After that night at Soi Cowboy, the three of us mie pan-ha yuh (had a lot of questions/problems). We couldn't stop analyzing the night and discussing what Soi Cowboy illustrated - about Thailand, about ourselves and about humanity. As Amber said before, it was like everything we had read about, right in front of our faces. I tend to consider myself somewhat desensitized to the prevalence of the sex industry here because I've lived here for such a long time. I've come to better understand the culture behind the sex industry, an industry which has become much more than simply issues of supply and demand. But, Soi Cowboy was still something else.
As we sipped on our beers, we wondered, what could possibly be sexy about fifteen naked girls on stage who weren't even dancing, but merely swaying in time to the music? Most of them didn't even make eye contact with customers, but rather looked at themselves in one of the multiple mirrors around the joint. So then we questioned the way men pick up the girls. Does a fellow just say, "Lookin' good, Number 22", referring to the number pinned between the bikini top, "Can I buy you a drink?". Does he eventually learn her name, or would it be easier to file her face away as a number in his mind? With a global service industry based on identifying customers by their social security numbers, telephone numbers or customer value numbers, should it come as a surprise that this particular sector is no different?
...In Love With A Stripper
Erin brought up an interesting observation. She said, if an alien were to come from outer space and observe the same phenomenon, they would probably see: teems of men gazing up in adoration and awe of the raw feminine energy emanating from a group of beautiful, bronzed women displaying their female bodies onstage. If one didn't know any better, it could have been a sacred ritual performed in a "pre-historic", animist, matriarchal society where women were revered by men. We were only slightly more informed than the alien observer, as a group of well-off, well-educated (mainly white) women from the West. Thus, our tendency to view the spectacle before us as a bunch of fat, balding pervs who simply needed the bucks to bang young, exotic but desperately poor women from rural Thailand.
But in so judging the, indeed saddening, state of the Thai commercial sex industry, perhaps we needed to reassess our position. Stories of love and marriage, leuk-krueng (half-Thai, half farang child) included, are commonly begun in places similar to Soi Cowboy. So often are we Western researchers (among others) keen to point out, study and fix the flaws of other societies without paying due treatment to our own society. Just today in the International Herald Tribune, it was reported that nearly a third of American female veterans say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military - 71% to 90% say they were sexually harassed by the men with whom they served. On another note, the incidences of sexual harassment and rape reported by females at American universities is staggering. We have our fair share of problems too.
So then we questioned our societies too - and reached a new level of thinking. Is what we were really seeing a product of the modern era, to which the history of man has led us? Maybe it was a picture of the power dynamics between Man and Woman, Rich and Poor, East and West, Developed and Developing, Light and Dark, Hopeful and Hopeless, Desire and Desperation. Yeah, man, we had reached the metaphysical height of the discussion - and then we didn't know where to go from there but home.
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