Once a bar girl, always a bar girl

Posted by admin on November 28th, 2007 filed in bars & beers, expat life, the locals

You can take the girl out the bar, but not the bar out the girl

Where there are tourists there will invariably be bar girls. For sure, its part of the attraction in Thailand for some. There is financial osmosis that goes on between rich men and poor girls and it’s turned a whole sector of Thai women into dependents, people with mislead ideas of being a full time ‘ladies of leisure’.

Traditionally, Thailand society has always dictated that women are financially dependent on their men, but this isn’t strictly true. Many women end up having to work hard to support themselves and their families for various reasons, but there remains the ‘dream’ among younger girls that they will one day marry and be ‘kept women’. Some do, they become mia noi (minor wives) to wealthy men and live a discreet but comfortable life, even if they are lonely and marginalised. Rich girls imagine they will be married into another rich family of equal status where money is plentiful and the most challenging task they’re faced with is raising the kids (with the baby sitters and house keepers) and organising socialite parties.

I think that this sort of background maybe contributes to the casual way in which many young girls get involved in the skin trade. The idea of being paid by men to party and never having to actually put in a hard day’s work, appeals to them. They see their older sisters coming home with pretty clothes and never having to go off ‘to work’ during the day. The have fancy mobile phones to flash around and behave like life is one long party. That’s the problem, once they step into that bar, their attitude to life and work is never the same.

From that point on they believe that they should be taken care of simply because they are ‘beautiful women’. Of course, they’re far from that, just available flesh, but most of the girls who step into the bar trade aren’t smart enough to ever realise this. A few years later when they are no longer beautiful, and their energy spent, they become washed up and bitter has-beens with little to show from their earnings and about enough savings to get a small somtam stand going on a street corner not far from where they used to ply their trade.

Anyone who has had an experience with a bar girl will have noticed the contrived friendliness of a bar girl. It’s all relative to how much money she thinks she can get out of you. Well, they’re there to get money but their perspectives are really quite unrealistic sometimes. If their previous customer was new and uninformed, dolling out several thousand baht for a night, they’ll expect the same from you and sulk dramatically when you refuse. Even when you point out that five other girls in the same bar mentioned a price much lower (about 1000 baht say), she will accuse you of being stingy and ruin the whole evening because of her deflated expectations.

If you end up spending a few days with a girl she’ll invariably take you to take her shopping, in which case she’ll pick out a $300 dollar gold watch or something else which is totally useless in the life of girl whose main objective is to feed her poor family back home. Of course she’ll sell it later but it doesn’t occur to her that even a fool would see through the farce. Afterall, who is going to buy such an expensive gift for someone they barely know. Most people don’t even spent $100 on a birthday for their own wives! But, it’s a business for them and, lets face it, bar girls aren’t the brightest wheeler dealers in the night sky.

The reality is, the skin trade is a ruthless money business where love is for sale and everything costs. I’ve heard stories from men who’ve taken girls out the bar, but you can never take the ‘bar’ out of the girl. She’ll want all sorts of unneccessary things like gold necklaces and such and her ‘love’ is always relative to what you spend on her. Afterall, she’s sold her soul to the dollar and falling in love spells the end of her negotiating skill. They succeed on pulling on the hear strings of lonely men. Afterall which man is going to back down when she’s spent several hours ringing up the bar tab and giving him a hard-on.

The saddest thing about the lives of these bar girls, is that few of them ever achieve much during their bar girl days other than survive comfortably and enjoy themselves. Apart from learning some of the most fluent English spoken in all of Thailand, they go nowhere and have few skills, other than running a bar, to fall back on when the make-up has faded. They work a mere 4 hours a night, plus a few more on their back when they get ‘lucky’, but will spend their days free lying around their small dingy apartments watching TV. They could of course go out and earn more money doing less lucrative jobs that have some longevity as a career, but that’s too much hard work and certainly isn’t enjoyable by their standards.

Another problem of working as a bar girl is that some days they can take home 5000 baht for escorting a rich farang around, as well as going out of town and staying in posh hotels that cost more per night than their mama & pappa back home would earn in a week. They love the high-life and then expect it all the time. Their perspective of the true expense and value of everything is skewed. They will promptly blow the 5000 baht on upgrading their mobile phone for a smaller, newer model but a week later will be starving because they’ve had a quiet week with no customers and no savings to fall back on. Many bar girls, despite earning some of the best money relative to their skills and position, still live hand to mouth. They’re lured into the trade by promises of 1500 baht a night rates but overlook the fact that you might only get a couple of ‘gigs’ a week.

But perhaps the most damaging thing to their work ethic is that they’ll never be employable in a conventional sense after working the bar. Afterall, when you were earning sometimes upward of 1500 baht a night for a few hours of drinking, looking sexy, playing pool and having sex, who wants to go back to working in a factory or massage shop for 1500 baht a week.