Pattaya: I am Not a Whoremonger (nsfw)

Pattaya.  What can I say about this place?  First off, it is beautiful here.  Perhaps the highlight of day two of my holiday was heading up to the top of the hill south of town which separates Pattaya from its little sister Jomtien. It was just at sunset, and as you’ll see in the video that follows, it was indescribably beautiful up there.  

Perhaps it was as I saw the spectacular show of nature up there on the hilltop.  Perhaps it was when I sat on my flipflops on the beach, meditating.  Perhaps it was when the random Thai person seeing me sitting there on the steps of the 7/11 by myself and asking “You have no friend?”.  I’m not sure when it was that night that I cleared up the mental dissonance that had been plaguing me by daytime.  

Left alone to contemplate my thoughts for a couple of hours in the Honda dealerships waiting room started it off.  Also, I am currently reading Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson.  If you’re not familiar with KSR, become so.  He writes in a way that gets his readers enmeshed in the ennui and confusion of his characters, making it tremendously engaging.  It also means that if you’re feeling a bit uncertain about life yourself, the KSR book just amplifies that.  You read on hoping that the characters in it resolve the conflict created not by the plot, but by their own inner contemplations. 

In any case, here in the capital of the Kingdom of Sex, I was frustrated.   

Without launching into a whole self-analysis of how the last 7 or 8 years of my life have been a mental struggle against the inescapable reality of getting older, how most of what I’ve done over that time has been a futile attempt to hang onto my youth, I can say one thing: I wasn’t having a good time.  I was feeling anxious. Depressed. Lonely. 

This is not how one should feel on holiday! 

Easy enough solution to be found everywhere in Pattaya: companionship for hire!  

I was a little restricted in this thought in that my motorcycle repairs had bit into my budget for the trip.  I only brought so much with me, and that is all there was.  No ATM was going to give me more.

Walking around Pattaya in the late afternoon I kinda became disgusted with my fellow Farang, the other foreigners…

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I wrote the above on the Saturday night of the trip.  I was about to launch into a critique of all the old guys I saw walking around Pattaya with hot Thai girls on their arms who were 20, 30 even 40 years younger than them.

Who am I to critique?  If that’s what these guys want and the Thai girls are willing to sell them that, who am I to comdemn from  my imbued Midwestern American value system?  Thing is, I don’t want to be that guy 5, 10, 20 years from now. 

Hence the self-realization,  or justification I got near the end of the night.

I’d rather pay nothing and be entertained by a bunch of sexy, dancing bodies than pay a bunch of money to have someone half-heartedly provide more personal intimacy.  Sex workers aren’t any different than any other workers: they want to do the least possible work for what they’re getting paid.

Any moral implications aside, this inescapable work dynamic seems to me to be a good reason enough reason not to be a whoremonger.

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Video Notes:

The first 60 seconds of the video chronicle the events of Friday Night, which I’ve already blogged about here.  Feel free to go back and check that out. It’s got pics, but no video. 

I’m including ‘frame grabs’ from the video here because I know some people aren’t able or willing to watch a video.

Highlights from the hilltop:

I’m not sure if recording someone else’s girlfriend posing in front of the skyline qualifies as voyeurism or not, but I can pretend.

Other framegrabs from the video:

I saw something I have never seen before: a rainbow patch in the sky.  What is this? 

The Father of the Thai Navy:

From the cabaret show, perhaps the most remarkable moment was when the ladyboy began singing “I am Woman” in full drag, and then stripped down to being shirtless.  Memorable, to say the least. 

In the next episode, I leave Pattaya for Rayong.