The Bar Girls’ Lament

The Bar Girls’ Lament

Well, you chauvinistic farang males, after reading on a local website about farang private investigators hunting down errant bar girls who haven‘t been keeping their verbal contractual agreements to stay out of the bars, I thought I had to write to you to once again to explain things from the bar girls‘ perspective (ex-working girl in my case, of course!)

We’ve all read and heard about the stories of the girls who spin tall stories to philanthropic lovers asking them to replenish vast stocks of ailing water buffaloes/pigs with swine fever/ducks deceased from bird flu or now, cats suffering from cat flu. We’ve also heard about the girls pleading help for real or fictitious relatives who have supposedly sustained appalling injuries crossing the road, probably being run over twice, and demanding immediate hospital treatment at exorbitant cost.
We’ve even heard harrowing stories of extortionate Mafia landlords who have just tripled the rent, with threats of imminent death or Ethiopian clitoridectomy (excision of the clitoris;/female circumcision) for non-compliance. Incidentally, I saw the documentary on BBC in England on Ethiopian clitoridectomy when I was on holiday, one time, and I have actually heard of a Bangkok Chinatown landlord who threatened to do just that to his tardy female tenants who were 2 months late with their rent.
Ok, some of the girls are very enterprising and even unfeeling and are probably self-tutored in the “Noble Art of Upping-the-Ante” books, freely available at local bookstores. Or perhaps they’ve swapped stories with their sisters-in-charms, who offer solicitous advice on how to fleece the lambs-fit-for-sheering. They may even have been sitting next to one of the really enterprising ladies in the late-nite internet cafes, cleverly juggling not just one, but up to ten absent lovers on-line, cleverly synchronising their returns, so that none turns up simultaneously. All ten of whom are contributing the same monthly stipend of 30,000 baht, giving a monthly income of 300,000 baht. Not bad for a naive girl from a deepest Isaan rice farm with no education, is it?.
Outrageous!” you cry and I admit some of the girls do take things a little too far. But let’s get things in perspective here. Who owns the majority of beer or go-go bars where these girls have to work? Farangs, right? Most of the bar-owners make a very respectable living from the girls and they adopt the worst Thai principles very quickly, like making some of them work 7 days a week, paying minimum wages, and forcing them to go “off” with as many clients as possible, just so they can keep consuming vast quantities of whiskey, run their expensive cars and keep several mia nois, all the while pleading poverty! So who is exploiting who?
And the clients themselves, most of them come from the affluent West and come to spend their reasonably high salaries (certainly high by Thai standards, anyway) over here on holiday where they get a very good return for their money. How much do sex-workers charge in England for a short time? The average is £100, so I’m told, that’s about 6,320 baht at today’s exchange rates. And you begrudge paying 500 or 1000 baht! Also, don’t forget Thai sex-workers are not in any way like Western sex-workers. How many Western girls are prepared to put up with overly-demanding lovers (probably highly dosed-up on Viagra), take care of them, sometimes even hand-feed, wash and dress them? Answer – very, very few. And how many Western girls go with men sometimes 3 times their age? I think you know the answer to that one.
How many of you have worked in jobs that are equivalent to working on rice farms, 12 hours a day from sun-up to sun-down, in sheer back-breaking drudgery for 100 baht a day, if they’re lucky? And you wonder why they come to Pattaya, where the streets are paved with gold, and take every chance they are offered because they well know that their time won’t be long. The bloom on the rose doesn’t remain very long, as they say.
And how many of you have to support families of 12 or more, often 3 generations, single handed, because there’s no work in the area? Or how many of you have lost the land that your family has owned for generations because of shark money-lenders or unscrupulous Bangkok developers who want to turn the whole of Isaan into planations for growing eucalyptus trees, which completely deplete and acidify the soil, making it impossible to grow anything after a short while?
How many of you have to pay your family’s medical bills where almost all hospital treatments start at 1000 baht and go up through the roof? I could go on all day, but I won’t. I think you get the point.
Another thing is the booze problem; especially among you long term residents in Thailand. Must you always spend so much time in bars, drinking till you’re almost stupid and always starting arguments, criticizing, getting angry and then sneaking off for short times? Time to go on the wagon, for some of you, for sure. But I’ve spent too much time criticizing, I think you begin to understand what it’s like for the bar girls of Pattaya.
So next time you come panting, with your tongues hanging out, to what I’ve heard called the Sex Centre of the Universe, expecting to get something for nothing, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t all go the way you’ve planned and you fall foul of girls who have their eye on the main chance. Sensible farangs who haven’t left their brains at the Airport quite often look for relationships with girls who work in supermarkets. They are less avaricious, so I’m told.
And as for you guys who set the investigators on the straying girls, as a mamasan friend of mine, Pebbew, says “If my boyfriend sent the detectives after me, I’d tell him to forget the whole thing & get lost”. Perhaps it will make you think twice, there again, perhaps not!

Tim Coxon