looking for life. Ps. I'm in a mood today. Nothing personal was intended. For the record I like reading your posts and am grateful for what you've contributed to this forum. You're intelligent, you challenge assumptions, and you stand your ground. I can live with that. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gobbledonk Posted December 21, 2011 Author Report Share Posted December 21, 2011 Agree on the 'dead past 30' point - absolutely and categorically - I think John Mellencamp put it best when he sang 'Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone'. Farang society has a lot of expectations of people over 30 - everything from business success to marriage to kids - and when the marriage disintegrates and a guy finds himself in Asia on a regular basis, I think we get put into a different pigeonhole. I've never had a problem with any of that, but its the fact that we are largely 'invisible' in a youth-oriented society past 40 : perhaps not to people selling luxury cars or speedboats, but definitely to the rest of the world. Have a beer in a pub full of 20-somethings and tell me you dont feel invisible. None of that will matter in <2 years, and I barely give it any thought now. For the rest of the stuff, haters are gonna hate. The thread that runs through a lot of the bile, IMO, is a sense of betrayal - Thailand had promised the new arrival so much and, 10-15 years on, reality has bitten him on the butt and its time to move on. I dont know anyone who thinks Sydney (or Melbourne or Brissie)is the same city they knew and loved 15 years ago - why the hell would Bangkok be any different ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashermac Posted December 21, 2011 Report Share Posted December 21, 2011 Bangkok scarcely resembles the delightful little city I knew in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the Thais are still much the same. One can't expect more than that. I haven't been to Sydney in 30 years and in the photos I see can scarcely recognise anything now. Time marches on ... and nothing we can do holds it back. (Well, except maybe in North Korea. ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flashermac Posted December 21, 2011 Report Share Posted December 21, 2011 Talk about changes, 50 years of Thai ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnnSSTCEJ8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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