Screw-a-Diner

Imagine that you live in a city where there is a restaurant with rather weird rules. Upon entering, you are supposed to say which meal you want and pay some money. You can pay as much or as little as you like, even though 1 cent would likely be frowned upon and 1000 Euros would likely be an exaggeration. You are also expected to do some work like clean a few tables or wash some dishes or change a light bulb or sing a song to entertain the people. The choice is usually up to you. After that you sit down and wait. The thing is, they may bring your food or they may not. Sometimes you have to wait 5 minutes, sometimes 5 hours, sometimes you get tired of waiting and leave without food.

The problem is that there is no way of knowing in advance how much you would have to pay or what work you would have to do or how long you would have to wait. Sometimes you will get a meal for 1 Euro, and sometimes you won't get one for 100 Euros. No matter how much money you give, no matter how much work you do, there is never any guarantee that you will get any food whatsoever. All your questions are answered with "you'll just have to wait and see". You ask how much money you should pay to make sure you'll get food, and there's no answer. Nobody knows. When you ask which meal would be available quickly, they don't know – you'll just have to pick one and find out if and when you'll get it.

If you complain, people are confused – that's the way how it's supposed to be at a restaurant, that's the way all restaurants in this city work, what else do you want? If you try to suggest that there should be a list of all available meals with prices and waiting times clearly indicated, the people think you're crazy. If you say you're starving, they laugh at you and tell you to grow up and not be such a sissy. You can see that many other people are really hungry, but for some weird reason they put up with it and act like they're perfectly fine and even like it there. Some people actually starve to death but nobody seems to care. When you try to go tho the chef and beg him to give you some food, you'll notice that dozens of people are doing exactly that, and the chef just tells you all to fuck off. More amazingly, some of the customers, apparently just as hungry as everyone else, are chasing other customers away from the chef. And people who are caught stealing any food are thrown to prison for years.

You notice, however, that the chef is letting some people in through the back door and they always get to eat what they want, without waiting and without even having to pay. Unfortunately, the chef would never let you in through the back door. You wonder how those other people do it, but all they tell you is useless platitudes like you just have to be friends with the chef. Unfortunately, you can't figure out how to get friends with the chef, so you're stuck going through the usual frustrating paying-working-waiting routine, just as 95 percent of the people have to.

Such restaurants are the only place in the city where people eat. Food shops are technically illegal. Many of them are tolerated by the police for some time and then raided. Even those that are in business are difficult to find, you are often treated with disrespect and the food is often of poor quality. More importantly, most people consider buying food from a shop to be awfully shameful or even criminal. For the life of you, you can't figure out why people despise food shops. What is supposed to be wrong with handing over a fixed amount of money and getting the food, instead of the horrible stress one has to go through at the restaurants? Unfortunately, nobody would explain it to you. People get angry at you for even asking, or ridicule you for being "the kind of person who would shop for food".

You could also find your own food, like fruits and vegetables and berries which grow here and there. Unfortunately, they are nowhere near as nutritious as real food, and besides, that is also considered horribly shameful. "Food-gatherer" is a wide-spread insult even more shameful than "food-shopper". Nobody would ever admit in public that he is gathering his own food, although you suspect that nearly everyone is doing it from time to time.

One hell of a fucked-up place to live in, isn't it?

Actually, I think the above ought to seem not so unfamiliar to you, if you're male. After all, that is the kind of life men usually have to lead – not in order to get food, of course, but to get sex. In order to satisfy our natural physiological need for sex, the overwhelming majority of us are expected to put up with outrageous date abuse. Our society has given women the complete control of sex. No matter how many times you have taken a woman out on a date, she will never have the slightest obligation to have sex with you. You can go on dates with dozens of women, but no matter how much money, time and nerves you have spent, there will never be any guarantee that any of the women will give you what you want. It's always a matter of chance, a game of numbers. You can't make an arrangement, like, you take her three times dancing, two times to movies and three times to dinner, and then she'll let you fuck her. No, you are just expected to keep investing, with no right to demand any return, ever.

Fortunately, there are places in the world where you can go into a bar, and almost as soon as you have sat down, a scantily dressed young woman will approach you to beg you to take her to your hotel room (or your home if you live there). She is the one who struggles to make conversation, while you can just sit back, touch her up and eye the other girls. If you don't fancy her, you can ignore her, and after a while she will leave and another girl will approach you, or you can invite one to sit with you. When you decide to take one of the girls away, it goes without saying that first you get to fuck her, and after that you can take her out on a date and get to know her better and have a relationship with her, if you so desire. You won't be stuck to approaching any girl who looks even halfway acceptable, in desperate hope that occasionally you will somehow succeed to get some of them into bed. On the contrary, you get to choose which woman you want, and if you choose a woman, it is clearly understood that it's "panties down before money down" (except for a small up-front payment). All that for a fraction of the financial and emotional cost of seducing a woman back home.

So far, I have found such places in two countries: Thailand and the Philippines. That is where I'm going to live soon. I have decided that I will never again submit to date abuse. Never again will I beg a woman to be allowed to spend my time and money on her without the slightest obligation on her part.