Bar-Girl Brides, and Slut-Wives.
It was on one of the Thailand forums that he came across a 'bar-girl wife.' The poster was living in Thailand and married a bar-girl, but he had not taken her out of the bar. She continued to work. He had posted a PDF file for the forum members to peruse. Trevor downloaded and opened it. It was set out like a magazine; photographs mixed with text. The text described their meeting and relationship, then commented on the photos.
First, he presented high quality photos of the wife, nude, in the bedroom, at home and on the beach. She was a good looking Thai girl of about twenty-five, slender and tall, who posed confidently. He followed up with grainer, poorly lit, candid pictures of her in the bar, dancing on stage, flirting with customers at their tables, then, dancing in stages of undress, culminating in her sitting on the edge of the stage, feet on two stools, with a cigarette in her pussy, smoking it.
On the final three pages he included photos of assorted quality, taken in hotel rooms, showing her engaged in various sex acts, souvenirs, given to her by her customers.
The poster clearly adored his subject, hyperbolically describing her beauty, sexual attributes and prowess. According to him, she gloried in the admiration of her customers and the regular and various promiscuous sex. He finished by describing their ambition to have her filmed being gangbanged on the bar stage.
After recovering from his initial perplexity, Trevor, fascinated, tried to understand how this could be.
He remembered the pride, and erotic thrill, he had felt in Kitten Club when Allyza competed in the Dirty Dancing contest and received necklaces from many guys in the bar, and the buzz he got when, at the end, she came to sit in his lap, bare breasted, with the garland around her neck, knowing that her other admirers could see she was his girl. A little sleazy he conceded, but little different to the pride any man feels with a good-looking woman on his arm.
He remembered the way Grant encouraged Alma to romp naked in Thi-Hi, and left her to entertain customers while he went off to play pool. Grant had not been the least put out when he found her sitting naked with him, he had been happy to own Alma as his girlfriend, to chat amiably with Trevor, and admit to an unusual relationship. That was a step further, but it was a matter of degree. Grant was flattered by the frank lust Alma provoked in other customers?
This diverted Trevor's interest to another theme that recurred on the Horn Dog forums. Some were adamant that bar-girl relationships were doomed, spoke from experience, and argued a convincing case. This rant appeared on an ex-pat's website:
'I overheard two foreigners chatting in a mall in Bangkok just before Songkran. 'Let me introduce my wife,' said one, waving at a girl many years younger than him who was holding a child. She was a nice enough girl, but I spotted her immediately as a former bar-girl. She still dressed and made up like a bar-girl, very sexy but not dignified.
So I tried to work out why this guy would think of marrying a prostitute. He surely read cautionary tales on web-sites. He must know the problems bar-girls bring with them? Forget the low likelihood of a happy ending, it must be obvious that everyone who has heard of Thailand will recognise her as a prostitute. All Thais who see them in the street will know she is a prostitute, every where they go. In the mall, in the park, on the beach. For as long as they live here that will be the way. He will be a man with no respect, looked down on by his Thai employer and work mates. In his home country it will be little different. Everyone will presume he has married a prostitute, and probably be right. So why does he do it?
Who are these characters who marry Thai bar-girls? In my experience they are exclusively sex-tourists. Equally most girls who marry westerners are bar-girls. An unpleasant fact, but fact, nonetheless. Westerners who take their wives home complain that they are treated as prostitutes by all and sundry, but they almost certainly are prostitutes.
I've never heard a sex-tourist describe himself as that. Who knows what they see themselves as. For me the test is easy, if you come here to have sex with bar-girls you are a sex-tourist. Worse still, if you came here to have sex with underage girls, or if you don't care how old they are, you are a paedophile. Some come to have sex with the ladyboys. Sorry to break it to you guys, but you are gay.
Just about every male who visits Thailand without a lady companion, from teenage backpackers to pensioners, are sex-tourists. You may live here most of the year. You may come over once a year to hook-up with your "girlfriend", but if you pay a girl for sex you are a sex-tourist. The vast majority of decent Thai girls will have nothing to do with you. Only bar-girls will be available to you. Because you're a sex-tourist they are probably the sort of girl you want, far too young for you, pretty and flirtatious. You probably know it is foolish, you've probably read all the warnings, but you're too stupid or vain or deluded to act sensibly.
Even freelancers picking up guys in Macdonalds or coffee shops, or hotel workers who will have sex with a guest for money are prostitutes. They sell sex, and if you marry them, it is a union between a sex-tourist and a prostitute, and it is destined to end in tragedy.
The reason? Just read the cautionary tales on the web. Bar-girls end up as bar-girls because they're soiled goods, sustaining themselves on drugs or drink and gambling obsessively in the hope of escaping the bar. Emotionally dependant, they probably have a Thai boyfriend or husband who is really no more than a pimp, and often an illegitimate child in the province being cared for by Mum. She will have a phone full of the numbers of the guys who have screwed her and who have left her distrustful. She knows you are a sex-tourist and she has no greater respect for sex-tourists than any other Thai.
She knows you have paid for sex with numerous Thai girls because women in your own country won't consider you as a sex partner, and that your addiction to prostitutes is unlikely to abate. How likely are you to settle down? How long before you want to pay for sex with another girl? Perhaps sex-tourists and prostitutes deserve one another, but the relationship will be too unstable to be permanent.
A large group who marry bar-girls are ex-pats who have moved to Thailand, the type you encounter in the bars of Pattaya or Bangkok Thick set guys with ostentatious necklaces and rings, and mobile phone clipped at their waist. These men claim Thailand is now their home. When you get deeper into conversation with them you realise they are only long term sex-tourists who have taken jobs that barely cover their cost of living. Small bar proprietors, ESOL teachers, computer based workers, scuba diving instructors. All could earn far more and have better career prospects in their home country, or other non-sex-tourist destination. The reason they live in Thailand rather the another country is that there here to satisfy there addiction to prostitutes.
It's the same for single pensioners here on retirement visas. It's not the low cost of living, the serenity of village life and temples that attract them. They live within 5 mins walk of Patpong in Bankok or Soi Post Ofice in Pattaya. Again, just long term sex-tourists. The government should kick them out, nothing would please me more. I can imagine what would happen in their home countries if they started buying sex with teenage girls.
Permanent residents, like holidaymakers have no chance of a relationship with a respectable Thai girl. If they marry it is to a bar-girl. They will say they met them in the mall or at a temple, but this is nonsense. When you talk to their wives it is soon apparent what sort of girl they are. Sometimes they have a series of failed marriages to bar-girls before they run out of money and go home. It bears repeating that a marriage to a bar-girl/prostitute cannot succeed. Any one who thinks his bar-girl truly loves him is in need of a good private detective before they invest their life savings in her.
It's true the number of marriages to Thai women by men considered ineligible in their home country is increasing. Paradoxically, the success rate amongst these is greater. Often the groom has a failed marriage at home and is now middle aged and wants a wife and family and sees an advert for Thai brides. This group often are not sex-tourist. They employ an agency to find a wife. If the agency doesn't trick them into marrying a hooker and the girl genuinely accepts a "farang" husband and is willing to relocate to his country the chances of the marriage succeeding are good.
It also helps that these tend to be marriages between equals, neither being particularly well educated or ambitious, so less susceptible to boredom. Also, agency arranged marriages emphasise companionship over sex so expectations on that side are reduced to normal bounds. This is where sex-tourist/bar-girl marriages unravel.
A girl who looks good in a bikini dancing on a stage or in a T-shirt and shorts is less attractive when bundled up against the chill easterly wind blowing in from the North Sea. Then the slender figure gives way to small and round figure on a European diet. As long as she continues to smile charmingly this is less of a disappointment to a man who has sought companionship through an agency than a sex-tourist who thought he was marrying a sex toy.'
Trevor re-read this several times, particularly the last two paragraphs. Not only did the Filipina bar-girls not see themselves as prostitutes, but the sex-tourists did not see themselves as sex-tourists.
He wondered:
What if I saw Allyza again?
What if we fell in love?
What if we wanted to marry?
How could we live in a world full of people as censorious as this poster?