Monday, January 6, 2014

Thailand Journal I: Chiang Mai Bargirls




The first thing one notices driving into the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai from the airport at night are the bargirls. Thailand is famous for bargirls and prostitutes, but this Northern city is particularly dark after sundown, with shuttered storefronts, weathered buildings and desolate factories epitomizing its backwater status. The only thing lighting up the darkness is the girls, hundreds of girls, dressed to the nines but for what? There's nothing particularly unique about a tableau of Thai bar girls, yet the disparity between their appearance and the hopelessness of their predicament is what is most dramatic. Where are the customers? Hardly any are in sight. Women turn to prostitution in countries like Thailand due to poverty and while it’s not legal, it’s plainly more than tolerated by the local authorities. However this is not Las Vegas. Chiang Mai is known for its culture of serious Thai massage, for Lanna architecture and for being the gateway to the temples of the Golden Triangle, It's a far cry from fleshpots like Bangkok and Phuket, with their legendary "soapy massages" where the wandering sybarite can find him or herself turned into the filling of a human sandwich. However there is still the matter of the girls. Why choose a profession for which the supply is so far greater than the demand? When you look at these creatures, whose supernal beauty, creates its own olfactory sensation, a kind of imagined perfume that can ignite a fever of longing, you’re reminded of the painted horses on a children’s carousel, moving up and down, turning round and round and going nowhere.

11 comments:

  1. So Chiang Mai appears to you to be a city with desolate factories, dark streets and hundreds of hookers. CM is not a factory town, so where are all these empty factories? Hundreds of prostitutes? You must just assumed that attractive young Thai women all must be hookers. There are certainly very few prostitutes in this town compared to the typical US city of the same size. To me, this report was a total hack job on Chiang Mai, and you owe a big apology to my city.

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    1. I have stay in Chiang mai for 3 months every year for the last 12 years and I have the same question as Greg. Are we talking about the same town cause I don't recognize any of it. What time in the night are you out and driving?

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  2. Hi Greg, firstly why don’t you go to the next few posts on The Screaming Pope. There I deal with other aspects of Chiang Mai, including The Chedi of the City Navel, Muay Thai at Traphae and Buddhist influences. The first post was a travelers first impressions and I stick by those. The girls definitely punctuated the darkness and I saw deserted looking buildings that looked like they had industrial capacities.

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    1. I read all your posts about Chiang Mai, and the judgmental attitude you display reflects on you more than our city. You write about your impressions, even though they are wrong, and of course you will stick to them. No need for you to do any homework to try to understand how things are here, because your arrogance allows you to quickly judge how things are. You see a Thai woman dressed well and you assume she must be a prostitute selling her body. You assume CM is a poverty-stricken hell hole with desolate streets and closed factories and desperate people. You saw deserted buildings? I don't know how you missed the massive building construction going on in Chiang Mai as it is going through the biggest growth period in it's history. New shopping malls, new condo high rises, large home communities just outside of town. Real estate is booming, and any deserted buildings are the few making way for new construction or renovations. There are strong efforts to preserve the older buildings in the center of CM, but they are certainly not deserted. You insult a proud culture and city that dwarfs the superficial short history of your home town in the USA. Next time, please learn a little about Thai culture, Thai history, Buddhist Religion and how people here think before coming her and making your trashy assumptions and then publishing it to the world.
      You did a massive disservice to Chiang Mai with your writings, and the people here believe you will pay for it with your kharma. I hope they are right.

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    2. It’s hard to believe you’ve read the posts on the Chedi and the City Navel, Traphae Muay Thai, Massage and Elephants and Buddha Mind. In these I describe a broad range of other observations, There is an instantaneous quality to blogging. It’s kind of like improvisation in theater. One day you see one thing and free associate about it and the next you see another. Beyond this, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. I was not trying to be judgmental or moralistic. Toulouse Lautrec painted the prostitutes of Paris with great love. Moralizing about prostitution which is ubiquitous in practically all cultures is far from my aim and it’s certainly not meant to be a reflection on the Chiang Mai as a whole as my subsequent blog posts showed. By the way the your notion of casting bad kharma on someone you disagree with is smacks of voodoo and not the kind of compassion I have encountered during my recent travels.

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    3. Karma is something you give yourself. No one gives it to you.

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  3. Shouldn't this read, "The first thing 'I' noticed ..."

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  4. As you said the women became a prostitute because of poverty....... they are too poor to raise their family and jobless too. How about the prostitutes in your country ?Are they due to the same circumstances, are they poor too or just other reasons behind to become a pros.... compare to the two, whom do you respect more? I just want to share and listen to your opinion.... no other intention.... thanks.

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  6. Poverty and drug addiction are two factors that are commonly discussed with regard to prostitution in the US as elsewhere, with the common denominator being hopelessness. But there are a large number of other factors that are responsible for prostitution. For instance, pimps however brutally are authority figures who offer a kind of perverse family to those who never had one. Also prostitution, taken less literally, is something that is part of the human condition to the extent that we all compromise ourselves and often do humiliating and degrading things to accomplish what a goal.

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