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Tagged: PROSTITUTION Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  hardie karges 6:29 am on July 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION, Thailand ( 67 )   

  Service workers don’t make jack in Thailand, 

  unless that’s the name of one of the many foreigners who wash up on the beach here. They usually end up in one of the many GI-style bars looking for a little R & R in a World War III of the soul for which an armistice is pending but never imminent. Nurses with ten years experience make the equivalent of a couple hundred American bucks a month, which admittedly goes a lot farther here than there, but still… Prostitution is a dream job for many in a dirt-poor agrarian economy with a highly competitive Chinese-descended service sector. To actually marry a Farang is a fantasy for many Thai women with only the minimum six years of education, an expanding thirty-something waistline and only a smidgin of Pidgin, but still enough to get the new cars and houses rolling in. Of course the big jackpot is the Big D itself (no, not Dallas), inheritance, Easy Street for life if the papers are in order. Many a smart cute cookie foregoes Boogie Nights at the disco and Priapic encounters of the third kind to service an ailing foreign account and go straight for a house on the Boardwalk when the old geezer croaks. Of course some don’t like the long wait and try to help the process along. No girl would ever cop to being an inheritance-chaser, of course, and most probably aren’t, really, unless of course somehow you know in a way with special circumstances events unfold Smith-like by an unseen hand. Even the government gets in on the deal, offering cozy retirement opportunities to anyone who can cough up the minimum $25,000 to deposit in a Thai bank. Some accounts probably go unclaimed when they expire. Call it inheritance farming.

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  hardie karges 11:28 am on July 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION, Thailand ( 67 )   

  The real problem is the dark side: 

  child prostitution, sex slavery, AIDS, etc. Even in modern almost-ready-for-prime-time Thailand, such unsavory situations still raise their ugly heads and lower their ugly butts on to the fresh silky-smooth forms of young girls that can only be described as flesh-candy to the mostly lower-class local male population. Everybody gets in on the deal in a situation in which women routinely get the short end of the stick in a society where the first male child is the unquestioned crown prince. Old habits die hard in a Chinese-descended culture. Parents don’t want to pay to educate a girl who’s going to marry and never use it. Many women love the idea of playing housewife to the big strong male, at least until he dumps her for some teen-ager, and she’s left to fend for herself. It’s a vicious cycle. Of course, there’s also another Dark Side: long dark hair and big dark eyes. That one’s easier to swallow. Ignorance lures eternal, twitching its cute little butt with a rhythm akin to salsa, a universality akin to ketchup. All you need is the missing link.

   
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  hardie karges 8:38 am on July 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: PROSTITUTION, Thailand ( 67 )   

  Thailand’s imperfect mix 

  shows its smiling face to the modern world as a fait accompli with little knowledge of the particular punctuations in its cultural evolution, and semi-deliberate masking of some of its more onerous social problems. Many, if not most, third world countries have grievous social problems. It might even be considered a rite of passage into a higher orbit of civilization if the bumps in the road weren’t so painful sometimes. Unlike the problems of racism, drug economies, violence, corruption, and stealth that other third world countries suffer, the main social problem in Thailand is the ‘victimless’ crime of prostitution, and its convenient scapegoat, poverty. Like other victimless crimes such as gambling and drug use, prostitution is especially difficult to eradicate since it can be a selling point for tourism that brings in the much-needed hard stuff, cash, that is. The much-needed physical love that so many Western men lack in their own ‘femi-nazied’ countries gets filled by professionals in the service of industry, so no one gets hurt. At least that’s the idea. The reality of course can be somewhat different. For one thing, most up-for-grab Thai women aren’t especially professional. Many wear their hearts right on their sleeves, and those hearts can get hurt or hardened. For another thing, the tourists go home, usually. The Thais are left in a society where Buddhist merit making frequently takes second priority to materialistic meretriciousness. Of course, many tourists decide to stay and live or retire, and many Thai women go abroad with their newfound boyfriends and husbands. I wouldn’t say they’re Thailand’s largest export yet, but their numbers are significant. But that’s not the real problem, of course.

   
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  hardie karges 7:51 am on May 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: FUNDAMENTALISM ( 2 ), PROSTITUTION, religion ( 106 ), TV ( 3 )   

  JINNS AND GENIES AND JEANNIES 

  Before there were the Ayatollah and Osama, there were Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts, live in Technicolor, threatening to send us all to Hell if we didn’t get religion. There’s not that much difference between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Despite the bad rap as the Great Satan, the US is really rather socially conservative, especially compared to modern Europe, out forever from under the yoke of the Pope, and anxious to show it. Amsterdam is not even the half of it, just being honest about what everybody else is already doing. Northern Europe never got rid of the old-fashioned brothels, so there’s nothing to bother with legalizing now. At the North Brussels train station, you can see the girls before you even get off the train, standing in the windows like underwear models, but instead of selling the underwear, they’re selling what’s under there. Ironically, this is on the edge of what’s probably the largest Muslim neighborhood north of Tangier. Turks, Pakistanis, Persians, Arabs, they’re all there doing what they’ve always done, selling carpets, selling cloth, selling hookahs, kebabs, and all things Islamic. The girls in the windows are all white. All we need is the Janissary Corps and you’d have a movie set for 19^th century Istanbul. Oh, wait, here comes a policeman now. The girls don’t care. They scratch their butts and suck the life out of their cigarettes as if to advertise the prowess of their jawbones. When they finally exhale, the smoke forms little jinns and genies hovering overhead, apparently waiting to see if the girl will twitch her nose and maybe we’ll get another new Darren to make my childhood even more traumatic than it already was. At least James Bond morphed after an absence of a few years, so that a new generation maybe didn’t even know the difference, but Darren just became a different face with a different personality like some nagual shape shifting in front of our eyes. Oh! Now I get it; he was the male counterpoint to Jeannie’s genius, a genie in his own right!