Pattaya, Thailand: First impressions

The air duct in the bathroom door of my hotel in Pattaya is broken. I just realised its on purpose. Lying on the bed, the man in this room before could watch his woman pee without her knowing. Maybe his long time Thai girlfriend, maybe his hooker for the night.. who knows. Apparently there is a story that one Thai woman here hooked up with a Canadian on the Internet. He came here, they got married and now she is in Canada. Her sister is still looking for someone..she's the one who told the story.

All I can think of while I pass through my second sex and tourism city is that the power supply in this country makes my computer screen pink, that traveling with someone with a shellfish allergy limits your diet not because of something they do, but because of your inner guilt. That all my relationships and friendships right now are so fragile – stretched rubber bands that could snap on either side of the sea. That to be lonely in Pattaya is worse than being lonely in Amsterdam. And I'm not really lonely here.. just that once again there is a sexual universe from which I'm blatantly and obviously excluded.

When feminism turned up its rather long nose at all pornography, all sex cities and all allegedly demeaning sexual activity, they brought women to this place, where we struggle with anxiety and desire. This is the first time I'm impressed by white women in reality, not the ones in books, music or movies. I watch the few who reach here, with their partners or without. One asking the tuk-tuk man for the disco, because surely there there must be something to do for her in this city. Others trying to not look uncomfortable with what they agreed their partners could do .. they thought it was a night with a prostitute, one fleeting night, the forgettable night.

But no, it isn't that simple. Because here.. is where white men rule. Here is where you go to flesh out your dom-sub fantasy in the kind of equation that entails absolute submission, with the threat of livelihood. And if the Thai girl is lucky and leaves the country with the man, then a later threat is abandonment in a strange land and deportation. Here is where a 54 year old man asks for a non-smoker, clean Thai woman aged 20-28. Sign language is for directions ... for the penis. Escort services advertise for anyone, old and young. Men, ridiculously ugly, get to fondle women in pubs and restaurants, in a gross yet familiar fantasy. Here is where the cliche of the sex show, the disinterested disengaged woman pulling out the ping pong ball from her vagina for the 100th time that day, now has to draw up her stockings, retouch her make-up for the wholesome goodness look and has to look interested. Even if she escapes having to be actually sexy in the show, she has to be affectionate, almost loving, simpering, beautiful when she is the escort for the night. And she is most well paid, most well looked after as the escort...so why wouldn't she be.

There are things I notice along with the broken bathroom door. I look around and see many imitations of my hot sexiest dates. The dim lighting, the food, the drinks, the intimacy of leaning into each other..and looking at them I wonder why the man's hands are not between the woman's legs. Then it strikes me.. without any exception, all the women (the countless almost hundreds I've seen) are wearing shorts or jeans, not a single skirt amongst the escorts. This is the barrier that they have erected, no pussy fondling in public. Besides ofcourse the clit doesn't exist in this land.

During the pussy show .. the famous ping pong ball, burst balloons with pins from your vagina show .. the gay man I'm with admits that this is the first time he's actually seen pussy. Ofcourse this pretty much confirms that he will remain gay forever... what could be more inspirational of thoughts of vagina dentata then the sight of the pussy capable of acrobatic cringe-worthy feats like pulling out a string of blades. And later he asks me.. so where is the clit exactly? My hand is reaching for a napkin to draw a diagram, when I realise how strange it is that in an hour long show where the hole is the performer, the tranny with the pink boa, the gay man with the biggest cock, somehow they forgot the smaller, perkier, queerer girl in the line-up behind the star. They just forgot her.

Apparently heteronormativity.. the word that I've ridiculed for its clumsy klunkiness is getting a Thai massage while being jerked off just for a tip. Here the white man gets the last laugh, just after the transvestite playing the fat white old woman or the essential 'ugly item' in the sex show gets to sing, or rather lip sync to the lyrics of I will survive.

From my terrace in the hotel room at 5:00 am I can see a snooker house, where a group of Thais are still hanging out. One Thai woman has a white eye patch. A Thai boy is leaning over to talk to a Thai girl. The whities/firangs have left. The coloured balls are in triangles across many tables. Welcome to Happiness Star Bar. Kittens Club. Boyz Town. All Girls. Tiffany Show. Classroom. Dollhouse.Tahitian Queen. Elephant Bar. Fantasia Show.

...these are first impressions, they might change once I get an erotically charged massage .. or not :-)

Hitting the ball out of the park with Zadie Smith

To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.

Fail better, Zadie Smith, January 13, 2007, The Guardian

So, for once, I think I did achieve sorta the laudatory title of the ideal reader. The Ideal Reader. It would look good as a pin, like the one I had in school which said something as silly as Deputy Secretary, Cultural Affairs. Ugh.

But nonetheless, the reason why I self-award is because I like Kiki. From the first chapter, my discomfort with her was her discomfort with infidelity - her grand scale judgment on something human. The one line explanation for Howard's act, that so late in life, he just wanted to switch tracks (from a black woman to a white woman, from a 200 pound woman to a woman who exposed bones through her thin dress at the age of 50). His gentle powerful words..its not like she was a student, she's older than you and me..that sent Kiki into a rage, made me stop and reconsider his act, outside of some narrow logic of fidelity and what it demands of us.

But fidelity makes fools of all of us – that much I will say easily. It makes a demanding servile idiot of me, when I expect it. When I do it, I'm resentful, angry and rattling inside a cage of stifling monogamy. When I don't do it, it reduces me to a nervous wreck; I imagine the sudden collapse of my house around me like in a dramatic episode of Buffy. It wouldn't surprise me, in those moments, if there was a war declared and counter nuclear strikes launched, a tsunami that reached into land-locked Bangalore... and all of them would feel linked to my act of seemingly innocuous betrayal.

My only moment of possible ease while rattling between the two possibilities is the precise one moment after infidelity. There is the buzz of having crossed the line, emerged unscathed. When I'm unmoved emotionally by the new lover and not yet gripped by a Christian confession fantasy. And ofcourse moved tremendously by the excitement of a new body, and a new body is forgiven ineptness or even lack of style. Everything looks good on a new body, even habits of turning pages with wet fingers like an accountant. The new penis is given the choice of tasting as it feels, and is not locked within a known familiar taste

But.. I can't leave Zadie Smith holding the ball for so long.. have to get back to hitting it out with her. Kiki does something for me, inspite of my disagreement with her absoluteness marked by every beautiful gesture like throwing her heavy plait over her shoulders, slapping the floor with her open palms, her post-yoga body slumped into a very expensive chair. Those palms are something I almost see, their deep dark lines etched into the tight, fairer skin on the inside of her palm. Kiki and I stand at opposites. I'm not Claire. I'm not Carlene Kipps. And I would never judge like Kiki. If ever I admonished infidelity or betrayal, it has been with laughter, with the acknowledgement that ofcourse... I have no right to expect fidelity or any such form of ridiculous unwavering loyalty. I'm not a queen like her, not deeply black like her, not as absolute or brilliant as her, not a nurse like her, not a mother of three beautiful children like her. Her hurt lasted a year, mine would (and did) last only a day.

But the book makes me be her inspite of this gulf. To dress up in her thoughts, to believe with her that she had built a life and it had fallen apart.
And I have to admit, that I wrote this just to have that beautiful photograph up there.

For gay men and their blistering insight into feminine psyche

Laugh...

The above is a cropped aside from the comic Friendly Hostility by K.Sandra Fuhr, a webcomic that someday I will explore in more detail. Its one of my favourites ... sometimes very obtuse, with its share of reluctant lesbians, cantakerous and queeny gay men, androgynous straight folks trying very hard to prove that they are straight.
Ofcourse I love the drawing style ... no shortcuts ala Persepolis (cute, but visually nothing to write home about. Somehow Maus inspite of its simplicity was still visually disturbing, probably because of that uncanny replacement of people with mice and how that transforms any scene).
Friendly Hostiliy explores the world of an incredibly hot, maybe Indian guy called Kailen (Fox) Maharassa, his family and friends. I love his cranky perpetually drunk boss at the newspaper that he works for ! And above what you see is his boyfriend.

Rape Fantasy

it is strange, you do help
apparently women cannot write about sex
they have meetings and mourn each other's loss
erotica is beyond them, they feel ashamed, a rush of
blood to their head, a slide of wetness between their thighs
a rising anxious urge like the wavy right margin of these lines
a knock in their chest, different from anxiety or fear
of a friend's possible hidden hatred

but it's strange that you do help
slow the thud of blood in my veins
help the thoughts form, let them spread into
words that you smear between your fingers and
bring them up to taste and smell.. you're the man with
the knife in the park of my rape fantasy saying
stop. and smell the roses ...

Bibliography or references
Margaret Atwood, Rape Fantasies, Dancing girls,(___: Anchor: 1998)
Gender and Censorship, Ed. Brinda Bose, (New Delhi Women Unlimited, 2006)
Jeet Thayil, Skewed, English, (New Delhi: Penguin Poetry, 2003

Awwww...the internet