Why do Farang men fall for ladyboys?

When you begin to gather information about the sex market in Thailand, you can't avoid running across numerous warnings about ladyboys: how there are so many of them and how they are so difficult to detect.

"Ladyboy" is a common term for transvestites and transsexuals. Transvestites are men who wear women's clothes, and apparently many of them pose as women in Thailand and woo tourists, so they would take them back into their hotel room – only to discover that what they thought was a girl has a penis. Transsexuals are persons who were born male but later chose to undergo sex-change surgery. From what I've read, they have surgically-constructed vaginas that can actually be fucked, although they don't get wet, and there is supposedly a slight risk of rupturing the thing when the penis is too big or the fuck too intensive.

On almost all photos, ladyboys look very obviously non-women. However, I remember a photo of a naked girl whom I would have never suspected, yet the person who had posted the photo claimed that the person on it was a ladyboy.

When I went to Thailand for the first time, I was very cautious about it. Before I took a girl back to my hotel, I stuck a hand into her panties regardless of her protests to make sure she had a vagina and not a penis. As to transsexuals, I found myself agreeing with one writer who said that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then he'll just treat it as a duck. I decided that when a person looks like an attractive woman, talks like an attractive woman and acts like an attractive woman, I don't care if he or she is a sex changer or not. I will fuck him or her and not worry about it. After all, it's the nice body that matters, not its ability to produce children.

As to the supposed difficulty of detection, one mustn't forget that transsexuals have only their genitals and breasts altered, not their throats or arms. Regardless of the silicone breasts and such, there is a good chance that the voice should give them away, and regardless of them having learned to walk like women, their manly muscles still have a good chance to make them look unattractive to us.

However, there is this weird thing – I have seen white women back home and in other white countries whose faces look very much like Thai ladyboys to me. Their percentage is especially large among beauty pageant contestants. In the distant past when I still watched those, I often found myself wondering how could any man find such women beautiful. Women I saw looking out of my window were on average clearly prettier than those tall and big girls especially chosen as suitable candidates for the titles of beauty queens. To make it absolutely clear – I am not talking about fat ugly dykes here. I am talking about women who are generally very stylish and attractive to many men, but tall and with crude mask-like faces. (To give you an idea what I mean – look at the porn models Sandee Westgate and Priya Rai. They have obviously female genitals, and I have no reason to suspect that they weren't born female, yet their faces look repulsively unfeminine to me, as does the large size of their bodies.)

Anyway, on my second trip to Thailand, I had this curious experience. I was walking along Sukhumvit Road, and there was another one of those places where girls stand on the sidewalk and do all they can to awake your interest. One of the girls gently grabbed my arm and addressed me, as girls do. When I looked at her, I not only found I didn't particularly fancy her – I also had a strange feeling that something was wrong. Anyway, I happened to be on my way to somewhere else, so I walked on. A little later it occurred to me that those girls were unusually tall for Thai women. Also they had faces like those big blatantly unfeminine chicks back home. So they might well have been ladyboys, I realised. The point I am trying to make is this – while I don't know what they had in their panties, I do know they didn't look like anything I'd ever want to fuck.

I also had my suspicions about a quite normal-looking, petite girl I took from a go-go bar in Angeles. When I was inserting my penis into her vagina, she began to wail and protest like she was in pain or something, and she adjusted her position and I tried it again, and again she wouldn't let me, and so we continued until I lost my erection and she gave me a blowhandjob. (I rewarded her with a correspondingly small tip.) Also she acted in a strangely dominant and aggressive way with the other girl. So she might have been a transsexual. Again, I have no way of knowing for sure.

Those two are the closest encounters I have personally had with ladyboys. Need I tell you that I stopped worrying about the ladyboy danger eventually? So I was mildly amused when a friend of mine told me this story. I knew his grown-up son who had moved to Australia after school. He was still living there, and the two of them decided to have a holiday together in Thailand. My friend told me how he took a woman into his hotel room and he or she turned out to have a penis. And he said there were several occasions when a woman caught his fancy and his son was like: "Get real, dad, that's a man!"

The point is, some men (such as my friend's son and myself) seem to be able to easily tell ladyboys from actual women, and some men just can't.

That story, along with that beauty pageant weirdness I mentioned, brought me to the realisation that many white men are apparently attracted to tall big women with rough unfeminine faces. That is why such women keep scoring high in beauty contests and that is why some men keep ending up with penissed girls in their hotel rooms.

Another thing about that buddy of mine: I have noticed how he keeps getting mildly gay when drunk – not outright touching, but brushing against me all the time, and generally getting uncomfortably into what I perceive as my private space. Whenever I try to move away by 20-30 cm, he just moves closer, apparently not aware of it himself. Apart from that private space thing, he has never shown the slightest sign of homosexuality. The way he talks, sober or drunk, he is a staunch hetero. Married and a repeat adulterer, for that matter.

Could it be that the men who fall for ladyboys fail to recognise them as such because, subconsciously, they don't want to?

Could it be that they sense the male pheromones naturally secreted by the ladyboys' bodies, and that turns them on (as well as turns men like me off)?

The suppressed homosexuality hypothesis does not explain the popularity of tall stone-faced white women. It is therefore likely that the primary reason for the ladyboy-gullibility syndrome remains the affected men's yearning for a big strong woman taking care of them (in other words, a substitute mother), while subconscious homosexual tendencies enhance the effect in some cases.

Stupid Farangs who can't let servants be servants

The general idea in business is that waiters, shop assistants and such ought to be polite to the customers. It was different in the old Soviet Union: the service personnel demanded politeness from the customers. It was understandable. Firstly, all business was government-owned, so there was no competition. Secondly, there was workforce shortage, so you could hardly afford to fire bad emplyees. Thirdly, the centrally planned economy fixed the prices below market value, which meant that the demand for wares and services significantly exceeded supply.

In spite of the capitalist economy, today's Western Europe seems to be on its way to forgetting what service is and where servants belong. The apparent reason is the equality obsession prevalent in the ruling leftist ideology. I remember a waitress in Germany who intruded into me and my companion's conversation as if we were guests at her home or something. And I remember when we were having dinner on a Greek island, and there was a middle-aged Swedish couple at the next table, and the man kept calling the waiter "sir" - like, he would loudly and jovially say "thank you, sir" when the waiter brought him the menu.

It's many years since I read in an advice book that you shouldn't wai Thais back when they wai you. The reason is very simple - there are complicated rules as to how high you should raise your hands and whom you should wai in the first place. I mean, I watched a Thai news broadcast recently, and there was a male newsreader and a female newsreader, and at the end of the broadcast they both waied, and the woman raised her fingers slightly higher than the man. So when you are not thoroughly familiar with their culture, you are bound to do it incorrectly, making yourself ridiculous and people around you embarassed. Unfortunately, many Farangs just think that they have to return the politeness, or they simply feel that waiing is so cute, so they imitate some kind of a greeting gesture they have seen in a Chinese movie.

But that is nowhere near as ridiculous as the scene I witnessed at an eatery a few days ago. A tourist couple next table had paid their bill and was leaving, and the waitress said "khoop khun kha", and the man answered "khoop khun kha". After that, I began paying closer attention to it, and amazingly I kept noticing several male tourists saying "khoop khun kha" or "sawatdii kha".

For those who are not getting the joke - Thai for "thank you" is "khoop khun". The sound written with "o" is actually something between a and o, such as in the English word "gone". "Kha" is the politeness particle which you add to the end of a sentence to indicate that you are being polite. (Actually the "o" in "khoop" is often pronounced short, and the "a" in "kha" is pronounced long, so "khoop khun kha" would sound like "khop khun khaa".)

The catch is that only females say "kha". If you are male, you are supposed to say "khrap" instead. So, a man can never say "khoop khun kha". He can only say "khoop khun khrap".

Similarly, the common greeting in Thai is "sawatdii". So when a Thai woman says "sawatdii kha" to you and you wish to reply in Thai, you must say "sawatdii khrap" when you are male, and "sawatdii kha" when you are female.

Thais often use the politeness particles in English, too. You will be hearing things like "seventy-eight baht kha", simply because no one has told them that "seventy-eight baht please" would sound just perfectly polite to us.

It's hilarious how some Farang tourists are too egalitarianist to accept subservience, but yet too close-minded to bother to find out what is appropriate in one or another culture and what isn't.

Once at a bookshop in Bangkok, a shop employee had to pass between me and another customer, a Thai. He did that crouching, apparently feeling that his head should be lower than that of that Thai. (I was taller than him anyway.) Will I ever see that kind of politeness returned by a Farang tourist?