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.

Phuket sucks – except in the way it's supposed to

It had been 12 years since I had last visited Thailand. Last year's winter, I was hesitating between Thailand and the Philippines. Briefly, the advantages of Thailand are sanuk and safety, the advantages of the Philippines are the girls' beauty and skills. It was a very tough choice, and I would have preferred the Philippines, but unfortunately I learned that there was a particularly nasty anti-prostitution campaign going on in Angeles, and then I got offered an unusually cheap airplane ticket to Phuket, and even though my heart was yearning for Soi Cowboy, I thought I'll check out Phuket. I mean, I had to go there once, just to have the complete picture of everything Thailand has to offer.

First of all, let's clear away some likely misconceptions. You might have the idea that Patong Beach is a street or an area in the city of Phuket. That is not the case. Patong and Phuket City are two separate towns on the island of Phuket, both serviced by the Phuket Airport. There is supposed to be something on offer in Phuket City as well, but the actual location of the sex market is in the town of Patong, more precisely a relatively short street called Bangla Road and its sois. The only go-go bars (less than ten, I think) are in one soi which goes north from Bangla Rd's western end:

(The soi is displayed as a straight dead-end on the maps, but actually it turns left and continues until you end up on Beach Rd = Thawiwong Rd.)

Also, there are a couple of outdoors gogos in the eastern end of Bangla Road. The open-air pole dancers are a spectacular sight – I mean the ones who are actually dancing, which, as we all know, is a rare occurrence in Thailand.

Apart from that, Bangla Road and its surrounding area consists of beer bars.

In the wider neighbourhood, there are dozens of massage parlours which purport to offer non-sexual massage but actually push sexual services quite persistently once you're inside.

Another thing I want to make clear right in the beginning is that whenever I point out things in Phuket that I found surprising, I am not necessarily suggesting that it is because Phuket is different from Bangkok and Pattaya. It can just as well be because Thailand in general has changed, or it can be because I have grown older. I will just describe what I observed.

The people of Patong looked racially quite different from those in Bangkok/Pattaya – I'd say more similar to the people in Northern China. That said, the actual Chinese tourists were still quite recognisably different – but that might have been less due to their racial features than to their lighter skin (meaning, more carefully protected from tanning) and different clothing preferences.

The percentage of attractive women in Patong was far above Bangkok/Pattaya (even though not reaching the level of Angeles, Philippines). Walk around for half an hour and you'll likely to find a massage girl who is really cute. And on Bangla Road itself I saw a few bargirls who were stunningly beautiful. I can't remember seeing anything like that in Bangkok/Pattaya.

Of course, it's clear to me that Thailand is populated by several ethnic groups, so those visible differences shouldn't come as a big surprise. Except that I didn't expect them to get more attractive further south.

One curious thing is that the left hand doesn't seem such a huge no-no in Phuket. I saw repeatedly how Thais gave something with their left hand to other Thais with whom they were visibly on good terms. Nevertheless, I played it safe and always used my right hand.

What was totally new to me was the ethnic composition of the tourists. Patong had an amazing percentage of Chinese and an amazing percentage of Russians. One could see lots of Russian language on shop signs, and Russians tended to address a white face in Russian without even bothering to ask if you speak it. Still, it was not as surprising as the overwhelming presence of the Chinese. I wasn't sure the white tourists even outnumbered yellow ones. And whenever I recognised the latters' language, it was, with very few exceptions, Mandarin Chinese. I have never seen such a concentration of Chinese outside of China itself. And, to think of it, I have rarely seen so few Japanese tourists anywhere.

By the way, in the sex tourist forums there is much talk about the Orientals having fucked up the market for us. A decade ago, there were reportedly separate go-go bars for the Japanese where the white customers weren't even admitted. They had girls with whiter skin, and the sex bars for the white people had girls with darker skin – that is, to each race according to their preference. Now, however, it would seem that "our" go-go bars are being invaded by the Japanese and Koreans who are showering the girls with money, and so the girls are all over them and neglect white customers. That is what they write. From my personal experience, I cannot confirm that. In my few visits to the sleepy go-go bars of Patong, I did not perceive Oriental customers as any nuisance. Neither did I feel in any way neglected.

Reading those numerous complaints in forums, tough, I began to think. I don't know much about that thing with separate bars for separate races, but the undeniable fact is that the Japanese have been filthy rich for decades. So why is it only now that Thai girls have (reportedly) begun to pay them so much attention? Could it be that the white race is losing its prestige, now that the white countries are in severe economic trouble with no improvement in sight? Just a stray thought.

What surprised me about the Patong hookers was how half-assed they were about their work. The girls sitting in front of the massage parlours were just sitting there and pronouncing a modest "massage kha" when a man walked past. "What's happened to Thailand?", I thought at first, being used to girls standing in the middle of the sidewalk, grabbing my arms, trying to drag me into their bars.

Well, a likely explanation is not difficult to figure out. Phuket seems to be making most of its money out of beach tourism. Sex is only a side-business. The large majority of the male tourists walking on the streets of Patong are regular tourists. So it's only logical that the massage girls have to keep a low profile, in order not to irritate tourists who are either not interested in sexual services or too afraid of their female co-tourists. In Pattaya, the girls can safely assume that you are after sex, in Patong the sheer numbers are to their disadvantage. I mean, even in Bangla Road, there are many more curious (albeit not-too-happy-looking) Farang women than Thai hookers on the street at any point of time.

For that matter, after the massage girls have identified you as a sex tourist (like, they see you checking out the girls one after another and then going inside with one from the parlour next door), some of the sanuk begins to appear. But still, I didn't see the Bangkok-style enthusiasm, not even inside of go-go bars. Maybe it has something to do with the influence of Islam in this region which makes even non-Moslem people less tolerant of the sex trade? Then again, even street vendors in Phuket were much less aggressive than in Bangkok. Go figure.

Anyway, the economic reality is that Phuket is hugely popular with beach tourists. That seems to be making Pattaya-style sex trade unfeasible here. Remember Patpong in Bangkok? A huge marketplace for regular tourists, and a number of rip-off joints for the sex tourists. Patong in Phuket is like that, except that it's not rip-off, it's just infested with dirt-brown-tanned white people of both sexes and in various states of undress. And that is essentially what ruins the place. When I'm choosing a sex partner, I don't fancy having half of my field of vision filled with geriatric German women checking out the "naughty nightlife".

That said, at least good massages with extra services are extremely easy to get in Patong. It is a little more difficult to get just a massage. For some time, I've been on the quest trying to find a massage parlour in Thailand where the masseuse will not be insisting on a handjob afterwards. I'm yet to see one. In Patong, I saw a novelty: some massage parlours (maybe 1 out of 20) have "no sex" written on their door. I thought I would check out one of those places, just out of my sick curiosity. Unfortunately, I never got around to it. (Let's just say I was kept too busy with other things.)

MY VERDICT:

Phuket Island is definitely not a place for a sex tourist to go. Not because it's particularly expensive (as many people are whining) but because the sex market is shamefully small, which means your choices are very limited, and the place is drowning in non-sex tourists, which means there is nothing like the fun and easy-going atmosphere you'll find in Bangkok and Pattaya. Feel free to check Phuket out if the curiosity is killing you, but seriously, if you'll never go there, you haven't missed anything.

P.S. Almost forgot about that sucking thing. In the olden days I always wished that they would be offering a blowjob instead of that stupid handjob after a massage. Well, they do now. Except that it's very expensive and very miserable. Emphatically not recommended.

Another little tip, one that is more cheerful – when a girl asks after a massage (with or without extras) if you would like some water, say yes. It's free, and it's really fun to walk slowly past other massage parlours sipping that water. The girls will know precisely where you got it from, and act accordingly. Priceless.

Various ways of whoring

I was at a bookshop in Thailand, checking out books on Thailand. I noticed a memoir book written by a hooker, co-authored by a woman with an English name. The book was in a plastic cover, so I could only read the introduction on the back cover. Two details in particular caught my eye. One was something to the effect "sex tourists prefer to call women like me "bargirls" but actually we are prostitutes". The other one was "For money I do anything the customer wants, except kissing. I feel that there are certain things which must remain reserved for the wives and girlfriends".

I hardly need to point out the mind-blowing stupidity of the suggestion that Thai hookers are somehow reluctant to kiss customers. They might have a problem with oral and anal sex (of course they don't do "anything the customer wants"), but refusing to kiss - that's hilarious. In general, as I'm sure any sex tourist has noticed, Thai prostitutes are far from reserving certain things to their husbands or boyfriends. On the contary - they not only refer to their customers as "boyfriends", but offer better GFE than, in fact, most non-prostitutes back home.

As to the suggestion that "bargirl" is some kind of an euphemism because we are embarassed to say "prostitute", that is also complete nonsense. Of course bargirls are prostitutes, but not all prostitutes are bargirls. For instance, massage girls are prostitutes but they are not bargirls. Neither are freelancers in the discos and on the streets. In other words, there are several types of prostitutes, and bargirls are one of them. It's simply convenient to use the term "bargirl" when discussing things that apply to bargirls but not to the other kinds of prostitute.

At first I felt appalled that, of all people, a bargirl (who obviously is very well familiar with the truth) would spread such appalling nonsense in her book. Then I realised what it was all about. I remembered who she was: a whore. She has simply expanded her business, found another way of making money. In the bars of Bangkok, she does and says things the Farang tourists want, so that they would give her money. In her book, she says things the Western readers want to hear, so that they would give her money. If she would tell the truth about the Thai sex market, she would hardly even get her book published. And, of course, her female co-author wouldn't be able to recognise that the hooker is bullshitting her, or more likely, she couldn't care less about the truth either. They both have only one goal - to make money. Last but not least, the general public in the English-speaking world doesn't want to hear the truth either. So it's no wonder that that prostitute co-authored a book filled with emotion-loaded untruths. She's only in it for money. Publishing a book is merely a different form of whoring for her.

Photo of Moroccan prostitutes from 1948

An amazing photo. I just love it.

Reasons why people hate prostitution

What this is all about

It’s hard to not notice the widespread despise of prostitution. Even men who go to brothels tend to be ashamed of it, not to mention the prostitutes themselves. In our everyday language, it is hard to overlook the self-evident feeling of moral superiority that accompanies the use of the word "slut" or saying that one or another woman is of easy virtue.

Ever since I learned, at some early age, what the words "prostitute" and "prostitution" meant, I've been trying to find out what’s supposed to be so awful and despicable about prostitution. I still can't fully understand it, but I believe I have found some likely psychological reasons to it. I am offering them for discussion, hoping that someone will tell me something that will help me to understand things better.

Method

Let's examine what it is that people dislike about prostitution, and why they dislike it.

This discussion shall be limited to female prostitution for men, since that's the overwhelming majority of the existent prostitution, as well as the symbol of prostitution for the general public. Thus, when I speak of "prostitution" from now on, I mean only women getting paid for having sex with men, and when I speak of "sex", I mean heterosexual sex.

It's reasonable to discuss the opinions of men and women separately, not only because of their profound biological differences, but also because their very different roles in prostitution – women can only be prostitutes and men can only be their customers.

As far as I understand, there are essentially five things people dislike about prostitution:

1) women’s willingness to have a lot of sex;

2) exchange of sex for money;

3) availability of sex partners for men;

4) sexual freedom (freedom to choose whom to have sex with);

5) assumed involuntariness of prostitution.

Of course, not all reason apply to all people. People are different and different people detest prostitution for different reasons.

It should also be clear that it's extremely rare that people actually admit to those reasons (apart from the 5th). They hide their real motives behind meaningless moralist slogans, like how the sale and purchase of "love" is "wrong". That is humanly understandable, but, of course, not to be taken seriously.  (What love? I'm talking about sex. What has love got to do with anything? And there is no such thing as "right" or "wrong". There are things you like and things you don't like.)

Please note that a number of ideas are covered rather briefly in this article. That is not because I'm being superficial, it's because I didn't want to make this article too long. (It's pretty long as it is.) I can explain all those points in detail, and in fact I have several additional articles in work, and I'm looking forward to publishing them in the near future.

Now let us examine the individual reasons for the people's aversion to prostitution, one by one.

1. Why people don’t like women’s willingness to have a lot of sex?

Men

A man's disliking of women who are willing to have a lot of sex can have some of the following reasons:

1. Before the invention of DNA tests, a man could never know for certain who was the father born to his woman. Therefore, men have evolutionally developed a number of psychological defence mechanisms against the danger of spending a huge portion of their resources on raising another man's child. Among those is a strong desire that the woman be a virgin and never desiring to have sex with more than one man during her life.

2. He fears that he is inferior to other men. He believes that other men's sexual skills are superior to his own. So he fears that his sexual skills aren't enough to satisfy the woman's expectations. Therefore he prefers his partner to have as little sexual experience as possible.

That fear results mainly from our destructive education and socialisation system of boys, as well as distorted representations of human sexuality in "adult" magazines.

3. He believes that women who enjoy sex are abnormal or bad. That belief results partly from failing to understand the complexity of sexuality, partly from religious and ideological propaganda.

4. Men have a huge need for sex and women can easily satisfy it, but they don't have to. The power to refuse sex gives women enormous influence on men. Therefore, a man might dislike women who aren't ashamed of their sexuality, as such women would have no scruples about actually using that power for their benefit, and he feels he's helpless against it.

5. Sex with a woman who likes to have a lot of sex might leave unsatisfied the man's natural desire for conquest.

Women

Many women have been taught from the childhood on that sex is bad (at least with a man who is not one's husband). That's why they detest "sluts".

Of course, such puritanical upbringing has been decreasing rapidly in the last decades, so this reason is increasingly less important.

2. Why people don’t like the exchange of sex for money?

Men

Men don’t like the exchange of sex for money mostly because they consider the prostitutes' fees too high. Rationalising away the hidden costs of seduction, they fail to realise that "decent" women usually cost far more – except when you'll gain them as long-time partners, and even that is disputable.

Women

Women have two kinds of feelings about buyable sex. An aging wife might feel envy – she has to spread her legs for her (similarly aging, and inceasingly less sexy) husband for free while some other women seem to be making considerable money with their bodies. For younger and more competitive women, in turn, the price prostitutes are asking for sex is far too low, but that has more to do with reason number 3.

In connection with the reason number 1, it should be noted that those women who consider sex dirty as such, are, of course, especially appalled by the sale and purchase of sex, as it increases the occurrence of the "sin" of sex considerably.

3. Why people don’t like the availability of sex partners for men?

Men

At first, it might seem illogical that a man would be opposed to the availability of sex partners for men. But it’s psychologically explainable with following reasons:

1. The misguided belief that non-prostitutes are free might easily produce another belief – that a "real" man doesn't have to pay for sex. Imagine a man who does everything he can to please women and to get laid for "free" – usually with meagre success. He likes to think that the brothel customers are pathetic men who are unable to seduce women (as if he was). It's understandable that he gets mad when such supposedly inferior men can get sexual satisfaction and he – a "nice guy who treats women with respect" – can't. As he has to work so hard to get laid, it's quite understandable that he's envious of men who get laid cheaper, quicker and with far less stress. As he's too ashamed to go to a brothel (see reason number 1 above), he opposes prostitution out of simple envy: if I can’t get any, the others shouldn’t either.

2. Men naturally desire many different sex partners, but the number of men and women in the world is about equal. Also, many men desire women with no or little sexual experience (see reason number 1 above). Thus, there are clearly way too few women in the world to satisfy all men. Therefore, men have the instinctive urge to try to deprive other men of sex.

Women

For women, the obvious reason for disliking availability of sex partners for men is competition. The less competitive women just hate the thought of their partners having access to other (and possibly more attractive) women. The more competitive women, in turn, are displeased because the prostitutes dump the prices.

4. Why people don’t like sexual freedom?

For shortness's sake, I will use the term "sexual freedom" in the meaning of "freedom to choose one's sex partner".

Sexual freedom is related to the previous reason (availability of sex partners) but it's not the same. Availability of sex means that every person can get laid whenever he wants to. Sexual freedom means that every person is free to choose to have or not to have sex with any given person. Example: if every adult human being would be forced to be married and refusing sex to one's spouse would be forbidden, sex would be available but there would be no sexual freedom. Contrarily, if there were no (hetero)sexual taboos whatsoever, but the whole population of Earth would be male, there would be (hetero)sexual freedom but no availability of (heterosexual) sex.

Apart from religious demands for monogamy, sexual freedom is generally unwanted because any unrestricted market promotes competition, which results in the more able getting more and the less able getting less. The more the market is restricted, the more it can be guaranteed that everyone will get at least something. So most people think that being chained to one partner for life is a lesser evil than having to constantly compete for sex partners.

5. Why do people assume that prostitution is involuntary?

It should be understandable that people who detest prostitution for one of the above reasons, find its existence hard to accept. Whenever a person is very strongly opposed to something, his brain tends to reject input that might justify it, and seek justifications for opposing it.

Among other things, when a person detests prostitution, it's easy for him to start believing that no woman would ever voluntarily do anything so abhorrent. It follows logically that if they do it anyway, they are being coerced.

The hypothesis of sexual slavery is the most effective weapon against prostitution. It is psychologically very difficult for a man to admit that he is terrified of women who have had many sex partners, or for a woman to express his displeasure at the prostitutes making sex so easily available for the men. When, however, they declare that they are fighting against sexual slavery, they appear noble and moral. By throwing big emotional words about supposed human trafficking and forced prostitution at people, they can avoid revealing their real motives (even to themselves).

Why does the society support and enhance the irrational anti-prostitution sentiments?

Rulers of virtually every nation cultivate the anti-prostitution sentiments with legislation, education and propaganda.

Some politicians really do oppose prostitution, for the reasons discussed above. It is quite understandable that they try to force their personal preferences upon others. Most people are inclined to do that, out of misguided belief that their opinion somehow represents what is "good" and "moral" and reflects the true "human nature", while people who have differing preferences are misguided and need to be made to see the truth.

Other politicians, however, fight prostitution because it serves their benefit. They can basically have two motives:

1) to increase their own chances of getting laid (by kissing up to women and by restricting other men's access to sex partners);

2) to increase their power (by making women more influential and by suppressing people’s sexuality).

So, this is it in a nutshell. Stand by for additional articles which will explain things in more detail.