Paradise lost for single men in Thailand

Thailand is often presented as a lush paradise for summer getaways, even among the international media. Yes, the Thai traditions are a bit silly — when some brides hold hands while receiving their husband-to-be, they don’t formally get married — but the country is lovely. If tourists went into Bangkok’s markets and picked through the plastic flowers and chrysanthemums, they’d come away with a classic taste of the Asian experience.Not to mention the streets full of pretty Thai girls ready to fulfill the desires of the millions of single travelers. 

But things might be changing. In multiple ways. All it takes is a walk down the world famous Walking street in Pattaya to see how it has changed over the past years.

But even among those who lived a hundred years ago, Thailand remains a source of both envy and concern. Thailand’s urban dwellers complain about the widespread abuse of human rights, particularly by the Thai military, which occupies many outlying provinces and has been subject to a long, bloody occupation of its own cities in the south. Meanwhile, the other half of the country — the rural poor — still live under the grim dictatorship of an entrenched caste, the Bangkok chave, which has literally trashed the rural infrastructure and made endless use of brutal repressive methods to suppress political dissent. (All this was also underwritten by Bill Clinton, who poured millions of dollars into anti-communist programs in the country that were a legal but morally questionable enticement to the Thai elite to ratify Washington’s 1996 Foreign Assistance Act).

Now Thailand’s royal family is refusing to bow to American pressure, and the Trump administration is standing behind the Thai junta. If it comes to that, it won’t be the first time Donald Trump has backed away from a principled ally when it means pleasing some foreign despot.

I know that Thailand’s democracy suffers from some serious flaws — which, to be fair, would happen in any place with as many different political forces and deeply entrenched interests. Yet it’s hard to believe that Thailand is any worse off under Suu Kyi’s dictatorship than it was under her military predecessor, Than Shwe, and now with a military junta.

Yes, the corruption and abuse of power are widespread, but that’s how governing works in most countries. It’s not at all clear that a deeply flawed democracy is preferable to a system in which the right leaders commit crimes against citizens. Moreover, if Thailand had recognized its democratic inadequacies, you’d be likely to see street protests. The worst thing about Thailand’s democracy is that it doesn’t work; the better thing would be to pursue reform.

Most importantly, the kingdom is keeping everything in order, which is more than can be said of Thailand’s more famous neighbors: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. If a nation can be said to have earned the right to boast of its success, it’s Thailand.

Why, then, is this country so loved? Part of the answer has to do with some of the pharaonic excesses that have become the standard, like the construction of a new Royal Palace complex, an extravagance that rightly enraged non-Thais. Or with their fondness for large family sizes.

But Thailand is also loved because people have seen it as an engine of global growth, which has afforded Thailand access to a far larger and more affluent world than its comparatively small size would otherwise permit. So when the good fortune runs out, in this case the cruel prophecy turns out to be true.

Whats up with girls on Walking street?

Yes, young Thai girls are back on the streets, roaming the major cities of Thailand at far in excess of what was considered safe and sensible. What a shame!

People respond in all sorts of ways to these phenomena. Some call for greater enforcement of existing laws; others believe that the wilder the crime scene, the better.

Which is much easier in an Thailand where almost any bar can afford an exotic dancer or a prostitute, and is willing to make a significant financial investment in doing so. For that matter, most Thais have no trouble understanding that the strippers on Walking Street in Pattaya are topless, as opposed to covered by an Angelina Jolie disguise or something.

True, in a certain light, the fact that so many Thai girls are now doing the stripping may not seem especially dangerous. If those women are non-dangerous, however, they also represent one of the most severe challenges to the old idea of the age at which young Thai women become candidates for sex.

Let me explain. We never really started talking about women and men differently — sex and marriage — in Thailand. One of the greatest cultural and societal social innovations of the modern era was the assumption that men and women could be separate. Women learned to hold down jobs, decide for themselves what to do with their lives, wait for men to step up, and most importantly — of course — that men would understand the natural roles of women and respect them in those roles beyond getting married with a grand wedding ceremony and having kids. That is, and, we at least now implicitly believe, remains the norm.

But then the Great Recession came along, and everything changed.

For one thing, as this column has already noted, young men seem to be scrambling for ways to finance their drinking, reckless playboy lives. And as alcohol becomes a larger and larger part of the cost of sexual activity, young men are going to have to ask themselves: What is the current value of drinking? And what are the risks involved?

That’s a different question than, for example, asking what the present value of marrying someone is. And yet it points to a distressing fact: Youth — the 20-something-year-old age range — is now having trouble finding a place in the job market.

And while women, for some reason, get new careers all the time — especially professional careers — it hasn’t happened with young men. Too many of them have ended up in low-wage service jobs — which involves not knowing how to work a computer, but it also means that young men find it increasingly hard to figure out what their real value is. If they can’t figure it out, the risk is they’ll fail to seek out new vocations. This will be a terrible waste of human potential.

And, as the old saying goes, it’s a real danger when young men don’t realize that having a girlfriend at 19 or 20 is not the same as having a boyfriend at 30 or 40. People don’t become happily married just because they decide that a wife is worth it, and the psychological aspects of young love are much more complicated than the social and cultural ones. The economy — if it actually delivers more jobs and income to young people — would have a huge impact on whether young men will be able to rise to the challenges that have their futures in mind.

This is why so many Thais already accept that all the girls on the streets are “rough sex,” to be found either with men or with little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Rough sex is the result of the Great Recession, as it is a natural consequence of reduced young men’s earnings.

It’s nice to see some limited progress in recent years. But just because we’re doing a better job of policing prostitution doesn’t mean that we should be afraid of seeing some more young women walking the streets. It’s hard to see what would happen if we simply allowed them to do so, because there’s a lot of very dangerous work going on outside of the sex industry.

The Thai wedding experience

I’m sure that Martha Stewart wouldn’t mind sharing my “secret” to achieving perfect aesthetic perfection, but there’s a problem: If you really wanted to use beautiful things, you’d never get married.

Take the “on” side of the wedding equation. If you absolutely, positively have to get married, you’re very much better off starting the process in the U.S. than in other countries — not just because of the mismatch between U.S. and European traditions, but also because of the spectacularly ridiculous costs here. This is not an unreasonable conclusion, although it would actually be wrong — social stigma is one reason. Instead, the challenge is, how do you find the right Thai girl to date and perhaps, marry.

Which leads us to the “off” side of the equation. Though at the time of writing, Thailand seems to be undefeated (the yeti vs. Thai child competition seems close, so far), the wedding trade is moving in the opposite direction. The Thai wedding market is now so big, and so central to the country’s economy, that the government is now spending billions of dollars buying up bad debts in the industry. And though widespread social conservatism means many planned weddings will be forced to be canceled, the real losers will be the weddings themselves.

Let’s be clear: It’s not that Thai girls don’t care about weddings. Everyone loves them, and the only Thai girls not likely to show up are single Thai gils and the professionals who charge a pretty penny for arranging them. (Friends and relatives are easy to find.) But when the people who are selling them break the debt rules and can’t pay back the money, you’re going to get a lot fewer weddings.

“Inefficient Debt Servicing,” a research paper by Suwanda Krishnan of the Inter-American Development Bank (whom I had the pleasure of meeting the the festival earlier this year), sums up the situation: “Despite the significant expansion of wedding/event services, the leverage leverage of organized wedding service providers across different provinces and cities across Thailand remains significant. Based on my on-the-ground research in various provinces, the majority of wedding companies are consolidated into the large service providers with, on average, extended operating sizes, capital requirements, and indebtedness on a par with services procured in developed markets.”

As the papers show, the level of leveraged debt is a small part of the bigger picture, which is that many family-owned businesses are failing even as others thrive. It’s a toxic combination, combining heavy borrowing — which makes it hard to renegotiate debts if demand for weddings dries up — with unattractive profitability, rooted in Thai wedding tradition.

It’s also a collapse in what might have been a promising opportunity. Historically, Thailand (along with China) was able to turn a vast workforce surplus into a market for high-end weddings, weddings organized by professionals rather than families. And with smartphones, those professionals could now communicate with far-flung customers anywhere in the world. In addition, having a big population, relatively high living standards and reasonably regulated markets (thanks to strong central-government intervention) meant that the opportunity was probably the biggest we would ever see, so even the early stage trauma might have been manageable.

Instead, we’re just going to see more Thai couples marrying their pets.

More misadventures dating Thai girls

Dating Thai girls has become one of those perennial cultural quandaries — like How to Watch Thai soap operas without falling in Love — that’s irresistible to Thai girls, women and men of all ages, which is how I’ve gotten into so much trouble with Thai girls at the Thai youth festival a few years ago.

But some might say my glibness merely reflects my prejudice, which is what provoked me to share a rather pleasing experience with you.

I first went to attend a typical Thai wedding in Bangkok last month. During the first week, I was traveling on my own. My heart is not in it, and I was feeling that way, since I also decided to drop out of grad school. But at the end of the month, I was assigned to work as an in-house scholar at a tour agency where foreigners help tourists navigate Thailand’s tourist attractions. After my first days on the job, I felt happy about my assignment. Plus, for once in my life, I was single.

I did not expect much. But then, finally, on my third day, I met the ladies — “the beautiful ones,” as they are called, one of whom is my favorite (well, of about 80 in Bangkok) and the other who I’m totally blown away by. This week I’ve been going on dates. In four days, I went on dates with two Thai girls and I really liked them.

But I’m still single. I can still afford rent and medical expenses here — so far, thank god. But I’m having to resort to friends’ apartments, which I really resent. And on top of that, this week, I’ve literally been surrounded by dames. I got in my “Friday” and wined and dined three girls in a row. And it’s as if none of this was really happening. It felt like I was ducking out of a big, dumb mistake I made. So I just said “Chai,” and turned the lights out.

This bittersweet experience at a Thai festival

My visit to Thailand was right on the cusp of the Thai Youth Festival, a sort of summer circus in Bangkok. I was with the invitation list, and each day, before going on stage, had to subject myself to Thai girls that was, in more ways than one, beyond amazing.

First, I was given a cursory introduction and asked for my name. Then I was sequestered in a dressing room, naked from the waist up. Finally, I was required to parade in a room outfitted with electric fans, The Red Light Girls, beneath a banner reading: “Do You Want to Date Thai Girls?”

What? At a 20-something age, you’d think I would be more focused on knowing about my history, or forging bonds with my fellow young people. I didn’t understand why this made me, after all, a woman, only a Thai.

So, having endured the walk of shame, one must surely wish to ask why I was permitted to spend so long in the room with this kind of stuff?

No, it was quite simple: Thai girls — which is to say, it was heavily Thai girls — were our “human props.” It was a sort of international version of the illusion contests commonly played out at Republican conventions. And while there may have been something poignant about being employed as “human props,” that quite literally has no place in my life.

Thus, the next morning, I headed out to shoot. I knew where I was going — and why, but nothing more. We entered a nearby zoo. It was already full. As I was shooting, a number of people tried to talk to me. I attempted to politely request permission to continue. There was no such thing as a polite no, and so I repeated my request — a ritual I’d learned in previous encounters with Thai men: absolutely no, but as long as we can share an afternoon in the zoo, I’ll go back the next day and take it one more time. As I was winding down, I heard a voice I recognized. It was the voice of my father — a renowned genealogist and historian of Western civilization. He’d been posted to Bangkok in the 1980s and had told me stories about the zoo as I grew up. They remained in my heart..

I hadn’t known much about the festival at that point, but at the price I was paying — they had become my human props — I knew why I was spending so much time there, and why I was so uneasy about doing so. Then I went on stage for the final show.

One hundred and fifty human props got into the grand hall. I estimated there were about 30 wearing bathing suits. The stage was huge, and the seating was close. There were chairs for everyone and rugs on the floor.

As the show began, there was a drum, the “carnival drum.” Then there was a solemn announcement, for which a woman introduced herself: “You know not to bother me in case they kill me.” There were 20 dancers in costumes that suggested “The Chinese Zombie Princess” from the 16th century, and a man in a 3,000-year-old traditional Thai girl costume. The musical I was playing “Croatoan” had four female dancers on “archaeological” platforms. Then, while I played my instrument, a similarly dressed group of girls gathered before me, as if to greet me. And so it went, for the next hour or so.

So it was late, very late — the organizers had indicated it would be around 10 — and when the show was over, I walked into the night, cheered by a raucous group of fans, euphoric about how my time in Thailand had been interesting.

But I had walked away more perplexed than exhilarated. For having listened to the performers, I’d been observed by them.

Dating Thai girls in Thailand

One morning, after a long night of sushi drinking in the tiny bar near my apartment, a young Thai girl at the next table insisted that I change my shirt.

“This is not necessary,” I said. “I can just take it off.”

But she insisted. In fact, she got a little unruly.

She was half Thai, the other half Japanese. She had a pretty face and a blonde hair, but I quickly discovered that she was not the real deal. She was a sexy, lying about her age and fabricating her resume. And it was clear from the way she pulled back her skin that she had a fake chest, and neither was she fluent in Thai.

At that moment, I decided I was not cut out for dating Thai girls. I am usually a pretty nice and easygoing, and I like Thai girls who are friendly and charming, but Thai girls were too flaky for me.

After an awkward night of conversation and some business together, I left.

I will readily admit that this was a mistake. To be honest, I always really liked Thais, and still do. But once I decided I was not cut out for them, I have been trying to overcompensate for this by living with Thai girls in New York and Thailand.

My living situation is almost always with girls from Southeast Asia. Thai girls, of course, are the most common, but we have also been working with Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Laotian, Vietnamese and Indonesian girls, among others.

My point is not, or not primarily, that these are bad girls. On the contrary, they all have their own charms, their own particular skill sets, and, to some extent, their own points of view.

My point is that these girls are the exception. Most Thai girls I meet on Tinder or other dating apps are neat, reliable, even-tempered and kind. They all seem to work and keep their kids and their houses, with all the accoutrements of suburbia.

I personally am not keen on ordering at the cafeteria, but these girls love fast food, as do many Americans.

And I know that most Thai girls I know work hard and are good at what they do, but much less enjoy their work than I do. Their work-life balance is generally much better than mine, because many of them work less and are more successful.

The point, then, is that dating Thai girls is a very particular experience. We like them for a variety of reasons. And why? Because they are Thai.

Some believe they’re better wives and mothers, at least if you believe the most hardcore conservative stereotypes of Thai girls. In my experience, I’ve always just found them nice, dutiful, loyal girls.

Some believe they’re better friends. Lots of Americans, as I’ve discovered, are extraordinarily friendly with their foreign friends. But I find Thais even more flirtatious than many Americans are with each other. And I’ve not met too many Americans who are as chill as the Thai girls I’ve been with.

Some believe they’re better girlfriends. Many men are probably ready to muck in with Thai girls as friends; some are not. I’ve found Thai girls to be polite but also wise. But then again, I’ve met very few Americans who are both polite and wise.

And some believe they’re better lovers. They’re not. Only time will tell if any of them are better lovers than the girls I’ve met.

But these are my thoughts, on one Tinder date. In short, Tinder Tinder Tinder is a waste of time.

I guess it’s inevitable that we would like some Thais in our lives. But it’s easy to see why the most common result of some of these dating episodes is disappointment.

The overall point, then, is not really to find true love or a good business partnership with a Thai woman. It’s to learn some Thai habits, some Eastern values, a few ways of living.

Sometimes these happen spontaneously. Sometimes they are planned. And often they involve a lot of Thai sex.