Thai Girls and Farang Men The Edge of Ambiguity: Keywords
Thai Girls and Farang Men The Edge of Ambiguity: Keywords
Erik Cohen
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the dynamics of the short-term and
longer term relationship between prostitutes and tourists
in Bangkok, Thailand. Based on fieldwork in one small
area of Bangkok it examines the expectations of the
women and the foreign men who patronize their services.
It concludes that for most of the women, prostitution
offers a career marked by a pattern of upward and
downward mobility, economic insecurity, often emotional
instability, and no long-term solution to the economic
conditions which made them join the profession in the
first place. Keywords: prostitution, relationships with
clients, social mobility.
403
THAI GIRLS AND FARANG MEN
RESUME
apartment houses. Many other, short time tourists, visit the soi,
eating in the little restaurants or spending time with the girls.
Several small hotels, coffee shops, and bars are located in the vicinity
of the sot.
The author conducted extended interviews and collected at least
partial biographies of some of the girls, and of the&rungs living in
or visiting the soi. The following is based to a large extent on this
case material.
The girls are predominantly in their twenties, from the north-east
of Thailand, and have lived from a few days to a few years in Bangkok.
Many have young children from an earlier disrupted marriage or
cohabitation with a Thai man, either back home or in Bangkok.
Some girls tried to work in other occupations, such as housegirls or
factory workers, but being unskilled, either found no work or could
not make ends meet from their meagre incomes and turned to
prostitution. Some may have worked with a Thai clientele prior to
turning tofurungs, but this point is difficult to verify. The girls work
primarily in bars and coffee shops which cater to tourists and other
foreign residents: there they are rapidly socialized by their peers into
a new and for many hitherto unfamiliar role. Most work in prosti-
tution intermittently from several days or weeks and up to a few
years. Some have Thai boyfriends who live off their earnings, but do
not serve as pimps: they neither hustle clients nor offer the girls
protection. Most girls, however, live alone and at least profess a
strong aversion against Thai men, based on their unhappy past
experiences (cf. Bujra 1977:25 for a similar aversion of Atu women
against African customers). They claim that they go out only with
farangs, and as far as one could establish, this seems to be generally
true.
The majority of girls had no formal training in English or any
other foreign language and, particularly at the outset, can speak only
Thai Since very few farangs possess any knowledge of Thai, com-
munication between them and the Thai girls is limited and in great
part conducted in simplified “foreigner talk’ (Ferguson 198 11,
English, or sign language. The chances of a girl to attract desired
foreigners are much increased by the knowledge of a foreign lan-
guage, since many farangs look for companionship as well as sex
during their sojourn in Thailand (for a similar situation in Kigali,
Ruanda see Vandersypen 1977:991.
TYPOLOGY OF RELATIONSHIPS
Combined with the problems the girl encounters in the wake of her
sudden, unprepared and radical transition into a new environ-
ment-the ignorance of the language and customs, the loneliness,
the separation from family and friends, the unaccustomed foods
and climate-these tensions and conflicts make such marriages
highly brittle and lead to their frequent early termination.
Other kinds of misunderstandings leading to tensions and
breakdowns derive from the issue of jealousy. The Thai girl usually
develops a marked possessiveness about her farang partner, ex-
pressed in strong feelings and protestations of jealousy upon the
slightest suspicion of unfaithfulness. This is the case even though
the girl, as described above, may entertain a variety of liaisons of
varying intensity with different men, or may not be emotionally
involved with him. On a superficial level, such possessiveness may
well express the girl’s fear of losing her source of security and
support. But on another level, it expresses, like the demand for
money, a deeper cultural theme: the sense of “losing face” or
shame caused by the discovery of infidelity, the intensity of which
is often incomprehensible to a foreigner, unaware of the crucial
importance of keeping one’s face in Thai culture. This lack of
comprehension is intensified by the farang’s perception of the girl
as a prostitute, i.e., a woman whose promiscuity is part of her
occupation, to whom he feels no particular obligation to be faith-
ful. Her profession, indeed, may well arouse his own feelings of
anxiety and jealousy, particularly during periods of separation.
Tumultous scenes of mutual recriminations and veritable tan-
trums of fury on the girl’s part frequently punctuate a relationship
and often precipitate its break-up.
The important point to note is that conflicts lead to at least a
temporary redefinition of the relationship on the girl’s part, thereby
exacerbating its ambiguity, Her principal strategy in the case of
conflict over money or the partner’s infidelity is to turn the
relationship provocatively into a mercenary one-by demanding
exorbitant amounts of money as payment for all the time spent
with her partner. The point of the exercise is not only to extricate
money, but also, by degrading herself to the status of an ordinary
prostitute, to rob the relationship of any intrinsic or “authentic”
meaning which it might have had for the farang-thereby seriously
injuring his male self-esteem. The relationship might break up at
this point in disillusionment. But in many instances, once the girl’s
fury has been acted out, it resumes again in the same ambiguous
mood which characterized it before, oscillating between emotional
attachment and mercenary interest and leaving at least the farang
and often even the girl herself uncertain as to where each precisely
stands with the other, or for that matter, as to one’s own emotions.
the crasser forms of staging on the part of the girls. Newly arrived
&rungs are more apt to turn a casual encounter into a permanent
liaison; there are frequent instances of tourists who married a girl
after a few days acquaintance. As the&rang gains experience and
becomes more discerning, his eagerness cools off and his attitude
to the Thai girls becomes less favorable. Many of those with
experience emphasize the greediness, opportunism, unfaithfulness,
and promiscuity of the Thai girls, qualities which sharply contra-
dict the image propagated in the media. While still physically
attracted to them, many decline to become emotionally involved.
Their disenchantment is often accompanied by cynicism, well
expressed by a drunken American working in Saudi Arabia, but
spending his time-off in Thailand, where he is married to a Thai
woman: “A beautiful people-as long as you have money!” Such
disenchanted farangs often cease to have protracted liaisons al-
together and entertain a sexual life-style characterized by a con-
stant change of partners, whom they often choose from the fringe
of the prostitution scene-girls who arrived only recently, and who
are still more innocent, naive and pliant than those with longer
experience.
The attitudes of the girls undergo a parallel change in the wake of
disillusionment. It is common for a girl to get quite deeply involved
in a love-relationship with one of the firstfarangs whom she meets.
The trauma of breakup of the relationship or of separation after the
departure of her boyfriend usually provokes a personal crisis, which
eventuates in a more guarded or discriminating attitude towards
farangs. Some become completely detached, at most feigning in-
volvement in “staged” relationships (Rasmussen and Kuhn 1975:
2791; others become more discriminating, but from time to time do
get seriously involved with a farang. Owing to the ambiguity and
ephemerality of such liaisons, the careers of these girls are punc-
utuated by emotional crises of varying severity.
The life of most girls is markedly ephemeral. It is characterized by
considerable precariousness and instability which-though rooted
in their broader social situation-is reinforced by the girls’ life style
and by the attitudes which they develop as they become socialized
into prostitution. This predicament can be observed on several
levels. The decision to engage in prostitution is itself, at least
initially, not a conscious choice of a career. Rather, it appears to the
girls as a temporary resort to be abandoned once a better chance
offers itself. Many girls, especially at the early stages of involvement
with prostitution, hope, like some Arab boys in Israel (Cohen 1971)
to escape their predicament completely, through marriage with a
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