Critical Insights: What Makes Thai Prostitutes Superbly Talented

“You can’t trust these painted-faced whores,” my colleague and longtime expat, Bryan, once warned me when I taught at a Bangkok-area university.

As detailed in my gold-standard expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, I failed to heed his due warning and paid the price — not with a literal prostitute, but a Thai girl who, like many, occupied that gray area between literal cash-for-sex prostitute and civilian playing games with farangs’ hearts for fun and sometimes for financial gain.

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(Sometimes it’s a fine line between literal whoredom and live-fast-die-young harlots who rope hapless farangs into their web of deceit and duplicity. None of this is to say that there aren’t wonderful, loyal, pure-hearted Thai women to be found. I dated such a glorious creature for three years. But the ones that make themselves most available to farang men tend to be the whores on the prowl.)

On balance, Thai women tend to be extremely emotionally adept to the point of cunningness. This psychosocial skill is a double-edged sword, to be used for good or for darkness.

The whores, practiced in the dark arts, use theirs for the latter.

They’ll make the farang feel like the funniest and most handsome man on the planet while plotting how to extract as much baht as possible from their bank account.

They’ll charm the shirt right off your back.

And have a blast doing it.

Sanook dee. (“Good fun.”)

Thai people love sanook.

But they’re also about the business.

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At the Bangkok place I recently rented, I enjoyed a front row seat to the brothel across the soi from where I was staying, as featured in the surreptitiously snapped photo from my living room in the thumbnail.

This being a predominantly Japanese part of town, drunk Japanese businessmen flocked to the whores in the miniskirts seated outside like flies to shit.

The whores smiled.

They kindly lit the Japanese’s cigarettes for them.

They lent a helping hand when they stumble.

Then they took them upstairs.

Then they took their money.

I can’t blame them; they’re trying to make it in the urban jungle like anyone else. (The vast majority of Bangkok whores are not actually from Bangkok but from the impoverished rice-growing region in eastern Thailand called Isaan.)

These are truly talented individuals in their own way, and few are immune to their charming predations.

Indeed, Thai police recently busted a monk honeypot operation in which a Thai woman in Nonthaburi province allegedly lured senior monks into coitus and then extorted them for cash, which she allegedly blew on online gambling websites.

Woe unto him who does not recognize the apex predator through the smiling, sweet veneer and enticing miniskirt.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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