I noticed the same thing… I was in Thailand for 3 weeks of vacation with my wife several years ago. I noticed the obvious prostitutes that were trolling the bars at night, but what surprised me was an interchange I had at a market. It was in an outdoor night market (I think it was in Ching Mai, but it might have been Bangkok) where I was perusing wares in tall glass cabinets. I wanted to look at something in one of the cases and I pointed at it indicating I wanted to see it. The girl behind the counter thought I was pointing at her and indicated openess to a transacation (at least this is how I read the situation).
Interesting place Thailand, I would love to go back and spend more time there. Probably the best vacation of my life and one of my favorite countries.
I’ll second this. My wife is Chinese, and is actually 13 years younger than I am.
But she’s petite, and her Asian looks make it hard for Westerners to tell how old she is. Some have mistaken her for being in high school - which, if true, would already make her 30 years younger than me!
If I were overweight, wore burmuda shorts with my dress shoes, or otherwise looked older than I am, I can easily imagine casual onlookers assuming that there was maybe even 40 years between us.
That does raise an interesting question, though. What’s the transmission risk of having vaginal intercourse with a post-operative transsexual? I’d think it would be pretty low: what infected fluids would you find down there? Certainly not semen or vaginal fluid, and it seems unlikely that blood would be a factor…
Since not a small portion of “ladyboys” pay for their surgery by whoring (not to mention the ones that get it paid for by their pimp, whether they want it or not), there’s a good chance of one getting infected with HIV. The flip side of this is that, as far as I know, none of the Asian surgeons will do a reassignment on someone infected with HIV (the only surgeon I know that will is in the United States). So for a post-op to be infected with HIV would require either that the candidate successfully concealed HIV status from the surgeon, or contracted it post-surgically.
Porn producer/perfomer John Stagliano claims he got HIV from a transexual. http://www.lukeford.com/luke_ford/clips/clips.html (no explicit photos on this page, though there are plenty elsewhere on the site–probably not the best site to look at on your employer’s computer). He has little incentive to tell that specific lie about the source of his infection.
I was actually involved in a case that is marginally relevant here, so pull up a chair, it’s story time:
The plaintiff in this case was a phlebotomist who worked in a hospital. She was taking blood from an HIV+ patient. Apparently, she was unable to reach any of the four sharps containers that were strategically placed around the bed, and she managed to stick herself with the needle. When she tested positive for HIV after the incident, she sued the hospital.
I was one of the lawyers representing the hospital. During discovery, we made a . . . er . . . discovery: She had been a he. Our expert reviewed her medical records and examined her. It was obvious that she was a transexual. But it gets worse. Back when she was pre-op, she had been in prison–men’s prison. At the time she had been taking hormones for over a year, and had breasts.
Our initial theory was that she got HIV in prison. It is very likely she was raped. There was also some evidence that she had been a prostitute before, and possibly after her bit in prison. All of this proved irrelvant, though, because she produced a string of negative HIV tests from after her prison stint but before the needle stick. The most recent was six months old when she stuck herself.
Obviously we wanted to get the fact that she had been a he in front of the factfinder. I came up with the winning argument. She was claiming shortened life-expectancy. This raised complicated issues: What was the life expectancy of a SRS patient? Should we use the male life expectancy chart or the female one? Was there even enough data to meaningfully estimate life-expectancy for a transexual who had been to prison? We won the right to question her life expectancy expert on these issues, and the plaintiff quickly settled.
Okay, this is a hijack, but… Why in hell could she sue the hospital in the first place? Needle sticks happen, and hospitals treat HIV patients. At what point was the hospital ‘negligent’ here? You said they provided sharps containers. What else were they supposed to do?
My wife is a nurse, and she’s had needle-stick injuries. Invariably, it’s described as, “Jeez, I was damned stupid today…” It baffles me how anyone can blame a hospital for something like that, unless the hospital was negligent by leaving needles lying around or something.
Usually it’s even simpler than that: Workers’ compensation remedy is exclusive. This case was complicated by the fact that the hospital was not her employer. The phlebotomists were provided by a contract with another company. This contract resulted in an additional complication here. It required arbitration. It’s tough to get an arbitration dismissed summarily, even if it is meritless, and arbitration awards aren’t appealable (at least not on their merits). While my client shared your views about the strength of the plaintiff’s case on the merits, it realized that there was significant risk and expense involved in arbitrating the case. In other words, everyone saw it for what it was, but she had some leverage. So we settled.
Sorry to resurrect this (somewhat) old thread, but some questions have prompted other questions.
First, are you in violation of US law if you go overseas (read: Thailand) and have sex with a prostitute (assume she’s not underage). If so, how often are people prosecuted for this?
Second, if you go over there and have sex with an underage prostitute, are the Thai police really that likely to turn you in to the US Embassy? I thought the Thai police looked the other way at prostitution. Do they (the Thai police) draw the line at child prostitution?