They make it decisively clear in their editing and introductory passages that they remain unattached, detached, unchanged, journalistic, otherwise logically aloof to consuming prostitution, whereas the people they observe are more or less perverts or weirdoes. The people we want, we need to read about everyday, the people journo’s love! Who are their readers if not the men who will act out and be actors within the scripts suggested in these letters? Are they appealing to ‘newbies’ like Leather’s ‘Stephan’? Men that should tread carefully within this world lest they lose their hard won rational? Or are they simply emphasising their command and elevated understanding of the scene that seduces and dominates, distorts lesser mortals? They are stating that they are above the abyss, staring down into it yet interrogating its distinctive lack of logic and common sense, namely that these are commercial women engaged in sex and relationships and the illusion of love for money, and that intrinsically they engage men that want it. They, the author, do not engage for love, sex and relationships in themselves but for fascination in the perverse on the western public’s behalf. In effect this means maintaining the god’s eye view or the purview of the dispassionate scientific observer. Even the most famous commentator on the unique nightlife of Bangkok, the Bangkok Post’s ‘Niteowl’ Bernard Trink, who had a very popular and ‘controversial’ weekly column for years in the Bangkok World then the Bangkok Post, emphasised his sobriety in covering its subjects. He did not drink when he visited the bars and claimed to have had no extramarital relations with prostitutes.
This perspective is inquiring and unable to, or not quite able to ‘grasp’ why these people are acting or communicating in this way. To reinforce this Walker and Ehrlich enrol the help of a Thai anthropologist, who, laying a ‘scientific’ credence to the accounts depicts the barworld as dominated by indomitable bargirls [Odzer also some of her bargirls ‘dominating’ the scene, one she even called the ‘sex goddess’], somehow in charge, not perhaps in their vocational choice, but more interestingly, by default. The western man in his naiveté is victim here to its creation.
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LXVI
In some way this is perhaps acknowledged in the present work’s title which is posed as an almost seductive invite, “Darling, yes, Step into…” It reeks of the man being invited by the ‘hello’ girl who stands outside to attract customers to the bar. You only leave the room of mirrors when your pick of the night shows you the exit. When she does you enter the hall of mirrors, and if she captures you and you can be captured then you enter the pavilion. It is all questions of scale and commitment and abilities to cope, financially and emotionally. Once the girls are installed in the barworld new logics kick in, ‘socially learned’, and they may be ruthlessly applied. This ping-pong logic dictates that they are professionals who intrinsically have a much wider ranging experience of the human condition and sexuality than many of the men arriving from atomised alienated societies and experiences. They are like those who perform surgery daily or fix computers and aircraft. They develop through time strong tacit skills in understanding