Keep Go-Go-Going: Friday Night Bar Crawl Along Soi Cowboy

Shy men who have been saying no all night find their wills sapped by drink and the ceaseless attention of near-naked young women; all of a sudden the prospect of going back to the hotel alone is more appalling—and somehow more amoral, a crime against life, even—than congress with a prostitute. Skillfully, the girls build a dream world of fantasy in the Western mind, a world that is mysteriously difficult to let go of. And the girls, too, have their fantasies: of finding the farang who would support them for life, or failing that, take them to the to the West and relieve them, for a year or two, of this living hand to mouth, not to mention the indignity of their trade. The bar is packed.  

from Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

Last night we went to Soi Cowboy. A short 10 or 15-minute walk from Sara’s home, we were all poised with excitement for our first night going out in Bangkok. After enjoying some Tex-mex food and icy margaritas for dinner, we decided to venture to this particular street (or soi in Thai) because of it’s notorious reputation for harboring some of the “nicer” commercial sex venues disguised as cheap bars with draught beer specials and beautiful dancing Asian girls. We figured since we were here in Thailand to study the sexual trafficking of women, we might as well do some informal research and see “a real flesh trade amid the flashing neon” as the guidebooks call it.

My first reaction as we turned onto the soi, was, “Wow, I feel like I’m at a carnival.” My eyes actually hurt from the brightness of the red, pink, and blue neon bar signs lining the crowded street. There was the smell of frying fish and spicy pork, mixed with a stench of alcohol and sweat as groups of men moved from bar to bar.

Once we reached the end of the street, we looked at each other and paused. Should we go in? We had made it this far. The first bar we chose was called Baccara and enticed us because it had no entrance fee and looked quite busy inside. Sara gently pushed Erin and I ahead, it was better if the farang (foreigner) girls entered first. I followed Erin’s ginger locks through the black curtain doorway and into a different world- a world where the fatter your wallet, the more love and attention you can buy.

Baccara’s featured two levels; the bottom floor featured the main stage where a group of little Asian women (sometimes) wearing tiny bikini tops and mini skirts bumped around smiling at the Japanese and farang men below them. I couldn’t help thinking that the stick-thin girls looked like chopsticks with hair, bouncing up and down on the table before the meal is served. To add to the image, the girls displayed little plastic buttons with numbers clipped to their bikinis, so that customers could place their order hassle-free. Very sexy, indeed. The upper level of the bar also had a stage, with an infamous glass floor, so that customers on the lower level could see up the women’s skirts. Internet sites advertising Soi Cowboy joke that in the West, farang women struggle to be promoted above the glass ceiling in the workplace, but the bar girls at Baccara’s have already succeeded in this lofty goal.

Erin, Sara, and I sat by the bar, facing the stage, next to a farang couple. Besides two farang couples, we were the only females in the place. I didn’t order anything from the bar, which was apparently unacceptable, as we found out when one of the bar waitresses came around to hound me down about ordering a drink. Sara pointed out they have to keep the clientele liquored up to maintain the dream-like atmosphere; the bar is not part of reality, so you can leave your moral constraints outside. As Sara and I dealt with the feisty waitress, Erin was swept up into a conversation with an Aussie guy selling real estate in Bangkok, who upon learning Erin was here for a research project, revealed he didn’t even know what trafficking was. Erin took her time enlightening him on the hidden crimes connected to the commercial sex trade, and he in turn offered his own insight, “Well, ya know it’s a different mentality for these girls. For them, sex is like washing dishes.”

Sensing our cue to leave, we ventured down the street to a less popular bar, probably because there was no full nudity. There were fewer girls on stage in this bar, but there were mirrors everywhere, creating the feeling that you were surrounded by booty shorts in every direction. This bar was too dark for our taste, had strange leather seats, and the music was too repetitive, so we continued down the road.

A tiny young girl with short buzzed hair and wearing little red jumper pants was wandering the street selling red and white roses. Erin bent down and bought two red ones, which made her giggle with glee. We passed her later, after she sold all of her roses, and saw her with a huge smile as she stood looking up at a big men pumped with steroids, walking out of a bar with a Thai girl linked on his arm. There is something wrong with a world that will ignore a little girl on the streets until the day she grows breasts.

Neon lights attracted us to Midnite Bar, which could be mistaken for a cosmic bowling center, if not for the go-go girls outside of it holding signs that read “Draft Beer 90 Baht All Nite Long.” Unlike the others, this bar was well lit inside, and as we walked through the crowd of men to a free corner in the back of the bar, we could feel some of the men shrink a bit and lower their heads. Our presence in the bar disrupted the dream and brought them back to the reality—and back in touch with their moral consciences.

Erin, Sara, and I could not maintain much anonymity in this bar, and before long we had a little group of bar girls cooing around us, touching our hair, asking us to smile, and then giving us big thumbs- up signs. The girls loved having other girls in the bar, especially a redhead and a blonde. Sara was assumed to be our Thai chaperone for the evening, and the girls conveyed to Sara in Thai how ecstatic they were that she brought such cute farangs to their bar. The girls loved dancing with us, even if it was just in our little corner. We got the chance to talk to a few of the girls; one girl who was particularly infatuated with our curvy bodies, told us she has two babies. One other girl told us it was her birthday tonight. She was turning twenty years old. We asked her if she liked working there, and she shook her head, “No, no. But I have to. For my father. My father sick.” Bam. Talk about a whack over the head when everything you’ve been reading in the research literature- suddenly is standing right in front of you, talking.

I admit, at many times during the night I turned into a robot. I couldn’t decide what outraged me the most- the fact that some of these girls didn’t seem to mind selling their bodies, the fact that some foreign men justified their sexual escapades as if it was just another business transaction, or that statistically, some of these girls were probably victims of sex trafficking- brought to Bangkok from their small villages up north under the guise that they’d be working in a nice, up-scale, restaurant. Are we really part of a society that still upholds the Madonna-Whore complex, full of men who want to marry respectable women who maintain their purity, but then indulge in hiring a prostitute during a business trip to Thailand?

The night was an experience I will not forget. Perhaps we should have stuck to The Lonely Planet’s guidebook suggestion for seeing Soi Cowboy during the day: “Stop in at the nearby internet cafes to see groups of bar girls writing love-letter emails to their new sugar daddies; the well-worn piece of paper in from of them is something of a ‘master’ copy.”