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There are several key cultural differences between Thailand and the West which confuse the Western males visiting for example Bangkok Patpong bar girls. First, Western men view prostitution as an occupation, while the Thai girls have a more open-ended, fuzzy understanding of attachments that can extend into long-term relationships. Second, Westerners consider love and money as mutually exclusive, whereas the Thai woman and girls find overlap between money and gifts, Thailand bar girl dancing nude at a gogo bar stage view money in the same way they view a gift, not as something having a derogatory connotation. Even gifts are calculated in precise monetary terms. Because of the emphasis on gifts, and the Thai girls skills in making their clients feel special and sexual attractive, it can be argued that the visiting males do not apply their previous concepts of prostitution to the Thai scene. Instead, many foreign males try to rescue the bar girl from her plight, help her recover her dignity. (Perhaps she never lost her dignity. Perhaps her clients lost theirs.) For these foreign men visiting Thai girl prostitutes in Bangkok, Pattaya or Phuket, then, the line between emotional commitment and material commitment becomes blurred, particularly when they find themselves in the hands of an experienced Thailand sex working woman, looking for a way out of the business. After age thirty, with ten or more years of work under their G-strings, Patpong sex bar girls are unlikely to find Thai husbands who would support them, only men who would use their earnings. But they can hope to catch a foreign male who accepts that their immoral practices are for moral reasons, to support their poverty-stricken families. In any case, Thai men are less likely to find these women attractive, since many have darker skin, come from northeastern Thailand and act aggressively. The ugly women of Patpong or Pattaya would not fit Thai men's image of beautiful Thai women. Here, as in the beauty contests, Bangkok sets the standards, and rejects the standards of beauty indigenous to the periphery.
Women in Thai society:
Although the logic of Buddhism relegates girls and women to a subordinate position, women in Thailand have considerable influence. In the rural North and
Northeast, land is usually inherited by the female members of a household, and husbands reside with their wives. It is common to find the wife
controlling the finances in a family, determining where and how much fertilizer to buy, and even giving her husband an allowance. This has been noted
for centuries: in 1433 the Chinese Muslim traveller Ma Huan recorded: It is their (Siamese) custom that all affairs are managed by their wives, all trading
transactions great and small. Although in public the role of the man is accentuated, in private, equality of the sexes or the reverse is more usually the
case. In the fields, ploughing is usually done by men, but other tasks are equally shared, and often women and girls do more than their fair share.
This contrast between the overt position of women and girls in Thai society, and their underlying role is a recurring theme. At one level, it appears that the cause
of women's liberation has not proceeded very far: minor wives (mia noi) are still common, and while a man can divorce his wife on grounds of adultery,
a woman cannot divorce her husband. Prostitution is illegal, but only the prostitute, not her client, is interpreted as breaking the law. Yet, female traders
and businesswomen are well represented, indeed there are thought to be more female than male traders. Their influential role in private enterprise is
partly because they are still largely excluded from high office in the public sector and as a result, ambitious girls are forced to enter the private sector.
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