Pornosophy: Ten Sex Clubs Where You Can Redeem Your Rewards Points

There's obviously nothing unusual about credit cards being used in sex clubs and lap dancing establishments. That's in fact how most of these businesses make their profits. The customer gets inebriated and the sky or his credit ceiling is the limit. How many purveyors of credit card sex wish the day after that they had not had their cards so readily available? But what about the sex tourist with a good business sense, the kind who is level-headed enough to use his or her rewards points to pay for their transactions? One of the most common ways of using rewards points is for air travel. Accumulate enough points and you can buy your tickets to Paris, Rome or even a sex capital like Bangkok. But once you have arrived the trick is to find the kind of lap dancing establishments, massage parlors and brothels where you can use your rewards points to buy foreplay or even intercourse. The question is can you reap a real reward for your rewards points and if in the moment of passionate lust, you have the wherewithal to defer your reward so that you can make a financially sound decision that will not exhaust the budget. How many sex tourists would have been spared credit card debt if they had had the presence of mind to employ this version of coitus interruptus? Sure they might drain their rewards point accounts to the point where it will be a long time before they’re flying, but the experience will undoubtedly produce its own high. Imagine a hypothetical list of ten new sex clubs where rewards points can be exchanged for sex. The first would be Last Tango in Paris’s Second Arrondissement. There for 1,000, 000 rewards points you’d be able to relive the famous butter scene from the Bertolucci classic.

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.

The Peripatetesthete: Bangkok

Bangkok is, if you think of it, almost the perfect name for a city that has the reputation for permissive sexuality. One wonders if the cart came before the horse. Nothing in the early history of the name suggests that there was any onomatopoeia involved (thought the actual Thai name for Bangkok, Krung  Thep Maha, is equally suggestive). Still one of the most notorious attractions is the red light district known as Soi Cowboy and what better choice of syllables to express the intent of wanderers in this part of town than “bang” and “kok.”Many visitors to Bangkok might not be saying it, but they are thinking “BangCock” rather than Bangkok when they breeze into town. Say no more. Bang is plainly what the average Joe does when he comes to Bangkok unless he has journeyed there for foreign affairs. It would be interesting to know what Noam Chomsky, who propagated the idea of a Universal Grammar, would have to say about the suggestive sounds which compromise the Thai capital’s name. If we deconstruct the word, would he find something in the culture and in the environment which produced a thriving pornopolis and is it sexual freedom, tolerance or simply poverty that that explains a culture where the capital city actually sounds like a dirty word. If the Greeks had been as permissive then Thebes might have been named Motherfucker.