A couple years ago, I was sitting at a patio table at the Hotel Inglaterra in Havana, sipping an espresso and watching two European men—shirts unbuttoned, big bellies spilling over their pants, noses red with sunburn, hands wrapped tightly around sweaty Bucanero beers—as they checked out the locals and commented on who they’d like to bed and the best strategies for succeeding in doing so.
Photo by René Ehrhardt
“Damn sex tourists,” I thought, spinning out my own narratives about the two sleazebags… and the women they’d ultimately take up to their hotel rooms.
Their motives seemed clear enough to me: these comparatively wealthy men were in Cuba for a sex holiday, looking for the most exotic Cuban beauties they could find and willing to spend whatever they were asked to fulfill their fantasies.
Mother-daughter writing team Annika and Annabella Ardin took a more objective approach after observing similar scenes in Thailand’s girl bars.
Having spent a good bit of time in the country, the Ardins noticed that scores of Western men seemed to fall—and hard—for Thai women. So hard, in fact, that men would often upend their entire lives in order to see or be with these women time and again.
The Ardins saw the phenomenon as something more complex than a form of prostitution.
They also considered the phenomenon to be sufficiently different from other forms of sex tourism around the world, and so they set out to answer a few questions:
What makes Thai women so alluring to Western men? Should the Western world consider these women victims?
And, as they ask early in the book, “Could it be that we Western women have lost our ability to communicate with the opposite sex, and is it…us [sic] who are driving our men to our Asian sisters?”
To find out, the Ardins spent lots of time talking to Western men in girl bars.
This is one of the shortcomings of the book, as the Ardins themselves concede: their methodology involves talking mostly to men, not women, resulting in conclusions that are rather one-sided.
While their observations are often interesting, they also become redundant the farther one wades into the book.
And their entire chapter devoted to developing a typology of the kinds of Western men who go to Thailand looking for love is tempting to adopt (after all, I was doing the same categorizing on that hotel patio in Havana), but it’s also terribly stereotypical and seems to undermine the very purpose the women set out to achieve in writing this book.
Still, the book—a quick read—is an interesting attempt to understand the dynamics of Western-Thai “love.”
The final explanations offered by the Ardins, which you’ll have to read for yourself, failed to convince me that the kinds of situations the authors describe are significantly different from your garden variety sex tourism anywhere else in the world, which is always characterized by the desire to experience “the exotic.”
That being said, though, the book is an honest attempt to reflect critically on one’s observations by trying to look beyond superficial scenes rather than assuming we understand what we see and making up stories about it.
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9 Comments... join the discussion!
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Also, love the photo.
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It’s true that there’s an awful lot of boring old sex tourism in Thailand. That’s bound to happen anywhere you have a lot of Western tourists pumping money into relatively poor and unregulated societies.
Even so, the situation is so enormously complex that I don’t think “a desire to experience the exotic” accurately sums up any part of it. I’m sure there are plenty of old white guys who go to Thailand for two weeks to have sex with exotic Asian girls, but the fascinating part of Southeast Asia’s sex tourism industry are the men who have, as you said, “upend[ed] their entire lives in order to see or be with these women time and again.”
In many situations, what’s really going on is men who have failed in love – either because they aren’t very good at it or they’ve indeed been driven away by the women of their native countries – are discovering that they can literally buy affection from Thai girls (whether it’s ‘genuine’ is certainly a matter of debate, but I’d argue that it doesn’t really matter). There’s nothing new about these men, they’ve always existed. The difference is that with the development of Southeast Asia as a tourist destination they have a place to start over instead of dying bitter and alone, where nobody would have ever heard of them. Exoticism has very little to do with it, and if these kinds of relationships were easily available in America or Western Europe nobody would go to Thailand for them.
Lest you think this is purely a male phenomenon, check out host culture in Japan – wealthy older women provide attractive younger men with gifts in exchange for their “company”. http://www.japanfortheuninvited.com/articles/host-bars.html
There are probably as many reasons for shacking up with a Thai girl as there are men in Thailand, but there’s something far, far deeper about this facet of expat culture than mere sex tourism. If the authors didn’t convince you of that, then I’d have to say the book didn’t go far enough. I’ll have to pick it up.
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Ross-
Thanks for your input–and since it’s based on your own observations in Thailand, I give it plenty of weight. Perhaps the phenomenon does go beyond your garden variety sex tourism, but the authors just didn’t convince me of that. Once they’ve made their basic argument– “This kind of sex tourism (which isn’t REALLY sex tourism, they insist) is different.”– they don’t really build upon the argument; they simply repeat the same argument over and over.
I also think that even if the phenomenon IS different, there’s still the question of what prompts Thai women to fulfill this fantasy for Western men (money/economic stability, usually) and you’re right: a far more complex treatment of the entire subject is needed. Unfortunately, I think this particular book just scratches the surface.
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Well said Ross.
I came to Thailand with one concept of the white man/Thai girl relationship in mind, but it didn’t take long to realize how complicated the issue really is.
The more I stay here though, the more depressing I find it. =(
I’m waiting for the day when the average Thai girl is rich enough and free enough to go flying off to Europe or North America herself if she really wants to date a foreigner.
Wouldn’t that be an interesting day?
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Interesting idea for a book. At the least, the title caught my attention enough to read the review. When I arrived in Thailand for the first time last year, I was definitely shocked by the prevalence of prostitutes – they were everywhere!
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This post reminds me of the 2006 movie “Heading South.” What makes the movie so interesting is that it’s about a group of 50-something women who take a sexual tourism trip to Haiti. It got a rave review from the New York Times http://bit.ly/QTn3h.
Like the book you reviewed, most of the focus seems to be on the “tourists.”
A followup story (http://bit.ly/S9UZU) in which the NYT interviewed women who had just seen the film noted that “the movie has hit home with this audience because it affirms the sexual reality of women of a certain age, that even as they pass the prime of their desirability to men, libidos smolder.”
Ellen, the lead character in the movie says: ”If you’re over 40 and not as dumb as a fashion model, the only guys who are interested are natural born losers or husbands whose wives are cheating on them.”
Like the guys who flock to Cuba and Thailand, the answer for Ellen and her friends is a trip to Haiti.
With the advent of more forms of communication than ever, maybe these men and women can figure out how to meet each other.
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Steven-
You know… I’ve heard of that movie and have never been able to bring myself to watch it.
As I keep thinking about this issue, I wonder what the phenomenon of sex tourism (or whatever anyone wants to call it) says about Westerners difficulties with the tough realities of long-term commitment. One of the refrains in the Ardin’s book is that Western men look for “love” in Thailand (though “love” is never really defined) because women in the US are overweight, poorly dressed, nagging, depressed burdens to “their” men. Thai women, in contrast, are portrayed as youthful, happy-go-lucky, blithe spirits who are happy to attend to men’s every need. I just think that the duality is way oversimplified–and I’m not sure it can be explained in a book, really.
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Interesting reveiw of what sounds like an interesting book.
A shame that the Ardins didn’t get some perspectives from the women involved. One wonders why? As often as not it’s the Thai girls falling in love and falling hard. When the ether wears off sometimes they find the undemanding older gentleman has issues.
Amongst the wide circle of Lao freinds we have in the US are a number of women from the Lao speaking part of Thailand. Last week my wife met a sister of one newly imigrated to England. She met her husband as she was working in a bar. He twenty years old and from a sheltered background. Her twenty one and newly working in the “entertainment” industry. According to her after their first night he was besotten and followed her around. They both still seem very happy. Must be something to those Thai girls. Ah to be young again.
Interesting that we westerers continually poke and prod the issue of sex tourism in Thailand.
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