His story is here. This is a very lucid, eloquent account of how guys can fall into the bar-scene trap over here, especially in Pattaya, a seaside town about 90 minutes from Bangkok. A very interesting story and good because the guy has been able to extricate himself – for now – from a situation that very often sends farang (Western) men diving off a high-rise balcony.
This is on the Stickman website. Stick is a Kiwi, a New Zealander, who has been here long time. A very nice guy in person, he is happily settled with a Thai wife. He does report on the bar scene but also has sections full of detailed info about living in Thailand and especially about teaching English, which he did for more than a decade before recently stepping down to pursue other interests here.
Geez, I thought this was going to be a tragic but ultimately uplifting story about how a young boy got trapped into the sex trade but got himself out of it, older and wiser. Innocence lost but dignity found kind of thing.
It was just some eye-rollingly stupid story about a dickheaded horndog.
I love most of your posts. I don’t think I ever told you before, so it’s a shame that my first comment to you is a negative one, but this is not one of your better links. Or maybe I just can’t appreciate it because I’m a woman who can not and never will understand how (some) men can live for their dicks and not their brains, hearts and souls.
Yes an interesting story, but the guy honestly sounds like a sex addict, and I wish him the best of luck in staying away. But I have a feeling he won’t be able to stay away for too long. I don’t really understand what the appeal of these Thai “bargirls” (prostitutes) is – these Western guys are smart and know that these lovey-dovey young girls are just putting on an act, or a rouse, to get their money. What is so appealing about the scene? They’re just sad lonely older men who want to fuck as many pretty young girls as they can, and they get lost in the fantasy of it, and become addicted to it.
The guy does have a pathetic story and at least he has admitted it’s a problem and moved away, but as he says:
I just don’t think he’ll ever be able to remove himself from this damaging fantasy… He needs to come back down to reality or he’ll always be miserable.
I can take the negative with the good, so no problem. I just found this story interesting myself because very few guys are ever able to walk away from the scene once they get that involved in it. Yes, he does sound like a sex addict, but usually they just get in deeper and deeper here. It’s actually kind of good to find someone who has not lost everything because of it.
The guy sounds like a self-absorbed jerk. And I have news for him. Those wildly attractive ladies were not attracted to him, a balding, overweight 50ish American. They were attracted to the big bulge in his pants aka his wallet. The fact is that they may have been devastated when he dropped them, but not because they had romantic ideals about their physical and spiritual connection, but because they’d wasted time, energy, and a small portion of their youth with a man who was using them as much as they were using him. Do gorgeous super models pine over men who look like Donald Trump? No. Ahh, but add wealth to the mix and suddenly, bingo!, he’s attractive! Why is that?
If he really wants to pursue a real relationship, he should return to Thailand sans his wallet. And he can discover for perhaps the first time how unremarkable he really is.
I have to say, I am always grossed out by these threads that express sympathy for the clients of the sex trade. They usually read like “enormous loser starts to get a glimpse of how the rest of the world see him and writes a weird article as a twisted defense mechanism.”
The write of the piece is of a type I have seen too much in my travels. If you are from the first world, paying third worlders to have sex with you, you are a gross loser. I exactly know the type, they complain about the women from their home countries being too uptight, or women’s lib has ruined them. Actually, it’s just that the women back home aren’t so desperate as to let fat sweaty creeps with combovers hump on them for $20 bucks. Just pathetic.
I get that, and yet these guys ARE addicts, and that is what addicts do. They justify their addiction, they blame their pusher, they blame the circumstances.
And often, addicts have a point. Prostitutes victimize these guys as much as they themselves are victims. Granted these guys are willing victims - at least until they become addicts.
Not the story I expected from the OP either. But still interesting. Sounds like there’s a vacancy for a fat American to hump cheap beautiful bar girls. Where to I put in an application?
It’s the fantasy of a lot of guys…you can have all these beautiful women. My WAG: when you know in the back of your mind that you aren’t really “earning” them, it’s a hollow victory. When you get past the hot sex and start developing feelings for them, you realize that it’s been about your wallet all along. What may have started out as confidence-building ultimately makes you feel worthless.
I’m not sure what innocence he claims he lost. It sounds like a bunch of rationalization, denial, midlife crisis, etc. to me. I feel worse for the women who are pressured by poverty to go along with such things more than I do for him.
In Pattaya, there is always a vacancy for middle age overweight Americans to hump Thai bargirls. The supply of Thai bargirls is like bison on the plains of North Dakota in the early 19th century…
Pattaya is like Wisconsin Dells with drugs and hookers.
They are very good about making you feel like it isn’t about your wallet. And our own Western belief that these girls had few choices - were perhaps even sold into prostitution by their families - helps to create a white knight fantasy where gaining her affection by rescuing her is believable. “I may not be handsome and young, but I am kind to a girl who has not known much kindness” is a powerful rationalization.
First of all, that guy is a little overweight, but his height carries it well, and he has a very friendly-looking face in a James Gandolfini-esque way. If that guy was a Doper here and he posted his picture in one of the picture threads, women here would be saying, “oooohhh, you’re cute!” So let’s not act like that guy is the most hideous man in the world. I have seen FAR worse.
Second of all, the title of his story is stupid. Innocence lost FOREVER? Come on, that makes it sound so much more dramatic than it actually is. I fail to see the high drama in this.
I don’t think men who indulge in this kind of behavior should be demonized. Our culture puts sex on a pedestal. Over there, it’s a commodity. Okay. So he’s just consuming a commodity, in part of the world where it is freely available and cheap. As long as he’s being safe about it, it’s not really any different from me moving to Colorado because I want to ski all the time.
I’ve seen lots of pictures of “bar girls” and they all kind of look the same to me. I might enjoy that scene for a few weeks, but pretty soon I would want redheads, Jewish girls, etc.
At this point in my life, I don’t have feelings of being sexually undesirable. Nor do I fear that I will be so when I’m older - being in the very unique position of having a playboy father who at age 52 serially goes through women in their mid-20s, travels around Europe picking up women in Budapest and Prague, and just recently had a brief fling with a well-known Hollywood actress (who shall remain nameless) makes me look forward to my middle age, not fear it. But I do remember being in middle school and feeling like an awkward loser who would never have a girlfriend - and I imagine some guys just never grow out of it. I really can’t blame these guys for resorting to prostitution to get their sexual relationships. Certainly in the case of a third world country where a guy who would be a TOTAL loser in America can have hot women night after night, it’s totally understandable that you could get hooked on it.
It’s a matter of priorities, I guess. Do you want random sex, or a real relationship? (It’s possible to have both, but I won’t go into that for the sake of this discussion.)
That would bother me to no end as well, for regular people like I know that brag about their occasional fling in detail. This guy has been with enough women that is well above average for most guys. There’s got to me some real emotional shit going on there and I sincerely doubt it was a brag fest.
As to the story, as long as he wasn’t after the young young girls, I won’t bestow any grief on him for it.
If ANYONE said “In my profile, I listed that I’d like a woman in her 20’s who was fit and gorgeous,” people would think he was an asshole. You just don’t come right out and say that in your profile. But the fact of the matter is, that every guy wants that. And if he can’t get it here, and he can get it somewhere else, what’s the problem with that?
Nothing, until you write an article entitled, “Innocence lost.” Then you should expect to be openly ridiculed.
The truth of the matter is that the blogger who pursued women out of his league in order to bolster his ego is no more or less repugnant than the women who pursued him because they wanted his money. At the end of the day, no one was innocent and nothing was really lost because it wasn’t real to begin with.